Perhaps charmed by the gentle smile on Lei Lin's face, the Wizard Apprentice gathered his courage and asked again: "Sir! Are you… not from around here? Might I ask your name? I… my name is Aelin!"
"Me? Of course I'm not from here!" Lei Lin smiled, then looked at the three apprentices.
"There's still a lot I want to ask you, but I suddenly realized it'd be faster and more convenient to just look for myself…"
Under his gaze, the three apprentices trembled all over, as though they'd been spotted by some terrifying beast.
"Run!" Aelin shouted, stepping in front of the two female apprentices while mumbling an incantation under his breath.
"Ridiculous! Far too slow!" Lei Lin shook his head, and three streams of black air shot out instantaneously, sinking into the foreheads of the three apprentices.
The three apprentices' vision blurred. Without even a single sound, they collapsed unconscious.
Lei Lin walked up to the male apprentice named Aelin and pressed his right hand directly on the apprentice's head. His eyes instantly turned pure black, even his pupils vanishing.
Massive amounts of images and sounds replayed before Lei Lin's eyes like video footage, while the Chip ran at full power, collecting and organizing every piece of information it deemed worth recording.
This was a spell similar to soul-searching, allowing Lei Lin to browse through the memories of low-level wizards.
However, this particular spell was quite niche — it only worked on beings below the strength of an official wizard, and it also required the target not to resist.
When Lei Lin had come across it in the Four Seasons Garden's library, he'd merely had the Chip record it on a whim. He hadn't expected it to prove useful now.
Although with his cunning and methods, infiltrating this small squad to extract information would have been simple enough, Lei Lin couldn't be bothered with all that trouble and didn't want to waste that much time.
Moreover, no matter how well he disguised himself, the South Coast and the underground world were bound to have many differences — things that couldn't be papered over with acting alone. Rather than arousing suspicion later, it was better to just take action now.
"Recording underground language data. Designated as Darkpolar Language. Stored in database…" The Chip's first priority was language information. As long as the organized memories were later transferred into Lei Lin's memory center and he practiced a few more times, he would quickly master this common underground language.
Next came a large volume of geographical and faction distribution data.
Although this Aelin, given his very low cultivation, had barely set foot outside the Eastern Darkpolar Region, the information still gave Lei Lin a much better understanding of this underground world.
Once all valuable intelligence had been recorded, a cold glint flashed in Lei Lin's eyes, and he began forcibly altering Aelin's memories, erasing every trace of his own existence today and leaving behind only a false memory of an indistinct-faced high-ranking wizard suddenly appearing to help them subdue the Six-Tusked Giant Dolphin.
Neither these apprentices nor the Knight had anything Lei Lin considered valuable, so he didn't want to create any unnecessary killing.
When there was no profit at stake, Lei Lin didn't mind showing a little kindness.
After all, he wasn't some homicidal maniac who killed purely for amusement.
However, this memory-alteration technique carried considerable risk as well. Lei Lin showed no regard for Aelin's original memories and simply forced his way through brute effort — avoiding any lasting side effects was nothing short of a stroke of luck.
Afterward, Lei Lin repeated the same process he'd performed on Aelin on the remaining four people.
Although the information he obtained from each was largely similar, combining it all together still filled in quite a few gaps.
"This six-tusked giant dolphin will serve as your compensation!" Lei Lin glanced at the several apprentices lying unconscious on the ground and smiled faintly. The black ropes binding the six-tusked giant dolphin suddenly constricted — boom! Blood sprayed in every direction!
After Lei Lin had been gone for a good while, Aelin finally came to, rubbing his head. "Ugh… my head hurts… where am I?"
Then, fragmented memories flooded back into his mind, and the earlier events replayed before his eyes. "We ran into a six-tusked giant dolphin, and that coward Blake actually ran off first — fortunately, a lord passing by saved us…"
Aelin looked at the massive corpse of the six-tusked giant dolphin in front of him and let out a cry of delight. "A creature material this huge — how many Magic Stones could it sell for?! I'm rich!!!"
……
Whoosh!