Lord Phillip stared at the bold, crimson S-Rank stamp resting directly over Laulif Flower's silver-haired portrait. A heavy, somber realization settled over his features, the lines on his forehead deepening as he closed the folder with a slow, deliberate snap.
"You're a bounty hunter for a reason, you're tracking the Bloom Syndicate... and you've come to eliminate the head of the serpent himself. I've seen your records from the central capital network, Hunter. You don't leave things half-done. The reason you came all the way back to this quiet province is to dig up the evidence the state missed. Well... you're in the right place." Phillip said, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly whisper that echoed off the parchment-lined walls of the office.
He leaned forward, his eyes locking onto the dark, hollow slit of my Leech's Hollow Mask with an intensity that showed he understood the sheer, continental scale of the threat we were dealing with. If Laulif's human trafficking network was allowed to expand through the dimensional currents unchecked, it wouldn't just be Town Allure that suffered… the entire kingdom would bleed out from the inside.
"SQUIRE!" Phillip suddenly bellowed, his voice booming through the heavy oak door.
The door burst open almost instantly, and a young, eager apprentice clad in the light iron-and-leather uniform of the local administration rushed into the room, coming to a sharp halt before the desk.
"Yes, Lord Phillip!" the young man breathed, his eyes darting nervously toward my terrifying, tattered crimson silhouette.
"Take the master keys from the secure cabinet, locate the exact seal logs for the Flower Manor's subterranean vault. Clear the restricted state perimeter and grant this hunter absolute, unhindered access. She has supreme sovereign clearance."
"Yes, Lord Phillip! Right away!" the squire squeaked. He bowed quickly, turning on his heel to sprint down the administrative corridor to pull the confiscated property files.
Phillip looked back at me, giving me a slow, grimly supportive nod. The path to the ashes of the Flower estate was officially open, and the coded secrets Snow Flower had hidden away from her daughter.
Lord Phillip leaned back in his leather chair, his gaze lingering on the empty, pinned sleeve of my tattered crimson trench coat before shifting to the thick cloth wrap covering the right side of my face. The somber atmosphere in the office deepened, thick with a sudden, suffocating weight of nostalgia.
"You know, Bounty Hunter, looking at you... you remind me terribly of someone I used to know. Four to five months ago, there was a girl in this town. A vanguard. She was resilient, stubborn, and as tough as they come. She even sacrificed an arm and her eye just to protect this province from the dark." Phillip murmured, his voice softening into a tone I hadn't heard from him since the world fell apart.
Behind the unyielding, calcified lines of my Leech's Hollow Mask, my remaining green eye stared back at him in absolute, freezing silence.
The tragic irony was a physical blow. He was talking about me. He was eulogizing the dead hero of Town Allure, entirely blind to the fact that she was sitting right across from his desk. My mind instantly flashed back to those brutal, agonizing battles that had slowly dismantled my human body. The left arm he spoke of hadn't been lost to some glorious battlefield; it had been violently severed by the Goblin King back at the jagged ravine, a desperate sacrifice to stop the goblin carcasses from contaminating our town's primary water supply. And the eye… my right eye… had been viciously gouged out by a stray, poison-tipped arrow fired by a bandit raid while I was holding the perimeter line.
What truly surprised me, however, was his timeline. In his mind, those horrific injuries had happened just three months ago, the trauma still fresh in the town's collective memory, while for me, the descent into hell and my subsequent vampiric ascension made it feel like a completely different lifetime.
Before the heavy silence in the office could stretch any further, the heavy oak door burst open. The young squire rushed back into the room, slightly out of breath, carrying a heavy, iron-reinforced lockbox wrapped in official Bureau evidence chains.
"I have them, Lord Phillip! The vault logs were clear, but the retrieval team had already extracted the secure lockbox from the master wine cellar's foundation for cataloging. This is the private chest from the Flower estate."
Phillip nodded, dismissing the boy with a wave of his hand. He slid the iron box toward me, the chains rattling softly.
"Snow Flower must have hidden this deeply. The Bureau thought it was just old property deeds, but if Laulif's secrets are inside, they belong to your hunt."
I reached out with my pale right hand, the metal box cold against my translucent skin. The keys to the Bloom Syndicate, the secret maritime routes through the coastal docks, and the absolute proof of Laulif's atrocities were finally in my grasp.
I cracked the iron-reinforced lockbox open, the heavy chains rattling against the dark mahogany desk as the lid swung back. Inside sat a stack of aged, delicately preserved parchment pages… the secret correspondence of the Flower family.
Using my singular, pale right hand, I began flipping through the papers with methodical, mechanical efficiency.
The early letters painted the picture of a normal, albeit distant, family life:
"Hey? How's White doing? I'm going on a business trip."
The next one, dated months later, showed the cracks beginning to form as his underground operations in the flesh trade began to take root:
"Sorry, I couldn't return home. A knight is a hard job."
Then came a milestone:
"Happy 5th birthday to White. How about our daughter? Is she okay?"
But the true revelation wasn't in Laulif's neat, aristocratic cursive. It was in the margins. Every single letter had been aggressively defaced. Scribbled in dark, furious, and bleeding ink strokes were the desperate responses of a betrayed wife:
"Fuck you Laulif. Rot in hell."
Snow Flower hadn't kept these letters out of lingering affection. She had kept them as a testament to her hatred, a reminder of the man who had abandoned her to build an empire of human misery.
I dug deeper, past the domestic lies, until I reached the final, un-archived letter tucked at the very bottom of the iron box. My single green eye scanned the ink, locking onto a specific paragraph that completely reoriented my tactical map:
"I'm on a business trip into the Milky Way Continent. There is a town that is humans-only allowed to enter. I will give you presents on the way back."
I froze.
A humans-only town deep within the Milky Way Continent.
The Milky Way Continent was famously known as a chaotic, unforgiving territory dominated by beast-kin, demons, and hostile demi-human factions where humans were typically hunted or enslaved. For an S-rank flesh-merchant like Laulif to operate a sprawling underground syndicate, he needed a secure, sovereign base of operations… a hidden sanctuary where his human cargo could be processed without interference from the local beast-kin executioners. A "humans-only" enclave hidden in the heart of enemy territory was the perfect tactical stronghold.
I didn't recognize the name of such a place; it wasn't on any standard Bureau registry map I had studied during my retirement prep at House 132.
Without making a sound, I slid the crucial letter across the desk, my pale index finger tapping aggressively against the specific line. I looked up, the dark, hollow slit of my Leech's Hollow Mask locking onto Lord Phillip, silently demanding that the veteran ruler examine the clue and give the Crimson Phantom her final destination.