Hidden genius: Black belly snake

Charlotte stood still for a few minutes before eventually walking out.

"Do you need me to come with you right now?" She asked, her voice somber.

"Yes," Salvatore replied. 

He looked at his daughter's bloodshot eyes and her blank face and it was not that difficult for him to guess the thoughts swirling in her brain.

He could tell that she hated him for forcing her like this.

He as well hated doing this to his daughter, but he had no other choice.

The man sighed as he prepared to leave. "Here is a flying sword." He handed Charlotte a long sword with a bluish tint.

"No need. I already have." 

Charlotte did not accept his and took out one of her own, albeit one that she stole from her father in the first place when she left Eldoria with Tang Yue.

She then followed the old elf as they both alighted on the sword and flew up, headed back towards Eldoria.

Charlotte neither took her contracted beast with her nor informed her Master. She just silently left without saying a single word to anyone else.

But… this was just the beginning of the chaos.

In the depths of the forests surrounding the Dwarven Empire, a particular dwarf was straddling a goblin under his grasp.

"Hmmm? This is getting more and more interesting?" Jorden or rather William Bastion mumbled.

The goblin in his grasp looked like a lifeless corpse, all the color drained out of his face and his eyes almost popping out in agony.

William had just performed a brutal memory extraction technique on the goblin under him, one of the hired assassins to take care of Tang Yue silently.

The goblin was tasked with taking care of Tang Yue but as soon as he heard about Tang Yue's progress, he promptly decided that this mission was not for him.

He was just about to return back to Eldoria, in fact, he was on his way when unexpectedly William had trapped him.

The man was not someone who waited around. 

As soon as he was interested in something, his character compelled him to directly go for it and pick it apart piece by piece.

So when Tang Yue had caught his eye, more than once, William decided to act on it and find out everything about her.

He learned quite a bit of information regarding her and several rumors in a local inn and the rest from the goblin he had captured.

Initially, when he had come to know about the dwarven girl who held special importance to the two elven princes, he planned to cast her as a pawn in his game.

He had killed five dwarven ambassadors but it was still not enough to incite a battle between these two Empires.

But something told Jorden that murdering this single girl would be more effective than those killings.

If everything went as planned, then Tang Yue would have been the final pawn he needed to use in this strategy.

This was also the reason he had infiltrated into this small realm, one of the hidden worlds in the ocean. 

He wanted to break it down from the inside so that it would be easier when the inevitable war began.

William, being the guild master, held this responsibility. He wanted to amass all these riches and keep them within their guild.

But when he stepped inside these lands, William couldn't help but feel a tug at his soul.

His fate magic showed that he had an extreme affinity with these lands.

Fate magic was typically vague and did not give out any specific details, but one thing was clear to him.

His life and death were related to these lands.

So even if it was a small thing, he paid a lot of attention to it.

So he trapped one of the goblins and extracted all the information that he could from the guy's brain.

But this small thing turned out to be an unexpected crucial event for William, which even he never considered as a possibility.

The goblin had completely spilled the beans. 

He told him about everything including the labyrinth and how Tang Yue was being hunted by the elders for stealing a treasure from the labyrinth and now that she was in the Dwarven Empire camouflaged as one of the dwarves.

William's eyes widened, every single piece of news shocking and alarming him greatly.

Others might not know it, but he knew everything. 

What he had suspected was indeed correct and the snake beast spying in the Dwarven empire was the same woman he had met in the ancient labyrinth.

Once was nothing, twice might have been a coincidence but for the third time, this woman had now crossed paths with him.

How could he ignore this any longer?

As William finished the goblin under him, draining the last bits of life from his body, his mind spun with contemplation.

"Tang Yue… Tang Yue… what's so special about you?"

And as he pondered… a frightening possibility arose in his mind. 

What if his fate was not linked to this small realm but rather to this single woman?

Engrossed deeply in his thoughts, the man lazily touched the goblin's body and it disintegrated into dust and then into nothingness.

Soon afterward, a wisp of soul alighted from the same nothingness and it flew towards William like a magnet attracting a metal.

It entered his body as if it was mana and swirled around his meridians and formed a separate tangible core at the cultivation center of his body.

If anyone else had seen it they would have been terrified at this sight. 

Only mana and elemental essences were able to be refined into energy cores and farmed for energy when casting spells.

It was completely unheard of for souls to behave in the same fashion and act as another power source.

Souls were something eternal and ephemeral. How could they possibly behave in this fashion?

Just what sort of energy and power could they unleash if they served as a cultivation core?

Just the mere thought of it had the ability to frighten the Nine Countries to the core.

But here William was… achieving such an impossible feat without even batting an eyelid.