Chapter 49
Even though only an hour had passed the pain in Adrian s arm had multiplied hundredfold. It felt like the very fact that his blood was coursing through his veins was aggravating the agony to an extreme degree. To be specific, if felt so much like he was being squashed and stabbed at the same time, by a thousand things
Currently he had held his arm to shield it from the cold. Usually Adrian doesn't care about changes in the weather but right now he honestly wishes he had worn every garment he ever owned. The chill from the wind and the fact that he is literally on the colder side of the waters, both these were cooperating in germinating a hair pulling coldness. Even the water was crystallizing a little bit. A horrid combination for an aching arm.
Though skeptical,he knows what Kijad had given him but he somehow feels like Kijad have him the stronger dose. What is he supposed to think? He had never tried the ribbon until yesterday so it's partially reasonable to think this way.
Still the case, since that can't be true, he just has to guess that demons are pretty strong. A safe assumption would be that demons may feel the pain when this ribbon is tired around them, it's just that the pain is way less since their pain receptors are probably not that responsive or sensitive.
Withal he has to treat his arm or else it might start to rot , since he feels like that is what his arm is intending
Such a block of energy would require him to go all out in his energy output but that kind of output would be detrimental to anyone near of a lower power .And since that is nearly more than eighty percent of the school he has to seek somewhere else . And the best alternative is out of the school in the forest nearby.
And so he got one one of the boats after leaving Kijad s quarters.
The wooden boat was a single user so it was not that heavy and moved quite smoothly . As it glidded over the water it partly felt like he was walking on top of the water. No friction or struggling whatsoever.
That being the case , he faced some challenges which he naively overlooked.
It was difficult to row the boat because every motion he made, he could feel the pain elevating though every nerve ,vessels and muscle. So occasionally he would take a breather and massage the arm or shield it from the cold as he believed it was a catalyst in brewing pain.
Because of this, he is destined to take longer than average as his speed had been reduced by more than sixty percent and also that he is breaking more frequently. An exercise that would normally take thirty minutes , took nearly four times as long. If he is not feeling really angered by this, he must be really patient..
Four rest stops later, he saw the bank. He sighed in relief as he can't keep going on like this but then again lost hope as his hand was aching more shamelessly and wanted to resign from its fate.
When he reached the bank, he jumped off the boat and towards the union of dry land and water.
His flying into the air was so quick that it could be measure in microseconds . The way he moved was like his whole was never at any point balancing on his legs.
However the instant that his legs attained stability, his enthralling and careful voyage through the air was insulted by the shattering of something in his arm , making him scrunched so much when he almost screamed.
All of his face scowled making him seem to be tasting slightly bitter tea as there was a tiny clue of discomfort but the agony he was in was like he had caught thunder with his bare arm. He also clutched his teeth so tightly that some of his enamel must have been compromised.
He doesn't really know to suppress the pain momentarily so for now he will have to bare this freezing in his body.
He reminded crunched a little ,thinking that the gravity he had just mocked would help subdue the pain but he was deathly mistaken because no relief was attained.
After about two minutes, Adrian declared that he won't challenge air resistance for a while because if he feels like that again, by the time he decides to go back home a piece of his body will definitely be missing.
Also , feeling the pang go down and the pain paralysis lift off , he decided to elevate from the ground but he did it slowly and he managed not to tip over. However despite this commendable achievement, he somehow felt like if he starts walking or moving now he is going to definitely fall over.
So in the process of deciding whether to move later or now, he looked at his hand and even though it was at night, it looked like frozen water.
He is pale on a daily basis but right now he looked so colorless . If Herim saw him he might stay he looks like snow. Also he is right and this keeps on at this rate his hand might become even whiter than his hair..
" Wow", he exclaimed while looking unimpressed, at his hand that he was not going to try to move freely or bend to any point . To be honest, besides the paleness ,it looked exactly like the other hand but it felt stiff and compressed. It's like that point where one thinks of they move something they might break it and he is at that point that he might break off his arm if he is not careful enough.
He raised his eyes from the turmoil of a limb and he looked to the dark forest ahead and he exhaled partially. The reason for his action was clear.
This forest has a lot of trees bundled up together that seem like their branches almost meet at a point kind of likes they are intertwining. But they didn't do that all the way since the light from the sky didn't have difficulty seeping through them.
The ground occasionally had roots interlocking a few times but there were a few open spaces carpeted with a bunch of leaves thrown here and there.
Within the towering trees which are haphazardly scattered and the creepy shadows they casted , under careful scrutiny one can identify hints of a former path that emerged from the forest to the water.
This path was really old and barely noticeable since some vegetation was growing there. However the vegetation was few and underdeveloped when compared to other areas. The fertile soil must have been eroded . Through critical analysis of this situation only bipedal creatures seemed the most probable as any other creature or weather element would not grow such a fondness to a single route. So that is the agent of erosion
Honestly the fact that there was a path leading to the island-school makes one wonder what was it leading to so much that they visited often to the point of scaring the ground with a path. Obviously they were not going to the school because only certain kinds of individuals are allowed into the border . But this path must have been frequently used to still have that look of ancient , since that meant it withstood the hands of time. There must be an explanation.
Indeed there was or there is.An analogy about the origin of the cultivation island of the werewolves!!
