novelraw Chapter 472: Memory Reaper
Chapter 472: Memory Reaper
Blackwater Town, a chaotic little town located at the border between two cities, in a lawless zone where no one was in charge.
The war hadn't completely destroyed this place. Instead, the collapse of order had turned it into a paradise for all sorts of gray market dealings and fugitives.
The town appeared dilapidated on the surface, but evil flowed in its underbelly.
Following the clues from the corpse's memories.
Su Zhan suppressed the vast majority of his aura, walking along the muddy streets like an ordinary traveler.
His spiritual sense quietly enveloped the entire town.
Soon, he locked onto a target.
At the eastern end of the town, a shop with a tattered signboard reading "General Goods Purchasing."
The shop owner was a middle-aged man who appeared somewhat balding, always wearing a shrewd, ingratiating smile on his face, bowing and scraping to everyone.
On the wall of the secret room behind his shop's back hall, hung a wooden carving of the Three-eye Symbol, identical to the one on the bone plaque on the lava giant's waist.It was him.
Late at night, when all was quiet and the shop was closed.
The balding boss, codename Mole.
Was inside the secret room, taking stock of today's gains.
A few antiques he had bought at low prices from refugees.
And a piece of intelligence that had just arrived via a secret channel.
He was in a good mood, humming a tune off-key, calculating how many contribution points he could exchange by handing these things over to his superiors.
Perhaps it would be enough for him to redeem one use of the Sacred Codex projection.
This was an opportunity to strengthen his Aberrant abilities.
The flame of the oil lamp in the secret room suddenly flickered violently, then eerily froze in a single moment.
Mole's movements stiffened, his humming caught in his throat.
He discovered in terror that aside from his thoughts, his body was completely unable to move, not even his eyeballs.
A bone-chilling cold shot up his spine all the way to the crown of his head.
A figure appeared before him without any warning.
"Su... Su Zhan..."
Mole recognized this face.
This face that had now become synonymous with nightmare within the Transcendence Society!
How could he be here?
How did he find him?
Su Zhan's gaze fell directly onto the pupils of Mole, filled with fear.
Time Abyss Pupil, Time Reappearance.
This ability could not only read the memories of corpses, but also plunder the memories of living people whose mental strength was completely inferior to his own.
Forcibly browsing through all of their memories.
"No! Get out! You can't..."
Mole resisted frantically in his mind.
He had received training against mental probing; his mental strength was far more resilient than an ordinary person's.
He constructed a mental barrier, wanting to detonate his consciousness core and perish together with the enemy...
This was the last resort for captured core members of the Transcendence Society.
But Su Zhan's mental strength was as vast as a sea of stars.
His resistance was like a mantis trying to stop a chariot.
The mental barrier he constructed crumbled instantly.
The consciousness core he tried to detonate was forcibly smoothed over by an even more powerful force.
All his struggles, all his loyalty, all his desperate cries.
Under the gaze of those golden vertical pupils, seemed utterly laughable.
He could only watch helplessly as the other's mental strength rampaged through the library of his lifetime memories, accurately grabbing all information related to the Transcendence Society:
His handler, a Calamity-level Aberrant codenamed Viper.
Several secret contact points and recognition signals he was responsible for passing intelligence to.
The locations and defensive strength of several small nearby strongholds he knew about.
The meaning of the Three-eye Symbol...
This was the emblem of the Thousand-Eyed Shadow faction, a rather mysterious and powerful faction even within the Transcendence Society.
These memories.
No matter how much Mole deep down didn't want to leak them, no matter how loyal he believed himself to be, were now laid completely bare before Su Zhan's eyes.
The process of memory extraction, for Mole, felt as long as a century, enduring the agony of having his soul stripped away inch by inch.
Yet in real time, only a mere dozen or so seconds had passed.
Su Zhan withdrew his gaze.
Mole, as if all his bones had been pulled out, slumped to the ground, his eyes completely devoid of light, drool uncontrollably flowing from the corner of his mouth, turned into an idiot who could only drool foolishly.
His consciousness had completely collapsed during the violent soul search just now.
Su Zhan obtained the information he wanted, even more than he had anticipated.
Without even a glance at the pile of mud on the ground, his figure blurred again and disappeared from the secret room.
A few minutes later.
The general goods purchasing shop caught fire. The flames only consumed the shop itself and all traces within, not spreading to the neighboring buildings.
And Su Zhan had already set off on the journey to find his handler, codenamed Viper.
The same script played out repeatedly in different locations.
Relying on the precise intelligence obtained from Mole's memories.
Su Zhan found Viper.
This was a Calamity-level, second stage Aberrant lurking in a city under reconstruction.
And he was disguised as a freight company boss.
Viper was more cunning than Mole.
The moment Su Zhan appeared, he tried to detonate the bombs hidden under the company, attempting to create chaos and perish together with his pursuer.
But under the effect of Time Deceleration, his movements slowed down as if frozen.
Su Zhan easily stopped his self-destruction.
Then, once again, it was those golden vertical pupils, forcibly invading his consciousness.
Viper's memory library was far richer than Mole's.
He learned more inside information about the Thousand-Eyed Shadow faction, learned the identity of the regional High Priest, learned about more hidden strongholds and safe houses.
Similarly, after enduring unimaginable soul-wrenching pain.
Viper also became a cripple with a shattered consciousness.
Along with his hideout, they were erased by the Flame of Destruction.
Su Zhan followed this vine woven from memories, from the lowest-level Mole, to the mid-level Viper, then to the regional High Priest in charge of affairs across several cities...
Pulling them out one by one, reading their memories, then disposing of them.
His methods remained consistent.
Find the target, control them, forcibly search their soul, obtain higher-level information, destroy the target.
The higher-ups of the Transcendence Society began to realize something was wrong.
The loss of contact with low-level strongholds could still be explained as accidents or being cleared by the authorities, but the mysterious consecutive disappearances of key personnel at Viper's level, disappearing so completely.
Without even a single useful warning message being sent back, this was absolutely abnormal.
Panic began to spread among the higher echelons.
They didn't know what method the enemy was using, why they could find them so precisely, and why they could make their people instantly lose all ability to resist and communicate.
They began frequently changing strongholds, activating backup communication methods, and even started suspecting each other internally, suspecting there was a mole at an even higher level.
However, all of this had minimal effect before Su Zhan's Time Abyss Pupil.
As long as he grabbed any single thread.
He could follow the torrent of memories, swim upstream, step by step approaching the core hidden deepest within.
Su Zhan was not in a hurry.
Leisurely walking through the memory maze meticulously constructed by the Transcendence Society, opening door after door of those memories that believed themselves to be unbreakably solid.
Ruthlessly exposing the secrets hidden deepest within to the sunlight.
As long as this continued, one day, he would stand before those so-called true higher-ups, read the deepest secrets in their minds.
And then send them, along with their twisted faith, into eternal nothingness.
This hunt based on memory tracing was far more despair-inducing for the Transcendence Society than a frontal war.
Because what they faced was a... Memory Reaper who could not be hidden from or deceived.