Once I was fully awake and refreshed I decided to summarize my current situation before making any plans.
- I was being hunted by most of the city's horrors
- I was going to die in 5 days of I didn't find the blood of a mythical beast
- My soul orb had reached Lvl 4 and I had plenty of soul energy to spare
- I still didn't have any solid leads behind my brother's death.
The beast blood should be a high-level treasure, stuff like this could probably be found in the stashes of these unspeakable horrors.
The problem however is I did not know anything about them, at all...
Unlike these people who were hunting me down, I did not have any connections in their world. I had no source of information.
Moreover, if my brother's death was truly an anomaly there would have to be records about it if it took place in the territories of any of these secret organizations...
I opened up my laptop to access the dark web, a useful skill I had acquired over the past two years.
Now lets see.. is there anything information about this list over here...
List of urban legends...
List of haunted houses...
List of unsolved mysteries...
List of truck accidents...
After skimming through pages of unrelated and fake pages I finally found what I was looking for
The List of Unspeakable Horrors-
1) The Devil's Broker: The Mysterious owner of the Shop of Fate
2) William Moriarty: The Student Council President of the Night Academy
3) The Red Princess: !@)&)$_&#^#(%)*&@#*^@*$!
4) Beezlegueze: The Cult Master of the Dark Templars
5) The Puppet Mistress: Rumored to Own an army of Puppets
6) The Scarecrow: A zombie general who sunlights as a grave-keeper
7) The Night Raven: Not much is known. Loves to stay in the shadows. Can Fly.
8) The Trickster: Poltergeist? Clown? Demon? Ghost? Human? No one knows. Make sure to never attempt communication. Is the incarnation of mischief and chaos.
9) The Crow of Nightmares: Came out of nowhere and stole the Orb of Souls from The Puppet Mistress' mansion. Is currently on the hunt. Replaced Dr.Chainsaw.
10) The Lycan: A new arrival to the city, a werewolf, took out mad dog and stole the necromancer's stone from the Dark Templars.
Now the list is quite detailed...
The shop of fate might be an interesting location... I might be able to directly buy the beast blood I need, but I doubt I can trust this guy or even be lucky enough to find the stupid shop in the first place...
Night Academy, it's supposedly located at the same location as the prestigious Rowkein Academy... I should find an opportunity to infiltrate them... if I can retrieve the philosopher's tome from them I might be able to resurrect my brother.
The Dark templars... well they are pretty useless since they lost their top tier treasure to Jimmy... but they judging from their name they seem like the lot who would conduct shady rituals and sacrifices, they are most likely to have what I need...
The Red Princess, who is she... I have never heard of her, all information about her seems to be corrupted... wait a minute... perhaps that's Alice? It makes sense as she has to be someone strong to be The Puppet Mistress's enemy.
Speaking of her I doubt I will find an opportunity to steal from her again, best avoid her...
The remaining three seem like vagrants they probably won't have much to steal from, they probably don't even have fixed territories...
It seems like the best target would be the dark cult indeed...
I tried searching up more information about them but other than the fact that they controlled most of downtown I couldn't find anything else...
Indeed my information gathering abilities are still limited... I smirked to myself as the perfect plan formed itself within my head.
I packed my things and left the house In a rush it was time for me to meet my old friends
------------
Sitting on the wild grass I looked at my old friends that had surrounded me.
I tossed out some grain as I saw the crows eat it up.
Yes... the friends I was talking about were the crows
I think its probably time to explain my obsession with crows.
You see a few months after my brother's death when I had gone full goth mode these crows would often keep me company.
I would spend hours at the graveyard in front of my brother's grave trying the latest satanical spell I had found to summon a demon or resurrect my brother.
It is needless to mention that I failed every single time and made a fool of myself, I was alone and my only company was these crows... hence I am quite fond of them.
Do you think that's weird?
Well too bad I don't care, like I said I was going through a phase.
Heck, I am still trying to find a way to resurrect my brother, at least this time I am dealing with the real thing.
There were ghosts and werewolves roaming the streets, resurrecting my dead brother should be a piece of cake.
Now back to the reason I was here, I needed an information network and what better way was there than to hijack the senses of crows and send them all over the city. MY net would be spread far and wide and nothing would escape my eyes.
