soul stone

Kuroro was lying on the white sheet, the book slipped from his hand and hit his face with a slap.He opened his eyes suddenly, took the book aside and threw it aside, and sat up.The faint moonlight condensed on the floor.Actually fell asleep... Is it because the amount of information ingested is too much and the brain is overwhelmed?

Sitting motionless by the bed for a while, he opened the book he read before going to bed——

"The day when the pursuit is obtained is the time when it ends, and the process of seeking is also the process of losing."

Before I woke up, why did I suddenly think of this sentence?

Came to the window, lifted the nylon bag on the seat, and shook his head down twice.Fragments of the whale's skull crackled and scattered on the ground, and the sharp edges glowed with a white light.He knelt down and counted, no more, no less, a total of thirty pieces.

It took Parker a full week to read the memories of this group of behemoths.

"Don't get your hopes up too much, Commander."

When she shot the message into his forehead with a tired face, he had already noticed it.Although it is so rare that there are only thirty of them left over a hundred, from this third of the memory, there is still no trace of Xue Ye.

Pushing open the door, a tall, hook-nosed woman walked towards her.

"Haven't you slept so late, Captain?"

Although it was a question sentence, the woman named Pike had no doubts in her eyes, only the familiar indifference and natural concern.

"It's the same for you, Pike." Kuroro smiled slightly, "It's been hard work for you, go to bed early."

"I'm fine," Pike quickly shook his head, then changed the subject, "Any clues?"

The black-haired boy didn't answer directly. He carried a nylon bag and walked towards the storage room on the basement level of the temporary base.Pak Norda tacitly followed behind him about three meters away.

"Pike, what do you think is the reason why the frozen island sank?"

"You mean...the tsunami and the sinking of the land caused by the whale?"

"Those are true facts, but that is not the real cause, but the consequence of the real cause."

"Hey?"

The stairs of the abandoned building are dark and sloping, and high heels rattle in the corridor.When we came to the first floor, we passed a red doorway, and the woman's wailing was no longer heard from inside.

Is it finally over... that woman who drifted at sea with the group leader for seven days and seven nights.

At the beginning, when Amy's memory was read and he was about to kill her, Pike suddenly softened his heart.She felt pity for this ordinary woman's experience from the bottom of her heart. As a result, Amy stumbled out and was bumped into by Feitan and Finx who just arrived.Her sympathy only aggravated her misfortune.

However, the head of the group doesn't seem to care at all about the fellow sufferers who have helped him through the same boat.Even Feitan sent her to practice new torture methods just for fun, he just said "whatever you want".

As long as the required information is available, the other party loses the value of living.For such a person, the group leader actually created a series of "accidents", just to eliminate her hostility and successfully extract the memory.But, what exactly is the leader looking for, and what made him go to all the troubles at all costs?

The basement storage room had a damp, musty smell.Kuroro threw the bag full of bone fragments in the corner.All kinds of treasures are piled up in the room, lifeless, it seems that it will never return to the ground.The captain is always keen to search for new things.After the memory is obtained, these bones are useless.Even if they come from rare and endangered species that many people dream of, they will inevitably be left here, unattended, slowly collecting dust, and eventually decaying with the building.Hopefully they outlast the buildings.

"Pike, when do you think people get angry?"

The leader's questions always caught her off guard.Pike opened his eyes wide, thought for a while, and replied: "Is it when important things are trampled on?"

The dark-haired boy turned around.

"Same with animals."

He walked around Pike and up the stairs.

"I was told that the frozen island sank because of the anger of the lava whales. After seeing their memories, I probably understood what was going on."

Hearing this, Pike extracted the memories of the thirty whales in his mind and checked them one by one.Frozen continents, polar day and eternal night, southward migration and return, huge rocks hidden under the sea as entrances, hot and bubbling boiling water in volcanic craters, and what seems to be driven by a giant motor underneath, as if reaching the center of the earth——

"swirl?"

Kurolo nodded.

"If I'm not mistaken, the small white fish wrapped in the center of the vortex is the 'White Fire', one of the seven beauties."

Recently, Maggie has felt that something is wrong with Parker.

"What's going on, Pike, you've been distracted for a while."

The hooked-nosed woman came back to her senses and smiled a little embarrassedly.

"It's nothing, it's just a little..." She picked out the right word, "I care."

The purple-haired girl blinked her golden pupils. She was also a minority woman in the brigade. She immediately understood what Parker was worried about.

"Captain?"

"Well, recently the head of the group is always locked in a daze in the room alone, and doesn't eat much food."

"A little indeed. I heard from the knight that the group leader asked him to post a notice on the Internet to collect some whale skulls around the world." Maggie frowned suspiciously, "Since when did the group leader become interested in animal remains?"

Pike shook his head.

