Chapter 74: Yes, I Knew

As they stepped inside the door, they immediately realized that it didn’t lead to a simple room.

Instead, there were stairs.

As they descended the dim corridor, Lia suddenly asked.

“Why…” she paused for a second.

Her voice hesitated slightly, as if she was still trying to process the absurdity of the situation right now.

Finally, she finished.

“Why is there a place like this in our house?”

Her eyes were wide, filled with not just curiosity, but genuine bewilderment. Her gaze shifted between the walls, the steps, and Lucian’s back as he walked ahead of them without even glancing behind.

Her voice echoed faintly through the narrow stairway, bouncing off the walls before fading away.

She had turned on the flashlight of her phone, making it easy to see through the dark room.

Seraphina walked behind Lia, one of her hands brushing against the wall as she carefully descended the steps, placing each foot carefully inside the slightly dark space, making sure not to fall.

As she heard Lia’s words, she turned her head slightly toward her.

“You didn’t know about this?” she asked in a low voice, not wanting her voice to echo out loud.

Because the narrow corridor made every sound echo loudly.

And the last thing she wanted was her voice bouncing around the underground passage like a loudspeaker.

“Huh, no. Of course not.” Lia shook her head firmly, making her ponytail sway lightly.

Her tone carried a mixture of confusion and disbelief.

Seraphina frowned faintly.

Because the situation didn’t quite make sense to her.

Seraphina had come to this house just two years ago, even before both Lucian and Lia had moved in, so she assumed that Lia might know.

But even Lia was completely clueless.

She looked around again, at the narrow stairway, the thick concrete walls, and the reinforced metal door above.

She didn’t have even a hint of something like this hiding in their house.

Lia slowly turned her head forward again.

Her eyes landed on Lucian’s back, who was walking before them calmly, as if he didn’t hear their words.

His hands were in his pockets, like he was at a damn picnic!

But neither of them noticed his reddened ears, which had been like that for a while.

Even though he had increased his Will by a great amount, that didn’t simply remove everything.

As for why his ears were red?

Only time would tell.

“Brother, are you going to answer or not?” Her voice grew louder, making it echo through the small pathway.

Lucian continued walking.

“Just come down, my dear sister. I’ll tell you everything.”

Hearing the words ‘my dear sister’, she huffed slightly with a small smile and went silent, even forgetting that she should have been irritated right now.

Finally, the stairways ended, and Lucian reached the bottom first.

He stepped aside and reached toward the wall, clicking the lights on.

Instantly—

The entire underground space lit up.

Both Lia and Seraphina’s eyes widened again, as they paused midstep.

Because the space in front of them was far larger than they expected.𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

The room was big, almost a third of the size of their living room.

There were a few lights and a ventilation system, so they wouldn’t suffocate underground.

The air inside the room wasn’t stale, but it carried a faint layer of dust, like the place hadn’t been visited for months.

And aside from that—

There were containers.

Large containers, stacked neatly on one side of the room, almost filling a quarter of the room.

“What the heck is this?!” Lia shouted in disbelief, finally losing it.

She instantly rushed to the centre of the room and looked around.

She ran towards the stacked containers and crouched down beside one.

Her hands quickly flipped open the lid.

“Canned beans, corns… water… and even more…” she mumbled in disbelief, seeing through each of them.

She immediately turned to Lucian, who was standing there, crossing his arms.

“How is it? Our safe place,” he asked, an obvious smile lighting up his lips.

“How in the hell did you build a bunker like this?”

Listening to Lia’s question, he paused for a second.

“I didn’t build it. It was already here when we bought the house.”

Lia blinked.

“Then… how did I not know that?” She muttered before frowning.

She had been with him when they had switched their luggages, then…

Why didn’t she know anything about this?

Lucian tilted his head, slightly confused.

“Because I didn’t tell you?” he asked, as if it was her fault for not asking about something that shouldn’t even possibly exist.

Lia’s eyes twitched, seeing his confused look despite the faint teasing tone in it.

Before she could say anything or argue further—

“But why is something like this built over here?” Seraphina asked suddenly.

She was confused.

There hadn’t been any war for hundreds of years, so why was there a bunker like this?

“This isn’t really a bunker,” Lucian said, already knowing what she was probably thinking.

“Well… it was once. But then it only got turned into a basement.”

He then added lightly.

“A secret one.”

Seraphina frowned faintly, but she didn’t ask more questions.

She was curious, very, but this wasn’t a time for that.

