Chapter 435 - A Confusing Case (2/2)

Link stood up and began looking around the corpse.

After a while, he found a blade shard 15 feet away from the corpse. Link reached out to touch the blade, but the instant his hand made contact with the blade, he pulled it back.

The blade looked normal, but it was extremely cold. Link’s hand was frozen numb the moment he touched the blade.

Link quickly released some Dragon Power to dispel the feeling of numbness. Since he could not touch it directly, he would just use the Magician’s hand.

The blade shard floated up and hovered in front of Link.

Link used his control over spatial magic to form a magnifying glass. Using it, he slowly investigated the blade. On the surface, it seemed to be made of grey steel, but after magnifying it, he found that the blade shard was in fact hollow.

The shard was made up of countless chains of Mana structures. Looking at it carefully, they were all made of ice element spells and precious materials. Link hadn’t seen it before, but he was sure that it reached it Level-9 in strength. The techniques used in crafting the blade and Mana structures were unknown—they weren’t used anywhere on the continent or among the High Elves.

This corpse has an extremely sturdy physical body despite being an Assassin. The blade probably belongs to him, Link observed.

Link continued inspecting the corpse and found more and more scars. There were probably two people here. One of them was small in stature, less than 88 pounds and was probably female. The other one would be the Assassin. The Assassin was then ambushed from behind by the creature. He managed to block one of the tentacles at the cost of breaking his blade, but the other tentacle hit him from a different direction and pierced through his heart… the girl then escaped.

Subsequently, Link discovered a few strands of hair, which were silky, smooth and long. This hair belonged to the girl that had escaped. Link traced the footsteps to see where she had escaped to.

She ran towards the East, moving about 300 feet per second. Based on the depth of the footprints, she was not using spells but purely her physical strength… as for the tentacle, it pursued her relentlessly…

Link traced the trails on the ground and found that the girl had run in a straight line all the way. As he followed the trail, he found that it entered into a dark area. This put Link on high alert.

Six hundred feet in, Link once again found another shard that was snow white in color, looking like jade.

With his previous experience, Link used the Magician’s hand to pick up the shard.

Upon closer inspection, he realized that this shard came from a bracelet. Similar to the blade, it was constructed in a mysterious and unknown manner. Link was unable to determine its function.

This area was now only 1800 feet from the black shadow. In order to avoid alerting it, Link continued onwards very slowly.

Six hundred feet in, he discovered even more clues which painted for him a rather depressing truth.

Two people with Neanderthal blood arrived in this forest, whereupon they met the Void Beast. The Assassin was killed on the spot while the girl managed to avoid the Void Beast for a while. Later on, she was defeated. However, she did not die. Instead, she managed to trap the beast into another space and is constantly shouting for help.

Link didn’t know if this truly was the case, but the clues seemed to point towards this possibility.

“Help! Someone, help please!” The cries for help sounded out again. It sounded extremely pained and anxious. It sounded like they would disappear anytime.

Link frowned. What would happen if she couldn’t contain the creature?

This Void Beast was of the absorption type, and it didn’t seem to have any weak points. From the way it killed the Assassin, it seemed to prefer sneak attacks. This was the hardest kind of enemy to deal with. What should Link do?

As he was pondering, Link continued looking for other clues. Three hundred feet in, he unexpectedly found another corpse!

This corpse belonged to the silver-haired girl that the clues seemed to lead towards. She was collapsed on the ground, and her body was bent in an impossible position. Most of her bones looked fractured, and some were piercing out of her body. That indicated that she was hit by a sudden force just before dying.

This didn’t seem like the work of the tentacle creature. Furthermore, her body was not withered like the Assassin’s, and this meant the energy inside her wasn’t absorbed.

Link inspected the corpse carefully. This girl also seems like an Assassin, not a Magician. How would an Assassin have the ability to restrict the Void Beast? What’s going on? The girl is dead, so who is restricting the beast? It can’t be her spirit, can it?

Link continued his investigation. Finally, a while later, he discovered new leads. These clues turned over his earlier suspicions—these leads actually pointed to a third person! Based on the characteristics of the trails, this third person was a Yabba as well as a Magician!

Link remembered Gaimin saying that the voice sounded like a Yabba voice. Actually, he had a similar impression when he first heard it.

Well then, where did the Yabba go? Was it her that restrained the Void Beast?

Link circled a few times around the Neanderthal female’s corpse, looking to see if he could dig out any more information. However, he couldn’t find anything more. Traces of the Yabba were gone; they vanished like water vapor.

He thought that he had gotten some leads earlier, but now, it seemed like he was thrown back into the dark.