Grey stood on the same spot for a good two minutes, but none of the ladies noticed him. Although he didn't even try to hide his aura, they still didn't sense him.

The eyes of some of the ladies were dull and lifeless, given the injury marks on the body of some of them, it was easy to see how much they've suffered.

Grey was sure most of them had already given up on life, and would most probably want to die than continue living such a hellish life. Of everyone here, what Grey found more absurd was still the young girl who was around eight or ten years old, he still couldn't wrap his head around why they would even keep her locked up.

The young girl hadn't even properly developed, what was she doing here?

Grey looked around for a while, his heart aching for these people. If he didn't see them, then he wouldn't care about it even if he heard about it, but seeing them now, he couldn't leave without doing anything.

'Hmm, I can't kill all the people here, obviously, and I still don't know how the Emperor would react if they find me missing when they come. Since that's the case, I'll slowly corrode the essence beads of the people below the Overlord Plane, if possible, I don't mind corroding their life forces,' He thought as he started strolling around the place.

While strolling around, he noticed none of the ladies even looked at him, they all had their heads hung low, looking at the ground.

He currently had his robe on, and even wore a mask since he couldn't take the risk of being seen. On getting close to where the little girl's cage was, he heard something that made him angrier.

The little girl was mumbling three words repeatedly, the words were, 'Please kill me'. Even Grey who rarely showed his emotions was almost in tears when he heard this, his eyes red from anger.

'How could the Smith family be this inhumane?!' He yelled in his heart.

For such a little girl to give up on life, even to the extent of actually begging to be killed, it was unimaginable what Jean and his people had done to her.

Grey didn't speak to her, instead, he walked away from the cage. The longer he stayed in the place, the more he wanted to kill every single living being associated with the Smith family. At this rate, he might even kill the horses and beasts in the manor, if he found people who were friends with the Smith family, he might kill them as well.

That's how much hatred he currently bore towards the Smith family! It was so high that even people speaking to them might be affected by it.

After walking around for another ten minutes, he unexpectedly found another secret passageway, this one was much harder to notice compared to the one at the garden. He could already guess it led to the vault, but he wasn't excited after finding it.

He walked inside the vault, and different treasures appeared before him. Plants, rare stones used for forging, essence stones, books containing different magical techniques, elemental weapons, and so on.

He didn't feel a shred of excitement even after seeing what he was searching for.

As soon as Grey touched the essence stones, his expression suddenly changed. Due to his emotions, he got careless and didn't even check for any traps in the place, he only wanted to take the essence stones and leave.

When he touched the stones, an array immediately lit up in the secret room. It was a trapping array, and even those at the Peak of the Overlord Plane would find it extremely difficult to escape from it.

Well, those without the space element.

Since the people of the Azure continent knew nothing about the space element, there was naturally no way for them to counter it, so no matter how powerful their arrays were, it couldn't trap Grey or Void. This is the reason they could go almost anywhere unhindered in the Azure continent.

The trapping array wasn't the only thing that was activated, another array was also activated. The second array was to notify all the experts in the manor that the vault had been breached by someone.

'*Sigh* I'll grab what I can then,'

With a sigh, Grey sucked in as many essence stones as he possibly could. Previously, there was an area designated for essence stones, the number of stones there was well over hundreds of thousands, and Grey just took more than fifty percent of them.

Of the fifty percent Grey took, more than half of the stones were mid or high-grade stones, the ones left were all low-grade stones.

The reason he was unable to take all of them was simple: he didn't have any enough space in his storage ring to take them. Had Void been here, given how big his spatial storage was, then they would've been able to completely sweep the entire vault in a matter of seconds.

After taking the essence stones, Grey turned around and casually walked out of the secret room.

Outside the secret room.

All the experts in the Smith manor whose cultivation stage was in the Overlord Plane were already rushing towards the secret room. Surprisingly, there were different places to go into the vault.

Just like Grey thought, there was one in Jean's room. He was the first amongst all the people to get to the vault, on seeing that the things were intact, he heaved a sigh, there were some extremely valuable treasures in this place that the family couldn't bear to lose.

His expression changed when he noticed that the array was still intact, but no one was in the vault. After looking around, he almost fainted when he saw how little the essence stones numbered.

Given how rare it was to get essence stones in the Azure continent, it was a rare commodity even for the big families. Although they had an easier time getting it compared to the others, it still wasn't that much.

There were few essence stones mines in the Azure continent as a whole, and each empire controlled about twenty-five or so.