Grikori was able to run almost twenty miles before the Purple Mist Sect members caught him. His strange shadow powers made it very tricky to pin him down, but it only took a small amount of their poison to slow him down and make him easy prey. Sage caught up with them and sent all three to the Inner World together. Thankfully, they had been considerate enough to bring him out into the middle of nowhere before attacking so Grikori was quite far from a settlement he could hide in. This level of the capital was not a very popular one, and from what Sage saw while traveling it was that the majority of the population was those born here and without the means to leave. Only a small number of the people came here on purpose and they were similar to Count Voctem in that they were dark and creepy folks who felt most at home in a creepy swamp.

Sage sent out a wave of Spiritual Sense to test for the nearest settlement. Then he ran over there without wasting any more time, using Cosmic Traction to make up for the places he couldn’t find a tree or other solid object to use as a step. This technique was one of the many reasons he never felt threatened by Count Voctem’s trap. Even if things got out of hand, he never felt that little ring of trees was enough to cage him in. He could just leap into the sky to escape. Thinking of it now, he was somewhat ashamed of his behavior, itching for a fight so bad he’d held back just to make the fight more enjoyable. Since when had he become one of those battle maniacs?

Stopping at the settlement only long enough to get his bearings, Sage then brought out a motorized watercraft and drove off towards Voctem’s manor. In the time he was running to the settlement he had a swamp vehicle researched and manufactured on the Inner World. At Voctem’s house he stopped to take a break, waiting outside for a night before heading inside like he owned the place. He knew exactly where to press to deactivate hidden mechanisms and disable protective formations. After retrieving all the valuable objects in the home as well as a few caches of hidden valuables, Sage left and went to one of the largest settlements on the level.

This settlement was the closest to the Level Lord’s home and there was an office responsible for this level that Sage went to. After a short wait he met with a representative and after handing over a contract he collected a Storage Ring full of Spirit Stones. This contract was the deed to Count Voctem’s land. He’d had to wait outside Voctem’s home for those on the Inner World to properly ‘re-educate’ the man and gather all of his secrets. Soon enough Sage knew where Voctem hid all his treasures and also how to deactivate all the hidden dangers in his home. With only the most basic security measures in place he handed over the deed as well as instructions for the formations and other traps hidden inside.

Even after liquidating the property and collecting all his treasures, Count Voctem had only barely more than what he owed to Guan Zhenyan. It was no wonder the man chose to fight back. Sage’s reward for his work was not something he wanted. Guan Zhenyan ‘gave’ him Count Voctem, the burly woman, and Grikori. Sage wasn’t sure if it was because Zhenyan knew he was not a fan of selling people into slavery, or if it was because the slave business was too troublesome to get into, but the ‘reward’ was not really a prize. Voctem was technically a Nascent Soul, but Sage would not trust him. Even if they’d been able to extract information from him, there was no telling what he might do if the opportunity to escape or get revenge presented itself. He was at best a Nascent Soul laborer to use on the Inner World.

On the plus side, Sage also got a copy of all the techniques they found in Voctem’s possession. Knowledge could be easily copied, so Sage added these new Yin Wood techniques to the Lang Clan’s technique library. They were actually quite compatible with the methods he’d taken from Hei Bai, but the material requirements were much more horrible. Instead of just needing the bones of a Demonic Beast, these ghost and zombie techniques required dead humans. Making zombies only needed corpses, but the technique to create those ghosts was vicious. A person had to be tortured and filled with resentment before they died and only then could their soul be harvested to implant into a special ghostwood tree.

There was at least one positive thing, each of the ghosts that the tree released was not the actual trapped and tortured soul. They were more like clones or incarnations of those trapped ghosts. It was sad because those ghosts were not destroyed and allowed to rest, but it also meant that Voctem had not tortured hundreds of people and only a few dozen. Though, it was also possible that he hadn’t personally ‘refined’ the ghosts and instead just purchased or otherwise acquired them. Either way, the man had trapped them inside his ghostwood tree. The control and nurturing of the ghostwood tree was the foundation of Voctem’s power. It was not just grown on the spot like the Sacred Banyan. Instead it was more like a plant version of a Magical Tool. When Voctem slashed the ground he opened a passage to a small dimension where the ghostwood existed. That tree that Sage had uprooted was only a branch off of the main tree. This was also the reason that Sage didn’t bother to take the tree at Voctem’s former manor. It was only a slightly larger branch with a door to access the dimension where the tree existed.

Once he mastered the technique he could go there himself and have the main body retract the tree with the door on it, or he could leave it there to have a quick escape route. In fact, that was the reason that Sage intended to learn Voctem’s techniques. He found the creation of tortured ghosts to be abhorrent, but their creation and use was not intrinsic to the ghostwood. These two techniques could be used together, but they weren’t exclusive. Sage was curious to see if he could use Soul Fragments or other spirit type entities with the ghostwood. Yet, that was only secondary as the main thing he felt was useful was the secondary dimension. Unlike most Storage Treasures, which merely seemed to compact space which was then carried around, the ghostwood was in a sort of parallel place like the Realm Heart. These other dimensions didn’t have to be accessed from only one location. If multiple doors were established it was possible to use them as a substitute for a Transportation Formation.

The problem was that these sort of secondary dimensions also had restrictions on them, so he had no idea how far apart each door could be formed or how many doors these things could support at once. He would have to perform some tests in order to discover the limits. He couldn’t mess around with the Realm Heart because it was too powerful and also unstable, but now that he could access this ghostwood he had the chance to do some tests. Wouldn’t it be nice if he could link up the Tianxia Capital with the Lang Clan? Even if it turned out that others couldn’t use the door it would still be useful if he could return quickly in case of an emergency.

Sage used his boat to travel towards the Quick Ramps and resumed his climb of the tower while he studied Voctem’s techniques on the Inner World.