Grab

The three wisps froze in their flight like northern winds batting frost onto a snowy mountain peak. Burdensome thoughts waterlogged their flames as their unified gaze fell on the soft voice that beseeched them. This voice belonged to a child. A mortal, human, skinny-to-the-bone, wimpy child. Still, as wimpy as the child appeared, the timbre of his voice exuded an uncanny authority. Uncanny for it accomplished a feat not possible for many—conjuring the attention of Heaven Realm's unruliest.

But more surprising was the predicament this child was in. He spoke the language of gods with such fluidity, too fluent yet appeared nowhere near being ethereal, or for the least, nowhere respectable. The child was on his knees, and bruises had already peppered its caps. In his arms, he balanced books that weighed more than his limbs.

He was being punished.

What a coincidence. Riven thought.

So were they. 

After a momentary pause of astonishment, the three wisps reached a silent consensus. There were no signs of Flaura, nor any signs from above. They might as well examine this mortal closely, and satiate their need to scratch the itch of curiosity.

Caelum, the wisp better quipped to holding conversations with mortals, flew in a beeline movement. He spun around the young boy, checking, scrutinizing, putting his centuries of mortal studies into better use. "You can see us?" The boy's pallid eyes traced Caelum's path. Though curiosity lingered in its depths, exhaustion peered out as well. "Of all the young maidens... the prettiest of flowers, the handsomest of men... only a scrawny child can see us?"

The tone of Caelum's voice failed to mask his displeasure, though he did not try for a bit to conceal it. He was genuinely upset. Having roamed the land of mortals for centuries, he lucked out being noticed by a scrawny kid.

The kid's eyes became half-lidded. Hints of disdain swirled in its depths as he regretted the words he had spoken. Kneeling was hard enough, why did he look up and call out to these wisps and got himself into more trouble. This punishment waa trouble some enough. Why had he conjured more trouble dor hinself. An exasperated sigh escaped his cahpped lips, let out a sigh, breathing heavier as his limbs fell stiff from the weight of three leather-bound books. He averted his gaze, hammering them into the cobblestone ground as if the bright balls of light hovering above him no longer existed.

"It's too late to pretend you can't see us now, kid." A colder, heavier voice rang in his ears.

Unlike the first ball of light that flew around the kid as soft as a spring breeze, barely letting its presence known, the second one was a knife to his neck—a cold spike of icy gust. It brushed past the kid's hair, the inky locks that curtained his sunburnt face shoved to the side, revealing early signs of dehydration from his sunken cheeks and flaky skin.

Riven flickered. His proficiency in medicine was immediately unearthed upon laying sight on this boy—three thousand years of dormancy proved his knowledge no less brilliant. He knew a patient when he saw one. "Another hour and you're a goner." He told the boy who looked up once again, drawn to his commanding voice. "You need water, kid."

The kid remained silent. Hesitant to speak. After deliberating, he spoke. "I only get water when I finish these book."

Three leatherbound, several hundred-paged books bore its weight on his bony arms. Faintly, the wisps noticed an iota of spiritual essence beneath its pages. These books were ancient—not the type to serve its purpose as weights for punishments.

"The hell are these?" Caelum leered at the topmost book, scrutinizing the inked characters written in human script. "Dual Cultivation for Infants? Interesting!"

His remark besought the other wisp's attention. Both appalled by what they heard, they rushed to surmise the books themselves.

Lucius displayed irritation upon surmising the words embedded on the aged leather. If he had hands, they'd be rubbing his temples. Not only was Caelum wrong, he was downright demented. "You idiot!" He hissed. "It's just Cultivation for Infants. What do you mean Dual Cultivation? How your filthy mind would even register that—"

"Shameless!"

"Whoops, my bad. Could've sworn I saw those extra characters earlier."

Riven observed the boy. If he were to die in an hour, might as well get their hands on information. It was out of his hands if this boy succumbs to dehydration. He was a doctor but it was oit of his hands—he didn't even have hands.

"Cultivation for infants," Riven repeated the words to himself, incredulous. How dumb must this kid be to fail a book for infants? He snorted. "You're real dumb, aren't you? I can see why you're being punished."

The boy let out a sigh, not for his labored physique, but out of exasperation. As if he'd exhausted not just the people around him but also himself for being stupid. "Cultivation for infants? Is that what it says?"

"And you can't even read?"

"Worse," the boy replied almost instantly. "I can't understand a single word they all say."

As funny as it should have sounded, not one of the wisps laughed. Instead, a cold shudder enveloped them like a bad premonition. They stole glances among themselves. Immortals; gods, demons or ghosts easily grasp the human language like the back of their minds. It came to them naturally, like a second language already imprinted to their cores. Only one in several hundreds of thousands failed to grasp this second language terribly. The three wisps themselves, have only ever met one. To make things more complicatedly thought-provoking, this condition was already uncommon among immortals. For it to manifest on a mortal was even more uncanny.

Who was this boy? Was he simply plain stupid? Several conherent questions surged through their thoughts.It was an understatement to consider them restless. The very entity who demoted them had the same inability to understand mortal language, afterall.