Chapter 501: Ripples upon Ripples
*Bing-Bong*
We interrupt your chapter arc for this important update.
The subsequent scenes of Zhen Li debating with himself over the morality of accepting power that came from questionable sources has been moved to a future chapter.
The reason being that the writer found the initial scenes a bit boring and wanted to see if he could improve them.
Instead, this upcoming chapter(s?) Is going to be a series of shorter ones with a shared thread.
See if you can find what that thread is.
That is all.
…
Do people actually care about these side characters?
|To be fair, one person’s side character is another POV’s main character. Like…the entirety of the Round Table or Robin Hood. Besides, there is a reason for me to be telling these short stories.|
Aside from you having writer’s block?
|Shut the fuck up.|
Make me, anyways, couldn’t you have used more modern examples? Like the J*stice L*ague or the *vengers?
|The fact you just asterisked your own speech just tell you why I shouldn’t.|
Fair enough.
*Bing-Bong*
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“Alright, where do I head off to next?,” Draigo asked himself as he sat underneath a shady oak tree, a map of the Alloy Republic, more specifically the frontier region, resting in his lap.
Next to him was his trusty shamisen, although it wasn’t the same one he had grown up with that were made of rather exotic materials.
This new one was rather simple, with the strings this time around were made of wolf, cougar and donkey guts, and the pick being made of a rooster’s talon.
Even the main body was nothing more than simple black lacquered wood, albeit, the skin covering the body was still made of toad hide.
“Hmmm, I could swing by Brassborough…wait, shit, is the leader of the Clockmen still alive?,” Draigo mumbled as he traced a finger from his current location to the nearest city.
It had been months since that fateful day of when he finally got his revenge on the bastard that killed his beloved and made his declaration to the heavens that he would become a world famous musician for Wyvara’s sake.
So far…he’s been keeping to it the best he could.
“Then again, Silver Fang city is closer…wait, no, I think I’m still banned after that one drunken stupor during my mercenary days…criminy, how did I survive this long?”
As an Aether Grandmaster, Draigo essentially had carte blanche when it came to traveling wherever he pleased, but that didn’t mean he could go everywhere.
Over the many years of grief he had felt after Wyvara’s death, Draigo had done multiple questionable actions that earned him the ire of several factions throughout the years.
Ranging from criminal to religious to worker based unions, a whole slew of organizations didn’t necessarily want him dead, but they did want to beat the ever living shit out of him.
“Oh that city had a great mead…can’t go there…”
Some of which had eventually given up on it because, why give a shit about an old drunkard at this point, but others still held onto their grudges.
“Ruby Ridge is not that much-wait…was that the place with the convent? Gods I hope not…”
Either way, there weren’t many places he could go to in the immediate vicinity that wouldn’t just beat his ass bloody the moment he showed up.
Life lesson: If you’re gonna be sad and unpredictable, do it someplace private so others can use it to prevent you from going places.
“Holy shit, I have pissed off a bunch of people in the region…hmmm.”
Keeping his finger on the map, Draigo eventually found a path leading to a place he hadn’t really thought about in a while, but had heard good things about in regards to music.
A place that happened to host a grand hotel that loved musicians.
A place that had a miraculous ship that just so happened to be hiring for what they were calling “cruise shows”.
Pearl Tusk Harbor.
“Well…I guess a part of being famous all over the world is to actually go and see the world. Not like I can just stay in one place and send music directly into the ears of people all the way across the ocean…”
With his mind made up, Draigo grabbed his shamisen, dusted his butt off and began his walk towards Pearl Tusk Harbor.
As he did though, tears began streaming down his face. Making this whole moment weirder, he wasn’t actively sad or crying.
‘Again with this?,’ Draigo thought to himself as he felt the warm tears on his cheeks again.
For the past few days, Draigo had been regularly finding tears coming out of his eyes for no clear reason. Making it weirder, these tears never felt like it was coming from him.
Emotionally, there was no reason for this.
Physically, he had a both a doctor and an alchemist look over his body and much to their surprise, they couldn’t find any particular reason why he was crying like this either.
If Draigo had to hazard a guess, it was like someone was just…using him to cry their tears.
‘Is that even possible?,’ Draigo mused to himself as he kept walking and wiping the tears from his face.
He didn’t think such an action was possible…but he did know someone who would.
“Hey, did you know that in Umbral Spider, they have a belief that if someone find themselves crying for no reason, it’s because they’re actually crying the tears of a lost loved one?”
“Really?”
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Hidden in the sea routes between Stampeding Bison and Umbral Spider, there is an island that most people assume to be deserted.
However, if one attempted to approach the island, they would find themselves misdirected and immediately sailing in a direction opposite to it.
This misdirection was thanks to a simple yet powerful formation known as the “Twisting Compass” formation.
This particular formation is known for its “unintrusiveness”, meaning one could overlay it with other formations without affecting its integrity and ability.
Combined with a couple illusion formations and several protection wards on top of it, one can essentially make a hidden base that was borderline indestructible, essential for hidden sects, secretive cults, or in the case of this particular island, an entire criminal organization.
For if one were to bypass all of these illusions and actually make landfall with the island, they would find that this so-called deserted island was actually home to a strange temple complex made of pitch black stone that was home to thousands of people.
This complex was one of the many bases of operations belonging to an international criminal organization known as the Night Parade.
While most people would assume such an organization was one massive being, in reality, it was composed of five smaller units, referred to as “Shadows”, that all specialized in one form of criminal enterprise or another, their specification indicated by a color.
There were the White Shadows that specialized in the acquisition, development and selling of illicit drugs and forbidden medical components. (Un)surprisingly, many alchemists had contacted them for their services in acquiring hard-to-acquire ingredients.
The Red Shadows were in charge of weapons trafficking and the creation of cursed treasures. The sheer amount of desperate kings wanting to turn their armies into full blown killing machines was simultaneously unsurprising and unsettling.
The Green Shadows involved themselves in anything mortal related, namely the buying, selling and acquisition of people. Evidently, while slavery was mostly banned or frowned upon in most parts of the world, many other places legalized it, even more places just gave it a different name.
The Purple Shadows were in charge of intelligence gathering, working with spies, paid-off nobility and brothels. There was a surprising amount of overlap when it came to two of these categories.
And last, but certainly not least, was the Blue Shadows, the unit that worked in, predominantly, “wetwork.”
Assassinations, bodyguards, loud and brutal mercenaries and highly trained killer aether beasts, if any of the other shadow units needed anyone dead, they would contact the Blue Shadows.
However, at this moment in time, not a lot of people were making use of the services of the Blue Shadows.
A “small” miscalculation that led to the loss of several dozen outer disciples, the loss of several elite warriors and the mental traumatization of several core leaders.
Physically, these leaders were fine.
Mentally, none of them could go out and kill anybody due to their minds being stuck in some sort of looping behavior.
They would pause to eat, sleep or make waste, but other than that, they would just repeat some meaningless action over and over again while muttering to themselves the same words over and over again.
In other words, the Night Parade had one of its fingers smashed in and rendered handicap for the foreseeable future.
And at the epicenter of this issue was one particular woman who wanted to make up for this blight, but couldn’t.
The reason being?
“AAAAGGGH! WHY CAN’T FIND THIS STUPID KID?!”
“Calm down, Madam Venus, we’ll find him eventually.”
“BUT I NEED HIM FOUND NOW!”
They just couldn’t find him.
