~ 63: The Night of Blessings and Curses - Part 8 ~

I was being revived, although I knew that I was alive, awake and well. I spluttered the water outside of my system, heaving painfully when it all came out. It surprised me that I should have been unconscious yet I was here, lying down on the soft grass while my eyes met the glistening irises of a silhouette of a man.

His eye was fear-stricken as his hand pushed down on my chest to get all the water out. His dishevelled hair had stuck to his forehead as he had tried to get my eyes to flutter open. Unconsciously, I reached my hand out to hold the side of his face in an attempt to reassure him that I was doing fine.

He stopped moving and stared down at my face, the sweat beading his forehead trickling down his temples. His large hand came to clutch mine that rested on his face, which he rubbed brushed with his finger.

"I am sorry," he said with his eyes closed. "I shouldn't have let you enter that cursed realm. I should have gone first instead of you."

"What are you talking about?" I questioned as I knit my brows. "I am perfectly fine. And you definitely didn't seem to be in a position to go into the river. Who said that you must be the only one to test the waters of a particular place? Do you think I'm incapable?"

He pushed himself off of me and settled down beside me, with one leg pulled up. He still held my hand as his other arm came to rest on his forehead. I held my breath, wondering if my question had hit a sensitive spot in his heart.

"What a curse," he breathed out as his gloved hand pulled back his unruly fringes. "I can never enter any pool of water unless it is shallow and I have a stable position in it. I have been thrown countless times into the depths of the forbidden waters to make myself strong, despite my rebuttal. I don't want to see you go through any kind of agony when you enter that realm, given the fact that you are already seeing unusual dreams."

I immediately snatched my hand away from his, sat up and looked at him through narrowed eyes. Just how many times had he been into my head without me knowing that he was able to catch that bit of information as well?

"I have told you plenty of times that you must, at all costs, keep your shield up," he said with a sigh, his hand covering his eyes. "Your thoughts are like a song which I hear from afar and can't help but take a look at. It's very tempting to see exactly what runs through your mind when you keep it open like that."

I swore and smacked his arm which caused him to laugh. The man had dared to enter my territory and linger in it for as long as he wished. He even learnt about all those weird visions that I had been getting for no apparent reason at all. Except for the fact that I was the descendant of Astoria, there seemed to be no reason on heaven and earth as to why I was receiving such weird dreams and hallucinations.

"Keep your questions until the end of this journey," Lucas said as he stood up before I could open my mouth. "And pull up those shields before I punish you for keeping them open. We have work to do. Figuring out a solution other than crossing like that."

"We would need to protect our legs from getting wet," I said in a matter-of-fact voice. "The soaked leather conducts electricity very well."

His speechlessness made me realise that he hadn't plucked that information from my head. He was only able to get my thoughts and not what I felt. He would only sense my danger, yet he would possibly never know what kind of danger I might be in.

"Tell me exactly what happened," he said in a raw voice, causing chills to run down my spine at the roughness and coldness of it. "Don't miss out on a single detail."

I narrated the whole incident from the very beginning to the very end as we walked towards the shade of trees. I kept away from that side as I didn't want any more surprises from the viper vines of Salvita.

His face had grown dark and grim as he heard me tell the witch's tale, although he might have heard it already with my shields being open. I kept my distance from him, afraid that his foul temper might act up if he had any that I didn't know about.

The stars were disappearing one by one and even the moonlight was starting to diminish little by little. By and by, we reached a side of the forest trees where the trunks were thick and sturdy. We stood for a while under its shade as I finished my tale.

"In all of Adrian," he said after heaving a heavy sigh, "there's no way you can touch that cursed river again. How are we to cross it without having to use swinging ropes like before?"

"If there's a good spot like this, we could use that," I commented. "Before that, we would need a non-conductive substance to insulate our legs from the electric shocks of the eel, like the tree barks, for instance. But we have only one knife and that's yours."

"You come up with the brightest ideas. The dagger shall do for now. One of us could cut the bark while the other created the ropes. I would rather do the latter as I already learnt how to make those."

We set to work with him making the ropes with Salvita this time to give it more thickness while I tried to cut off the bark of the nearest sturdy tree. The task was tedious and painful as the bark was rather tough. Plus, I was using a dagger to cut slices off it, not an axe.

I had made it about two centimetres or more when a green fluid started to flow out. Unconsciously, I touched it while trying to scrape out some bark from the top of the gap. That caused the reaction. My uncovered fingers, which had got sap on them, started to burn as the sap opened up the healing scratches on them.