Chapter 53
Step. Step.
The footsteps climbing the deserted ridge at night came to a stop.
It had been two days since Theron left Rembar and headed north.
Standing on a low hill...
He looked back at the road behind him.
Fields covered in darkness.
There was no sign of anyone following.
He had split his trail into three different paths outside the city.
At the final fork...
He walked upstream through a shallow creek for nearly half an hour to erase even his scent.
No matter how good the dogs' noses were...
They would wander for a while.
For a while.
But...
They would never give up.
Remembering the people Theron had dealt with in his previous life...
There was no chance they would stop here.
The dogs of the central authorities were not the sort to tuck their tails after losing prey.
If anything...
The real hunt began after they lost their target.
Theron had seen that countless times in his previous life.
And the next people they sent...
Will be on a completely different level from Kuarem.
Theron sat with his back against a rock.
The cold night air entered deep into his lungs.
He needed time to organize his thoughts.
What he needed to do immediately.
And...
What he needed in order to fight them in the future.
I need to become much stronger than I was before.
In his previous life...
Theron had broken through the limit of the Darkfin Mana Method and reached Seven-Star.
Among the Shadows...
He had unquestionably been the strongest.
Strong enough that those at the center had started to fear him.
And yet...
All he had been able to do was struggle.
Asbon Zionhart.
The power of a man who had reached Eight-Star...
Was beyond anything Theron could overcome.
At least Eight-Star.
No... stronger than that.
Not every person within the same realm was equal.
Even within one realm...
There were lower, low, middle, high, and peak levels.
The Asbon Theron remembered belonged around the high level of Eight-Star.
To defeat him...
Theron would need to reach peak Eight-Star.
Or beyond.
And for that...
Simply changing my mana method won't be enough.
The first thing Theron had to deal with...
Was Wandering Wind.
The footwork contained in the handwritten manual he found on Hell Island.
The more he practiced it...
The clearer one thing became.
Incomplete.
It was an incomplete martial art.
Without the experience from his previous life...
Theron probably would not even have recognized that.
At a certain point...
The flow of the steps failed to connect properly.
Like a long bridge with a missing section.
Even in its incomplete form...
Wandering Wind was exceptional.
But...
If those steps connected perfectly...
Just how extraordinary would it become?
And only after realizing Wandering Wind was incomplete...
Did Theron finally understand why nearly eighty percent of that handwritten book had been meaningless chatter.
When he first read it...
He had thought the paper had been wasted on nonsense.
But...
To think there were traces hidden inside all that nonsense.
Only after reading and analyzing it carefully...
Did Theron discover six digits.
Numbers cleverly repeated inside completely unrelated stories.
A complaint about paying eighty-three coins for alcohol.
A story about crossing two mountain passes.
A meaningless habit of counting to one hundred seventy-nine before falling asleep.
Seen separately...
They meant nothing.
One hundred out of one hundred readers would dismiss them as the ramblings of a drunk.
But when arranged in the order they appeared...
"...832, 179."
They formed location coordinates.
Coordinates ordinary people would never recognize.
A system used by special adventurers.
People who entered lands absent from ordinary maps...
And paid with their lives for every piece of information they gained.
In his previous life...
Theron had worked with such people.
That was why he recognized the system.
He did not know why the creator of Wandering Wind had used coordinates belonging to specialized adventurers.
But one thing was certain.
The rest of the answer is there.
The continuation of the broken steps.
Perhaps...
Even more than that.
And there was another thing he absolutely had to obtain.
Mardian Root.
Just thinking of the name brought old memories back.
Mardian Root had once seemed like an obscure medicinal treasure.
But Theron later learned just how extraordinary it truly was.
It was, without exaggeration...
One of the most effective medicinal treasures on the entire continent.
Its only flaw was that fully absorbing its effects required a great deal of time and a specific method.
But that did not matter.
Theron could not kill his enemies immediately anyway.
His body needed to grow.
And he needed to merge the Darkfin Mana Method with the Tempelst Mana Method.
Theron slowly opened his eyes.
"Haaah."
He exhaled.
No matter where his thoughts began...
They always ended with the same image.
Asbon's sword piercing his heart.
Theron could still remember the sensation clearly.
Cold.
Precise.
Not a trace of hesitation.
And behind Asbon...
Castillo's smiling face.
Just wait.
Even if it took years...
Theron would find them.
Eventually...
He stood.
Knowing the coordinates alone was not enough.
He needed one more thing.
A map used by specialized adventurers.
Theron raised his head and looked at a village in the distance.
It was not large.
But a village of that size should have somewhere he could obtain such a map.
The only problem was...
Going in normally will be difficult.
He needed to enter as quietly as possible.
Buy only the map.
Then immediately leave.
Having made his decision...
