Monarch of Evernight (Web Novel)

[Volume 2 - Bloom of the Other Shore Flower]

“No. The scene is extremely clean, and no clues were left behind. The culprit must be a pro.”

Wu Zhengnan paced around the room as his killing intent leaked and caused the temperature inside the office to drop rapidly.

He suddenly stood still in front of the window and looked at the soldiers who were still training at the drilling grounds and said coldly, “Just because your men couldn’t find anything doesn’t mean that there are no clues to be found. You can ignore this matter. I will ask Dark Blade to take over!”

Qi Sicheng’s facial muscles twitched. Dark Blade was anything but a happy term.

Wu Zhengnan thought for a moment and added, “Go check if Qi Yue had recently done some things and offended someone. The trade may have been found out by accident because someone set their sights on him.”

“Yes sir!” Qi Sicheng was secretly impressed. Wu Zhengnan might be tough and forthright on the outside, but he was in fact a competitive and ruthless person. The reason he was able to maintain his position for so many years was because his work was watertight.

When Qi Sicheng left, Wu Zhengnan pressed a button beneath the corner of the office table. Moments later, a monstrous-looking person walked into the room.

This man was almost two meters tall, but he was unusually and had extraordinarily long limbs. His skin was pale white, and his eyebrows and hair were a faded yellow so faint that it was nearly indiscernible. Moreover, this person had a bizarre pair of vertical, amber-colored pupils. It looked like the eyes of some sort of reptile.

The man asked immediately after he passed through the door, “Who are we killing this time, general?”

“Qi Yue is dead. Find his killer and bring them back to me alive if possible. If it’s inconvenient then a dead body is fine too. My only request is that they must die a painful death! Do whatever you want besides that one requirement. You don’t have to worry about their status either!” Wu Zhengnan said fiercely.

Surprisingly, he was able to be forthright with his emotions in front of this person.

The strange man was startled for a moment before he said, “So the young master is dead! Alright, how many men can you afford me?”

Wu Zhengnan waved a hand and said, “You may mobilize the Dark Blades however you like!”

The strange man stretched out his long, scarlet tongue and actually licked his own nose with it. Then he smiled sinisterly and said, “Don’t worry. There’s no way this person is escaping Yu Renyan’s grasp no matter who he is.”

“Go! I await your good news.”

Yu Renyan retreated from Wu Zhengnan’s office. When he passed by the female aide, he suddenly twisted his upper body at a bizarre angle and nearly pressed himself to the woman’s face. Then, he licked the woman’s neck strongly with his long tongue!

Caught off guard, the female aide instantly lost all color on her face. However, she immediately recovered and stood as straight as she possibly could. However, she dared not cry out or even show signs that she wanted to avoid him.

Yu Renyan let out a tapering laugh, casting her a sideway glance before striding away from the place.

Half a day later, Yu Renyan brought a dozen or so people to where Qi Yue was murdered for a careful investigation. Qi Sicheng’s subordinates had already searched through this place multiple times already, and their investigation yielded no additional results.

Then, they headed towards the vampires’ remains.

Yu Renyan suddenly crouched and picked up a body part from the ground. He played around with the body part and inspected it closely before he picked up a broken strand of hair from the body part.

Suddenly, he stretched out his tongue and swallowed the strand just like that. After tasting it carefully for a very long time, he said, “This is the murderer’s hair. I have memorized his scent.”

Yu Renyan revealed a cruel smile. There was nothing more he loved to hunt than living prey.

The traces that murderer had left behind were surprisingly few. It was obvious that he was a pro. However, it was exactly because he was a pro that it was fun to kill him. He tossed the body part high up into the air as his mouth suddenly became unusually huge. He actually swallowed it in a single gulp. Then, he picked up another body part while looking like he wanted more. He actually looked like he enjoyed the “taste” of these body parts a lot.

However, Yu Renyan didn’t simply consume the new body part. Instead, he carefully tasted it, even as his facial expression grew odder and odder. Suddenly, he opened his mouth and vomited everything he just swallowed.

The vomiting became uncontrollable the moment he started. In the end, Yu Renyan even lay on the ground and vomited until he almost fainted!

The Dark Blades garbed completely in black robes might have gotten used to Yu Renyan’s strange actions a long time ago, but they had never seen him like this before.

They looked at each other in dismay. Yu Renyan looked like he had eaten something bad, but the fact was no one had ever seen Yu Renyan suffering from a stomach ache before. He literally thrived on rotten meat like a real vulture. However, no one dared to ask Yu Renyan a thing before he spoke up first.

Yu Renyan continued to vomit until even his gastric juices and bile were completely gone before he finally collapsed on the ground and panted heavily.

While panting, he suddenly began to laugh neurotically and muttered to himself, “Interesting! How interesting! This poison specifically targets the black blood, but I don’t even have a clue what it is! Not bad. This is what makes for an interesting hunt! Follow me, you all!”

He suddenly bounced up to the air and flipped before he landed on all fours. Then, he moved swiftly like a large insect with his face almost pressing on the ground. He sniffed the ground non-stop with his nose and ran all the way to the north.

The Dark Blade warriors knew that Yu Renyan had already found a scent to follow. They silently followed behind him.

These people were elites who were seldomly seen even among the expeditionary forces, and Yu Renyan was their leader. Yu Renyan had the chance to enter a top ten special corps in the past, but he ultimately chose the expeditionary forces because the Evernight Continent was the only place he could completely let loose and do whatever he pleased.

Far, far away, Qianye still had no idea that a group of cruel, vicious, and cunning wolves was tailing behind him.

He had been moving at a uniform speed of forty kilometers an hour, and he had ran non-stop for nearly ten hours. This was an escape method that employed ultra running over long periods of time to swiftly depart a scene and shake off any potential pursuers. There were no tricks to this method. It was a battle where both parties compete to see who had the better counter tracking abilities, stamina, and willpower.

