"As for the location, even if you went back and searched through everything again, it would be hard to find anything more valuable... Look, this piece of intelligence only mentions seized items and remnants; it says nothing at all about captives... From what I know, laboratories like this are quite common in the Silent Forest. Those wizards only conduct experiments inside and never leave behind any clues."
"Besides, you were lucky. This isn't the sort of news that can be published in a newspaper."
The Wanderer Wizard congratulated the black cat on not wasting his jade coins. Raising his glass, he took a small sip of gin. "I reckon the hunter selling this information had some other reason, which was why he set a time limit..."
If it could have been made public, it should have appeared in the papers days ago for Fatty Xin to see. He would not have needed to spend money buying it now. The black cat nodded in agreement and lowered his head to lap up a few mouthfuls of goat's milk.
"...But the important thing isn't those masks. It's the other photographs."
The bar owner pointed at several photographs related to the test subjects, his tone utterly certain. "This laboratory was conducting Demon Flesh transplant experiments... Look carefully. The fleshy growths protruding from these subjects' necks, abdomens, and backs form standard radial patterns, arranged with great symmetry. That is the classic form of a test subject mutating under the stimulation of Demon Flesh... And the contours of their eye sockets are heavily shadowed; that is blood pooling beneath the eyelids... Their eyeballs are crisscrossed with blood vessels. I needn't emphasize that."
The old wizard's gaunt fingers slowly moved across the photographs as he patiently and meticulously analyzed all the inconspicuous details hidden within this