Mystical Journey

In the vast canteen, the silver metal tables and chairs were fixed to the ground and neatly arranged on the floor, the clean white walls around them were covered with pictures of ducklings, apples, and pears.

The students sat on the chairs in twos and threes, eating the food on the trays, while others were lining up at the canteen window to bring out their trays.

Garen and Raffaele sat opposite each other on the right end of a long table, the two of them eating the sandwiches on their respective trays, occasionally dipping them into the cheese sauce between them, drinking some of the tomato and potato beef stew.

There was a low buzzing around the canteen, the sound of many people talking reflecting around the empty canteen, mixed with echoes. It felt as though he could hear what they were saying, but after listening closely, all he could hear was a blur.

Garen raised his head and looked at Raffaele sitting opposite him.

"You haven’t answered my question from last time."

"What question?"

"What exactly do you like about me?" Garen picked up a piece of apple with his fork and put it into his mouth.

"Everything, probably…" Raffaele’s expression was completely open, "If I have to choose, it’s probably because you look good, so wouldn’t it be really cool when I bring you out?"

"....."

"Then what other reason do you want?" Raffaele shrugged.

Neither of them said anything more for some time.

Garen felt that this person was slightly strange, she was obviously a girl, but acted like a boy.

"Can you tell me what promise you made with Eeleen and Serin?"

"I can’t tell you that." Raffaele smiled, "But you just need to know that the power of the oath cannot be stopped. This is more than just me and them."

"Is that so?" Garen narrowed his eyes, thinking that he might have to go back and ask his parents about these secrets of the town. The two of them had lived here for so long, they might know some of the mysteries here, more or less.

This secret might very well involve his potential points problem.

"Let’s go play ball after eating, I have a girl friend waiting at the court for me, you can cheer me on then." Raffaele still acted as though all this was completely natural.

Garen wanted to know more about her too, to get into the secrets of the place, so he just nodded and did not refuse.

After eating, they went to the court for a game or two of basketball, and after class in the afternoon, Garen was escorted home by Raffaele, Raffaele insisted on sending him all the way home, just like how a boy would send his girlfriend all to way to the gate of her house.

At home, he played with Vivien, who kept calling him Big Bro adorably, and finally waited until his parents returned home one after the other.

In the study during the evening, Garen distracted his older brother and younger sister, sitting alone as he looked at his mother opposite him, her expression confused.

"Is there something up? You look so serious, just like a little adult." His mother Trish laughed, reaching out her hand to pinch Garen’s face. "Alright, did you get bullied at school?" She asked gently.

Shaking his head, Garen avoided his mother’s hand.

"Mom, I wanted to ask, is there some ancient traditional oath in this town, that you must obey after you promised to make it?"

"An oath?" Trish thought about it, perplexed, "It’s been many years since we moved here, true, there is something like a ritual here, only the locals will follow it, as outsiders who moved here, we’ve only heard it but haven’t actually seen it. They call it something like the Oath of the Ancestors."

"A ritual?"

"Mn, more or less, the locals treat it like a very formal and solemn thing, their ancestors are something that you must be careful around, you can’t even joke about it, if you swore at someone using their ancestors, for example, it might end up costing your life." His mother Trish told him straight-facedly. "Oh yeah, I hear a girl is pursuing you? And she’s really pretty to boot? Is that so?"

Seeing his mom’s face instantly turn mischievous, Garen also figured that he would not get any more information from her. After talking for so long, she had basically said nothing.

His mom’s expression seemed to really not know anymore, so he had to give up on her end.

After chatting idly with his mom for a bit longer, Garen left the room. He grabbed his computer notebook, a birthday present from his dad last year.

Hammering out a line of words on the keyboard, he entered a web address into the search engine.

There were many hits about oaths, so to reduce the range, he added a space and once more typed in America, Grano.

Smack.

He pressed the Enter button, and there were only five results left on the screen.

It was an oath from something like a religious ritual, four of them were local public ritual oaths, and one was the oath students made to the national flag, swearing to uphold the American spirit.

He read all the information about the religious rituals carefully, they were all public affairs, rituals that required many items in preparation beforehand, and they were either for the spring harvest or fishing, or an event for a holiday, with no other worth whatsoever.

Turning off the computer, Garen sat by his bed and mused. In this town, many of the women, especially the local women, all had a special common secret, a secret that was ancient, solemn, and one that everyone seemed to obey the rules to.

"Looks like the best way to get to the bottom of this is to use my relationship with Raffaele… once we get close enough, many secrets won’t be secrets anymore…"

His life after that did not change much from before, the only difference was that the two girls who had always stuck with him, Serin and Eeleen, became just one girl, Raffaele. Raffaele would run over here every day, precisely on time, to meet and send Garen to school, occasionally giving him some little presents, which were always decent old gadgets and little antiques. Garen wanted to chat up Serin and Eeleen several times, but they kept avoiding him, so he had no choice but to give up.

The days passed one after the other, and he slowly got used to Raffaele’s existence as well.

