Petra squatted on the bed, poking a humanoid sapphire statue with a stick.
This statue was the result of the Nine Sapphires Demon Snake's Venom. One bite could turn you into this gem-like state, and it was an irreversible poison that was almost guaranteed to kill when given enough time.
She mumbled to herself, 'We probably should have left one alive…'
Not only could this assassin not be returned to normal, but his body was also worthless. Although it looked like gems, it actually wasn't. The current state of this man's body was closer to a 'solidified soul', whatever that meant.
While Petra grumbled to herself, Nebula gave Petra a quick explanation of what had happened.
As she listened, something seemed to click in her mind. Her brain turned back to the first day they had arrived in Sevensen, when they overheard some gossip in passing.
Did this have anything to do with Dorthy's disappearance?
Was she also targeted?
Did that mean that she was recognised?
Petra's eyes rolled.
If it were half a year ago, she might have run, but…
With her current strength, she suddenly wanted to play around. She had many tools at her disposal. She was a first realm cultivator, a first realm mage, and an unknown level of controller. She had over two hundred poisons primed in her body, and she had the King's Hand if she ever needed to flip the table. Best of all, she had the teleportation ability of the Ethereal Echo Silverwing Butterfly.
After the most recent wave of evolution, the Ethereal Echo Silverwing Butterfly had further developed its spatial and illusionary abilities. Petra could now teleport the people she was touching and weave basic illusions into her body.
Overall, she felt that if 'deleting' the city wasn't an option, she could just run away.
With the sudden commotion caused by the fight, it wasn't long until the inn's staff came up to investigate. Petra was very experienced in dealing with corpses, only this 'massive sapphire statue' became a problem. Luckily, Petra had stored some of the Tower Spider's venom to play with before leaving.
With the tap of a finger, the sapphire statue melted into a blue sludge. Petra had to be careful, because if she made a mistake, then she might melt a hole through the floor.
By the time the staff arrived, the room had already been cleaned up.
After a quick investigation, they settled on the story of a pervert breaking into the room in the middle of the night.
-
The next morning, Petra walked around town, looking for clues as to who attacked her.
The assassins held no identities, excluding a grey snake that wound around a part of each of their bodies.
Petra used this to stealthily ask around, eventually discovering their connection to a large assassination organization that stretched across the continent. This was called the 'Grey Snake', and it was a part of the Mercenary Alliance.
Petra continued her investigation using the ants as an information network.
Thousands of small eyes slowly opened up around the city, one after another. They observed, investigated, and listened to the quiet whispers in the dark.
Around noon, Petra received a full report from the ants.
The ants had discovered that the assassins from last night came to her upon the request of the city lord. She had become a target for kidnapping. For one reason or another, the city lord wanted her.
Petra's mind spun, connecting many threads.
'City Lord wants Petra' == 'City Lord wants the Heavens Chosen.'
'City Lord wants the Heavens Chosen' == 'City Lord wants Dorthy Quella.'
'City Lord wants Dorthy Quella.' == 'Dorthy Quella disappeared!'
Therefor…
'The City Lord has Dorthy Quella.'
-
Although this logic was massively flawed, this still seemed to make sense in Petra's mind.
After knowing this, she decided to personally make a trip to the City Lords Mansion tonight. In the meantime, Petra walked into a large alchemy store called 'The Steel Cauldron'. This was the alchemy workshop that she had used the first time she visited Sevensen to make the gender changing poison.
When she entered, she was immediately greeted by the overly enthusiastic staff.
Petra had become somewhat of a celebrity after her last visit.
There were many people who were overly excited to see her again.
Just imagine the cliche where the protagonist walks into any random shop, meets the little white lotus (bitch), gets challenged, and then spends a full chapter face slapping.
In short, Petra walked away a small celebrity, and the cannon fodder villainess walked away a man.
'A man…'
Anyways, this time Petra had come to purchase some special alchemy equipment. Aside from renting out high quality alchemy labs, this place also sold some ancient and lost equipment that could only be found here.
She bought a Gravity Forge, a common tool used by high level alchemists to compress liquids, a Vortex Core, the heart of a new tool that Petra planned to build and use to separate substances, and a large spool of magic thread, silver steel dust, ash embers, and memory grass.
After that, she left to the disappointment of the staff.
Her hasty departure was just in time to avoid a certain effeminate man bursting through the doors and screaming some predictable lines about 'cheater' and 'evil child'.
* * *
Sevensen, Night.
The moon hid behind the clouds, and a chilly wind gently blew.
Petra went alone.
She wore a skin-tight black suit, donning what looked like a little ninja costume. She ran through a quick stretching routine before blinking away. Her body flickered with black light, her position disappearing from one shadow to another.
For the first time, Petra realised something.