Although it was not accredited as it's not in the forbidden books, this analogy of events is the only thing that explains the path with respect to the human-wolf separation. But it is very much different in its own way.
The forbidden book just said the school emerged because wolves wanted to cultivate. And that humans and wolves were simply separated. However this is far from the case with the analogy.
According to the analogy , humans hated 'were-humans' as they were refereed to as back then and so they were all voting for the separation of prey and predator. But obviously the separation of wolves and humans didn't happen instantly,it took some centuries.And during this period more and more wolves were sufficing .
Because of this , a court meeting was held between the leaders of the humans to discuss a resolution, since of course more wolves meant more demand for resources and that broad term basically meant human pneuma.
On top of that, the police were overwhelmed because the wolves were too scary to fight and even more impossible to attempt containing because it is like trying to containing a ticking bomb. A hungry wolf is dangerous and trying to block it from feeding makes it angry. And there is nothing more lethal and unpredictable than an angry wolf.
Anyway at one point, the other wolves who were not being rebellious by trying to hunt humans wrote a document to the human king that he allow the wolves to hunt or drink on the elderly humans since they are going to die eventually.
The document was obviously not that crude. It said that since when humans are in the death phase which is sometimes termed the threshold of life and death, they start releasing human pneuma slowly and gradually. They keep doing that until there comes a point where they no longer have any left . And once they have none left they cease to exist .
So since wolves can detect human pneuma even more so when it's being emitted , they plead that they be allowed to collect it and thrive on it instead of it disappear into thin air.The aura is no longer useful to the dying so it's basically waste otherwise why would they lose it!!
This just made the humans more furious.
First of all they didn't ask the wolves to become wolves so why should they care about they survival to the point point of sacrificing their fellow humans. Second why would anyone give away their family member to become someone s lunch. How dare these 'abominations' dream of such atrocities?!!
Without a doubt the humans refused. And thus some wolves were starved to death.
At this point the surviving ones questioned the king s bias, Wasn't he the one who said all that is in this land he will rule with a straight mind? Why is he siding only with the humans? It's not like they are asking for humans to kill their seniors or the dying. They are just asking for permission to drink the aura or would they rather have the wolves be moraless and just drink it? Would they like it then?
The wolves felt that the humans were declaring war with then .
Predictably one thing lead to the other and the humans had enough. Simply because the wolves were getting out of control since now they are hunting out of spite and not for survival.
And thus to deal with this, at this meeting, it was then that the notion of 'Jeruv hunters' were proposed. Their mission was to hunt for wolves that were being troublesome
A wolf especially the were-humans prioritizes stealth, meaning they won't be easy to catch. So for this team to effectively hunt wolves they would have to adopt other sub-human techniques. Aka cultivation .
They were not hunting bad energy nor were they implying that wolves have black energy. They just need some of the techniques like spell casting , charging weapons using energy and others more. After all some wolves might have been magicians
Anyway, without a doubt this team was a secret . In the people s eyes they were just mere imperial guards but their real purpose was to hunt wolves.
That being said only the best of the best could form this team and it was only made made of nine.
So because only those with sufficient cultivation training can practice cultivation and use its objects and tools, this team had to train vigorously to acquire the cultivation skills while also growing their core at lightning speed.
But because of the fact that the humans don't have that intensive insight on cultivation nor do they have a plastic core like creatures or were-humans, they didn't know the tricks to stop the core from killing its owner through malignant self-consumption.
That means that while training and one keeps not doing it right , they would guaranteedly set themselves on the threshold of life and death . Approximately two months into training, they start releasing aura which their fellow trainees won't be able to detect . And even if they did , what can they do ? Who ever stopped death?
And so this became a scary truth and was the reason why the team was kept small and not told to the public as Jeruv would be considered a suicide scheme that is no different from capital punishment.
But the real reason the team was not announced is becoming they were using magic , the very magic that created creatures that are causing a headache
Anyway because of through dedication and hard work, Jeruv was successfully launched
They followed a simple procedure. Jeruv would investigate a scene and they would take away the body of the victim .Once they are secluded they would then gather clues from the victim and they would use those clues to trace the wolf and within five to ten days the wolf would be caught.
The apprehended wolf is taken no place other that the island which is was like a prison. Not for the wolf to repent but for others to know what will happen if they replicated the culprit s wrong -doing.
There must have been several measures to ensure the wolves don't escape once they were trapped there but the analogy didn't disclose anything.
Either way, whatever happened in 'the den' was probably not amicable because the wolf was still bad news to humans
With wolves becoming aware of what is happening, the more Jeruv caught wolves, the more others got angry and wanted to erase the human kind . However thanks to the team ,they were very unsuccessful.
Their anger and need for retribution only got them in trouble and headed for the den.
As such because this became a habit for them , to get angry and be rebellious, Jeruv had no trouble sending them to the island.
Eventually a lot of wolves wound up being transferred to the island.
Maybe Jeruv didn't think it through but whenever they transferred wolves to that place they were basically re-uniting several packs. And like human tribes, each pack had its own set of skills through which when all of them are joined together, any enemy must have reserved a seat in the after-life if they dared challenge the wolves.
Despite their differences they were united by one thing and one thing only. Vengeance!!