As silence returned to the surroundings, Shang's face turned towards the Patriarch.
He saw an extremely expensive Focus with five Amplifiers and several Space Rings on him.
It was quite enticing to just take that.
However, plundering the belongings of the targets of the mission was against the rules of the temple, with good reason.
There were too many ways to track belongings, and if one Agent overlooked even one of them, the entire branch of the temple might become compromised.
Additionally, part of the reason why the clients paid such a ridiculous fee was the loot.
Most of the clients that ordered a hit on an organization, person, or family had the means to collect the loot, and one of the main reasons very often for why they wanted that target dead was something the target owned.
Shang looked at the many corpses buried beneath the rubble.
Nearly every person had a Space Ring that harbored all of their wealth.
The amount of money buried in this place was at least five times as much as Shang would get paid.
Yet, Shang preferred the risk-free and secure payment.
SHING!
Shang summoned something from his Space Ring.
It was a large container of blood.
CRACK!
Shang slashed through the container with his sword, breaking it and dispersing all the contents onto the ground behind the Patriarch's corpse.
The blood landed in a special way that painted an image.
Behind the Patriarch's corpse was now a two-meter wide blood-red silhouette of a person.
There were no visible features on this silhouette, making it seem more like a shadow.
Leaving this mark was also one of the temple's rules.
In order to not make the Enforcers dig too much into the matter, the Agents of the Temple of Blood always left behind a symbol.
Normal Agents left behind the symbol of the Temple of Blood, which was a circle with three stains of blood of varying sizes inside it.
Named Agents left their personal symbols behind. The special kind of blood the temple used to create these symbols was proof enough that it had been them.
The bloody silhouette Shang had painted with the blood was his own sign.
He was one of the Named Agents, and his codename was White Ghost.
After leaving his sign, Shang walked over to the barrier and retrieved the emblem he had put on it.
The barrier turned transparent again and acted like nothing had happened.
After using the two medals again, Shang stepped past the barrier.
From the outside, the area inside the barrier looked like a ruin.
The middle of the gigantic castle had collapsed, and there was no life anywhere close to or inside the castle.
A dead ruin.
Shang looked at the barrier once more.
It was now using its normal amount of Mana Crystals again, which meant that it would remain active for around ten more days since no one was alive to refill its Mana Crystal storage.
This meant that, at the latest, people would take note of Shang's work in ten days. When one of these barriers ran out of Mana Crystals, the manufacturer that sold them would be informed, and they would send someone to investigate.
However, people would most likely notice everything before that.
Over 500 High Mages had died, and nearly all of these High Mages had important connections with the outside.
Someone would surely try to contact the High Mages, and after failing a couple of times, they would check up on them or directly call someone to investigate.
Shang guessed that everything would be discovered in five hours at most.
He would be long gone by then.
SHING!
Shang vanished.
The sun still hung brightly and conspicuously in the sky, bathing the entire world in a warm glow of life.
It was difficult to imagine that a huge slaughter had just taken place on such a warm and peaceful day.
As Shang was running through the mountains, hills, and forests, all the light around him bent, hiding him from all manners of Spirit Senses.
Shang avoided flying through the sky since it would be easier to find him there.
Even though he was invisible to most Spirit Senses, he wasn't completely invisible to the eyes. In the sky, someone might notice the bending light around Shang.
Additionally, Archmages had terrifyingly accurate perceptions of their surroundings. The Mana fluctuations Shang left behind while walking on the ground would mostly be hidden by the different forms of life and Mana constantly interacting with each other, but things would be different in the sky.
While running through the forests, Shang had to avoid several dangerous spots.
This was no longer a place where Zone Beasts stopped their strongest beasts from killing humans.
No, the beasts in this place loved attacking humans.
If someone ran through the wilderness without a map, they would most likely die.
Even as an Archmage.
There were plenty of Archbeasts and Ancestral Beasts in the gigantic wilderness. If one wasn't careful, they might enter the Spirit Sense of one of these.
And the worst part about it was that the beasts constantly moved.
A map someone bought one day might be completely outdated the next day.
So, one either needed enough power to defend oneself from any random Ancestral Beast they met or something that could tell them where powerful beasts were without entering their Spirit Senses.
This meant that one either needed a lot of power or a lot of money, and both things mostly came together.
In this world, going outside was not something for poor or weak people.
Going outside was a luxury only afforded to the powerful or rich.
Shang theoretically had enough money to travel quite some distance in the wilderness, but just one trip would consume over 10% of his wealth.
And Shang was definitely not poor.
But then, how was he traveling through the wilderness right now?
That was a perk of the job.
The Temple of Blood had a method that allowed it to scry areas from far away.
For the missions, the temple would use that method to tell their Agents where they had to go to avoid beasts.
Shang had gotten a specific path to follow at specific times, and if a beast suddenly moved unpredictably, he would be informed.
Because of that, Shang's journey was uneventful, and about eight hours later, he reached his current home.
The Temple of Blood.
