Chapter 16, What’s This?

After I was satisfied with how much I explored the room I left it, while I was shutting the door behind me I ended up getting another blast of mana which made me fall. 'Had to give me a kick on the way out huh?' I got up and went to the door across the corridor only to find that it was locked, and since I didn't want to break the door down I left it alone. 'Maybe I'll find a key somewhere.' I walked away from the door and continued down the corridor. 'I hope I find something cool.'

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The corridor led to a large white room with a glass dome roof and a marble floor, 2 marble staircases on either side leading to the second-floor balcony and continuing onto the third-floor balcony, and a large red door with golden decorations, the door was the only thing untouched by nature. I walked to the middle of the room and slowly circled the room, "This looks like a king would live in here, why is it so isolated?" The door looked like it would be the final room so I decided to save it for last.

I climbed the staircase to the left and stopped at the second floor to admire the beauty. 'It would be nice to live here, or even keep it as a hidden base.' I looked around and saw 4 doors, one slightly larger than the others. I entered the door closest to me and looked around the room. 'Is this the living quarters? Did they have an entire army in here?' The room was very long and it had beds with chests at the end of them lining the walls. Each bed had various degrees of usage with the closest one looking like it was the oldest one.

While exploring the narrow room, I took interest in how used and guarded the chests look. Some of the chests had locks that look unbreakable while other chests had poorly made wooden locks. 'How do you even make a lockout of wood?' I walked up to one of the newish looking wooden locks and broke it so I could look inside the chest. The chest contained a wooden sword, a wooden shield, a bow with wooden arrows, a poorly made wooden wand, and some basic clothing.

I stared at what was in the chest for a while, 'this all looks relatively new, is someone still living here?', I closed the chest and walked over to one of the better-looking chests, 'I wonder if they all save the same contents?' I tried to break the slightly rusted metal lock only to fail. 'Oh yeah, this lock is way stronger than the other one.' I used some magic to slowly melt the lock away while making sure that nothing caught fire. 'It took 10 minutes of sweat, but the lock finally fell off,' I adjusted myself and opened the chest, 'now it's time to see what's inside this.'

Reaching inside the newly opened chest, the first thing I pulled out was a wand. 'This looks like it was used. The color indicated that they're a fire user.' I put the wand off to the side and leaned over the chest to get a better look at what's inside. The chest was very different from the last one, this chest has better-looking clothing, no sword, a small red shield, and a small book. 'What's this?' I picked up the book and dusted it off.

Once cleaned the book's title was "Jou*$al @f K*%#" The title was mostly faded but at the very least I could conclude that it was a journal. I opened the journal expecting to find out some more about this place only to be disappointed that it was nearly illegible, not that it was faded, but that it looked like a child was writing in it.

In frustration, I started flipping through every page in the journal, I was about halfway through the journal when a few pictures fell from it. Distracted from my annoyance, I picked up one of the pictures and looked at it. The picture showed a man wearing the same clothes on the chest and a small girl just below him. 'Is this his daughter?' The next picture showed the same man but with an older pregnant woman. And the next had the man, the woman, and the little girl altogether. Another picture had the woman and the man at some sort of wedding, and the last picture was a very young version of the man.

'This seems out of order.' I held all of the pictures in my hand and arranged them like so, Young man, man and woman at a wedding, the man with the pregnant woman, man, woman, and little girl, and the last one with just the older man and little girl. 'Looks like he lost his wife.' I put the pictures down and picked up the journal again and flipped to the last few pages, the only legible pages were the last 2.

The last 2 pages read like this, "this is it, It's my final day to live, oddly enough I don't regret @ny*h%ng." the page was slightly smudged from tiers. " Who am I fooling, that's a lie, I regret a lot of things. Not being able to save my wife from the lord, and not being able to give my daughter a good life to grow into. I wasn't even able to see my own daughter grow up, I was forced into serving the lord of this hell hole. But lucky me, from today onwards the lord will fall, even if it costs my life, at least my daughter won't have to serve that monster calling himself a king. Even if I do fail, the bastard won't even know where she is, I can only hope that whoever finds this journal can give my daughter a nice home to grow up in."

I flipped to the last page and was slightly disturbed at what I read, or more like the lack of what I could read. The page was stained red with blood and the few things I could read were, "I don't wanna die!" every time it was written, random letters were capitalized with random punctuation throughout the whole page, with the last words saying "I'll just try again. Maybe next time it will be easier."

'What?' is all I could think of during that moment, at this point I felt an odd illness setting in my stomach, and altho I wanted to put the book back and through it felt important to leave, so I closed the book and put it away in my bag. "I'm going to need some sort of therapy for this." I put everything except the book back in the chest and left the room. 'This is not how I foresaw my day going, but I'll continue anyway. Hopefully, I'll find something cool to brighten my mood.'

End.