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Stepping into the Sorrow Clan's mansion, Russell could immediately see that the house had been rebuilt sometime after its original construction. Some sections were alarmingly rough—the kind of shoddy patchwork no self-respecting craftsman would ever claim. The reason, however, was immediately obvious to him. When [Sword Lake] first descended into this world, the Association had clearly carried out an iron-blooded suppression. That process would not have been a polite negotiation; it would have been an affair of blood and fire. It was only natural that the original mansion had been burned to the ground.
"So, they're not exactly living in squalor," Russell thought, stroking his chin. Still, he had come all this way. Well, I'm here now, he thought, resigning himself to a thorough search.
After passing through the main hall, he came to the backyard. Since so few members of the Sorrow Clan remained, the backyard wasn't very large. He could tell at a glance which house belonged to Silas and Emil. Compared to the other buildings, which looked like they had been salvaged from some war-torn ruins, the two rooms in the middle were far more exquisite—though only slightly.
Shaking his head to clear the random thoughts, Russell pushed open the door to the central house. It was fully furnished, but aside from the basic furniture, there were no other items of note. And even the furniture was obviously remade later. There were certainly no stashes of gold, silver, or other treasures that he had fantasized about.
"Heh," Russell's sigh echoed in the silent house.
He carefully scanned the room, looking for any potential hiding places, before slowly walking to the bed. He sat down and began to think about what Emil had just said. As he pondered, his knuckles tapped lightly on the wooden bed frame, making a crisp tap-tap-tap sound.
The currents in this world run far deeper than I imagined.
Although Emil's dying words had been fragmented, they raised enormous questions. As is often the case, the brevity of the message only hinted at the magnitude of the problem. "Sword Sovereign… the Four Great Evils…" Russell murmured the two names. They were obviously major players, entities far beyond his current reach. And then there was the unseen culprit who had caused Emil to self-destruct. Combining that with the context, it was becoming clear that the arrival of these secret realms was being controlled by an invisible hand.
Thinking of this, he began connecting other pieces of information he had gathered. First, there was the ridiculously large sea chart he had seen on the ship when he first entered the [Black Flag] secret realm; the known explored area only accounted for a tiny fraction of the map. He remembered Zane telling him to just regard the rest as the demons' fanciful imagination. But based on the information he had now… "Were all these secret realms part of the same world before? Or is there some connection between them?" Russell silently began to piece together a theory.
Then, there was what Mr. Sterling from Golden Talent Credit had told him: the Spirit Begging Society was trying to make New Metro as chaotic as possible. The most direct result of chaos is a decline in population. And Russell remembered what was written in the standard textbooks: the more uninhabited a place is, the more likely it is to spawn a secret realm.
A bold, terrifying idea ignited in his mind.
"Could the Spirit Begging Society be planning to directly summon a massive new secret realm, right in the middle of New Metro? But can the arrival of a secret realm really be guided by human hands? And what good would it do them?"
He had never heard of any related cases. Burying the guess deep in his heart, Russell breathed a sigh of relief. "No matter what, I'm now lurking within the Spirit Begging Society. If they are really planning something this big, there will surely be signs." Indeed, for a plan of that magnitude, there was no way he wouldn't be assigned some task, even a minor one. If it weren't for the possibility of being ordered to kill innocent people, he wouldn't even want to leave the Society. After all, he was getting paid in rewards and secret information.
Putting his thoughts away, he was about to get up, but suddenly he noticed something. The sound his knuckles had made on the bed frame… it had been a crisp, hollow sound, not the dull thud of solid wood.
"Yoriichi, please cut this bed in half."
As the bright light of Yoriichi's blade flashed, the wooden bed in the room instantly split in two, revealing a hidden interior compartment.
"It really exists," Russell muttered to himself. He bent down and picked up a book from within the hollow space. He casually opened it and saw pages filled with densely packed script that he didn't recognize. He remembered that humans and demons could communicate without obstacles due to some unknown rule of the world; each side would naturally understand the other's spoken words in their own language. That didn't mean they used the same written language.
After turning a few pages, a guess began to form. "This can't be a diary, can it?" The format, with dates followed by blocks of text, looked familiar.
But what normal person writes a diary? Russell complained in his heart. Oh, right. He's not a normal person. He's a demon. But since he couldn't understand the text, this was just a guess. Shaking his head, he tucked the diary into his coat. He could only hope he'd have a chance to understand it in the future.
After searching the main house, he went to inspect the several other houses. Unfortunately, no other demon seemed to have the habit of writing diaries.
"It's about time to go." After summoning Pidgeot, he prepared to leave. His mission for this trip was complete, and the Association's rules stipulated he could only harvest from one designated gathering place. The Sorrow Clan had been one of the richest families in the realm. If Emil hadn't blown himself up, he estimated he would have earned two to three million credits from this trip.
High in the air, he knew there were no flying monsters in the Sword Lake secret realm, which meant there was no aerial surveillance. "Can you go higher?" Just to be on the safe side, he gently stroked Pidgeot's head. "Fly forward while increasing your altitude. Don't make it look like you're deliberately trying to fly high."
Accompanied by the soft cries of his mount, Russell flew higher and higher until the hazy clouds obscured his figure from any potential observers on the ground.
"This should be good enough. Thank you, Pidgeot."
The next moment, Russell first activated his [Beads of Concealment] before summoning the [Mark 3] armor.
"Tinnie, please record the contents of this book," he commanded. Tinnie was the name he had given to the armor's artificial intelligence. What he had to do now was record the contents of the diary. The physical book would definitely have to be handed in to the Association; the surveillance cameras inside and outside the Sorrow Clan's house would have seen him pick it up. This was also why he had flown so high to summon the armor. As for why he didn't just use his phone to take pictures… he was afraid the Association might format his phone after he handed it in. To be safe, letting the [Mark 3] scan it was the better option.
After a while, the scan was complete. After putting away the armor, Russell rode Pidgeot and flew back in the direction they came from.