Searching

The opportunity the tyrant princess gave me would last a maximum of a month, and a minimum of a week to find a new soul technique. To prepare for the worst, I planned on leaving the jail in a week. It seemed unrealistic to find one in a week, given it took me a few years to find my first, but it took me a few years before I thought about bribing prisoners with food. I'm still a little embarrassed thinking about that.

In addition, I have the prisoner's records this time around.

I spent my first few days examining the current prisoner records. I wasn't looking for anything specific, if it was that easy to figure out who possessed soul techniques, Torus wouldn't have been rotting in jail. Instead, I was aiming at the weaker demographic of prisoners. I hypothesized that if everyone in here is imprisoned for similar crimes, weaker criminals would be more likely to have a trump card that doesn't use mana or ki than stronger criminals. I could be completely wrong but I don't have the time to visit all the prisoners.

There were also a few other minor reasons. I believed it would be easier to converse with a weaker prisoner than a stronger prisoner, and I didn't want to associate too much with strong prisoners.

As I was skimming through the records, I separated the mages and the martial artists because I couldn't compare how strong they were compared to each other. Next, I separated those two groups by the level of strength written in their records. While I was separating them, I tallied how many people were in each tier of strength. The most glaring flaw in my simple analysis was that I was unable to compare the strength of magicians and martial artists, skewing my statistic. I decided to accept those flaws and move to the next step of my plan.

I took the records of the weaker people and began analyzing them. My goal was to eliminate outliers so I didn't waste time talking to them. An example of an outlier would be a prisoner who swindled money from nobles. He's an outlier for me because he isn't the kind of criminal I'm looking for.

After that sorting, I sorted by how many years the prisoners have left before they leave the prison. I didn't want to talk to people with less than 3 years left, because they wouldn't want to risk their freedom. I also eliminated people who shared a room, it would be harder to talk about trump cards with other people nearby.

Once I finished removing the outliers, I had 10 magicians and 32 martial artists who were potential candidates. I was satisfied with 42 people to question, if I did 10 people a day, I could finish within the worst-case time scenario.

Instead of approaching the criminals indirectly, I decided to ask directly ask them about their secrets. I wouldn't specify what exactly I wanted, I would just ask them to give me their secret for food. I hoped they would be desperate enough to taste decent food after staying here.

I thought about utilizing one of Tracking's flaws, people who can use soul essence would recognize someone is using a soul technique, but I deemed it too risky. This prison was about 2.5x bigger than the other prison and had much tighter security. What if they had a way to detect soul techniques.

With these thoughts in mind, I left my cell and looked for Celtin. He had essentially become my gopher these last two days, he delivered whatever I needed at any time. He was probably surprised to see me out of my cell.

When Celtin heard me asking for fruits, he agreed without much hesitation, but when I asked for alcohol, he started to hesitate. I thought there might have been laws regarding the minimum age for alcohol consumption, but he said it wasn't allowed for prisoners to consume alcohol. It took one sentence to convince him to give me the alcohol, "Stop talking nonsense."

A few minutes later he handed me the fruits and 5 bottles of alcohol. Seeing how fast he brought them to me, I realized the reason he tried to not hand me the alcohol.

I randomly picked 2 people to approach today as a test run. One murdered his colleague for a treasure, and the other assassinated a warrior one level higher than himself.

I approached Swain, assassin first. He was in the prison for 4 years and had 5 more years in his sentence.

I first asked the nearby guards to leave the area, I used the excuse of being intimidated by them to make them leave. When I arrived at his cell, I handed him a piece of paper and a pen. I took out another piece of paper and pen for myself and started writing.

Let's talk through writing. Write down yes on your paper if you agree.

He looked at me confused before writing down:

-Ok.

We began a small conversation through writing.

Do you want fruits?

-No

How about alcohol?

-You have alcohol?

If you want it I need something from you.

-What do you need?

You assassinated a warrior, stronger than yourself. I want what allowed you to kill him.

-I killed him when he let his guard down, I didn't do anything special.

I know you're lying. I won't tell anyone, I want it for myself.

I didn't know if he was lying, but that didn't matter.

-Are you really a child?

This might be your only chance to get alcohol this decade. If you answer me, I'll give you 2 bottles.

-3 bottles

Ok.

-Have you heard of cursed weapons.

I haven't heard much, explain.

-I don't know much about how they're made, all I know is that they can give you power beyond your limits in exchange for something. In my case, my weapon desired positive emotions. It would give you power in exchange for taking those emotions for a period of time.

Where is the cursed weapon now?

-It's gone, it was taken from me when I was caught.

Why wasn't this written in the records?

-Cursed weapons sell for a high price on the black market. Do we still have a deal?

Although this conversation was useless, I was a man of my word.

Hand me the paper and pencil and I'll give them to you. It's not my responsibility if the guards take it after I leave.

Before he handed me the paper and pencil, he wrote down:

- Don't use cursed weapons, I regret sacrificing my emotions. You may be powerless but at least you're still a complete human.

I didn't reply to his statement, I handed him his fruits and alcohol and left.

Although I made a loss on this prisoner, my strategy seems to work. As I walked to the next prisoner's cell, I hoped his information would be more useful for me.