As soon as the characters were scattered, a change occurred instantly.
With Wen Wen as the center, the fog quickly dispersed, leaving only a thin layer, which stopped extending when it reached the neighborhood.
The oddly shaped monsters all stayed where they were, bending their limbs to lower their bodies, their heads touching the ground, as a sign of submission to Wen Wen!
The word Wen Wen uttered did not carry any superpower, yet the fog obediently complied.
"This... ha! Interesting, very interesting." Wen Wen suddenly laughed, his laughter growing louder, and then he just sat down on the ground.
"Perhaps the original Bai Du also had some trace of Sanctuary’s qi, which caused the surrounding fog to gather abnormally. Like me, he launched an attack actively, which is why he thought the fog had hostility towards the Sanctuary’s qi."
"But he didn’t realize that it was showing affinity towards the Sanctuary, and his setup to counter me actually ended up being a huge gift to me!"
"However, even if he had realized that back then, it wouldn’t have mattered. More than three hundred years ago, his authority had already been revoked by the Sanctuary, and he couldn’t command these monsters like I can."
After laughing for a while, Wen Wen got in the mood and said to those monsters, "Line up."
The monsters immediately lined up neatly in order of size as per Wen Wen’s wishes.
"Eyes front, face left, march..."
Wen Wen made several demanding requests, and those monsters could satisfy all of them. If only the monsters detained in the Sanctuary were as obedient as these, Wen Wen wouldn’t need to delve deeply into the Beast Tamer’s Manual.
Even though they were very obedient, Wen Wen still grew tired of them after a while.
This was because these monsters had no intelligence; they were like puppets, blindly obeying Wen Wen’s commands.
"Disperse, all of you, and the fog and monsters in this city as well..."
However, to Wen Wen’s surprise, upon hearing his command, the monsters just retreated back into the fog and did not dissipate into nothingness as he had expected.
"Disintegrate, disperse, die on the spot, ascend into spirals!"
Wen Wen tried several different phrases, but none achieved the desired effect. With a wave of his hand toward the outside fog, all of it came back.
After trying for a while, Wen Wen discovered that he could only control the fog and the monsters within a certain range around him.
He could neither completely disperse the fog in an area nor make those monsters turn on each other.
This meant he only had a specific authority within the fog, not the freedom to do as he pleased within it, much like how he could control characters in a game through a keyboard but couldn’t use game characters to destroy the game itself.
This meant that when the fog became dense enough, it would still bring a massive disaster to Nim City, which was not what Wen Wen wanted to see.
"So now, the only way to stop this fog is to lock the Mist Box and Stein in the Sanctuary. Since the Mist Box obeys the Sanctuary’s commands, entering the Sanctuary should result in some new changes."
"Tell me where the physical body of the Mist Box is."
The pure white fog simply shaped itself into the outline of Nim City in front of Wen Wen, and then a box-shaped pattern moved along the map, seemingly heading in Wen Wen’s direction.
Wen Wen’s mouth curved up in a smirk as he sat down on the ground, saying, "It seems I don’t need to go looking."
As soon as Stein opened the hotel door, he frowned; the dense white fog made it hard for him to see clearly.
After obtaining the Mist Box, he had immediately taken refuge in an underground black-market hotel, all the while fretting about the box without noticing the changes outside.
He wasn’t afraid of the fog, but with its density now, it would be difficult for him to find Wen Wen again.
That’s right, Stein had made up his mind.
He was going to find Wen Wen and walk right into the trap!
It was his only possible way out.
Although he could rely on secret magic to deceive the Tings Hounds, it was, after all, just a deception, and it was nearly reaching its limit.
Initially, the hounds would attack only every few days, but now they were attacking every two to three hours.
According to the records of the Makur Family, when the time interval shortened to within an hour, the hounds would no longer be deceived, and no matter how many people Stein killed, his death was certain.
Through the experiments of the ancestors of the Makur Family, the maximum life extension using deception was just about two months, but the whole process required the deaths of dozens of people.
Therefore, their family left a teachings not to use this method to evade the hounds, and they did not pass down the method of deceiving the hounds.
But just because they didn’t pass down this secret method did not mean that other surviving families hadn’t, and Stein eventually learned this method and even made some improvements to it.
However, even if Stein wanted to find Wen Wen, it wouldn’t be easy; his only method was to find Wen Wen’s location before the fog completely engulfed everything.
But given Stein’s current condition, if he time-traveled for more than five minutes, he would inevitably encounter the hounds again. He was already unable to deal with one; another would undoubtedly mean his death.
As Stein stood hesitating at the door, a hundred meters away on a rooftop, a woman dressed in white with golden hair and wearing a floral wreath aimed a longbow at Stein.
The woman’s features were very delicate, but her ears and eyes were slightly different from those of ordinary humans.
She was one of the ten Upper Sequence Superpower Users from the Golden Eagle District who attended the exchange meeting, named Martina. Her mother was human, while her father, called the God of the Forest, was a True Order Monster friendly to humans.
Inheriting her father’s abilities allowed her to lock onto prey using only her intuition; the fog had no effect on her. It was precisely because of this ability that she was the first to locate Stein amidst the dense fog.
She drew her bow, tensed, released her fingers, and the arrow, glowing emerald in color, streaked towards Stein like a green meteor.
Apart from his time-traveling ability, Stein had no other superpowers, so he was completely unguarded against this arrow.
If nothing unexpected happened, Stein was going to die from this arrow, but a monster, resembling a kangaroo, appeared out of nowhere, leapt high, and intercepted the arrow for Stein!
"Where did that monster come from?"
Martina’s brow furrowed slightly. Her arrow wasn’t meant to be blocked by just anyone; the kangaroo-like monster had been dismantled by the arrow, but Stein had ultimately escaped this fate.
Martina did not take immediate action because she keenly sensed that there were more monsters like the kangaroo around Stein. If each one would block arrows with its body, she wouldn’t be able to kill Stein in a short period of time.
If she caught Stein’s attention, it might lead to a terrifying outcome.
For Stein, a Time Traveler pursued by hounds, not being able to kill him quickly meant he might simple kill her as easily as slaughtering a chicken!
Pity, she was actually overthinking it; the Hounds’ abilities were perverted, but Stein himself wasn’t so powerful that he could locate a superpower user from such a distance.
In fact, Stein didn’t even know that he had just walked through death’s door.
At that moment, he was pondering which method to use to find Wen Wen.
As Stein was thinking, the fog in front of him cleared, and a monster, resembling a horse, came forward and crouched on the ground.
The posture clearly signalled to Stein to mount it!