Unsealing Emptiness

He could tell he wasn’t the same person he had been during their prior meeting. However, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t pinpoint the cause of this strange shift.

“Gahaha... those old fogies are going to fight like beasts for you.”

While others were caught off-guard with his sudden burst of laughter, Ozul instead focused on those particular words more.

‘Old fogies?’ he pondered. Having already accepted the possibility of there being other humans as strong as Old Gu, he could guess that these old fogies must be just like him.

This much was enough for him to understand that his current power was really not enough for the world out there.

“Why are you here?”

.....

“Ghaha! Well, aren’t we good friends already, boy? Why so many formalities? Can’t an old friend like me come to visit another friend?”

Despite his pleasant-sounding assertions, no one appeared to accept them. Everyone was staring at him with bated breath, and Ozul’s face was devoid of expression as usual.

“So, why are you here?” Ozul asked again after Old Gu stopped talking.

“Tch! You are more boring than scarecrows. At least they look funny,” Old Gu grumbled, but in the next second, he appeared to have forgotten it as he continued, “I found this on the streets boy. How could I not come looking for you?”

In his hand, he suddenly held a small painting of the pattern the Three-Eyed Strangers had been spreading all over the continent.

Old Gu watched in interest as the usually stone-like face of Ozul started showing cracks and for the first time, he found the boy expressing actual emotions.

‘No... It’s just that I have never been able to detect his emotions... or at least whenever he doesn’t want me to,’ pondered Old Gu as he noticed the gaps in his emotional wall were quickly filled up.

“Gahaha! Don’t be so tense boy! I don’t know anything about these,” as he said these words, Old Gu could bet on his life that he felt a spark of annoyance burning in Ozul’s eyes before, “... but you might or might not find your answers soon.”

Saying that he began to slowly walk towards the stairs. Only Ozul followed after him with the duo while the rest kept staring at their backs. The old man had successfully piqued Ozul’s interest and it wasn’t appropriate to talk about that in front of everyone.

Old Gu only stopped once they were outside the tower.

“Do you really not know what that means?” Ozul asked out of nowhere. This time he focused on the old man’s emotions which he previously wasn’t able to determine precisely.

“Aren’t you impatient~ I really don’t know what it means but that is not the question here, boy,” Old Gu then squinted his eyes at Ozul, “The question here is; why are you searching for this inscription? And how did you get your hands on this?”

At this point, both parties were probing each other for answers but neither could understand the other.

“They can’t even work here, so there is no way this piece was created by someone in this small world. Tell me, boy, are you sent here by someone? What do you want to do with this inscription? And why would it be here in this scrapyard?”

With each word, Old Gu’s aura turned fiercer as he leaned further towards Ozul as if trying to intimidate him.

“I don’t know what ‘inscription’ is. And you don’t have to know what business I have with it.”

Even while receiving so much information at once, Ozul remained firm as ever. He knew the old man was testing him and there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t attack him if he wasn’t satisfied.

Be that as may, he was also not willing to reveal his purposes for looking for that pattern.

Old Gu remained silent at his answer. Taking this opportunity, he asked, “How do you know it’s really this inscription you are talking about? It could be the runes as well.”

Old Gu’s eyebrows relaxed a little as he replied, “I have been here far longer than you, boy. I can tell what runes look like. They are merely simple letters conveying orders – trash. This here, though. It’s more complicated than that. Each line of this pattern is complicated. If it was any common inscription, I would have easily been able to tell what it was. But inscriptions are not my specialty, so I am clueless on this one.”

Then he paused a little before turning around, “Gah! Anyway, it seems like you are just a brat who is still wet behind your ears. I got excited for no reason. Tch! I could have had a good fight.”

As he continued to walk away, Ozul contemplated the meaning of everything Old Gu had just said. There were many things that were only his speculations but one thing he could be sure of was that this inscription was not something of this world.

“Was that all?” he called out to Old Gu.

“Huh?” Turning his head around, Old Gu looked annoyed a little as his eyebrows rose suddenly as if he had remembered something, “Ah! Yes. Only four days remain! You three are to be inside the circle within these four days!”

“Circle? Which circle?”

“Urgh! That... uh... what was it called again, I forgot,” Old Gu mulled over his memory.

He wasn’t too far from the trio so Raven could hear his mutterings, “The Desolate Borders surrounding the Neutral Lands?”

“Ah! Yes! You are a bright lady! Pity you have to follow this cold as snow brick brat. Anyway, before the test starts, all of you are to cross that circle...”

Old Gu wasn’t shouting. His voice slowly diminished as he walked away into the woods.

The fact that he had found their headquarters didn’t even surprise them anymore.

The duo was busy making heads and tails of his words while only Ozul could understand half of what he had told them.

‘Scrapyard?...’ that word kept ringing in his mind. Old Gu had called their whole world a scrapyard. Was that all this world amounted to in the face of everything that was out there?

Thinking about it again, he really needed to get stronger.

***

Just as Old Gu had said, there were only four days left before the deadline.

As it turned out, only the trio wasn’t informed that they had to arrive in the Neutral Lands on that day. Ozul assumed that the old man had just forgotten to do so.

Even with a sense of urgency to get stronger, there wasn’t much he could do.

There wasn’t much improvement he could achieve with the Ball of Purity and he would always feel some restrictions while dealing with his new power. It was as if he lacked something or something was intentionally interfering with him.

Despite that feeling, he continued to work with those shadows since there wasn’t much he could do otherwise in this short time.

The results of his efforts became apparent when he started to feel less tired every time he used that power. He could now sustain that state for much longer which meant more time to deal with any nuisance that he wouldn’t be able to eliminate normally.

The thing which he had already anticipated but still disappointed him was the failure of the mission to find any clues about the pattern.

All members in the headquarters were extremely embarrassed and many felt guilty for not bringing in any results at all, but most of the pressure was on the upper echelon as they were in charge of everything.

The ones who felt the worst were Raven and Blaze even though they knew that Ozul wasn’t planning to blame any of them.

When only two days were left, Ozul called them to his room and told them to stop the search.

If anyone really knew anything about the pattern, then they would have already come out for the massive rewards. And then Old Gu had also asserted that the pattern was an inscription which supposedly wouldn’t work here.

‘... but why was I born with these patterns etched into my skin here in this world then?’ questioned Ozul but there was no one to answer. He was sitting alone atop the tower with Jinx whose absence nowadays would leave him feeling empty.

He stood up with a sigh to find the duo.

It was time that they arrived in the Neutral Lands as well.

All the others who were chosen had already left their respective places and arrived in the Neutral Lands. Only the trio hadn’t made the journey.

Finding the duo had always been easy. They always remained close to each other due to his instructions.

He had once advised them to stay together, and they had taken it quite seriously. Now it had almost become a habit as they followed each other everywhere. Ozul’s intention in making them do so was because he knew that they weren’t strong enough yet.

In terms of strength, they hadn’t progressed much in the recent months as they were busy dealing with the mission Ozul had handed them.

Both of them were at the peak of Rank-8, however, they were far from reaching Rank-9. Their Mana Cores were nowhere near big enough to promote them to the next Rank.

Most of their recent progress was only due to improving their bodies by integrating more Mana into them.

“It’s time to go,” informed Ozul before he made his way out of the tower without giving any orders to Haley or Irvin who were expecting him to say something before the departure.

He didn’t feel refreshed as he felt the cool breeze hit his face.

There was a strange feeling inside him, poking his conscious as if telling him that something was going to happen... something he hadn’t predicted.