Chapter 360: Entering soul oceans. |
Moments passed which soon turned to minutes as the bartender stood outside the room with her ear pressed against the door as she found it strange that there was no noise coming from within. But that didn't make a difference as the silence continued until the door was quickly opened by a woman with long silver hair.
"Uhm, I'm sorry. It's just that. Well… I-" The bartender said as she looked up at Hong Xia with shock as she wasn't expecting the door to open so suddenly.
Hong Xia looked at the woman for a few moments as she understood a few words that she had mentioned but she still hadn't gotten the hang of learning the language yet. She held out her hand to the woman and gestured for her to come inside.
The bartender hesitated for a moment as she walked into the room behind Hong Xia to see that the man that had held her at knifepoint was sitting in one of the wooden chairs and blankly staring at the ceiling as though he had lost all sense of consciousness.
"What did you do to him!?" The bartender shouted out as she saw that the expression that the man was making was that of a broken man. There was definitely something that went on within the room despite it being so quiet.
"Don't worry. I kept my word. I didn't harm him in any way. I just used a technique to get access to his memories for a few moments. There will be some minor side effects but it isn't anything you should worry about. He will be fine as long as he isn't left out in the cold.
He might have a little trouble using his Qi so it would be a bad idea to put him in any dangerous situations." Haru explained with a proud look on his face as if he had just done a noble act by interrogating the man. But as the bartender looked at him she felt as though she should have been more specific about harming the man. Mental trauma was still trauma after all.
"Pretty butterfly." The man in the chair said suddenly as he reached his hands up and clapped them in the sky as if he had caught something within them.
Haru looked over at him for a moment before realising that it was just one of the delusions that were caused by what he had just put him through to get the answers out of him.
"Well, I guess so. It's quite common for people to revert to a child-like state when they experience something mind-altering. I guess he is just feeling a little bit out of it for the time being. He should be fine with a few days rest." Haru said as the bartender looked at him again but this time with a questioning stare.
"Should be fine? What if he isn't? How am I supposed to tell the guards what happened to him when they see him like this?" The bartender asked as Haru thought about it for a few moments. He couldn't think of an answer to give her.
But he appreciated the fact that she didn't ask him specifically about what he had done in order to reduce a grown man to a child-like state. He figured that he would have to come up with something believable for her to stop asking questions.
But it seemed as though she knew that it was for the best that she didn't ask anything unnecessary. It wasn't like she would get an answer anyway. But it saved Haru some time as he didn't need to make something up
But as Haru was talking to the bartender he felt a tug on his sleeve as he turned to see Hong Xia trying to get his attention without alerting the woman to the fact that they both spoke an unusual language.
"Hey, I think you should let her deal with this already. If anyone finds out what you did to him you will be a criminal. I doubt that it's legal to look directly into someone's soul." Hong Xia warned as she whispered into Haru's ear.
Haru nodded his head as he agreed with her. But he had yet to tell her that he had already broken the law and the guards of the town were most likely trying to find him even as they spoke.
Haru sighed before walking towards the bartender and talking to her directly.
"I assume I can leave it to you to see that he is handed over to the correct people. I don't want anyone to know my involvement of course." Haru said as the bartender sighed with relief as she was wondering what the reason she had been called into the room was for.
But it was so that Haru could show her the exact state that he had left the man in. If she had reacted to it negatively he would then have to dispose of both of them so that he didn't get into any further trouble from the guards or the people that had sent the man to kill him.
But from the way that the bartender had acted Haru was confident that he could leave it up to her to decide how to go about handing the man over to the guards.
"I have some business to take care of with the people who employed him so if you don't mind I would appreciate it if you take him to the guards as soon as possible," Haru said with a sigh before sitting down on the edge of the bed.
Hong Xia helped the bartender get the man up to his feet before walking them both to the door as the man continued to act like a child as he reached for the air as if he could see something that the rest of them could not.
Just as she was about to close the door, Hong Xia spoke out.
"Thank you." She said as she put her very limited knowledge of the language to use to thank the bartender for helping out. The bartender smiled as she figured that Hong Xia was just shy and that is why she didn't talk at all. But she could tell be how laid back Haru was and how Hong Xia acted concerned about the man despite watching him get interrogated that the two of them weren't people to be feared unless you got on their bad side.
The bartender then went about with the task that she had been given and took the man to the guard's office while Hong Xia walked back over to Haru who was lost in thought.
"What did you do to him? You said that you had a trick to make him talk but he didn't make so much as a sound yet you still look like you found out why he was sent here." Hong Xia asked as Haru had yet to tell her anything about what he had done. But the longer that she was with him the more she began to doubt that he was really from Earth.
Despite being on another planet Haru looked like he was calm and collected the whole time yet that was how it seemed from the outside. In fact, he was struggling to figure out what he should do.
He had no purpose other than getting stronger so that he could become ready to revive Suyin's soul and explore the universe just like his teacher had done. But from what he understood it would take a while before he got to that stage of his cultivation and being stuck on a planet that he knew nothing about was quite confusing and overwhelming to the point that he was starting to hesitate.
"I took a look inside his soul ocean and asked him a few questions," Haru said as Hong Xia took a few steps back out of shock.
"You can enter someone's soul ocean at will!? Where did you learn such a thing? That is a truly terrifying skill. You could theoretically rip memories out of someone's body and view them as if you were that person." Hong Xia said as she looked at him in disbelief but Haru was even more shocked that it had worked.
'I didn't know if it would really work, but that just goes to show that cultivation and magic go hand in hand with each other. But why is there something preventing people from learning both of them? I was clearly told that it was impossible for Li Jun to use magic and become a cultivator at the same time. Yet why did I gain the ability to do both?' Haru questioned as had happened to make the impossible possible.
The way he was able to extract information from the man was because of a spell that was only taught to the highest-ranking officers in the Japanese military.
It was a spell that was capable of forcing a person to spill their deepest and darkest secrets by taking over a small part of the brain. The fact that he had captured someone for questioning made him remember the spell and he knew that it would be useless to make him talk out loud since there was a risk of them being overheard in a place like that.
So instead he decided to direct the spell away from the brain and inject it with Qi as he aimed for the man's soul ocean.
In a split second, he watched the man's life flash before his eyes and learnt who wanted to assassinate him and why. Yet he had never seen the man before in his life yet he the man called him Lord which confirmed Haru's initial suspicion that it had something to do with the men that had attacked Annabeth.
"I guess I can enter someone's soul ocean. But it is probably something I should avoid doing too often. I have a headache. I think I'm going to take a walk. Stay here and wait for me okay?" Haru said before leaping down from the open window into the street below.
"Wait I will come with you-" Hong Xia shouted out as Haru vanished from her sight but as she looked down from the window Haru was nowhere to be seen.