The combination of her teleportation, illusions, and the darkness element was really fun!
She swam through shadow like water, blinking between the darkness like interconnecting pools. She clad herself in an illusory cloak that blended her into the background, making it nearly impossible to discover her. Her dimensional sense that had been slowly refined was like a gyroscope, never letting her lose her way while submerged in the sea of shadows.
Her speed defied what an individual at her level should have.
She moved through the city like an arc of lightning, flashing from one point to another.
Quickly, she reached the city lord's mansion.
She came from the side, blinking past two guards before submerging herself under the shadows to avoid another. She kept moving, quickly reaching a window.
Her tiny hands tried to pry it open, but she quickly realized that she couldn't. Instead of turning to her mental strength, Petra used the new shadow 'spell' that she had learned.
Petra's shadow wriggled, then rose. It took form, manifesting as a black tentacle formed from her shadow. It seeped through the crack into the window and flipped the latch from inside.
Petra grinned, satisfied with her new skill.
She had used this a few times, and she found it very useful.
Petra flipped through the open window and disappeared into the shadows of the dark room.
A black tentacle silently closed the window behind her.
Petra paused, looking back for a moment.
Her brows furrowed.
Something flashed in her mind, but she shook it away.
This thought passed as quickly as it came. Petra turned back, her focus returning to her mission. She disappeared down the endless halls of the City Lord's mansion.
Time passed.
Petra checked one room after another.
She wasn't sure what she was looking for, but she felt as if it were here.
As Petra moved from place to place, small ants would occasionally break away from her robe and spread throughout the room. These ants were only the size of a poppy seed, but they slowly spread throughout the city lord's mansion at a speed that far exceeded normal ants.
Petra's 'eyes' and 'ears' quietly expanded.
Petra passed through a music room, an indoor hot spring, and the treasury.
After a while, she had looked through almost every room in the mansion. At this point, Petra might have even become more familiar with the city lord's mansion than the city lord himself.
When she occasionally met a guard, she would disappear into the shadows, and when she faced magic wards, she would bend around them or disarm them. Her knowledge of the rune language had far exceeded the laymen of the continent.
She absorbed the knowledge from the library and looted the best treasures from the treasury.
When she was ready, the ants led her to one of the six 'not so secret dungeons' that had been discovered. This was the only dungeon that had any relevance to her, and it was the only dungeon that led down into an unknown space.
When she disappeared beneath the split floors of an 'unused' dresser, Petra found herself moving through a descending labyrinthine prison that stretched far beneath the city lord's mansion.
Judging from the miniaturized series of overlapping runes that densely covered the stone walls, Petra easily concluded that this was a remnant left behind by the high elves, not a creation of the humans after they had taken over the city.
She descended, making sure not to trigger any of the traps.
The annoying thing about the runework of the high elves was that they had a bad habit of overcomplicating things. This was a complaint that perhaps only Petra could make, but it wasn't without reason. What they did was the equivalent of stacking five sentences on each line of a lined piece of paper.
As Petra passed through the underground prison, she found that most of these 'prison cells' were empty. The deeper she went, the more she found, and the more she found, the 'fresher' each corpse was. It would seem like this man liked to bury his demons very deep.
Continuing down, the few lights flickering in the cold halls began to disappear.
Silence was magnified, making even the smallest echoes resonate like thunder.
Petra moved quickly through the long and winding halls, encountering very few obstructions.
After an unknown amount of time, Petra came face to face with a large door that was sealed shut. This door was made of thick steel and used complex and primitive locks to keep itself closed. One look and you could tell it was dwarven in design. To each side of the door stood a guard, but these guards seemed dazed, almost like something was twisting their minds and manipulating them like puppets.
Petra walked forward, emerging from the darkness with a ripple of light.
The guards twitched like puppets and snapped their heads towards Petra. One lashed out while the other moved to better block the door. Their actions came in an instant, moving unlike any human should.
The first guard stepped forward, drawing his sword in the same action as he slashed at Petra.
The iron blade cut through the air with an abnormal resonance.
Petra flicked her wrist and the sword dissolved after meeting a cloud of white gas that twisted out of her body and formed into a shield. Before it could reach her, it disappeared, its remaining momentum fluttering her clothes slightly.
The 'guard' was stunned, before collapsing to the ground.
Petra's attack didn't stop only at his sword, her wave of poison was a combination of three different poisons. The white shield was a gaseous form of the Tower Spider's venom, and the nine yellow streaks that followed the white shield's momentum was a paralyzing poison. Unseen to the eye, a third poison silently reaped the lives of the two guards.
Petra's compound poison engulfed the area like a hungry storm, causing stone to hiss and metal to cry. Their flesh was paralyzed and dissolved, and their inorganic belongings melted like snow. The room filled and decayed, replacing the air with an unknown mixture that caused the air to become heavier.