If you ever feel that a random crow is watching you, then it is probably just me hijacking their senses, Muahahahaha!
Now how to go about this?
I used my soul senses and soul energy manipulation to analyze Alice's mark and how to recreate copies of them.
Using that as a reference I was able to come up with a similar spirit mark that I could place on the crows, that will enable me to hijack their senses at will.
After preparing I began the process.
I began shaping the soul energy, forming the marks and sticking them onto the crows one by one.
I tried analyzing it with the orb
Object: Luke's Surveillance Mark LVL 1
Cost: 30 soul energy
Description: Its a mark created by Luke, it can be placed on crows and other small creatures, it can be used to locate the positions of the crows at all times and access their senses. By spending soul energy, the user can even give orders and mental suggestions to the creatures.
Can be also be used to inspect recent memories.
Essentially I had turned the crow into a flying security camera, err more of a spying drone but you get my drift...
I spent the rest of the day applying the mark to about 500 crows.
I had only 5000 soul energy left of the 20,000 I had.
I then ordered them to spread all over the city.
I placed a few of them around my home and set up a suggestion for them to alarm me if anything were to happen.
I then set them around known locations like the Puppet Mistress's Mansion and the Nightmare Academy.
I used a lot of them to scour through downtown and placed them around suspicious locations.
I let the remaining do as they wished.
I checked my soul energy to see only a pitiful 1000 was left.
Either way, my mission was a success.
This way I was bound to catch traces of my opponents before they made their moves against me.
I didn't dare to directly probe any of them or that would reveal the fact that I could spy on them using crows, the less they knew about me and the more I knew about them, the better it is.
As I brushed off the feathers from my clothes and prepared to leave I had the fright of my life.
Standing partially hidden in the shadows behind me stood an old man with a grandfatherly kind smile on his face.
He was leaning on his cane and slowly approaching me.
The heck!
Here I was creating an information system to spy over the entire city only to ignore my immediate surroundings and get spooked by a random old man.
"I see you have come here again."
I recognized the man, he was the gravekeeper of this graveyard, he would often pass by me when I was trying out my experiments and comment on how all of my spells were all show and had no substance.
Just a cranky old man, with nothing better to do with his free time.
"What do you want old man!"
"Nothing nothing, it's just that I noticed something interesting today... its been a while since you last tried to resurrection magic here."
"I was stupid back then forget about it."
"But no you are clearly on the right track, whatever you did today was the real deal!"
"What are you talking about?"
"I could feel slight fluctuations in soul energy from this direction today, took me a long time before I realized they were coming from you..."
As the old man rambled on a pressing question slowly rose to the surface of my mind-
Why does this random grave-keeper know about soul energy...
"You have actually managed to cast a real spell, if you actually manage to raise an undead I might consider taking you in as an apprentice!"
Unless he wasn't a 'random' gravekeeper.
"It's too bad that killing you is a much more tempting option! I am pretty sure you would make a nice zombie servant!"
Lightning struck the ground to complement the spooky atmosphere that was building up.
His broken yellowed teeth and blackened nails seemed to give off an immense sense of danger.
An extremely familiar one at that...
"Hahaha, look at your face! Don't mind this old man! I have always liked scaring youngsters such as yourself! Back when I was your age..."
The old man started rambling about other things, but I knew he wasn't joking earlier.
I made an excuse and managed to get away from him.
As I left the graveyard and trudged back home I slowly wiped the cold sweat from my face.
That familiar sense of danger was from the night I had detonated the soul orb.
The old man was none other than The Scarecrow... the guy who was in cahoots with the dark templars and was chasing Jimmy the other day.
I knew that if I attacked him back there I would not have won.
It was his turf, I was probably surrounded by zombies hidden underground waiting to ambush me if I were to make a single move.
To think that the other side of the city had been so close to me all this time...
While I was trying to resurrect my brother, there was probably an army of undead zombies lying in wait right beneath my feet.
I dunno, maybe he didn't have an army of zombies but it wasn't smart to let the enemy have an advantage over me.
I will need to spy on him more and figure out an attack plan.
Since he was in cahoots with dark templars, he should have a lot of information about them.
I should probably get Jimmy's help, we can attack this place together tomorrow night.