Chapter 371: Shopkeeper is Dead But the handle wouldn’t budge. The door remained firmly sealed despite his strength. Darian frowned and applied more force, channeling his peak grandmaster-level power into simply yanking the door open through brute strength. The wood should have shattered, the hinges should have torn free, but nothing happened. The door remained as immovable as if it were carved from solid mountain rather than ordinary material. It must have some sort of hidden mechanism, Darian thought with growing frustration. Blood recognition or magical signature verification that prevents unauthorized entry. His eyes turned toward his prized possession lying broken on the ground nearby. Lola remained collapsed on the floor, her tear-filled gaze fixed on Noah’s lifeless body with an expression of absolute devastation. She seemed unable to fully process what had just occurred. Everything had been going so well for the past weeks, yet everything collapsed at an instant’s notice. Lola didn’t blame Noah, she blamed herself for being weak. Noah had trusted her strength and judgment in protecting him. Yet, she failed to do so. Darian walked over and grabbed her roughly by her hair, yanking her head back with callous disregard for her injuries. He dragged her toward the shop’s entrance, her body too exhausted to properly resist. "Open it for me," he commanded coldly. Lola didn’t answer, still dazed by the trauma of watching Noah die while she lay helpless. Darian’s grip tightened painfully. "Open this door immediately, or I will mutilate his corpse. I’ll scatter pieces of him across the forest for scavengers to consume. I will place his head as the entrance to my kingdom. But if you cooperate, I’ll ensure he receives a proper burial befitting humans." The threat finally penetrated through Lola’s shock. She blinked, awareness returning to her eyes as she processed the horrible choice being offered. Opening the shop for Darian meant betraying everything Noah had built, but allowing his body to be desecrated felt even more unbearable. She made her decision and reached toward the door handle with a trembling hand. Noah had given her authority to access the shop alongside his own, recognizing her as trusted partner rather than mere servant. That authority should allow her to open what remained sealed to others. The door responded to her touch, the lock mechanism recognizing her authorization and disengaging smoothly. The entrance swung open, revealing the shop’s interior with all its miraculous items displayed on neat shelves. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶 Darian’s eyes went wide with greedy triumph as he saw the treasure trove before him. Premium items that could elevate practitioners multiple ranks, enhancement consumables that defied their understanding of powerful items, all of it now within his grasp. He began laughing maniacally again as he stepped through the threshold into the shop. "Finally! All of this power, all of these miracles, everything belongs to me now!" But Lola had used those precious seconds while he was distracted by greed to drag herself fully into the shop as well, managing to get her foot across the threshold before he could notice and prevent her entry. And once she was inside, everything changed. Lola immediately invoked her authority within the shop’s system, something she had never attempted before but desperately hoped would function. "Remove him! Eject the intruder from this establishment!" She wasn’t sure if it would work since Noah had died. He was the one who had granted her authority in the first place, and with his death, that permission might have been revoked automatically. But she tried nonetheless, gambling everything on one final desperate action. And it worked. One moment Darian was standing triumphantly among the shelves, his hands reaching for the nearest premium items. The next moment he was outside the shop, ejected through some force that bypassed his senses entirely. He appeared several meters from the entrance, confusion written across his face as his surroundings changed. His expression shifted rapidly from confusion to fear to absolute fury as he understood what had just occurred. "She had administrative authority inside the shop! How is that possible?!" He had never seen or heard of any ancient artifact system that could grant multiple administrators. The very concept violated everything he understood about magical constructs and their singular binding to masters. He had suspected that the human shopkeeper possessed some sort of special power or leverage. Hence, the reason why he never tried to oppose him. B never in a million years had he imagined that authority could be shared or transferred. How could an ancient artifact be tied to two separate people simultaneously? In his mind, It was a theoretical impossibility according to every magical principle he had ever understood! Darian’s fury fuelled his body. He launched a devastating dark element attack directly at the shop’s walls, pouring his full grandmaster power into an assault designed to shatter whatever protective barriers existed. The attack struck the shop’s exterior and simply vanished, absorbed or negated by invisible protections that left no trace of the tremendous energy that should have devastated the structure. It was as if his technique had never existed at all. Inside the shop, Lola tried desperately to use her remaining mana to retrieve Noah’s body from where it lay just outside. She reached out with telekinetic force born from her fire manipulation, attempting to drag his corpse across the threshold into safety. But the other dark elf grandmasters immediately grabbed hold of Noah’s body the moment they sensed her magical attempt. They held him firmly in place, recognizing that his corpse might still have value as leverage or as proof of their victory. Darian himself added his strength to preventing the retrieval, his furious determination ensuring that Lola couldn’t reclaim even Noah’s remains. "You can hide in there like a coward, but his body stays with me! I’ll decide what happens to his corpse!" Tears flowed freely from Lola’s eyes as she realized she couldn’t even bring Noah’s body to safety. With trembling hands and a heart breaking into pieces, she slowly closed the shop door. Her back pressed against the solid wood as she slid down to sit on the floor, weeping with soul-deep anguish.