The Martial Unity

Rui sighed. 

What he did perhaps wasn't the wisest, but he hadn't been able to muster up the willpower to stop himself from acting. He glared at the Martial Apprentice in his left hand. 

'Got his hands on a little bit of power and thought he could do anything he wanted. It's because of monsters like you that ordinary people are fully justified in being terrified of us.' Rui narrowed his eyes as he flicked the man's skull softly.

CRACK!

A deep indentation appeared on his skull, killing him instantly. Rui made sure to hold back immensely in order to prevent the skin from breaking, leaving no blood behind that could be used to gain a better understanding of what happened. He would have to bury the Martial Apprentice somewhere far away.

He sighed as he thought back to the words that the woman had told him.

You do not find them, they find you.

If that was the case, he just hoped that they would find him worth contacting. He didn't think he would be able to find them, based on her words and the intelligence of the Derimont Bazaar that he had been provided.

He quickly spread through not just the Ferendul nation, but also through the legal ports of entry through all the other nations that stood in his way in the Saiful region.

He was pleased to see that not every nation was in as bad a condition as the Republic of Ferendul, but he had not been able to make any headway on how to contact the Derimont Bazaar when he asked around.

Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that it was a futile exercise. Not a single person knew anything, and even if they did, he got the sense that they wouldn't talk even if he tortured them, which he would never do in the first place.

It took him a while since he had decided to go through the official port of entry, but eventually, he managed to reach the center of the Saiful Region; the Saiful Abyss.

A no man's land that no country dared to try and conquer and colonize. None of them wanted to declare war against the most powerful organization of ordinary men and women. 

He breathed deeply as he got his first proper look at the Saiful Abyss, narrowing his eyes.

He was being watched. 

He could feel it, though he wasn't able to spot anybody.

It was dark.

Abnormally dark.

And yet the endless sea of trash, debris, and empty infrastructure was as clear as day. A dense forest packed with disposed garbage and abandoned huts and buildings. It was filled to the brim with crowded waste. 

It gave the beholder an impression of endless worthlessness.

This overflowing ocean of wasted garbage and wasted space was the home of the Derimont Bazaar? The market that was created by the Beggar's Sect as an evanue to approach them?

An ordinary person would scorn with disdain and contempt at the mountain of waste that lay before them and yet...

Rui's eyes widened with shock as he beheld the Saiful Abyss.

'Why...' He stared, stunned. 'Why are my senses being hampered?'

This sensation reminded him of the Shionel Dungeon. It wasn't nearly as extreme as the Shionel Dungeon, yet even with its reduced intensity, Rui could never possibly forget this sensation in his entire life.

Both Tempestuous Feel and Seismic Mapping were heavily crippled, giving him extremely blurred and disrupted readings. He even recognized the very specific sensations when he focused in particular directions.

'These are the same esoteric substances that I dug out of the Shionel Dungeon!'

Having spent a year and a half in the Shionel Dungeon, Rui had come to be able to identify the 'flavors' of disruptions of the various esoteric substances of the Shionel Dungeon.

He sensed vast amounts of their presence in the bedrock of the Saiful Abyss. Yet they were just below the surface, this was not a natural occurrence.

A shocking realization dawned on him.

'You're telling me that the Beggar's Sect accumulated half a floor's worth of esoteric substances from the Shionel Dungeon for the sole reason of creating a zone of sensory disruption in the Saiful Abyss?'

Furthermore, it had been integrated such that it would disrupt senses on large scales, not short ranges. Thus Martial Artists trying to engage in espionage over large ranges would be extremely hampered while everybody would still be able to sense over shorter ranges, allowing them to function normally.

It was a zone that the Beggar's Sect created to be the antithesis of both esoteric sensor technology and Martial Artists. A zone where the ordinary man functioned better than either of them.

He instantly knew that the Beggar's Sect had probably been one of his biggest customers when he sold supplies of esoteric ore deposits from the Shionel Dungeon. Of course, given that he didn't see their name ever, they were certainly discreet enough to use shell corporations and other fronts while purchasing large quantities from him.

He essentially made this happen.

'...It doesn't matter. It happened so long ago that it is irrelevant. Thankfully, not even such extravagant measures are enough to stop me.' His eyes narrowed as he extended his Riemannian Echo into the distance. 

He had created this technique for precisely these circumstances, though he never expected he would come back to these circumstances ever again. 

He focused his senses specifically across the surface of the Saiful Abyss, allowing him to extend his senses further across that particular sliced section as opposed to all directions. 

His eyes narrowed

There were surprisingly many scouts that were extremely well hidden and even camouflaged within the ruins and the heaps of garbage. They carefully watched the edge of the Saiful Abyss with monoculars, whispering into remote communication devices continuously while fiddling with a bunch of other devices.

He could even sense the ones ahead of him and closest to him staring straight at him unperturbed as they continued their tasks. 

They were most likely the Beggar's Sect's patrol scouts to keep an eye on all activity at the edge of Saiful Abyss and were probably under the impression that he was unaware of them.

His senses further extended into the Saiful Abyss as he took note of everything he saw. The deeper into the Saiful Abyss's surface his senses went, the more people he could sense. Just as he reached the limit of his senses focused along the surface of Saiful Abyss, the population density spiked heavily.

He smiled.

He had found the Derimont Bazaar.