In the past, Qianye only needed to run four hours non-stop to achieve his objective of moving into another region. The Red Scorpion’s lowest acceptable standard for ultra running was to run one hundred and twenty kilometers within three hours. Now that Qianye’s origin power had ascended to rank three, and his constitution was that of a vampire’s, his endurance had soared by leaps and bounds. That was why Qianye decided that he might as well push his endurance to its limits. Ten hours later, he officially stepped into Boulderstone Region’s territory.

Qianye stopped to rest for an hour at the border before continuing forward.

High up in the air, a bald eagle flew by and trained its sharp gaze onto the lone figure running on the wasteland. The figure ran continuously and never changed his speed.

The eagle hesitated, but it ultimately decided that man’s actions were overly bizarre, and that he gave it the strangest shivers for some reason. Therefore, it let out a long cry before changing direction and flying off. It gave up on this obvious prey.

A day later, Yu Renyan also appeared at Boulderstone Region’s border.

By now his face looked even paler than before. His face and body were completely covered in dust, and his hair was about as disheveled as it could be. It was obvious that he was greatly exhausted from the pursuit, and because he accidentally ate the vampire body part that was tainted by Qianye’s blood energy, he would vomit or shit from time to time. This caused him to lose much of his strength.

Yu Renyan had also discovered that his opponent had actually employed ultra running to get away from his pursuers during the chase. He couldn’t help but feel worried. He was a true master in field tracking, and he knew that he was more than half a day behind his opponent to begin with. If his opponent successfully put too much distance between the two of them, then he might lose track of them completely.

This was an absolutely unacceptable defeat.

Yu Renyan had no choice but to employ the stupidest but most effective method of them all, a full speed pursuit. However, things hadn’t gone well for him from the start; his opponent had ran and ran as if his stamina had no limit!

At the fifth hour, Yu Renyan finally couldn’t keep it up any longer. He had to rest for a consecutive three hours before he could continue pursuing his opponent.

When he reached the border of the Boulderstone Region, only three Dark Blade warriors were still with him. The rest of them had all fallen behind.

Yu Renyan finally discovered his opponent’s resting spot. He wasn’t sure whether to be happy or worried of his discovery. He was happy because the miniscule traces he found meant that he hadn’t strayed off the right path and that his opponent was ultimately human. He was also worried because this fellow had displayed endurance far beyond that of a common human being. Even the monsters of those elite corps could only do so much.

In the end, Yu Renyan decided not to continue the pursuit any further and rested at the place where Qianye had set up camp.

He discovered that the more than half a day distance between him and his opponent had already been extended to a full day. This also meant that there was no way he could catch up to his opponent’s speed. Moreover, his opponent was obviously a pro and left very few traces behind to track. After a day’s time, his scent had became so thin that it wouldn’t take long before the final trace of it would be lost entirely. Moreover, the moment his opponent entered any one of the four great cities of Boulderstone Region, he would immediately disappear like a drop of water inside the sea.

Rather than pointlessly wasting his stamina, Yu Renyan decided that he might as well recover his strength and plan for the future.

This didn’t mean that Yu Renyan was going to give up, however. On the contrary, the difficulty his opponent had presented made him so excited that he felt like was spending every second on high. In fact, he nearly moaned a couple of times as a result.

Yu Renyan decided to hunt down his enemy until the end! There seriously weren’t many opponents that deserved a tracking and assassination expert like him on this rundown continent.

When Qianye walked past the gates of a small town, he looked just like a young mercenary.

He enjoyed a fulfilling meal at the most overcrowded restaurant in town and took a swig at the most jam packed bar he could find. After squeezing a girl’s round buttocks in passing, he slipped into the toilets and left quietly through the bar’s side door a moment later.

When he walked out of the town once more, he had transformed into a middle-aged uncle with a short mustache.

Qianye was certain that anyone who could have still been pursuing him would have lost his tracks after his twirl in that small town. He continued to run without pausing even a single time, and three days and three nights later, he finally arrived at Darkblood City at the border of Boulderstone Region.

The city was huge. It had four great Perpetual Dynamo Towers at the four corners of the city. Its foundation was covered in steam machines that were as big as hills. Overall, it had an extremely lousy design as gigantic hanging pipelines and cables were built all over the people’s heads. They stretched like spider webs across every corner of the city and provided heat and energy to its defense facilities.

The city’s absolutely chaotic power system design looked impossible to sabotage unless someone were to flatten the entire city. Perhaps this was the original intention of the designer?

Darkblood City was situated at the first line where humans and the dark races clashed against each other. It was the most important supply base for the expeditionary forces, hunters, and pioneers.

This city’s order was just as chaotic as its hanging pipelines. Even the expeditionary forces held the highest level of authority here only in name. All sorts of crimes were being carried out in this city, and many people would die in the process but no one paid attention to them at all.

This place was an adventurer’s paradise, and a fugitive’s heaven. However, it was hell for the weak.

Almost a thousand years ago, the human race and the vampires had fought a great battle here. Both sides had sent a couple million soldiers, and it ultimately ended with 11 million dead humans in exchange for the lives of 6 million vampire warriors, pushing the eight-month war in favor of the humans.

It was only after the battle was over that the humans finally built a fortress city at this place. The blood on both sides seeped into the ground and dyed several thousand kilometers of soil in red. The color didn’t fade even after hundreds of years. That was why this city was named Darkblood City.

This was also the place Qianye had chosen to stay in.

This was the first time Qianye had arrived at Darkblood City. He couldn’t help but be stunned to the core when he stared at the grandiose city walls that were thirty meters tall and gigantic city buildings that were a dozen or so stories high!