Leader 3 felt like his brain is going numb, he couldn"t think clearly for a second and before he knew it, he started feeling dizzy and fell on the ground directly.
The subordinates of his immediately ran over trying to check up on him. But when they came near, all they could see is him being unconscious, with facial expressions full of pain and suffering. He is muttering something as if he is dreaming.
When they saw all these symptoms they felt puzzled and lost. They thought that he fainted because of the exhaustion or some hidden injury, but no matter how much they examined they couldn"t see anything.
After all, none of them are healers. But if they were, they would have noticed that the flesh of their leader is slowly being corroded from inside out.
One of them immediately carried the Leader on the back and started running towards the city with the rest of them following. They even discarded the Leader 1"s dead body and the spatial ring as if it is not their business.
As soon as they left, Sam and the team came and picked up the spatial ring. Night Ghost swallowed the soul while Tamas took the body.
Inside the spatial ring, Sam saw a small piece of metal which seemed to be a part of a blade"s edge.
He could feel that it is special and that also fits the description of the heirloom of the Black curtain, being a dagger.
This is one of the dagger pieces.
He stored those away and the team slowly followed the group of leader 3 towards the city.
Half way there, the group suddenly stopped.
They placed Leader 3 on the ground trying to see what happened to him.
Leader 3 is spasming uncontrollably. He is still in the slumber and his energy is completely out of order as he experienced worst of his nightmares through the curse of illusion and the curse of pain intensified the pain caused by the curse of flesh corrosion.
While he is experiencing all of this, suddenly the chest of the Leader cracked open and blood started seeping out. The subordinates hurriedly removed the robes to see what happened and all they can see are two slashes diagonally on the chest. They are extremely clean as if they were cut of sharp blades.
But that is what confused the subordinates the most, because as they checked Leader 3 before, they didn"t find anything wrong with the other party"s body.
Before they could think of what to do, five elemental energies attacked the Leader followed by a long and dense electric shock. The soul attack of Night Ghost already attacked him but the effects are not visible to the naked eyes.
The subordinates don"t know what to do, but they are sure that things are extremely troublesome and before they knew it, Leader 3 died.
The curse of slumber, illusions and finally Night Ghost"s attack made it impossible for Leader 3 to even resist and the rest of the attacks caused by the curse made it impossible for him to survive.
The subordinates were horrified by this development.
Before they could even come out of the shock, Sam"s team already arrived and a battle started.
Night Ghost sneaked an attack on one of the people while Vidyut shot an arrow at another one.
Both used the stored curses once again and two people died in the similar way the Leader 3 died.
Now the rest of the group are easy to deal with. After killing everyone, Sam found the second fragment of the heirloom and left the bodies like that. The city is not far away and people are bound it see it sooner or later.
Unlike before, Sam only let Night Ghost take the souls of the people and Tamas only got the bodies of the subordinates. The body of the leader was left there for people to see.
By the next day, the upper echelon of the city already came to know that Leader 3 or Black Curtain died. His subordinates are nowhere to be seen and Leader 1 also disappeared.
The news shook the remaining four Black curtain leaders to the core.
They don"t know how the situation turned out this way. Some of them even went to the funeral conducted by the remaining son of Leader 3 just to make sure. They wanted to see the body and confirm it.
And after confirming it, their shock only doubled. The body is in such a tragic state. The flesh is corroding slowly and the muscles are all charred from outside, the two cleaves on the front of the chest are also a shock.
They immediately went back to their headquarters to make plans.
Now that leader 3 died and the situation of Leader 1 is unknown, they knew that chaos would reign supreme once again within the Black Curtain.
From the injuries on Leader 3"s body, they could confirm that a third party is involved in the battle. They knew Leader 1"s abilities, so they are sure that Leader 3 was not killed by leader 1 himself.
They speculated that leader 1 must have paid a large price to get someone to kill Leader 3.
But where did he go? No one knows.
The most nervous of all is actually leader 2. He joined hands with leader 3 after Leader 1 made a deal with leader 4 to suppress him. Now that leader 3 is gone, he would be forced to deal with leader 4 all by himself and he doesn"t have any confidence in doing so. Particularly with his new expansion of the territory, things wouldn"t be easy for him to start a war.
And leader 3"s son is also in a pickle. The trusted subordinates of his father advised him to collect as many resources as possible and leave the place immediately.
They knew that the rest of the leaders will now look at Leader 3"s territory like a big fat piece of meat ready to be eaten. Every leader would want a share.
That is a lot of territory. But at the same time, they are worried about the third party involved. The third-party which they speculated as someone the leader 1 hired.
But they couldn"t bring themselves to just let this go and leave the territory to rot like that.
So, all the leaders had some tacit understanding. They would just take over leader 3"s territory and leave Leader 1"s territory up for grabs for himself if he ever shows up.
As for Leader 2 who was involved in the war, Leader 4 is not going to let it go, but Leader 3 who is also adjacent to leader 2"s territory is also planning to take a bit over. They all knew that at least one more leader is going to die.
But only Sam knew that more than one is going to die.
After all, starting the conflict is the harder part, since the conflict already started escalating is a piece of cake. This might take two more months to reach the final stages, but that doesn"t mean it wouldn"t be worth it.
From the looks of it, Black Curtain is the most troublesome of all, so it would be easy for them after this was done.
And Sam didn"t stop there. Someone anonymously tipped Phoenix tail sect about the Black Curtain who made a move on their future hope and their current situation.
So, now they are going to join in the fun.
Sam created chaos as time pa.s.sed. Every day they arrived at one of the Black curtain"s locations and just did things to escalate the situation more and more as the war intensified.
n.o.body wanted to back down and even the Phoenix Tail sect is too involved and embroiled in the war.
And Sam took the chance to contact the rival of the Phoenix Tail sect and made a deal with them. All that he has to say is that they have some bad blood and want revenge. They would create chaos while they take over the Phoenix Tail sect"s territory.
Everything went well.
And two and a half months later. The final battles took place between leaders and Sam collected one fragment after another. In every battle, one leader disappeared while the other one died.
And finally, only leader 4 remained and he managed to make peace with the Phoenix tail sect from his side.
He even offered to help them with the war against their rivals.
But after he promised, Leader 4 mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen again.
Only at that moment did Sam finally selected the Black Curtain in the list.
He noticed that all the leaders have a statue of Hel in their lairs, so Sam performed the ritual from the Leader 4"s lair after they dealt with him to talk to Hel.
"How are you doing, Hel?"
"This is awfully fast."
Hel said calmly.
"Not really, It has been a few months. How clever of you to include an organization like Black Curtain in this game. That is as big as six organizations combined."
"But Leader is still a Peak stage Transcendent cultivator."
"Anyway, thanks for the Myriad Curse guide. It is really good. It really helped me in dealing with your organization."
Hel was dumbfounded.
"Okay, that is all I wanted to say. So, goodbye."
With that, Sam destroyed the statue and left.