Yet while no one inside could leave the town, people from the outside could still enter freely.
Before long, Jennifer's actions spread throughout all of Devil's Kettle. The once peaceful little town was transformed into a slaughterhouse, and Jennifer was the butcher harvesting lives.
She was like a starving demon that could never be satisfied. Every time hunger struck, she would hunt the townspeople without mercy.
The residents had tried to fight back.
Bullets, bombs—none of it worked.
To Jennifer, such things were meaningless. She could even manipulate the objects around her with nothing but her thoughts.
Despair and fear settled over everyone like a dense, suffocating fog, impossible to escape.
Until one day, a new figure stepped into the town known as "Devil's Kettle."
The originally bright daylight had long since been swallowed by a layer of gray mist. The town had become desolate, almost completely devoid of human presence.
Scattered debris littered the streets—streaks of dried blood, chaotic muddy footprints, fallen bicycles, and several cars of different makes smashed into one another in messy collisions.
It looked less like a town and more like the aftermath of a panicked evacuation.
Matthew walked calmly along the town's main road.
On both sides were shops, supermarkets, and restaurants, though the scene there was even worse. Broken glass covered the ground, and abandoned vehicles clogged the street so badly it was nearly impossible to pass.
The sky was hidden behind thick fog, yet strangely, the deeper parts of town seemed less obscured. At the very least, visibility there wasn't severely affected.
Matthew stopped walking.
The blocked road ahead wasn't the real reason he had paused.
What truly made him stop was the complete absence of life.
There wasn't a single living presence around him.
And yet, his Observation Haki had caught something else—an aura that made his instincts recoil in disgust.
It was filled with evil, darkness, greed… something fundamentally foul.
Matthew clicked his tongue softly, the corners of his mouth lifting into a faint smile.
"Looks like I came to the right place."
Standing in this eerie, sinister town, he felt no fear at all. If anything, he seemed almost pleased.
Half a month ago, he had rescued Reacher and learned that the mastermind behind everything was Alexander Pierce.
Since Pierce had set his sights on him, Matthew naturally had no intention of pretending nothing had happened.
The reason he hadn't moved immediately wasn't because he feared Pierce's influence or his vast network of connections.
It was because he had a bigger plan.
What he wanted wasn't simply Pierce's death.
He wanted to swallow everything Pierce owned in one bite.
That meant not only his enormous wealth, but also his private armed forces, his decades of carefully cultivated influence, and the massive hidden power structure he controlled.
Killing Pierce would be easy.
Too easy.
And far too wasteful.
Matthew hated waste.
If he could take over Pierce's assets and power, it would make all of his future plans move far more smoothly.
And the best way to achieve that… was to control Pierce himself.
As long as he controlled the man at the top, all of that vast power would effectively become Matthew's.
The question was how.
Simple brainwashing wasn't impossible for him.
The mental pressure of Conqueror's Haki alone was enough to repeatedly crush Pierce's mind. Combined with psychological suggestion, someone like Pierce—just an ordinary man of flesh and blood—could eventually be reshaped into whatever Matthew wanted.
But the problem was time.
He would need a long enough blank period to fully control Pierce.
And Pierce wasn't just some wealthy businessman. Publicly, he had his official position. Secretly, he controlled a massive Hydra network. If he disappeared for too long, it would immediately trigger suspicion from every direction.
That made the safest and most efficient solution obvious:
directly altering his memories with psychic power.
And as it happened, within Matthew's Devil Fruit Encyclopedia, there was one fruit perfectly suited for exactly that purpose.
The Paramecia-type Memo-Memo Fruit.
This fruit had once been eaten by Charlotte Pudding, the seventy-sixth child of the Charlotte Family and a member of the Big Mom Pirates. Its power allowed the user to read, extract, replace, and alter the memories of a chosen target.
It was the perfect tool.
But to unlock the Memo Fruit within the encyclopedia, he needed one thing first—
the soul of a demon.
Fortunately, the encyclopedia itself possessed the ability to absorb souls.
Which meant the solution was simple.
Matthew only needed to hunt demons.
The most troublesome part wasn't killing demons.
It was finding them.
Because Earth had its own hidden guardians.
What had once been the ancient order of sorcerers had now become Kamar-Taj. Together with the three Sanctums scattered across the planet, they formed an enormous magical barrier that protected Earth itself.
That barrier made it extremely difficult for demons to descend directly onto Earth. Most of them could only sneak in through various loopholes and hidden methods.
And even if they succeeded in crossing over, they still faced the constant risk of being discovered, exorcised, or outright killed by the sorcerers.
As for the few that managed to slip through unnoticed, there was still the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division—known in the future as S.H.I.E.L.D.
It was a massive special organization dedicated to handling all kinds of strange and supernatural incidents. The moment an abnormal event was discovered, they would move quickly—investigating, sealing off information, and eliminating the problem before it spread.
Because of this, ordinary people knew almost nothing about the hidden side of the world.
The reason Matthew had found Devil's Kettle was simple: the situation here had grown too large to suppress.
The town had been swallowed by a strange mist, and a bizarre magnetic field trapped everyone inside, making escape impossible while also cutting off all signals.
Calls for help from inside the town never went through.
Messages posted online vanished like stones sinking into the sea.
Nothing got out.
But over the past several days, people had continued entering the town anyway.
Some came for work. Some were delivering supplies. Others were simply passing through.
Every single one of them disappeared.
And not just one or two.
Far too many people had entered Devil's Kettle and vanished without a trace. Naturally, others came looking for them.
As time passed, the town's strange situation could no longer be hidden. People called the police. Posts about it began appearing across social media.
Half a month ago, Matthew had already instructed Karla, Neagley, and Reacher to pay close attention to online distress reports and use their own networks to gather information on unusual incidents like this.
Just yesterday, Karla had reported the abnormalities in Devil's Kettle.
The moment he heard it, Matthew came immediately.
When he arrived at the outskirts of town, he found numerous county police already stationed there. Barricades and police lines had been set up along the main road leading into town, blocking all unauthorized entry.
Outside the cordon stood not only police officers, but also the families and friends of the missing, along with a growing crowd of journalists who had rushed over after hearing the news.
But obstacles like that meant nothing to Matthew.
His superhuman hearing had already picked up the sounds coming from inside the town.
The moment he released his Observation Haki, it spread outward instantly, covering several kilometers in every direction. Countless chaotic sounds and fragments of information flooded into his mind all at once.
Almost immediately, his brows furrowed.
His gaze snapped toward a specific direction deep within the town, and a sharp, dangerous light flashed in his eyes.
"A large number of residents gathered together… and…"
"That disgusting presence."
A low hum filled the air.
Brilliant golden light suddenly erupted from Matthew's body, dazzling enough to pierce the gray world around him.
In the next instant, he transformed into a beam of golden light and shot straight into the sky, blasting a path clean through the heavy mist above.