"That's none of your concern."
Vael answered while staring back into Koveric's eyes.
"I see." Koveric didn't press further and slowly got up from his seat. Still, Vael could see him trying his best to hold in a tiny smirk. "Though I am still curious how you found out about Nina."
Saying so, he pushed a button on his desk to close the shop's main door and started walking towards the door at the back.
"Follow me."
Vael silently followed behind him as both of them walked into the shop's backroom before eventually making their way towards the basement.
Once there, Koveric told Vael to wait for a few seconds as he began setting up the portal in front of him.
There was a reason Vael had decided to come to Koveric to buy something so sensitive, and so openly at that.
Usually, people with his identity and status hid their identity when it came to doing such illegal transactions.
Koveric was different, however. The bastard was once an archbishop of Erina, the goddess of money, and thus had the ability to see how a person's future was going to affect him specifically, whether that person was going to be harmful to him or was going to make him money.
In fact, that's how they had met in his previous life as well, only then, Koveric was the one who had approached Vael.
Even now, the only reason he was being so cooperative was because he must have seen through Vael's future.
"Step back for a second," Koveric said while turning on the gateway portal in front of him. At once, the space in the basement began to warp, coalescing together into the void.
"Nina must have told you where we are going. Still, watch your step." Saying so, Koveric stepped inside the portal, with Vael following closely behind.
The moment Vael stepped inside the portal, he was blinded by a momentary flash of light, causing him to wince.
They were currently standing in the middle of a dark alley right beside a dumpster.
Huh, guess despite seeing Vael's aura, Koveric had decided to bring them here through one of the illegal smuggling gateways.
This was it, Alexandria.
Neon lights lit up the sky, painting the glass towers in shifting colors. Floating ads hovered everywhere, some glitching, others shouting straight into people's heads. Overhead, trains roared along skyrails, loud and fast.
Vael smiled as he took in the familiar cityscape. It hadn't changed much.
"First time here?" Koveric asked, stepping out of the alley.
"Not exactly," Vael said, his eyes drifting to the tall skyscraper in the center, marked with the Interplanar Association's logo.
Alexandria, the city of plane divers. It was the heart of the Interplanar Association and a safe haven for Plane Divers like them.
The city had been built in its own separate world, right next to Vornak. That made it the perfect neutral zone, a place where people from other high-tier planes could meet, trade, and travel without stepping on each other's toes. Thanks to its location, not only did it promise neutrality, but it also made it easy to trade and travel inside the worlds where civilization had spanned past galaxies.
As Vael and Koveric made their way onto the main street, they stuck to the side path. Around them, beings of all kinds moved past elves, dwarves, and even a few giants.
Vael took a deep breath, soaking it all in. The city still amazed him. He remembered his first visit, the way his jaw had dropped when he saw so many different species living side by side.
After walking about five or so minutes
As they kept walking, the scenery around them began to change, their surroundings being replaced by garbage and poorly built houses.
Guess they had made it to the outer parts of the city.
Like every seemingly utopian city out there, Alexandria had a dark side of its own as well. The farther they moved away from the center, the more the surroundings began to turn grim. A foul smell permeated the air, people lay on the street in tattered clothes, high on drugs, while others looked at Vael as if looking at fresh meat until they saw Koveric in front, at which point they would avert their eyes.
They soon reached their destination. Walking into the slums, Koveric led him inside one of the unsuspecting houses on the outskirts before ushering him inside.
There, he once again led him down into the basement through a steel door.
Vael quietly followed behind, only to have a sudden chill run through his spine.
Stretching for a couple of hundred meters was a morgue with corpses after corpses, ranging from different beasts to humans lying on tables. The temperature inside the morgue was chilly, probably to make sure the corpses didn't decompose.
"Sorry to have to bring you to the warehouse. We received this shipment just yesterday and didn't have time to package them in storage units. Hope that's not a problem."
Vael simply shook his head and took a step forward. This sight might have looked disturbing to him once, but after all that had happened before his regression, it only seemed like a child's playground.
"Where are the cultivator corpses?" Vael asked while trying to inspect the corpses around him with biomancy.
"Right here, if you would follow me." Koveric led Vael towards a corner where lay twelve human corpses, both male and female.
"This one," Koveric spoke while seemingly reading something from his neuroband, "belongs to a Foundation Establishment cultivator with low fire affinity but a mid-grade core purity. Its price is 80,000 credits."
"This one right here..."
One by one, Koveric began explaining the corpses' details to Vael, including their affinity and core purity.
Vael, on the other hand, was busy trying to use biomancy on these corpses, trying to find any indications to confirm his theory. After all, he wasn't going to blindly waste all of his money for nothing.
The golden projection floated above one of the corpses as Vael focused hard to locate its meridians.
Please work, please work. Praying to himself that he was correct, he located one of the meridians right beside the person's navel when
--
Core Meridian detected.
→ Purity: 37%
→ Affinity: Fire
Proceed with extraction? [Yes] / [No]