Part 4 The Undead Chapter 207 – Fish Bait

　　Colin Iliad glanced at Lovia without responding directly, and waited until he had drawn the two straight swords stuck in the ground before nodding his head and saying:

　　”Good.”

　　A group of five people, walking around the periphery of the city of Nos, several attempts to enter, but by the seemingly normal but actually no sound of the city-state “daily life” scared off, do not dare to rashly explore.

　　Seeing that the frequency of lightning in the sky was getting lower and lower, and darkness gradually ruled the world, Colin gazed deeply at North City for a few seconds and said:

　　”Let’s set up a small camp first and wait until daytime before continuing.”

　　The so-called daytime was also the period when the lightning frequency was high and the darkness was at short intervals.

　　The other members of the exploration squad had no objections, and soon set up a rudimentary camp with the help of a pile of rocks at the edge of the riverbed.

　　At the far end of the camp, sheltered by the boulders above so that there was no need to worry about rain, a campfire was blazing, the remains of various strange creatures accumulating beside it, occasionally thrown in as fuel wood, and Colin, Lovia, and the others sat around the fire, each eating the dried food they had brought along with the carcasses of the monsters that had proved to not be able to cause too much harm.

　　The grease was roasted to a crisp and Colin Iliad, Chief of the Council of Six, looked to Derek Burger and said:

　　”Let’s patrol the camp and wait for them to finish their meal before we swap.”

　　In the past, Derek would not have had any additional thoughts, but at the moment, the first thought that flashed through his mind was:

　　The Chief has something to say to me in private ……

　　”Okay.” Derek stuffed the rest of the meat in his hand into his mouth and lifted up the Thor’s Roar that was sitting right next to him.

　　The meat was clearly cooked, but still had a miserable green color.

　　After arriving at the edge of the dimly lit camp, Colin the Demon Hunter spoke in a low, unchanged tone:

　　”The city of Nos is even more sinister and dangerous than I expected, I wonder what you think about the next action?”

　　I don’t know much about this place, and my experience isn’t much, so how could the Chief ask for my opinion? Derek was stunned, and instinctively wanted to raise his left hand to scratch the back of his head.

　　He immediately remembered the several conversations he had with the Chief in Silver City, remembered the analysis that Mr. “Inverted Man” had done on the hidden meaning of the words, and his heart suddenly moved and realized:

　　”The Chief is hinting at me!

　　”He means that the city of Nos is more sinister and dangerous than expected, and that the hunt of the shapeshifters will be more difficult than imagined, and he wonders if it is possible to change the target.

　　”He wants me to pray to Mr. ‘Fool’ to obtain an oracle and give ‘advice’?

　　”In that case …… Mr. ‘World’ is truly a man full of wisdom, on the way there, he did tell me how to hunt the Trickster Evil Monster in a simpler way and obtain its blood, ergo, in this case now, it seems to work! ”

　　As thoughts flashed, Derek responded sincerely:

　　”Yes, Your Chief Excellency, I have some suggestions.”

　　Colin Iliad breathed a silent sigh of relief, swallowing back the more blunt words and nodding softly:

　　”Speak.”

　　”Since there’s been a change in the city of Nos, and we’d be taking a big risk by entering, perhaps we could consider luring the shapeshifters out.” Derek did not copy “World” Germaine Sparrow’s approach, but made certain modifications to take into account the current situation.

　　”Demon Hunter,” Colin asked rather cautiously without outright dismissing it:

　　”And how should the shapeshifter be lured out?”

　　Derek said without hesitation:

　　”I have an item that has a very strong lure for shapeshifters, so as long as it is placed at the edge of the city of Nos or a little farther away, the shapeshifters can be lured out.”

　　Colin, whose hair was pale and messy, wasn’t a bit surprised by his words and nodded mildly:

　　”What item?”

　　He had known for some time that Derek Berg had taken advantage of the vigil to sneak in a ritual of praying for bestowal along the way!

　　And, if he hadn’t helped cover it up, it certainly wouldn’t have been hidden from Lovia, Rigel, and Gunarune.

　　Derek didn’t know what to call or describe it, but he took out an iron black square box from the inside of his clothes, which was very different from the style of Silver City, and lifted the “spiritual wall” on the surface.

　　Then, he did not lower his head, but instead, he turned his head away and opened the box purely by the feeling of his hands.

　　Inside the box was a palm-sized humanoid object. At a cursory glance, one could notice that it was filled with a transparent liquid, which sometimes bubbled and emitted a black aura, but at a closer look, one could see that it was made up of a worm-like substance, and the subtleties of it were filled with unnameable patterns characterizing a variety of abstract concepts.

　　This was the real soul of the Spirit World Marauder that Klein had acquired earlier!

　　He believed that this extraordinary material had an incomparable attraction to the Trickster, not only because of the Law of Convergence of Extraordinary Characteristics, but also because once the Trickster obtained it, it would become a complete “Trickster”, freeing itself from all the current limitations, obtaining an essential elevation in its level of life, and truly becoming a demigod!

　　Therefore, in order to make the hunt for the Trickster simpler, clearer, and without wasting time, Klein lent the real soul of the Spirit World Predator to the little “Sun” at the risk of losing it.

　　Colin Iliad looked at it carefully for a few seconds and retracted his gaze, saying:

　　”It should work.

