After confirming the thickness of the stone wall, Shade did not continue wasting his own spirit to melt it with Feliana's Witch Light. Instead, after removing the cloth wrapped around the scabbard, he inserted Night Watchman into the hole his arm had melted through the wall.
Taking a deep breath, he channeled elements and spirit into Night Watchman's blade:
"Witch Light!"
In an instant, golden light burst from the blade, and the spreading radiance immediately melted a large hole into the stone wall. Satisfied, Shade pulled Night Watchman back and bent down to crawl through the unusually smooth opening into the space beyond.
The space behind the stone wall appeared to have been forcibly excavated by some external force. Its interior was irregular in shape, and its original user had likely treated it only as a temporary base.
The total area was about the size of three or four wardrobes. As soon as Shade entered, he crouched down and used the sunset twilight streaming in from behind him to inspect the ground. Sure enough, he found a mess of footprints in the thick dust.
He reached down and touched the dust on the ground.
"Dust means no one has come here for many years. This basically confirms that this was the base—or rather, the Safe House—of Halder Ondiba, the previous holder of 'Arrow,' more than a decade ago. The footprints should have been left by the two people who visited Rust Alley fifteen days ago."
He straightened up and squinted at the space behind the stone wall, illuminated by the twilight. The footprints on the ground were extremely chaotic. Though Shade called himself a Detective, he did not possess the deductive ability to reconstruct all of someone's movements from such a mess.
He only knew that the footprints belonged to