Don't forget, in her past life, Petra was called the Poison Sea Sage.
She was the most terrifying when she was alone.
The steel door began to melt, but it broke free from its foundation before it could completely dissolve. The door slammed down, releasing a deafening boom that exploded throughout the prison.
Although this would attract attention, Petra didn't care at all.
She waved her hand, retrieving the poison that lingered in the environment, and called it back into her body. She planned to leave something special for anyone who dared to come and investigate.
Petra passed over the fallen door, descending into the bottom levels of the prison.
-
Soon, she found herself in an underground laboratory.
Around her were the dissolving corpses of multiple men.
When she descended, she found these people torturing a young girl. They wore long white coats and were using surgical tools to cut her body apart. Petra was unsure as to what kind of experiment they were trying to do, but it didn't matter.
After killing them, Petra looked at the unlucky girl on the table.
If she left her like this, she would definitely die.
Petra's mind turned, contemplating her next course of action.
Petra smirked.
Was there even a question? As an Emerald Dragon, there was only one thing to do.
Her little arms pulled over a few pieces of whatever remained of the scientists and piled them up in front of the table. She struggled to climb up, using them as a makeshift stool.
When Petra reached the operating table, she checked on the condition of the dying girl.
After nodding, she began repairing the girl's broken body. As Petra worked, she quickly understood what those scientists were trying to do, so she casually finished their work.
While Petra completed the only successful attempt at the 'True Dragon Vein Physique,' she listened to the ants that had been scattered throughout the labyrinth make their reports. Petra slowly understood the movements of everything within the prison labyrinth.
After Petra was finished, she closed the girl up, and sealed her body with many layers of bandages.
Petra moved on, leaving the girl on the table.
Soon, she discovered a small research room.
She scanned through the notes on 'Artificial Leyline Implantation' before burning them and moving on, not bothering to add them to her inner library. After a quick read, Petra understood that these people didn't understand what they were doing at all.
Whoopsie!
Leylines were like the natural magic channels that stretched throughout the world. Cultivators called them the 'Dragon Veins', and Mages called them the 'World Wells'. These were river-like channels that produced an endless supply of energy that flowed directly from the heart of the world and through its surface like the veins in the body.
These notes covered their attempt to break off a part of the Leylines, and surgically implant them into a human subject.
Petra stopped before a series of 'cells'.
The strange thing about this project was that only women could survive the implantation process, and men would be instantly rejected, dying from an internal collapse a few minutes later.
Petra looked at the eleven 'survivors'.
Just because you could survive didn't mean that it was successful. In fact, the girl that Petra had just saved was the only successful subject so far.
Petra frowned at the 'monsters' in front of her.
These women were still breathing, but some had collapsed, while others had hollow eyes. They sat there, some in despair, while others were in constant pain. The bodies of their dead sisters covered the ground, over a hundred in total. It was cold, wet, and cruel, crossing a line that even Petra wouldn't dare. The air stung of rot, and the unnerving cry of a metal chime rang in the distance.
What all of these girls had in common was the same 'aftereffects' caused by the unfinished procedure.
The places where the dragon veins had been implanted bulged up into crisscrossing patterns on top of their skin, like glowing purple veins that flickered with an abnormal heartbeat. These purple patterns were different for each girl, some having dozens of scars, while others had a single mark that covered a quarter of there bodies.
Petra could tell that each 'heartbeat' would send a wave of sharp pain through each girl. They grimaced with different expressions, some suffering multiple times a minute.
Petra's eyes darkened, and her fingers twitched, her shadow flickering beneath her feet. She was a monster in her own right, but she had a strange quirk, and that was that she hated continuous suffering. Whether it was physical or mental, it crossed her bottom line.
After clearing out all the tools, reports, and samples, she then had to decide what to do with these girls.
Petra thought for a moment.
After a quick spin of the mind, she decided that having a few background maids couldn't hurt, right?
What were the odds that she unknowingly pulled another 'main character' into her family?
It would also allow her to justify 'helping' these pitiful girls fix a few of the flaws, or 'aftereffects' left behind by the failed experiment.
Petra nodded to herself.
She ignored the flickers of doubt and suspicious gazes that were filled with distrust. These girls had been through a lot, so the few survivors were naturally not normal people. While going through one girl at a time, Petra pulled them out of the cage and threw them onto the operating table. While 'fixing' each girl and completing their procedures, Petra scanned for Dorthy, but found that she wasn't here.
She frowned.
The ants had spread through the mansion and cleared basically every room. At this point, Petra could be sure that Dorthy wasn't in the City Lord's mansion.
Since that was the case, then...
What was she going to do with this silly City Lord?
A cruel smile crept up the little dragon girl's lips.