The “safe house” of Eric Partizan and his team, was actually just a humble warehouse used by several of the academy’s grocery stores and even traveling merchants to store some inexpensive and non-toxic goods. The gates were made of wood with metal edges and slightly heavy for a civilian, and they had two locks that were just enchanted to the lowest degree.

For Eric Partizan, picking this lock using his Xen magic was but a piece of cake. Right now there were a lot of buckets in this warehouse, which made them feel somewhat cramped in. None of his team had checked the status of this “safe house” recently for it was not a very defensible place and had relatively high foot traffic. And also there could be situations like it was today, where the buckets containing materials which they presumed were stored here for the firework festival and competition were taking up most of the room.

When they shut the gates, Ailyn Shrier almost passed out on the floor, sweating and short of breath. Eric Partizan immediately cast a healing spell on her, and the spell seemed to have somehow exacerbated the effects of the poison.

“This seemed to be a poison in the circulation system, you cannot use normal healing spells.” Igor Vankov did a check on Ailyn Shrier’s forehead, neck pulses and wrist pulses and said: “We need something to slow the spread of the toxin.”

“Use the Ice Hornet Honey Drops, then cut both of my wrists.” Ailyn Shrier said to Eric Partizan in a weak voice: “It will cleanse my blood flow and let me bleed it out.”

Ice Hornet Honey Drops was made off exactly what its name suggested, concentrated and with a few other ingredients added to prevent the concentrated ice magical energy in the honey from acting too quickly and damaging people’s blood vessels and internal organs.

Eric Partizan nodded, then he waved his hand at the floor and released a purple energy wave, and a piece of the floorboard lit up in purple light, from a small symbol marked on it. Then he lifted the floorboard up, took out a metal box from under it and took out a small transparent bottle with some thick light blue liquid inside.

Eric Partizan rushed to Ailyn Shrier’s side, opened the bottle and dripped three drops of the thick light blue liquid into her mouth and both of her nostrils.

“Igor, Check what’s inside.” Eric Partizan threw the paper bag to Igor Vankov: “Make sure our thing’s are there. And contact Mason while you’re at it.”

Ailyn Shrier’s body shivered as the droplets of Ice Hornet Honey Drops took effect, and the surface temperature of her body lowered significantly as if she was about to be frozen. Eric Partizan created an energy knife using his magical power, then slit the wrist of Ailyn Shrier. Her blood started slowly pouring out, and in her blood he could see some tiny and shining particles inside, these were the crystals formed by the honey drops when cleansing the toxins.

On the other hand, Igor Vankov took out three heavily wrapped plastic bags which were themselves wrapped in pieces of big leaves from inside the paper bag. At this point, Igor Vankov would not dare to open the plastic wraps again, he just used his magic and let his power go through the wraps to test and see what it was.

“One bag of dried ground Kekugora mushroom. One bag of Kandera Wyvern bones, feels particularly high density, might be tail bones. One bag of ground Swamp Serpent teeth.” Igor Vankov then said to Eric Partizan.

“What the fuck - only one of them is ours.” Eric Partizan cast a spell on Ailyn Shrier’s wrists when he realized her condition was getting better to prevent her from bleeding out: “And who the fuck in their right mind would bring Kandera Wyvern bones in?! What the hell were they thinking?”

Just this moment, the detection spell Eric Partizan left on their way here was triggered, and he could sense that the team of three that was pursuing them were closing in.

“Which is a reason why they would be willing to actually kill.” Igor Vankov said with a stern and concerned voice: “They must be planning something really really big.”

“They’re closing in on us.” Eric Partizan watched as Ailyn Shrier slowly regained consciousness from the effect of both the toxins from the blow dart and the Ice Hornet Honey Drops: “We cannot bring these things with us. Hide them - hide them in these buckets! And then we sneak outta here!”

“Why? Shouldn’t we hand them over to Mason?” Igor Vankov asked.

“They’re willing to kill for these. So if they catch any of us with things on us, we’d be dead. But if we don’t have it, we still have a chance to live.” Eric Partizan answered: “Fuck! Never thought they would be this dangerous - we’re clearly outgunned here.”

Igor Vankov thought for a brief moment then sighed: “Okay.”

He hid the three plastic bags in three buckets that were holding the special gunpowder for creating enchanted fireworks, and tried to put the lids back exactly like they were before.

“What happened?” Ailyn Shrier gasped and woke up: “Where am I?!”

“Shhh - we’re in the warehouse.” Eric Partizan immediately said: “We’ve gotta go. ”

“Bang!” the gates were busted open, the gush of wind and shockwave knocked many of the buckets over, and some were even damaged and started leaking the dark, coarse-grained and oily looking gunpower all over the floor. But the team of Katrina, Lia and Gregory were late, as Eric Partizan and his team had already left the warehouse through a tunnel only they knew existed.

Breaking out of the memory flashback, Professor Barnes now had a clear understanding of what had caused the circulation of the contaminated materials - the oily look of the gunpowder was because the grains were treated with a kind of oil that had special affinity to almost all kinds of magical energy, which would make the gunpowder easier to enchant and thus allowed even students with minimal grasp of magical enchantment to craft fireworks that would have beautiful and flashy explosions. But on the other hand, the oil was also highly soluble to many kinds of plastics.

Plus, the normal process of dispensing gunpower, as far as Professor Barnes knew, required the venders to mix the contents of many buckets and ground them down to finer grains so that they would be easier to use. A procedure which, in this very situation, made everything worse.