Unknown to her, even if she had tried to ask further—

Lucian wouldn’t have answered her.

Why?

Because the place they were in was a secret basement… used by the owner of the house to have affairs with other women behind his wife’s back.

His ancestors had built it during a war, and when there was no longer any need for it, he simply turned it into his secret place.

A place where he could secretly meet his mistresses and sleep with them in secret… while hiding it all from his wife.

Lucian’s lips twitched slightly as he remembered that.

Thank god the man had already gone for a long time.

Apparently, the former owner’s secret activities hadn’t really remained secret forever.

It had been about 10 years since he was eventually caught red-handed by his wife, who used the shotgun in their house and shot a bullet in his groin, killing him right then and there.

The wife had been arrested afterward, and the house had been seized for a while.

Eventually, it was sold again years later.

And that was how Lucian had ended up buying it.

Leaving that ridiculous history aside, how did Lucian find out that the house had a bunker?

He hadn’t.

This was just a coincidence, and a very good one.

It had allowed him with much more things he had planned, without worrying much about his family’s safety.

Seraphina’s gaze slowly moved away as she looked at the containers.

Her eyes lingered on then, before her eyes narrowed as a thought struck her.

“What about this then?” she asked, directly looking into his eyes.

“You aren’t going to say that this was also here from the start, right?”

Lucian broke into a slight cold sweat, seeing her icy blue eyes, which looked like they would find out if he even tried to lie.

He coughed lightly.

“No, of course not.”

His answer made both of them curious—and a bit uneasy.

Why had he been collecting supplies?

Did he know that something was going to happen?

Did he already know about the monsters before the apocalypse struck the world?

“Yes, I knew.”

***

About half an hour had passed, right now, all three of them were sitting on wooden chairs placed inside the basement.

The room was quiet with a tense silence.

After Lucian had said those words, he hadn’t answered anything more.

Not even a single explanation of how he knew.

Nothing.

Even after trying to ask more, he didn’t answer.

‘He’s really being annoyingly stubborn.’ Lia thought as she grumbled slightly.

But still, they left it at that.

He wasn’t going to answer—they knew that with frustrated certainty.

And they couldn’t just spend their entire day arguing over here.

Even though Lia was still curious, she too kept her silence.

“You just stay here. I’ll come back in a bit.” Lucian said suddenly, his voice breaking the silence.

But before he could get up—

“Where are you going?” This time, it wasn’t Lia who asked it.

It was Seraphina.

“I have to clean up the mess upstairs. The blood might attract more monsters.” Lucian answered.

Seraphina’s gaze lowered slightly.

“Are you going to do the same as you did to the other creature?” she asked quietly.

She didn’t directly imply what she meant, but Lucian understood.

He paused for a second, then nodded.

“Yes.”

He had already been lying too much right now.

There was no need to stretch it further.

Seraphina watched him carefully.

“At least tell us what it even does,” she spoke again, as her voice trembled slightly.

“It felt like something was wrong with you after you devour… yes, devoured it, as you said.”

She brought her chair towards him, sitting just ahead of him.

“Please… tell me the truth.”

Lucian sighed, then he finally told them everything…

And by everything, he told them about his bloodline, about his skill [Devour], and what he had done to the goblin—how it disappeared and was absorbed by him.

He told them how he could sometimes gain their powers after devouring them, along with the memories that occasionally slipped in.

Both of them were astonished by his words, not just by the skill absorption part, but by the memory part as well.

Memories.

Memories were what made a person who they were, something that defined them, shaped their personalities, and many other things that could create… or destroy a person.

And Lucian was saying that he could get those memories from others?

Just by devouring them with his strange powers?

Seraphina and Lia both felt dread as they understood its implications.

Even if the memories he got were only small fragments, they were still something that shook both of them.

Finally—

They understood something.

Why Lucian had suddenly been behaving aggressively a few minutes ago, why he had been holding his head as if it was splitting apart.

But then another question slid in.

How in the heck was he so calm right now?!

The goblin’s memories had clearly affected him earlier.

So why did he look so composed now? As if it were just a fleeting reaction for that moment?

The goblin was something inhuman, something primitive… meanwhile, Lucian was calmly sitting in front of them as if nothing had ever happened.

He looked exactly like the Lucian they had always known.

They really didn’t understand him anymore.

He was getting stranger and stranger with each passing second.

He had specifically told them that it was very rare to obtain memories after devouring them, but it didn’t lessen their worry even a bit.

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