CHAPTER 367: SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS

The door had barely closed behind Damien’s back, before Lane was out on the balcony, kicking off the railing, then the air with his Sky Step, to get to his own apartment upstairs. His laptop was there, after all, which he needed to go through the past reports and his own notes, as he tried to figure out what was the reason behind the reactivation of that C-rank Gate.

He always kept it upstairs. Not because he didn’t trust Damien or anything like that... Well, perhaps he was still reluctant to trust the man in some aspects - primarily whether Damien would still be willing to stay with him if he knew the whole truth - but he knew that Damien wouldn’t snoop around his personal stuff without permission. Besides, the laptop was password protected, so even if someone else (that is, Clara) tried to go through it while visiting, they wouldn’t be able to do anything. Lane wasn’t so stupid as to allow anything about the secret organization to be easily accessible. It was just that...

Lane didn’t want to keep anything related to the secret organization around Damien. Somehow, it would make him feel even more guilty. Hiding it, but at the same time placing the truth almost within Damien’s reach, as if playing some sick game of cat and mouse. No, if he wanted to hide it, then he should at least do it properly...

Well, as properly as he could. He had already given Damien a few reasons to be suspicious, but it was hard to avoid it entirely...

It wasn’t the time to worry about Damien catching on to something, though. First, he had to figure out what was going on with the dungeon reactivation. After all, it could have a tremendous effect on his own future, the future of the secret organization, the Capital, and probably even more... Even the whole country, and maybe the whole world. Not immediately, of course, but depending on the reason, if things were to spiral out of control...

The consequences could be grave. How grave, Lane wasn’t able to tell - he wasn’t an expert, he depended on his strategists to create all the plans for the organization - but even he knew it could be dangerous. Their original plan had already predicted there would be a lot of casualties, and if the dungeon breaks and Manaforming exceeded their expectations, the death poll was bound to be catastrophic.

And Lane’s intention wasn’t to exterminate humanity, but rather speed up the progress, advance their civilization. Some casualties were unavoidable, but they should be kept to the minimum.

He plopped down on the pillow by the coffee table, swung his laptop open, and started typing, trying various keywords to sort through the database. After all, there were way too many reports, both his own and the ones he had received from his team, to get through them all. Even if he limited it just to the last year, when the Fertilizer was the most likely to have been planted if it was indeed the reason behind the Gate’s reactivation, it would take him DAYS to go through them all.

He stared with his own notes. Although he was quite certain of it, after his scouting mission with Clara, but he wanted to be absolutely sure that he wasn’t the one responsible. And it turned out that he was right - he went through his personal record of all the dungeons he had planted the Fertilizer in over the past three years, and that C-rank Gate wasn’t mentioned in them. It was certain, then - this reactivation wasn’t his fault.

...He didn’t know whether he should be happy about it or not.

Probably not.

Once that had been confirmed, he moved on to the reports from his team. There were quite a few dungeons in which some of their members planted Fertilizer... But they were mostly experiments conducted in the inactive Gates located in Forbidden Zones, since they weren’t under the Association’s surveillance, and were easy to access for the organization’s scientists. Other than that, there were a few other inactive Gates, but mainly outside of the Capital, and only high-ranking ones. Members other than Lane had to exercise far more caution on their missions, after all, so they didn’t waste their energy on the less significant Gates. The lowest-ranking Gate in the reports was a B-rank. There wasn’t even a single mention of anyone planting Fertilizer in a C-rank Gate by the Lapis Lake.

Lane bit his lip, staring at the screen blankly. So it wasn’t that he was negligent in reading the reports... It’s just that nothing like that had ever been reported to him. Which could mean two things: either his organization wasn’t at fault... or someone was deliberately hiding things from Lane. With the latter, the most likely culprit would be, obviously, Blanc.

Lane tapped his fingers on the laptop’s shell, before typing a few other keywords. Before he went on to investigate Blanc - which he wanted to do regardless of whether Blanc was related to the incident or not, but since it was a tricky operation, he had to think it through well and proceed with caution - he wanted to check a few other options. Primarily whether it was possible for anyone else, who wasn’t part of their organization, to plant Fertilizer in the Gate...

Or a Fertilizer’s substitute, to be precise. The Fertilizer that Lane had been using in inactive Gates was for the secret organization’s usage only, and it wasn’t for sale. However, they did develop a similar product, based on the Fertilizer’s early prototype. It was much weaker, had a different composition, and it wasn’t locked within two shells, but rather simply kept in regular containers, which were then stored in spatial bags to isolate it from the outside environment...

But it still had its uses. It was an actual fertilizer, that could be added to the soil to promote the growth of plants of dungeon origins that contained Mana, which gave them special properties... Naturally, it was only sold on the black market, and the Association was unaware of its existence, otherwise it would surely make it illegal, but there were a few Guilds that purchased it to use for farming purposes.

...Including the Allen Guild, which had left Lane very much disgruntled. But by the time he had found out about it, the deal with the Allen Guild had already been made, and it was too late to back down. If he had forced the organization to cut off the Allen Guild’s supply, then there was a risk that the Allens would report the existence of the substance to the Association, making their fertilizer business much more difficult... And it was too profitable to pass on that.

Either way, how Lane felt about it right now didn’t matter. He checked the receipts from selling the Mana plant fertilizer to the Allen Guild...

And as expected, they had been steadily increasing, reaching high numbers in the past months. It didn’t necessarily mean anything...

But it could be a clue.

Was it possible that the Allen Guild decided to experiment with the Mana plant fertilizer to see what would happen in an inactive dungeon? All the Mana plants that had been growing there had been long uprooted, and all that remained were just the regular plants with no Mana, but perhaps they wanted to check if they might develop Mana plants by supplying regular dungeon species with Mana fertilizer. The Allens were never afraid to try uncertain investments, as long as the potential gain was worth the investment. They could most certainly afford to spend some money to run some tests...

As for the Gate. It was hidden within a metal shed, under several sturdy locks. They had been all still in place when Damien’s team arrived - Lane could clearly remember Damien struggling with the locks - so no one could have broken in there...

But the Obsidian Guild had the keys. It was their dungeon, after all, they had the right to enter it whenever they wanted. They didn’t even have to report when and why they had gone in there. As for the Allen Guild... They had snatched the rights only now that the dungeon had reactivated, but who’s to say that they hadn’t made the deal with the Obsidian Guild earlier?

It made sense that they would prefer to conduct the experiments in a Gate that belonged to someone else. In case it truly worked, they could still reap the rewards later, and they wouldn’t want any incidents to happen in the Gates that they owned.

And that Gate was perfect. It was located right by the Lapis Lake, inside the Restricted Zone, so it wasn’t properly surveilled. The Allen Guild frequented the area for the sake of the ’fishing’ trips, while the Association could hardly enter, since most of their members weren’t ranked high enough...

The circumstances were simply ideal for it. Of course, it was still only speculation...

But it was certainly plausible. If the Mana plant fertilizer could spark a similar reaction to the true Fertilizer, that is.

That was something Lane wouldn’t be able to figure out by himself, though.