Seal of the Four-Colored Horse (III)

"Phew... huff..."

Heavy gasps tore at his chest as a short, limping man staggered through a dark alley in flight.

Every step his right foot took came with the stabbing pain of dislocated bones, while an old injury in his back made him hunch ever lower, like an aged mole.

The gas streetlights in the distance flickered on and off.

Through the man's sweat-blurred vision, the swaying shadows of branches seemed to twist across the ground into dancing moths.

"Hah—"

He suddenly coughed up a mouthful of bloody foam.

The long escape had left his lungs burning, and every breath felt like swallowing blades.

Dark-red blood left a trail across the gravel path.

A strange clicking sound came from the man's throat, instantly drawing rats out from the shadows.

Gray fur detached from their bodies.

Like drifting dandelion seeds, it scattered down over the bloodstains and footprints.

Soon, every trace he had left behind vanished.

The man felt his temples throbbing. It was a sign that his ability was nearing its limit.

How much longer were they going to chase him?!

Pain from his nerves kept washing through his brain.

The man wanted to stop.

But the murderous intent stabbing straight at his heart followed him like a shadow.

Damn Mariana! I gave her the best rum, and that bitch couldn't even deal with one little bastard!

Trash was trash.

She'd been a useless whore while alive, and now that she'd become a walking corpse, she still couldn't fucking bite anyone!

The man cursed endlessly in his heart.

Suddenly.

He heard the rasp of leather scraping over the ground, along with the faint smell of gunpowder.

Why couldn't he shake them?

I clearly erased my tracks with my ability!

Could one of the people chasing me be some lackey from that den of goddamn mystics?

Damn it!

Then a crisp crack came from the end of the alley, as though some creature were resetting its joints.

"No!"

He knew that sound of breaking bones all too well.

They had caught up!

And they had even summoned a Cursed Walking Corpse!

If he were affected by the walking corpse's aura, he would become an insect caught in a spiderweb, completely unable to move.

His long-taut nerves finally snapped.

"No!"

Like a wounded beast, the man dragged his right leg and charged forward desperately. The sound of a skull cracking rang out as the crown of his head slammed hard into a brick wall.

This was a dead end.

And the man, fleeing blindly, had failed to notice.

Ye Yan slowly emerged from the shadows at the other end, a revolver in his hand.

Coordinates recorded indirectly were difficult to maintain for long.

When the person corresponding to a coordinate died, he did not even need to verify it; the fragile coordinate would collapse on its own.

He could clearly sense that as the man's life force completely faded, the already precarious coordinate on the Compass suddenly crumbled, freeing up another storage slot.

Ye Yan glanced at the corpse, then turned back.

Under the streetlamp, a tall figure leaned against the lamp post, idly playing with half a shattered glass in one hand.

"Mr. Smith, this man is dead."

The man Ye Yan had called "Mr. Smith" casually tossed aside the broken glass shards and walked over with a black umbrella in hand. "The cat-and-mouse game is over. Unfortunately, the one running wasn't a clever mouse, but a blind mole."

There was a hint of mockery in his voice.

"Then, according to our agreement, the wanted criminal and the walking corpse's bodies are both mine."

Ye Yan nodded.

Even now, he still doubted the identity of the man before him. The other man had acted far too recklessly from start to finish, nothing like a low-level member of the Administration.

He had seen with his own eyes how Smith forced people into desperate struggle, then lured them step by step into a trap.

Of course, Ye Yan had been an accomplice as well.

If he had not used the Luck Compass to pinpoint the short man's location, Smith would not have been able to find that rat who had been hiding in the sewers.

Ye Yan lowered his head and tucked the gun into his waist pouch.

Using the motion as cover, he hid the gloom that was becoming impossible to conceal in his eyes.

Was he slowly being assimilated by this world?

Other than a momentary physiological discomfort upon seeing the corpse, he had felt no psychological burden at all over killing someone.

No, he had not changed at all.

It was not that he felt no sympathy whatsoever for the death of another human being. It was simply because the dead man was trash unworthy of being called human.

His self-reflection lasted only a brief moment.

By the time he raised his head again, Ye Yan's expression had returned to normal.

"My mission is finally complete."

