[MA] 130. Bad Intel (Patreon)

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[A/N: A bit of a slow chapter, but a necessary one. Things will start to gain momentum from the next chapter onward.

 1/3 this week. Next one on Thursday.]

Shen had killed thousands of people, but it had always been in a battle context. Even back in the US, when he had killed prisoners trying to escape after the Sorcerer King's failed ambush, they had been part of the ambush. They had tried to take his life first.

This time, Shen had killed two people outside a direct, physical confrontation, and it weighed heavily on him.

Yes, Martino had attacked his Path. Yet, Shen had answered to it by blinding the man. What came after was simply Shen deciding he had the right to take a life because that person was too dangerous to live.

He didn't regret it; he felt he had done the right thing. He would do it again if given another chance.

The issue was that there was no coming back from that decision. If Shen was found wrong later, Martino and Boisclair would be dead already. Shen's decision had been final.

It had taken him what, a couple minutes to decide to end everything those two people were?

Alicia had said that power corrupts. She might be right, might be wrong, but it was undeniable that power, at the very least, changed. It affected one's perspective, reach, and actions. The D-rank Rising Star Feng Shen was not the same as the G-rank cripple Feng Shen. Even if he lost his power right now, he would have already been changed by the power he had wielded.

The person who gave the first step on a Path was not the same who reached the end. Shen had known that on an intellectual level. But to be a part of the process, feel it so crudely, and witness his transformation in real time... It impacted him.

Today, Shen had evolved, and he wanted to believe it had been in a good direction.

| Bounty complete: Kill the Italian Rebellion Leader

| Base reward: +100,000 AP

| Rising Star bonus: +25,000 AP

| Total AP: 156,564

| Bounty complete: Kill the Italian Rebellion General

| Base reward: +50,000 AP

| Rising Star bonus: +12,500 AP

| Total AP: 219,064

The notifications surprised him. Not the Bounties' existence, but the rewards. That was a lot of AP. He couldn't believe those two people had stayed alive for so long with that kind of Bounty on their heads.

Right after Shen killed Martino and Boisclair, Alicia opened her mouth wide. She kept like that for a while before saying, "What the actual fuck? Now you torture people before killing them, too?"

Shen frowned. "Torture?"

"You blinded the motherfucker for no reason!" she pointed out. She wasn't yelling, but her voice was raised because of her shock.

"I blinded Martino because he tried to cripple me," Shen explained. "I killed him because he was a terrible war criminal with too much power to be left alive."

"What do you mean, tried to cripple you?"

"His discourse wasn't random or out of a desire to protect his actions as it might have sounded. He deliberately chose to verbally attack me in the places that would hurt an inexperienced or non-self-confident youngster the most. He wanted to crush my will to control me. He had around sixty extra charges of blackmail over the General. He knew what he was doing."

Alicia frowned. "Are you sure about that?" Shen nodded, and she said, "Fuck that guy."

Shen raised an eyebrow in surprise. "I thought you would argue more against killing them. They were defenseless."

She snickered. "Motherfuckers using their power and influence to stay above the law is nothing new to me. I want to kill my relatives, remember?"

He didn't hide his frown. "You sounded much less enthusiastic about killing when we witnessed that girl do it back in the White House."

Alicia crossed her arms. "That was different. She murdered them in cold blood because she disagreed with how they were doing things."

"I did the same," Shen insisted. "Both the girl and I killed for the greater good. As you want to do. We're not that different."

She frowned. Shen waited, but Alicia said nothing in the end. He shook his head, approached the corpses, and crouched.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Pillaging, of course," he said without stopping. "Cultivator culture is clear on it. Whatever you leave at home or at your organization's headquarters will go to your descendants or whoever you appoint in your will. If you bring it to the battlefield, it'll belong to the winner. I doubt the Alliance will be much different."

"That's crazy," Alicia said. "Who will go around with their best items if it's like that?"

"I wouldn't leave my spear at home," Shen said while patting the General's corpse, looking for any magic items. "Without it, I'm more likely to die."

"And with it, you're more likely to be attacked by people who want to take it from your corpse," Alicia countered.

Shen shrugged. "It's up to you to find the right balance. But you're right that the most important thing is personal strength. Even in my time, showing too many riches or extraordinary artifacts without the power to protect them was a sin. The perpetrator was almost always found and punished, but the victim would also almost always be already dead by then. We had a cautionary saying: the rules don't matter if you don't get caught. People will take their chances no matter what."

Alicia snorted. "Sounds to me like they were teaching you to ignore the rules if you can get away with it," she said.

Shen froze in realization, then laughed. "Maybe they were, but I was too stupid to understand. Then again, I was also repeatedly taught that any crime in my hometown would be investigated and discovered. It does explain why mystical realms were so dangerous."

Shen had previously considered how few people returned to mystical realms. It seemed he had been right: he had been very sheltered in his upbringing.

"Mystical realms?"

Shen started Identifying everything on the corpses while talking to Alicia. Identify didn't show the dead person's name, so it didn't prevent Identifying items like it did in living beings.

"People always want more than they have," Shen said. "Some people in my hometown specialized in opening portals to other places, searching for opportunities. We called those explorer portals. I don't understand how, but sometimes they found some spatial 'bubbles' in the realities superimposed on our galaxy. We called those bubbles mystical realms."

