God-Tier Extraction Talent: Reincarnated in a Game-like World!

Chapter 532: Memory Fragment

By the next morning, Stellar City was already boiling with rumors.

The name Black Star had always carried weight, especially among players, and the moment word spread that their hidden base had been destroyed, every part of the city started talking at once. The streets were loud with guesses, and on the forums the threads were multiplying by the minute as players, information brokers, and people who knew nothing all tried to sound certain.

Gabriel had already made one thing clear to ChaosKnight before leaving their tower.

No one was to speak about what happened.

Because of that, none of them said a word, and that only made the mystery worse. White Phantom had been seen in the city, yes, but after that nothing concrete came out. No names. No witnesses stepping forward boldly. No guild claiming responsibility. The silence itself only pushed people to speculate harder.

The location of the Black Star base had not been public before. It was the destruction itself that brought it to light. Once the old building collapsed and the hidden structure beneath it gave way, people had no choice but to notice. The city guards moved in first. After that came Adventurer Guild investigators, and soon enough the area was sealed while bodies were dragged out one after another from the broken stone and burnt passages below.

The discoveries only made the matter worse.

The body of Black Star’s vice leader was confirmed among the dead, and several other known members were identified soon after. Yet the body of their leader, Torin Black Star, was never found. Some people believed he escaped. Others believed the collapse burned or buried him too deeply to recover. In public, they started leaning toward the simpler answer and assumed he was dead.

The biggest shock came when another corpse was identified.

General Aston.

The moment that news surfaced, the whole city grew louder.

His son had gone missing only a few days earlier, and now the general himself had been found dead inside the base of an outlaw assassin clan known for hunting players. That was the kind of detail that made every version of the story uglier. Some thought he had gone there to kill Black Star and failed. Others thought he had secretly been tied to them all along and had turned on them or been betrayed. A few took it even further and began saying the Aston family had been working in the shadows for years.

However, at the end of the day, all of this was merely speculation.

...

Back in his room, Gabriel knew nothing about the growing noise outside. He had shut the place off from his thoughts for the moment and focused on something else entirely. Since he still did not know how long he would be staying in Stellar City, he chose to deal with the one prize he had pulled from the ruined base before anything else could interrupt him.

He called Grizzlenaught out first.

The floor beneath him rippled, and the massive spectral bear rose soundlessly into the room, its electric blue eyes glowing faintly in the dim light. The moment it fully appeared, its presence filled the space with a quiet pressure that made the room feel more secure.

"Stand guard," Gabriel said.

Grizzlenaught gave a low growl and moved toward the side of the room without needing further instruction. It sat there like a red wall of muscle and spirit, head slightly lowered, eyes fixed on the door and window.

Only after that did Gabriel take out the memory fragment.

The glowing orb rested in his palm, faintly pulsing with soft light. Memory fragments were not treasures in the usual sense. They were more like broken pieces of someone’s life. If used, they could pull the user into fragments of the dead person’s memories and let them witness moments that once belonged to someone else. Sometimes they were useful, while other times they were meaningless and failed to show accurate memories.

Gabriel looked at the orb once and did not waste any more time.

He lay back, held it firmly, and activated it, intending to learn from it.

His body remained on the bed, but his consciousness began to sink as if he had been dragged beneath deep water. The room, the ceiling, and the faint smell of medicine all blurred at once, and before long the last thing he felt was the pressure of the orb in his hand and the silent presence of Grizzlenaught nearby.

When the darkness cleared, Gabriel was no longer in the room.

He found himself standing in another place entirely, looking through a scene that was not his. The ground beneath his feet was rough and uneven, packed with dirt and broken stone, while the air smelled of blood and sweat. The sky overhead looked dull, and the place around him felt like the edge of some battlefield or training zone far from any city.

Not far ahead stood two younger figures.

Gabriel recognized them almost at once.

One was Torin, much younger, still in his teenage years and far less composed than the man he had killed in the base. His face was leaner, his body not yet fully developed, and though there was already something sharp in his eyes, he had not yet grown into the cold stillness he carried as an adult.

Beside him stood another teenage boy.

General Aston.

Or rather, the man who would later become General Aston.

He was younger too, though even now his posture was more upright and disciplined than Torin’s. Both of them were facing forward with tense bodies and drawn weapons, and from the way their breathing moved, Gabriel could tell they were under real pressure.

In front of them stood a huge monster.

Its body was massive enough that even from this distance it looked oppressive. The muscles along its frame shifted restlessly, and the pressure coming from it made the air around the two boys feel tight. Yet that was not the thing that held Gabriel’s attention the most.

There was someone else.

Farther away, right in front of the huge monster, stood a third figure. The figure appeared to be around the same age as the other two.

Gabriel could not see the face clearly. The distance was too great, and the way the scene blurred around that figure made the features hard to catch. Even so, one thing was impossible to miss.

...The presence.

The pressure coming from that child was far heavier than the monster, far heavier than the two boys, and eerily similar to what Gabriel had felt from the king of the Valerian Kingdom.

Suddenly, a thought entered his mind, and his eyes widened.

"Don’t tell me..."