As Smith spoke, he removed his top hat and pressed it against his chest.

A few strands of silver-gray hair fell over his forehead. He adjusted the glasses on his nose and looked at Ye Yan with a smiling gaze.

"Your ability is truly well suited to the Natural Administration. Leave the Sanctuary and join us. I'll be your sponsor, and you'll accomplish great things in the Administration!"

Ye Yan shook his head, rejecting the empty promises.

"Sorry, I like the Research Institute very much."

To keep the other man from pestering him further, he shamelessly borrowed someone else's prestige again. "Besides, I don't want to betray Mr. Holmes's trust in me."

He had already made up a story about joining the Sanctuary before. It was not too much of a stretch to say that some big shot had taken a liking to him, right?

At that, Smith showed a regretful expression.

"All right."

He shrugged helplessly.

Seeing that Smith had finally stopped paying attention to him and turned to deal with the bodies on the ground, Ye Yan let out a sigh of relief.

Acting opposite an award-winning actor was truly exhausting.

So, how had he met this dangerous man named Smith?

They had to go back seven hours.

Cold. Dead silence...

Ever since he had frozen unconscious, Ye Yan's awareness had drifted through darkness, as though submerged in the abyssal sea of an eternal night.

Suddenly, a beam of light pierced the darkness.

Within that vision at the boundary between illusion and reality, a majestic city seemed to emerge amid shimmering golden light.

He rubbed his eyes, wanting to see it more clearly.

But when he opened his eyes again, there was no city before him, only an unfamiliar ceiling.

That familiar sense of déjà vu.

For one moment, Ye Yan had even thought that he had transmigrated again.

"Finally awake, lucky boy?"

A gentle voice came from nearby.

But it did not belong to the familiar Doctor Watson. It belonged to an unfamiliar man.

The gentleman before him had a meticulously styled slicked-back haircut. He politely removed his hat in greeting, his smile warm and friendly, while only his ice-blue eyes revealed coldness and rationality.

"Where is Old Jack? What about the other people in the Inn?"

Ye Yan asked.

"Oh? The first thing you ask after waking up isn't about your own condition, but about the others?"

The gentleman raised an eyebrow slightly. After his gaze lingered briefly over Ye Yan's anxious face, he put his hat back on, concealing his strangely colored silver-white hair.

"Don't worry. The entire Inn was affected by the walking corpse's aura, producing Secret Aura. Ordinary people will only think they had a strange dream and won't notice anything unusual at all."

Secret Aura?

More strange knowledge had been added.

From the other man's description, the effect of this ability resembled a Muggle-Repelling Charm or a barrier spell, preventing ordinary people from noticing the existence of supernatural phenomena.

Yet not a single word about such important information had been mentioned in Beginner's Guide to Occultism.

Ye Yan silently complained to himself.

Perhaps this book would be more appropriately titled Guide to Joining British Occult Organizations.

"As for that old coachman, he's truly exceptional at playing dead. Even I was nearly fooled by him."

The gentleman continued speaking, his ice-blue eyes still smiling as they observed the youth's facial expressions. "So, do you have time to care about your own condition now?"

Ye Yan lowered his head.

Only then did he realize that the wounds on his body had long since healed, without even leaving a scar.

Only the exhaustion in his mind and the tears in his clothes reminded him that everything which had happened before was not an illusion.

"Did you save me?" Ye Yan's voice was somewhat hoarse. "Before I fainted, I saw a moth."

"Yes, that was my ability. I gave you Mead in time. A little later, and you might have turned into an ice sculpture."

"Thank you very much. May I ask who you are...?"

"James Smith."

To make his words more convincing, the man took out his identification. Ye Yan saw the Chain Sword emblem representing the Administration faintly appear on its cover.

"I am a junior investigator of the Supernatural Administration Bureau. I came here in pursuit of cultists from the Church of the Sunset. Now, I have an agreement—or rather, a deal—I would like to discuss with you."

He deliberately emphasized the final word.

"So, will you accept?"

Smith took out a pair of handcuffs from his coat again.

"If you refuse, I will have no choice but to arrest you for 'illegal possession of weapons' and 'interfering with special law enforcement.'"