　　”You close the lid without attaching the ‘Wall of Spirituality’ and carry it like that, and see if you can attract them to the camp.”

　　”Them?” Derek subconsciously asked back.

　　A small smile appeared on Colin’s face which had several old scars:

　　”You think there’s only one shapeshifter in Nos City?

　　”If the item wasn’t bit-ranked enough, I was worried that it would lead to even more terrifying monsters.”

　　With a pang of shame, Derek scratched the back of his head and, as the Chief had instructed, closed the iron-black, square-shaped box and tucked it back into a concealed pocket on the inside of his clothing.

　　He remained on high alert for the rest of the patrol, but never waited for the shapeshifter to attack.

　　After a while, Lovia, Rigel, and Gunarune took over their duties, and Derek sat back down by the warmth of the fire.

　　

　　This brought about a feeling of unspeakable terror, and Colin Iliad drew his straight sword and looked up.

　　Suddenly, his mind stirred and he quickly turned his gaze to where Derek Berg was.

　　On the opposite side of the fire, two brown and yellow-haired teenagers who were close to one meter nine in height with remnants of boyishness on their faces were staring at each other in a daze, both of them stunned.

　　Colin’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he immediately shouted:

　　”Shine!”

　　One of the teenagers was first stunned, then suddenly realized, letting pure warm sunlight be released from his body one by one.

　　With a brush, a residual shadow swept past, and the straight sword in Colin’s hand cut through the false Derek.

　　It was a spectral shadow, a vague and transparent spectral shadow!

　　At the same time, a red-eyed crow high in the sky suddenly landed, its body expanding away and transforming into a pitch-black shadow.

　　Above this shadow, there was a transparent one-eye that shone with a slight hint of ghostly blue, and around the one-eye was eye after eye with the same characteristics but a few circles smaller.

　　Shapeshifter!

　　Shapeshifters that could disguise themselves as crows!

　　This dark shadow just had landed, Derek’s head was a burst of numbness, his body was petrified as difficult to move, and he could only watch the other party pouncing on him.

　　Snap!

　　The shapeshifter crashed into an invisible wall, failing to go any further.

　　At the edge of the fire, Colin Iliad drew the other one he was carrying after thrusting the straight sword in his hand into the ground.

　　The surroundings brightened at once, as if the legendary dawn had descended on this forsaken land, and endless morning rays thus erupted, connecting into an illusory ocean that engulfed the pitch-black shadows along with all the crows from bottom to top.

　　At the entrance of the camp, an illusory knight more than five meters in silver armor appeared behind the “shepherd” Lovia.

　　A dark red flame burned in each of the knight’s eyes, and he locked onto a position in an instant.

　　”He” violently stepped out and flashed to several hundred meters away.

　　A ray of sharp silver light then burst out, cutting everything around him into neat little pieces, including the various monsters hiding there, including the shapeshifter who had escaped the fatal blow of the Demon Hunter with the help of some kind of ability, and had moved to this place.

　　The creature was still alive, and it shifted its real body again, but the pure and clear morning sun came down once again, flooding a large area completely.

　　When the dawn faded, the figure of Colin Iliad in a brown coat with two straight swords appeared there, calmly watching the cracked ground in front of him as a little bit of light coalesced, and watched as the black and red blood, which had been dried up for the most part, slowly overflowed.

　　It worked! Derek was so happy that he hurriedly used the “Spiritual Wall” to seal the iron black square box again.

　　”Colin the Demon Hunter then thrust his swords into the ground, took out three metal bottles that had drunk the potion, and filled them with the blood on the ground.

　　Waiting for the material to take shape, he said to Lovia and the others with his usual expression:

　　”The materials left behind by the shapeshifters are useful to me, I want to exchange them down directly.”

　　In Silver City, there were generally two ways to handle the harvests from this kind of exploration, one was to bring them back and attribute them to the city-state, exchanging them for the corresponding contributions and distributing them according to the different levels of contribution, and the other was that if they weren’t particularly important and one of the members had their eye on them, they could exchange them for the equivalent items or contributions on the spot.

　　”I have no opinion.” Rigel and Gunarune spoke at the same time.

　　Lovia didn’t say anything, indicating her acquiescence.

　　After the illusory silver-armored knight returned, she turned her head sideways and glanced indifferently at Derek Berg by the fire.

　　……

　　Inside the temporary office of the Red Glove team in East Baylon.

　　Thorst looked around the room and addressed all the team members:

　　”Her Excellency, the ‘Eye of the Goddess’, has asked us to investigate the sale of extraordinary materials in the local and surrounding cities’ ‘hunter’ avenues, as well as any disappearances or deaths of the corresponding extraordinary.

　　”She agrees with Daley’s suspicions and suspects from the death of the Intis spy that it was an evil spirit of the ‘hunter’ pathway.

　　”Of course, we can’t ignore the other anomalies, after all, that’s only one possibility.

　　”There’s also another point, we only need to do intelligence gathering, we don’t need to care about anything else, we don’t need to investigate in depth, this is the order of His Excellency the ‘Goddess’s Eye’!

　　”Remember?”

　　”Remembered!” Cindy and the others responded.

　　Solstice looked at Leonard and Dai Li, retracted his gaze, and said in a deep voice:

　　”Action!”