"I've never seen the head of the group be so obsessed with something. No, it can be called 'obsessed'. It's just..." She hesitated, "It's like a different person."

"It's just an ordinary bone, and it's not an ancient book..." Intuition flashed across the night sky like lightning, "Could it be that the leader...was manipulated?"

Suddenly, a familiar voice came from behind the two of them: "I am not manipulated by...."

Pike and Maggie turned at the same time.

"Captain..."

"Pike, a new batch of skulls has arrived, and I want to trouble you again."

"...Understood, I'll go now."

Watching the back of Pike leaving with the leader, Maggie decided to find the knight.

"Manipulation? Hahahahaha..."

When she told her intuition to the brunette boy of the same age as her, the other party held his belly and laughed for a long time. It took a lot of effort for Maggie to resist the urge to sew his mouth shut with thread.

"I don't think so. Although there is that possibility, the leader's appearance is obviously not in a state of being manipulated."

"……How to say?"

"I am an operating system, and the mental state of the person being manipulated by ... can be seen at a glance." The knight raised his index finger, his jade-like green pupils shone brightly, "absolute obedience to orders is the result of being manipulated by ... The number one characteristic of manipulation."

"so?"

"Assuming that the head of the group received the order to 'collect whale skulls', what is the intention of the person who issued the order? If you want it, you can go up and put a reward on your own, and the hunters will flock to it. People with that kind of power, money should not be a problem .”

The girl glanced in the direction of the basement: "That's true. However, I always feel something is wrong."

"Your intuition is right." The boy smiled, bent his index finger and scratched the tip of his nose, "In my opinion, the leader is in love."

"Hey?"

Maggie turned her head speechlessly, and glanced at a pair of busybodies behind her who spoke the particle words on her behalf.

"Finks, Feitan...how long have you been eavesdropping?"

"Not long." The masked little man narrowed his eyes.

"Hey, knight, you said that the leader is in love, what's going on?" the tall man with protruding browbones asked solemnly.

"You..." Maggie couldn't bear it anymore and said, "It's too gossip."

"What are you talking about? The happiness of the head of the brigade is related to every member of the brigade." Finks plausibly said.

"That's right." Fei Tan nodded in agreement.

"Ahem..." The chivalrous man who had been watching the show interjected, "Unfortunately, the leader ordered me not to tell the story. Pike probably received the same order."

"What, it's really boring." Finks was very disappointed.

"Tsk." Fei Tan spat.

"However, he didn't say that it can't be used for writing." The boy smiled and handed over a piece of information, "These are the things the team leader asked me to investigate. The material cost is 500 million ring nuns per person, thank you for your patronage."

The three of them automatically ignored the last sentence, focusing all their attention on dozens of pages of printing paper.

"Oyagi Mansion?"

The knight nodded.

"Last summer, the head of the group went to this place, probably for the same purpose."

"How do you know the leader's whereabouts? Did you install a tracker on him?"

After Finks finished speaking, everyone fell silent.

"What a cold joke." Maggie said coldly.

"Finks, you look down on the leader too much." Feitan was a little sullen.

"Just kidding, why are you so serious." Finks shrugged.

"Okay, okay, there is no tracker. Actually..." Xia Ke smoothed things out, "When I searched online, I happened to find an eyewitness."

At the same time, a major event happened in a remote village on the other side of the world.The villagers who were about to go out to sea found a stranded whale on the shore, which had been dead for a long time.He happily called his companions, and together they slaughtered the whale.When cleaning out the stomach pouch, they made an amazing discovery——

A white skeleton.

Judging from the size, it should be a woman or a child.Unbelievably, the deceased still held an earring tightly in his hand.After staying in the whale's body for so long, even the owner's body has been turned into marl, but this earring was shining brightly when it was discovered, exuding a translucent pure purple.

Leaving the earrings to whoever first spotted the whale, the villagers tossed the scraped skeleton into the sea along with the skeleton.In order to prevent others from rushing ashore again and scaring others, heavy stones were tied to the bones.

"Dad, you're back!"

The clear and crisp child's voice rushed forward with the energetic little figure, and the father patted his son's head lovingly, putting one hand in his pocket.

"Where did you go, did you come back so late?" The son blinked his big watery eyes curiously, and asked with a pout.Anyone who sees him like that will feel pity, let alone a father.

"Dad caught a fish as big as a mountain today, and uncle and the others spent a whole day to cut the fish off."

"A fish as big as a mountain?" The son turned his head and thought for a while, "Dad, you're not talking about whales, are you?"

"That's right, it's a whale."

"Dad, a whale is not a fish, but a mammal." The son corrected him earnestly.

"Haha, as expected of my son, he knows so much..." The father rubbed the back of his head embarrassingly, and quickly changed the subject, "By the way, Kurapika, where's your mother?"