Outworld Liberators-Chapter 183: Dealing Guilty Blood in Low-Priced Trades

A sound went through the Arena like a coin dropped into a deep well. Not one voice, but thousands of small breaths caught at once.

Greed flashed in the crowd’s eyes. Tiberius and Eldric saw it in widening pupils, in hands tightening on sleeves, in the way men leaned forward as if that alone might turn a false claim into a substantial compensation.

Then the flash cooled. Common sense took the heat out of it. People remembered there was no such thing as free money without a hook.

They remembered names like Contractcrown, and they remembered what happened to those who treated powerful men like open purses.

Over eleven large underground factions. Seventy-two medium ones.

Uprooted in one day by the Cooperation of Radeon Terraces and Contractcrown of Plunder Alp.

Numbers too big to feel real until the chains outside answered them.

The truly victimized did not look greedy. They looked hollow.

Then they looked like they were allowed to breathe again.

A woman in the lower seats pressed both hands to her mouth and sobbed without sound. A man beside her wiped his eyes.

Some did not even stay to hear the rest. They ran outside as madmen.

They shoved past knees and stepped on toes and took the aisles like they were escape routes.

Not toward freedom. Toward vengeance. Toward answers they had been afraid to ask too loudly.

Tiberius felt the shift in the air. The Arena had been listening. Now it hunted.

Outside, the iron music grew louder, a dragging storm of chain and weight.

The bound were being marched close enough that the crowd could smell them.

When the first line of prisoners came into view, the raging crowd surged as one body.

Most suspicions proved true.

Men who had once walked the streets untouchable stood in bindings now, their fine robes stained and their faces suddenly ordinary.

Underground bosses who had made merchants bow were staring at the ground, blinking too often, trying to find a way to look harmless.

There was no harmless left.

A mother lunged at a man with a broken nose and a silver ring.

"My daughter," she screamed. "Where have you brought my daughter to!"

A fist struck the man’s cheek. He did not react. It was the same fate those who dared steal at Radeon Terraces faced.

The damage did not show on the outside. It lived in the soul.

A different voice rose, grief and months of swallowing rage.

"Die. Die. I’ll haul you down into the pit of hell with me." His lips peeled back, spittle flying.

"Venerables, let me have him. I want to eat his flesh and drink his blood."

Another guard tried to pull the maniac back. The attendants were being overwhelmed, and the crowd pushed, not to hurt, but to make white-robed attendants see these were the ones who had taken what mattered from their lives.

"You killed my brother," a young man shouted, voice breaking on the last word. "I’ll skin you alive."

Tiberius watched the attendants. They could have locked shoulders and held the crowd back.

They did not. They let themselves be pushed. They stumbled at the right moments.

They gave ground like reeds in a current, just enough to make the enraged feel powerful.

It fed the fire. People hit harder when they believed they could.

Tiberius saw Eldric lift a hand, not to stop it, but to shape it. His face stayed calm, almost gentle.

Then Eldric’s voice boomed across the Arena, into the crush beyond.

"Let the people vent their anger."

The words landed like permission, like law. The mob roared, and the sound held no joy.

It was release, years of helplessness given teeth for one day.

Then an almost imperceptible pressure drove the rage hotter and cleaner, like hot breath forced through smoke and into bellows.

Inner Heart Amplifications.

The Tiyanak’s art rode the crowd without anyone knowing, threading through pulses and lungs, turning fear into motion and motion into certainty.

It did not make them happy. It made them sure. Sure that striking was right. Sure that striking was owed.

That was the point.

On the edge of the lines, Jekyll watched with a smile that did not reach his eyes.

His skin fit too well today, his posture too relaxed for a man looking at this much violence.

He stood with other Hemal Tithe cultists.

Tiberius saw Jekyll at the edge of his eyes. Saw their satisfaction without hearing the words.

A nod here. A glance there. The kind of approval that never said its price out loud.

Three birds with one stone, their faces said.

Glory for the cult, painted in public blood and public mercy.

Mercenary ventures re-established under a cleaner banner.

Tiberius’s name rebranded, negligence washed with compensation and staged sincerity.

Tiberius kept his expression steady while the mob screamed itself raw.

As the crowd vented its anger, Eldric did not stand above it like a judge. He walked through it.

He moved between kicking feet and swinging fists with the calm of a man after a service.

He gave children gentle pats on the head, offering small blessings in a voice that carried warmth.

To anyone watching from afar, he looked like a kindly elder.

Not a necromantic cultivator who called the dead and made them eternal servants.

Jekyll saw him angling closer and stilled. The other cultists did the same.

Their jaws tightened. Their faces said they were bracing for a scold, or a demand, or some pointed word to remind them who owned the win.

It was the kind of thinking that came built-in. No one wanted the cultists. Everyone was aware of the violence they enacted.

Eldric stopped at a polite distance and smiled as if they were guests at his humble abode.

"Fellow Daoists, I thank you for granting this old man the honor of witnessing such competition."

He rummaged through his sleeve and drew out a paper. Not a scroll with a shining seal.

A simple draft sketched in charcoal, folded once, then twice, like something made quickly between breaths.

"I have no need of blood," Eldric said, and let the words hang for a measured beat. "Here is the draft. Kindly have a look."

Jekyll took it and unfolded the list. Demands in exchange for the blood, plain and practical.

Herbs. Specialized ores. Materials that were not common, but not so rare they would start a war to find them.

In return, Eldric would handle the extraction himself and pack the blood into arrayed carts that kept it clean.

There was even an option to have men bled into old age, a constant supply outsourced through Radeon Terraces.

Jekyll passed the paper along. Elders and core disciples lifted their brows as they read, surprised in spite of themselves.

It was fair. A bit discounted, even. That meant something. Not mercy. Not charity.

It meant friendship, or the closest thing men like them ever offered. Cordiality. Cooperation. A door left unbarred.

Jekyll looked back out at the Arena where bound men were being dragged, shoved, and made to kneel.

Most of them were cultivators. That was a lot of vitality walking on two legs.

He began to estimate how much could be pulled, how many rites could be fed, how long it would last.

Then he felt the weight of that work in his bones and the exhaustion it would demand, and he shook the thought away.

He met Eldric’s eyes.

"We shall agree to this, and have it set down in writing," Duke Jekyll said. "Once we have the materials brought here, you will examine them for us."

Eldric nodded as if he were agreeing to a delivery schedule.

"No pressure at all," Eldric said mildly. "I shall see to it that not the faintest wisp of vitality escapes their blood."

They spoke as if the guilty were cattle in a slaughter.