The smile on Elias’s face didn't change in the slightest.
He even nodded to the two officers before turning to walk away from the front of the print shop.
“Have a safe night, officers.”
“I hope you don't run into any trouble tonight.”
The two officers watched his retreating figure, feeling that his words didn't quite sound like a blessing, yet they couldn't find anything wrong with them.
Only after he turned the corner and heard their footsteps fade into the distance did the smile quickly drop from Elias’s face.
“Instead of catching thieves in the middle of the night, they're specifically targeting an upright citizen like me.”
“The work scheduling at Old Palace Yard is definitely a bit flawed.”
He swept his gaze over his surroundings, his spirituality quietly flowing.
【Moonlight Veil】 draped over his shoulders.
His clear silhouette seemed to be gently erased by the night, his presence rapidly fading.
Elias hugged the red brick wall, circling halfway around the street, and doubled back through the narrow alley behind the abandoned print shop.
The basement exit was hidden at the end of a flight of stone steps leading downward.
Moldy wooden frames were piled beside the door, and a layer of uncleaned coal soot had accumulated in the corner.
Elias crouched down, embedding a pure silver wire into the crevice of the threshold, then wiped a layer of dust over it with his fingertip.
The fine wire instantly vanished from sight.
Next, he chose a spot outside the door that would be convenient for a retreat and pressed three slender pure silver nails into the gaps of the surrounding floorboards, leaving only their nearly invisible heads exposed.
The two short hardwood stakes were tucked into his trickster pocket dimension using 【Trickster's Fingertips】.
Only after completing these preparations did he look at the door lock.
There were no spiritual circuits or alarms; it was just an ordinary brass lock.
Elias gripped the body of the lock and exerted a bit of force.
A faint, muffled thud came from the wooden door as the latch, along with two screws, was ripped straight out of the rotting door frame by his hand.
A physical 【Knock Spell】.
The advantage was that it didn't consume any spirituality; the disadvantage was that the door repair fee could not be reimbursed.
He caught the falling lock before it hit the ground, then gently pushed the door open.
A stale, musty odor that had been trapped for days rushed out to meet him.
The scent of moldy wood, dried printing ink, and a faint metallic tang of blood mingled together, clinging to his nasal passages in a highly unpleasant way.
The moment the smell entered his nose, the hairs on the back of Elias’s neck stood on end.
He had no idea how this vampire could stand such a place.
The basement wasn't large.
Two gas lamps hung on the walls, their dim yellow light barely illuminating the long table in the center.
A pale woman in a black dress sat by the table.
Beside her hand lay a reddish-brown cowhide notebook.
The wear on the cover matched the description of the rubbed page Moreau had shown him exactly.
He had found it.
As for the person guarding it, she looked far more expensive than the notebook—and far more dangerous.
Elias let the 【Moonlight Veil】 slowly disperse, actively revealing himself.
“Hey!”
“My lady!”
The woman raised her head.
Her face was beautiful to the point of being lifeless, but her lips were strikingly red.
Elias raised his hands, adopting a non-threatening posture.
“No offense intended.”
“That notebook is mine.”
“Not anymore.”
A flash of crimson lit up the depths of the woman's eyes.
The red light wasn't piercing, yet it seemed to travel along her gaze and plunge directly into Elias’s sea of consciousness.
“Come here.”
An invisible force slammed against his soul barrier.
It was very light.
Like someone rapping their knuckles against a thick wooden door from the inside.
If Elias hadn't been on high alert since stepping through the door, he might have even dismissed this slight anomaly as an illusion.
The feeling was somewhat similar to a siren's song.
It didn't forcibly seize control of his body, but rather made him feel as though obedience was his own decision.
Unfortunately for her, his soul barrier was unreasonably thick.
Elias didn't resist.
At least, not on the surface.
The vigilance in his eyes rapidly dissolved, and his shoulders slumped, looking as if his mind had been completely captured by those crimson eyes.
One step.
Two steps.
He walked slowly toward the long table.
Watching him approach, a sliver of contempt curled the corners of the woman's lips.
Her right hand was hidden beneath the table, but several threads of fresh blood silently seeped from her cuff.
Instead of dripping, the blood elongated and thinned under the manipulation of her spirituality, turning into several dark-red threads slightly thicker than a strand of hair.
They slithered along the edge of the table, darting straight toward Elias’s throat and chest.
The blood threads cut through the air without making a sound, leaving only an increasingly dense scent of rust in their wake.
At such close proximity, an ordinary person wouldn't even have time to realize they had been hurt.
His 【Malice Perception】 suddenly flared.
In the next instant, Elias, whose eyes had been vacant, suddenly raised his hand.
He slammed a paper packet hard onto the floor between them.
Puff!
A massive cloud of white powder burst into the air.
The blood threads happened to pass right through the powdery mist.
The flowing blood instantly coagulated, and the thin blood threads turned into rigid, dark-red strips in the blink of an eye, clattering onto the floor one after another.
The mechanism of the blood-stopping powder was to accelerate blood coagulation, making it absolutely perfect for this situation.
The woman's expression changed dramatically.
However, she was already so pale she looked like she had just been dragged out of a coffin, so it was hard to tell how much paler she could get.