Sometimes he would give Raffaele some little items back, and their relationship began to grow warmer, like best friends but also like lovers.

To children like them, their completely unchanged lives passed by extremely fast.

Slowly, Eeleen and Serin gradually faded from Garen’s vision, and his relationship with Raffaele became better and better. He was never someone to approach others himself, pursuing his own target, so he had no time to get to know the people around him. But the type who approached him of their own accord, such as Raffaele, slowly became an exception for him.

There was not much difference between his junior high life and his elementary school life, the only thing was that the students grew up slightly faster, and their thought processes were slightly more mature.

Garen practiced his secret technique every day, but his power stayed on the second level, his progress was extremely slow, and he had subtly asked Raffaele about the buck badge several times, but every time she just said that she did not know, only her grandma would know more about it. This made Garen, who was basically stuck where he was, more and more curious.

*********************

On the bright blue sea, the golden-red waves of twilight kept rippling about.

A beach a hundred kilometers away from Grano.

On the pale yellow beach, a golden-haired boy in his early teens was walking slowly toward the ocean, wearing nothing but black swimming trunks, his clothes tossed far away on a black coral rock.

The boy had handsome features, with a hint of gentle androgyny, giving off a feeling of tender weakness. He was obviously a boy, but somehow he had a gentle beauty that made people want to protect him.

He walked toward the seawater slowly, step by step, his feet getting submerged, followed by his calves, then his knees, thigh, stomach, chest.

In an instant, wisps of ink-black mist extended from his body, spreading everywhere with the tide.

The mist was like ink, rapidly dying the water around the boy black.

The boy seemed completely oblivious to it, however, continuing to walk towards the depths of the sea.

Strangely, the seawater that had reached his chest did not go any higher than that, even as he left the shallows and walked towards the depths, the water level did not budge at all, reaching his chest and no further than that.

Whoosh!!

Suddenly, there was the rippling of waves on the surface of the sea nearby, and two triangular fins rushed toward the boy from the distance. Under the mixed blue surface, there were two large blue-black giant sharks, they swam towards the boy rapidly, their fins cutting through the waves like submarines, drawing out two lines of white waves behind them.

Just as the fins swam into the black water around the boy.

The boy’s weakness changed abruptly, his hands as pencil-straight as two sharp knives, stabbing down into the water hard.

Psst!

The two giant sharks exploded abruptly with two popping sounds, becoming two chunks of bloodied meat, the bloody water was quickly integrated into the black water territory around the boy, the color of bright blood quickly covered by the black, and then everything returned to the same peaceful scene at the very beginning.

Garen raised his hands, frowning.

"The progress is too slow…" He sighed.

The Black Claw of Sethe’s power had already achieved the same level as a Grandmaster of Combat, and his current body was already capable of just barely releasing his aura, so he had indeed recovered some of his power.

But the laws of this world are different, it seemed that he could no longer fully condense his aura, and even at his current state, he could only insert his aura into an item and then use that to influence other external objects, he could no longer simply release it as he used to, and overwhelm the enemy with it alone.

But this way, he merged his aura into the water, and into the air, turning it into something ordinary people could see as well, and not just something only for the eyes of Grandmasters of Combat. It was just that this required a lot of energy, and right now Garen could only sustain this aura release for ten minutes max, the area covered by his aura included a radius of about ten meters with him in the center, within these ten meters, any and all creatures that enter this area would be subjected to a terrifying psychological illusory pressure, while at the same time the materialized Black Sethe Insidious Palm Power would also seep into the enemy’s body together with his aura, slowly weakening the opponent’s vitality and speed.

Right now, rather than saying his aura was a product of the merging of his spirit, it was more like a pure poisonous gas released from Garen’s body. This poisonous gas had a powerful hallucinatory effect, and could even weaken the opponent’s vitality and speed, plus it was soluble in water.

"Garen! You went into the water again!" Far away on the beach, a slender golden-haired girl was waving at him hard. "Come up to shore, there’s something I want to tell you."

Garen turned around to look, it was Raffaele, he was very into training these days, so he would ride his motorbike to the beach for a swim every day after school, but in truth, he was practicing his application of the Black Sethe’s Insidious Palm Power.

This secret technique seemed to truly be an evil technique, it could actually absorb and dissolve the blood and flesh of other creatures, external blood and flesh even boosted his palm power significantly. Since randomly hunting and killing in the forest might attract unwanted attention, he decided to go further away, and ended up training here in the ocean, so no one actually noticed anything at all.

As an evil technique, the Black Sethe was unique in its poison and also its potent ability for camouflage, perhaps even Grandmasters of Combat at the same level as him would not be able to sense that Garen was using any secret technique power at all. That was also something Garen was extremely satisfied with.

Garen quickly pulled back the poisonous mist that had melted into the surrounding seawater, and turned around, heading back to shore.

His movements were extremely natural, the lines of his body unnaturally gentle, and with every stroke, his body would swim ahead quickly, like a fish.