It was dark outside. Victor had exhausted the mana in his reserves after three hours of making mana crystals. There was no shortcut to replenishing mana as the only way to do it was resting or using mana crystals and using the mana crystals he had was like drinking the water he had spit out. While resting, his eyes shook in fear. He had realized the mistake he had done. He went to the bathroom as he thought of his next move.
'Keeping Frazer alive is dangerous even if the chances are low. But considering Frazer's greed, the chances of me getting betrayed increases. As the mass buying of used mana crystals and after a month the bulk selling of low grade mana stones was noticed by someone of high power. It could be tracked back to me. If Frazer was offered a large amount of money, it wasn't even a question of betrayal. Frazer would tell them that it was me who wanted the crystals.'
He entered the bathroom. It was a huge room with a huge pool in it. The water in it was maintained at a warm temperature with a magic device called the water heater and the temperature could be changed according to one's wishes with a type of measuring valve. He didn't come here to bathe. He went to the other side of the room, opened the window and jumped out. 'If my room wasn't in the first floor I wouldn't have to do this. My body is just too weak to jump down from that height.'
He walked fast. He didn't need to walk slow .He wasn't wearing his footwear so it helped him walk in silence easier. He opened the door of Frazer's house with some basic lock picking methods and went in. He went to the kitchen and searched around. He found a good looking knife. He then took a carrot and cut it with the knife to test the sharpness. The knife went down smoothy, proving its sharpness. The knife wasn't much useful in killing people. Looking at the shape it was solely for cutting and chopping vegetables and for other culinary practices. 'Well.... although it isn't useful in fights, this knife is enough to kill someone who is tied up.'
Victor searched every single room while trying to not make any sound. He didn't leave anything out. He searched every single corner, drawers and cupboards. He didn't find anything of much value. He then went out of the house and went behind the building .Tapped the ground two times here and there. After about ten minutes he found the trap door. He opened the trapdoor with some difficulty and went inside. He walked down the stairs while he counted them. He could see light coming from the other side after walking for a while. He slowed down and went down with caution with the knife in his hands.
He saw a man tied to a crucifix and the man looked a lot like Frazer but he was malnourished. When Victor confirmed that the man was actually tied, he went inside the room. He saw many bottles of potions and different types of torture devices. They looked fancy but he didn't know how to use them. He went up to the man and nudged him. He didn't wake up so Victor checked his pulse 'Alive but unconscious or sleeping.' *SLAP* *SLAP* *SLAP* Victor slapped him on the cheeks. The man's eyelids trembled and he slowly opened his eyes and gave out a growling sound.
"Where is the way to the inside of the house." Victor asked. He knew that all the passages or secret rooms built had a connected pathway to somewhere inside the house. All the noble mansions and houses had them. Their main purpose was to serve as an emergency exit when faced with attacks. But as time passed, people added some rooms in middle of the passages for some extra storage for their goods or to keep their victims captive. Frazer didn't have a noble title but he was a descendant of a royal knight, so Victor was sure that this room had a passage connected to somewhere inside Frazer's house.
"Guuu urrrr ruuu."
Victor frowned and pulled down the man's lower jaw, only to find the tongue missing.
"Point me towards the pathway and I'll help you out of this place."
The man's eyes brightened and pointed towards a broken down cupboard with his chin. Victor nodded and went to check it out. The cupboard didn't have anything special so he pushed the cupboard to the side, revealing an arch type doorway. He nodded, went back to the man and sliced off his throat in the blink of an eye. He went towards the table full of potions and found that there were potions of three different colours. Sky blue, dark blue and pale yellow. He knew just by looking at them that the sky blue ones were the healing potions, dare blue were sleep potions and pale yellow were poisons. He read a lot in the library about weapons, potions, magic, monsters, herbs, trees etc as he douldnt do much as he was very young. He sighed 'I can't take them back home now as I didn't bring my storage bag but I also need to finish the work I came here to do. Hopefully Frazer will have a storage bag kept somewhere.'
He took one bottle of sleeping potion and went up the pathway towards the house. He had reached the end pretty soon and the entrance was covered with a cloth. He moved the cloth a little bit and saw that the entrance was in Frazer's bedroom and looked at Frazer who was sleeping soundly.
'Heh… Frazer. You shouldn't have tried to cheat me.' Victor came up from the entrance and went up to Frazer and let him smell the sleep potion for a minute. Then he opened his mouth and put in about a tenth of the contents of the bottle inside it, smiled and started searching the room. He found two storage bags and a heavy trunk. One bag contained very little space but it was made with high quality leather and the other one was made with a normal cloth but it had more than double the space of what Victor's storage bag had. Victor's bag had a volume of ten meter cubes and this one had 25 meter cube of empty space. The small bag contained some bronze coins and stone rings. Stone rings was the currency that was below the bronze coins and one bronze coin had an equal value to 1000 stone rings. Unlike the coins, the stone rings had a hole in the centre and the centre part was thick and gradually the thickness reduced near the outer circumference.
He kept both the bags in his pocket and started picking the trunk's lock. It was rusty but it had an intricate design. After five minutes of hard work the trunk was opened. There was a knife and a book kept on an expensive piece of silk cloth. The knife was rusty so he left it alone and checked out the book. The pages were smooth but had a dark purplish tinge. Victor folded one of the page but it fell back like a piece of cloth. 'Tch, this bastard had a grimoire locked up and he didn't even use it.' He was extremely delighted with the loot he found. He put the grimoire inside the storage bag, locked the trunk and ran to the kitchen. 'I wasted a lot of time trying to open the trunk. Gotta hurry." He threw the knife on the table and searched for the Flame stick.
Flame sticks were ignition devices used to light up stoves and chimneys. They used fire crystals as fuel to work. Fire crystals were man-made crystals which used the structure of the original, naturally formed mana crystals as the base. The crystals were filled with fire attributed mana by either fire mages or monsters.
He ran to the store room and searched around in a hurry. Kept two large pots filled with Slime oil. Slime oil burnt very quickly and was mostly used to get a fire started. In short it worked like petrol but it left a black sticky residue when after burning and this was called black oil. It helped preserve wood for a longer time and make the wood more flammable.
He made a tiny hole at the bottom of a pot and started running around the house. He covered up the entire ground floor with one pot and moved to the first floor with the other pot. 'Although the fire from the ground floor would eventually move to the 1st floor, I don't want this to be a failure.' After running around the 1st floor including Frazer's bedroom, He ran down to the store room again and brought the pots and placed them right outside the bedroom window. There were 8 pots of slime oil left and he placed six of them right under the bedroom window and took the other two to the escape pathway. After 5 minutes, the pathway from Frazer's bedroom to the exit was covered with excessive amount of slime oil. He had cleared up the table full of potions while doing so. He wiped the soles of his feet that were covered with slime oil with some nearby leaves and threw them into the pathway.
"Time for a huge bonfire hehe."