At the sa ti, Yuan felt a wave of profound embarrassnt wash over him.
This was the sa woman who had killed one of the adventurer guild’s arch magi. The loss of that arch magus had been a devastating blow to their organization.
It had single-handedly destroyed the delicate power balance that had previously existed between the guild and the Grand Magus Order.
Sure, the poor arch magus had likely been caught off guard by the untouchable nature of the shadow.
But it didn’t change the mind-blowing fact that a grandmaster magus had managed to defeat and kill an arch magus.
That event had sent shockwaves through their leadership, leaving them scrambling to find a way to counter such a lethal and elusive foe.
Yet, Mr. White had taken care of that sa foe with a casual ease that was almost insulting.
He had not found her shadow figure troubleso in the slightest. He had caught her "ultimate" attack with two fingers and snapped it like a dry twig, treating a killer of a powerful arch magus like a minor nuisance that needed to be cleaned up.
Yuan gnashed his teeth, his jaw tight with a mixture of awe and anxiety.
’I sure hope he’s on our side...’ he thought, his pulse quickening.
The idea of Mr. White being an enemy was a nightmare he didn’t want to entertain. If a man could delete the powers of a grandmaster with a single wave of his hand, then no one in the guild—not even the highest-ranking elders—was truly safe.
The rest of the crowd seed to be having the sa thought.
The hundreds of adventurers and civilians stood in a heavy, contemplative silence.
They looked at the woman encased in earth, then at the massive ice mountain, and finally at each other.
The sa thought was spreading through the ranks like a slow-moving tide.
Mr. White had the power to destroy one’s magic channels.
The rumor began to take shape even before the first person spoke.
It was a terrifying piece of information that would change the way people approached the mysterious man in the mask.
Like that, the na ’Mr. White’ would keep spreading.
It would move from this small city, to nearby cities then then throughout the continent, shocking everyone.
***
Crackle!
A sudden bolt of lightning fell from the sky.
It descended with a blinding flash, striking the earth directly behind Noah’s house.
The lightning vanished as soon as it struck.
It left no scorched earth and no crater in its wake. The energy simply dissolved into the air, revealing a handso, white-haired boy with piercing blue eyes lying on the grassy ground.
He was no longer wearing the intimidating mask of "Mr. White." He was just a youth, his chest heaving as he stared up at the afternoon sky.
He laid perfectly still.
Noah found that he was unable to move even his fingers. His body felt like a leaden weight, pinned to the soft grass by a force he could not overco. Every muscle was locked in a state of rigid paralysis, and his connection to his own limbs seed to have been severed by the sudden departure of the limit-breaker’s power.
It felt like a thousand needles were running through his body.
The sensation was relentless, a localized storm of sharp, stinging agony that traveled through his veins. It felt as if all his bones and his internal organs were being ground into powder by those microscopic needles.
The pain was deep, burrowing into the very marrow of his skeleton and the sensitive lining of his nerves.
There were no visible injuries or broken bones on his body, his skin was just as ut normally would, and his fra looked perfectly intact from the outside.
However, the pain he felt far exceeded that of any flesh wound or shattered limb he had ever experienced.
He couldn’t even grunt or scream.
His throat felt as though it were filled with hot lead, making it impossible to let out even a whimper of distress.
He could only lay there in absolute silence, his jaw clenched so tight it ached. His vision blurred at the edges as he endured the internal grinding of his own essence.
’The system really wasn’t... exaggerating when it said intense pain...’ Noah thought.
Now, with his body screaming in protest, he realized that "intense" was an understatent for the tornt he was currently enduring.
A single drop of a tear rolled down from his eye.
It traced a slow, wet path across his temple and disappeared into his white hair.
It was not a tear of sadness, but a physical reaction to the sheer volu of pain his brain was processing.
His blue eyes remained wide, reflecting the shifting clouds above as he counted the seconds of his five-minute sentence.
He felt a wave of relief despite the agony.
He was fortunate that he had managed to get away as quickly as he did. If he had hesitated for even a few more seconds, the tir would have run out in front of the crowd.
He pictured the scene in his mind—the powerful arch magus Mr. White suddenly collapsing while the crowd of adventurers watched in confusion.
He couldn’t imagine how much chaos would have ensued.
If his magus rank had reset in front of everyone, his secret would have been laid bare.
He would have been at the rcy of Yuan, the guild, and the woman he had just stripped of her power. To be unable to move for five minutes in such a high-stakes environnt would have been a death sentence.
Things hadn’t ended the way he wanted, but at least, they hadn’t ended in the worst possible way.
He was alive, and most importantly, the world still believed that Mr. White was an invincible force of nature that could not be touched.
’I got... too carried away...’ he thought to himself.
The regret tasted bitter in his mouth, as he realised he had allowed the overwhelming power coursing through him at the ti distract him.
He had almost even forgotten there was a five minute deadline for using limit breaker, and subconsciously wasted most of it flexing his strength.
He had never planned on leaving the woman with the strange shadow elent in the hands of the guild.
To Noah, she was more than just an assassin or a rogue magus; she was a walking anomaly.
Her existence represented a hole in what he knew about magic, and leaving her with Yuan wasn’t what he had in mind.
The shadow elent was a variable he had never heard of before, so wanted to get to the root of the matter himself.
He needed to know who had trained her, where this "shadow" power originated, and exactly how many others like her were lurking in the dark.
And perhaps... if there were other elents majority of the world doesn’t even know about...
It was clear that his knowledge about this world was still lacking in a lot of ways.
There was also the lingering possibility that she was sent by the adventurer guild itself to assassinate him.
He wished this wasn’t the case—he truly did—but he was a realist. He couldn’t deny that there was a chance that the very people who claid to need him were the ones plotting his downfall.
He wondered if Yuan was deeper in the conspiracy than he let on.
Or, perhaps, it was soone even more powerful than Yuan—a hidden power within the guild’s hierarchy who saw "Mr. White" as a threat to their established order.
If they were the ones who sent her, then handing her right back to them was the equivalent of returning a failed weapon to its master for repairs.
He would have liked nothing more than to take the woman with him and ask her questions himself.
He wanted to hear her truth from her own lips, without the interference of guild politics or the prying eyes of the public.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have a place to put her.
He couldn’t bring her to his ho for obvious reasons, and more importantly, there was the tir he had to watch out for.
He had been forced to choose between his secret and his curiosity, and he had chosen his secret.
’Also, she reverted to a normal human being... imdiately after I stripped away the shadows surrounding her,’ he mused.
It was the most baffling part of the entire encounter.
Unlike the crowd, who had quickly arrived at the convenient assumption that Noah was the one who destroyed her mana channels, he knew the truth. He knew he wasn’t responsible for her losing her power.
The golden mana wave he had unleashed was only ant to dispel the shadows and reveal her true face.
It shouldn’t have touched her internal mana channels, let alone erased them entirely, resetting her grandmaster magus rank completely.
And then, there was the matter of her appearance.
He hadn’t even expected her to be naked under the shadow.
He had assud the smoke was a layer over clothing or armor, a magical shroud that complented her physical gear.
To find that her entire "form" was composed of nothing but the elent itself had caught him completely off guard.
Even as he lay there, unable to move a single muscle, his cheeks reddened slightly.
The heat of the embarrassnt was the only thing that could compete with the needle-like pain in his nerves.
He squeezed his eyes shut, but the image of her standing there in the golden light was burned into his retinas.
’That was my first ti... seeing a naked woman...’ he thought.
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