Only Wisdom Awakened - Chapter 237

Chapter 237: Hidden From The Sky
Apart from the loss of heart, paying all that money just to take a taxi didn’t matter much, Hans was still beyond rich.

He walked a few steps, and as he looked around, he realized:

‘If my memory hasn’t gone bad, things weren’t like this…’

Almost a third of the Duomo was enveloped in scaffolding.

Most of the things inside the great square just in front of it also appeared to be new.

‘The city must’ve suffered a lot of damage…’

Hans was born in Milan, just like his sister, but when the catastrophe first broke out, his family decided to move east and found a home in another city in Italy, while Emma and her family remained in Milan.

‘Emma… huh…’

As if he were an old man troubled by life long sufferings who held onto his cane, Hans was sitting on a bench, resting his head upon his trolley’s handle.

It was here, wasn’t it? The place where I last met Emma, well… I mean last time doesn’t count.’

Hans didn’t have many happy memories, he had spent four years of his life trapped inside a nightmare, as if the world had closed its doors to him, but before that… his world was just as any other kid’s.

He was a bright kid, he fit in well with everyone, and was really sociable.

Even from early on, he immediately managed to make some reliable friends in elementary school.

One was Emma, and the other one was Ludovico, his name was always a hassle to say, so his friends always called him Dodo.

Hans, Emma, and Dodo spent most of their time fooling around, talking about other people, playing tag… I mean, doing most things kids would.

Emma used to be a shy kid, but under Hans’s influence, she became a social butterfly.

Dodo wasn’t the brightest, but he was always the best at sports, his body was also quite huge, he had always been a couple of centimeters taller than Hans, and his body was also huge…

Hans was thinking about him…

“Sigh”

‘I want to see him… who knows what he’s been up to for these past few years, maybe he’s a hunter… with his mentality, I bet he’s going around smashing monsters’ heads just to help the civilians…

And about Emma…

Who knows.

Since she’s Money Maven, I bet she worked her ass off all this time to build the night market…

Hans felt a little defeated, he thought he had done so much just by becoming what he was… while his friend had built a world-level association in her teens…

‘Haha… when I see it like this… I’m really not that much compared to her’

“What’s up handsome?

Something on your mind?”

Hans’s thoughts were interrupted by those words.

‘I know this voice…’

Hans immediately noticed.

He turned his head around as fast as he could, and he saw exactly what he expected…

A woman whose black hair fused with the night sky was standing right beside him.

Hans hadn’t been able to detect her until she was really close… but he didn’t care about any of that, he was just happy to see her.

He simply watched her amazed…

She was beautiful, she had this ethereal aura to her because of her black hair and those deep purple eyes.

She was dressed in a black dress, it seemed both elegant and practical, but it looked like it didn’t really belong to that era, it was more similar to a gothic-style clothing.

Other than the corset, she wore black sleeves, connected to the dress with a black mesh with intricate details that wrapped around her shoulders and upper sleeves.

The dress also contained a black neckline which the woman adorned with a brilliant and beautiful silver necklace.

The woman’s silver necklace and earrings stood out just as much as her peculiar eyes under the moonlight.

Her warm and bright smile was nothing like the emotion she wore on her face the last time they met.

Hans closed his eyes briefly and sighed before saying…

“I was just recalling how we used to fool around when we were kids”

“Is that so?”

The girl’s smile seemed to slightly fade away as she heard that, but it soon returned when she went ahead and sat right beside Hans.

“It’s been a while hasn’t it?”

“Technically it hasn’t… you haven’t forgotten what happened a year ago have you?”

An awkward smile appeared on Emma’s face as she stared at Hans without knowing what to reply…

Her expression became a little more serious as she spoke of something less sentimental:

“Do you have a place to stay at?”

She asked.

Hans watched her with questioning eyes.

“I don’t mean it like that…

Someone is watching you”

“Mh?!”

Hans was confused by this exclamation… he hadn’t sensed anything with his mystic insight…

Just to be sure, Hans slightly leaned forward and touched the ground with his index… a couple of seconds passed, and even if curious about what he was doing, Emma just observed him.

“I don’t understand how you came to the conclusion that someone’s watching me…

I don’t sense anyone suspicious in a five-hundred-meter radius.”

‘Ha… haha’

Emma was dumbfounded because of what Hans said, just half a minute had passed and he had analyzed five hundred meters in all directions…

‘You’re still a monster’

She commented inwardly.

“Of course, you didn’t notice it because it’s not a person, well… not physically…”

Emma raised her chin and turned her head to the sky, while Hans watched her passively, tilting his head in confusion.

‘What…’

His mouth opened as he realized what she was trying to say.

Hans watched up in the sky, even with his vision he could not spot everything, but it wasn’t absurd to think about it…

“They’re keeping me in check with a satellite?”

Emma wasn’t surprised that Hans understood, after all, she had given him all the necessary hints.

“That’s right, and of course, all the cameras here are also watching”

“What?!”

Hans immediately realized…

“Why did you come here then?! Wasn’t your identity supposed to be a secret? Even if they won’t find out about it just by seeing you here with me you’ll be put under investigation!”

Hans was genuinely worried about her, he had always heard many things about Money Maven, and many were compliments, but no one talked about her as if she were a good person, if her identity got out, it would without doubt create a lot of trouble.

“Don’t worry”

She reassured him with a smile…

“If it was so easy to find out my identity, they would’ve done so long ago…”

…

“Sir! We have a problem!”

One of the association security team managers hurriedly reported.

“What is it?”

A man dressed In an elegant suit who seemed to be his superior asked.

“The Satellite we placed on Hans Ritcher it’s… it’s not working anymore”

“What?!”

The man jumped out of his chair in surprise.

“What about the cameras?!”

He immediately inquired.

With the same worried expression, the manager could only tell the truth:

“They-they’re not showing him anymore, everything else’s fine but he’s not there anymore… as if he had disappeared all of a sudden.

It feels like the cameras are being… live processed.”

“You’re telling me our security cameras are being live processed under our noses and we can’t do anything about it, and this all while we lose contact with our satellite?”

“I’m, I’m afraid so…”

Trembling, the man was ashamed of his lack of abilities.

“Hurry up! Fix the problem! Track down whoever’s doing this and in the meantime place all the available satellites on the boy, we can’t lose him or it’ll be a mess finding him again!”

“Y-yes sir!”

…

“So? Where are we going?”

Hans was following the woman without a clue about where they were headed.

They were walking down some dark alleys, which Hans had a hard time noticing when he was passing by in a taxi.

‘This city which looks so safe and calm… can actually have such a side to it’

Following the woman, Hans got out of the little alley and was welcomed by a light, which appeared to him as blinding after being in the dark all that time.

A huge and intricate mix of streets and little plazas was revealed to his eyes, which shone bright with the reflection of the few electric lamps hanging down from the ceiling.

All those poorly constructed and uneven streets were rather small, and between the rundown buildings that surrounded them, just a few meters above the floor were hung huge pieces of cloth and light folds of metal.

“This whole structure’s far away from the eyes of those satellites, and no cameras will ever be installed in a night market, so you can rest assured, no one will ever find us if we want to hide here.”

Hans was amazed…

‘This… this is a night market?’

Hans had seen a little branch of the night market, but it was nothing like this…

‘This… is even bigger than the trading center in Chicago…

It’s like… a city hidden inside Milan’