"So you raided other people? Like Vikings?"

"No," Shen said, taking a golden bracelet from the General's arm. "Simply finding enough minerals in uninhabited places, or even some qi-rich resources, more than made up for the work and resources required to open a portal. If there were sapients on the other side, we negotiated. If they attacked us, we crushed them. If they just ignored us, then we left at a loss. Sometimes, portals were opened to our hometown too. Wars were rare but not unheard of."

Alicia frowned. "And mystical portals are like... a ghost world on top of hours?"

"Superimposed, yes, but I understand it's not on the same... depth as what we see, for lack of a better world. I don't know much about it, only that mystical realms—not mystical portals—were always qi-rich and hid many treasures and secrets. My... government sent agents to make sure the law was followed there, but not enough to keep track of everything. Exploring mystical realms was very dangerous. I was told it was due to the dangers already there, but I wonder if some cultivators didn't just kill others for the riches instead."

Alicia had no further questions, and Shen kept searching. Other than the bracelet, the only other magic item was Martino's boots.

After double-checking the corpses, he Inspected the items again, this time paying attention to what they did.

Gold Bracelet of Shermina (E-)

Enchantments: Anti-Wear (E-), Physical Senses (E-), Mana Sense (E-)

Bracelets of this kind belonged to the gold-tier Priestesses of the long-departed Shermina. It was believed it connected one with the spiritual world, but it was a trick caused by having improved senses.

Boots of Stability (F+)

Enchantments: Self-Repair (F+), Stability (F+)

Makes the wearer less likely to stumble.

Shen expected both more magic items and better ones. Instead, he found simple things that only slightly improved oneself. Those people really hadn't come prepared to battle.

"Do you have magic boots?" Shen asked, passing the boots to Alicia.

His own F+ Autaur Boots had resisted the fire of the missiles' attack in Iceland. He didn't use their functions nowadays, but they felt comfortable and more resistant than mortal boots.

"Nope," she said, taking her shoes off and putting the new ones on.

Shen put the bracelet on. It was a thin gold wristband with a silvery moon surrounded by two diamond stars. It was decidedly feminine, but Shen cared little for what he wore if it could improve his ability to stay alive.

As soon as he put it, he felt something different. The physical senses enchantment did nothing to him, whose stats and senses were already D-rank. However, for the first time in his life, Shen felt mana.

Qi was refreshing. Feeling qi was like feeling a cool breeze on your skin—except beyond it—or static electricity in your soul. Mana, however, felt heavier and dirtier. If qi was a breeze, mana was tainted steam.

Moreover, while qi was all around, Shen felt mana only inside Alicia and the magic items. That confirmed that it was a manufactured type of energy, or at least scarce and controlled by the Alliance.

"Would you mind producing a floating flame, please?" he asked Alicia.

She complied, and he felt mana in the ball. The range wasn't great, the feeling disappeared after a dozen feet, but it was better than nothing.

"Does this helps you at all?" he asked Alicia, passing her the bracelet.

She widened her eyes. "Wow. It's weird to feel mana that isn't connected to me."

"Does it help with your spellcasting in any way?" Shen asked. "Or in understanding your mana better?"

"No." She shook her head. "I can feel my mana much better than exterior mana, with or without it. The bracelet makes no difference for that... And now that I know it's possible to feel mana in items, I think I can find a way to do that myself."

"Then I'll keep it," Shen said. "It'll improve my combat capability."

He put it on again. Sensing mana wasn't pleasant, but just as he didn't care about the thing's appearance, he also didn't mind the sensation. He could only compare it to smelling a fart all the time. He would get used to it; his survival was more important.

"They didn't come prepared to fight, but Martino was very antagonistic of me," Shen said. "I don't get it."

Alicia shrugged. "Don't look my way. I have no fucking idea how assholes think."

Shen frowned, looking at Martino's corpse as if it would have any answers. Shen's Battle Sense detected dozens of people outside the restaurant's kitchen, yet the man hadn't brought anyone to protect him after Shen's strike. Moreover, no one had come to investigate the screaming, which hinted at them being previously told not to interfere.

"Martino wasn't a Guardian," he said, "so he didn't have extra anger issues. The General, who did have it, was calmer than him. What is going on?"

"Some people are just stupid," Alicia tried to help despite saying she had no idea what had happened.

"He was in a position of power," Shen insisted. "He had a General under him, and the Major obeyed his command to leave the room. We know that the Major brought a lot of air support when she came to us. Martino wasn't small fry.

"People in power, especially if they rose to power themselves like he claimed, aren't stupid enough to threaten the life of someone who just proved they are willing to do them physical harm. Even if he interpreted it as me being unwilling to go all the way and killing him, I could've hurt him badly again. How could—" he stopped talking when he realized something. "Oh."

"What is it?" she asked.

"He wanted me to hurt him," Shen concluded. "He would use it against me in some way. That explains the General's reaction, too. She was a military woman yet didn't even try to put herself between Martino and me. It was all a setup, but I bet they never expected me to kill them."

"That sounds very dumb for someone you said wasn't small fry," Alicia pointed out.

"It does, doesn't it?" Shen shook his head. "I guess we'll never know what they thought, but they were clearly given bad intel about how far I'm willing to go—or concluded stupid things from good intel. Either way, they are dead, and it's time we figure out what we're going to do now."

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