Elias had already shifted half a step.
His 【Shifting Afterimage】 remained in place, while his true body rapidly glided backward, retreating to the pre-selected spot on the other side of the threshold.
The silver wire stretched between them.
At the same time, cool moonlight expanded in front of him, forming a translucent 【Moonlight Barrier】.
The black elemental revolver instantly appeared in his hand.
The woman had already retreated into the shadow cast by the long table, refraining from rashly crossing the silver line.
She looked down at the blood-stopping powder on the floor, then back at Elias.
“Who on earth are you?”
“John Constantine.”
Elias's breath didn't even falter as he lied.
“A scholar.”
“A scholar?”
The woman's tone finally wavered with obvious emotion.
It was as if this answer offended her even more than the packet of blood-stopping powder had.
What kind of scholar could resist her 【Domination Gaze】?
Was he not lying through his teeth?
As soon as she finished speaking, the gas lamps on both walls went out simultaneously.
The darkness didn't spread gradually like a 【Darkness Spell】.
Instead, it fell like a heavy shroud, swallowing even the faint light filtering down from the stairs in a single gulp.
Elias immediately activated 【Darkvision】 while draping the 【Moonlight Veil】 over himself once more.
The outlines within sixty feet reappeared in his field of view.
The walls, the long table, and the coagulated blood threads on the floor were all clearly visible.
Only the spot where the woman had been standing was now empty.
On the floor, nothing but a patch of shadow—darker than the surrounding gloom—slithered rapidly across the room, merging into the corner in the blink of an eye.
Her spiritual aura vanished at the exact same moment.
“Why do vampires like fighting with the lights off too?”
Elias tightened his grip on the gun handle, his eyes scanning the surroundings.
“This habit is a bit too cliché for your race.”
No one responded.
The basement was so quiet that only his own breathing remained.
A wooden board made a tiny creaking sound beneath his boot.
Elias didn't whip his head around toward the sound, instead letting his muzzle slowly sweep across every shadow where someone might hide.
The next instant, he suddenly sensed something wrong beneath his feet.
In this absolute darkness without any light source, shadows shouldn't exist.
Yet a black silhouette belonging to him was firmly pinned to the ground, with a slender, dark-red spike piercing its chest.
Just as Elias was about to turn around, his legs suddenly felt incredibly heavy.
His muscles weren't injured, and his joints could still move, but the soles of his shoes felt as though they had grown directly into the floorboards, rendering him unable to even lift his feet.
He didn't try to wrench himself free.
Spirituality instantly lit up along his rational circuits.
Several spheres of bright 【Hexfire】 ignited around his feet simultaneously, illuminating his body from different angles.
Under the intersecting beams of light, the complete shadow that shouldn't have existed was instantly torn into several pieces, and the dark-red mark pinning its chest dissipated.
The restraint suddenly loosened.
A pale hand reached out from the shadow beside him at that exact moment.
The hand didn't slam against the barrier; instead, it seemed to grow directly from the darkness within the barrier, five sharp fingernails lunging straight for the side of his neck.
But before the arm could fully emerge, one of the pure silver nails pressed into the floorboard crevice suddenly glinted with a cold light.
A puff of white smoke instantly hissed from the back of the woman's hand.
The flesh where it touched the silver blackened rapidly, and a pungent odor of burnt hair filled the air.
“So that's where you are.”
Elias turned and raised his gun.
“Bang!”
A radiance bullet tore through the darkness.
The woman shrank back into the shadows at the last possible moment; the bullet failed to pierce her chest, but it still grazed her shoulder.
A dazzling burst of light exploded on her black dress, charring a large patch of fabric and flesh.
She was forced out of the shadows, reappearing in the depths of the basement.
White smoke continued to billow from the wound on her shoulder.
The woman stared deathly at Elias, slowly raising her injured hand.
An unfamiliar spirituality began to flow between her fingers.
Elias had already squeezed the trigger, but his movement faltered for a fraction of a second.
The spirituality clearly did not belong to the Moon Lord, yet it provoked a faint, almost imperceptible resonance from the silver circuits resting in his sea of consciousness.
At the exact same moment, the inverted corridor of mirrors above his sea of consciousness also vibrated slightly.
Two completely different rational circuits had actually captured some sort of similarity from each other's power.
This was illogical.
But now was clearly not the time to flip through reference books.
Flowing darkness rose from beneath the woman's feet, rapidly spreading up her black dress, turning into a constantly undulating dark cloak in the blink of an eye.
She took a step forward.
Her figure overlapped with the darkness once more, clearly preparing to continue her assault.
Elias spun the cylinder, rotating another elemental bullet into the firing position.
On the gun grip, the owl's two eyes lit up simultaneously, but they glowed with entirely different spiritual lusters.
The woman had already approached the silver wire.
Her gaze had originally been locked onto Elias’s throat, but as the distance closed, it suddenly drifted downward, landing on the hand gripping the gun.
More precisely, it landed on the owl-head pattern engraved on the grip.
Her footsteps abruptly ground to a halt.
“This owl...”
She actually took half a step back on her own initiative.
“Why is it on your gun?”
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