The night was black as ink. Forest City's streetlights lit up one after another, spilling warm yellow halos over the streets as pedestrians gradually thinned out.
The sallow-faced Association commissioner hurried along the main road, appearing perfectly ordinary throughout. The patrol personnel stationed along his route merely took him for an Association employee out on nighttime business, neither stopping nor suspecting him.
He traveled unhindered all the way to the Wilderness boundary outside the city, where all signs of human habitation vanished, leaving only the night wind rustling through the vegetation.
His advancing footsteps abruptly halted. The sallow-faced man raised a hand and vigorously rubbed his throbbing temples, then looked up at the full moon already hanging high in the sky. His eyes were filled with bewilderment and confusion as he murmured, "Strange... I'd clearly just finished my work and was about to head back to rest. How did I end up outside the city?"
The wilderness beyond the city was pitch-black, its barren trees and strange rocks looming indistinctly with an eerie chill.
The terror of inexplicably appearing somewhere unfamiliar seized him at once. His face paled, and he dared not dwell on it. Turning around, he broke into a frantic sprint toward the city, his footsteps utterly panicked, terrified that he had encountered some strange ghost.
What the sallow-faced man failed to notice was that an extremely faint blood-colored mark was gently pulsing on the skin at the back of his neck. A red gleam flashed and vanished, like a dormant little insect, leaving no trace in the night.
Inside his private Training Room deep within the Fighting Association, Lin Sheng lounged sideways on a spacious leather sofa, holding a bottle of high-density energy drink that glimmered with a luminous blue sheen.
He tilted his head back and