As we walked away from the castle, the castle gates fell behind us and no one stopped us from leaving, as if we were thrown away after use.
After a while we got to the city as we walked among the people, studying them, I'd had this doubt from the start. was this really just a world in a book, or did these people actually live here? Is it an actual world ? If this place was real, then the questions linked to it just multiplied...
" Everything is mess ! "
After giving some thought to my question i pushed all those thoughts aside, for now what i needed to focus right now was to survival
Looking at jaipa i sighed
"Jaipa ! I said with a little high voice
"Don't just look at stalls....I told you to look for the well ? "
"Hey, what do you think I'm doing? He responded like i was the one who was slacking off and what was more to it was his voice full of confidence
" I'm just looking for the well i don't even glance at the stalls," he protested while wiping saliva off with his sleeve
"... OKAY....you're doing a great job Continue the hard work of yours."
Shaking my head i wandered around the streets, then we saw everything that could be seen in the real world, as if it was telling me it wasn't a fabricated world. And with that, I got a question
"Why?"
"Why the hell is it trying so hard to convince me that this isn't a fabricated world ?"
I was still in the middle of thinking when a voice disturbed my thoughts ringing loudly
"Hey, Rudra! Come here!"
Jaipa was standing near a stall, repeating my name again and again until I got there He had called for me several times like a little kid calling for his parents in need
Looking at him, I asked, "What is it?"
" Come closer ! "
When I got closer i took a look around and at last at the stall, there was a old man wearing blue and white clothes was sitting beside it, selling items I looked at Jaipa again "What is it?
He directed his eyes making them wide to the items which were laying on the stall then he continued to point his looking at him
I took a careful look at the items, after just few seconds i observation i could feel a faint energy leaking out of most of them
With a little suprise i got close to Jaipa and whispered to him, "Are those ? "
"Yes ! those are magical items," he whispered making a wired face then a third voice spoke. "Yes, these are magical items, kid."
Hmm ?
I looked at that old man turning my head to left after a while i asked him about few items that had caught my interest, like a pair of clothes, Answering me, he said those clothes could fix themselves after getting damaged, and it was the best thing I could have for me, who would constantly fight monsters. At one point, my clothes would be torn to pieces, and for me, it was the best thing i could have
After giving it thoughts
"How much is it?"
" Hmm....Forty monster cores"
Monster cores ? I repeated those words
Then i whispered to Jaipa, "Do you know anything about 'monster cores'? Or is he referring to the mir stones?" Jaipa nodded his head saying he doesn't know about that
Turning to old man i bluntly asked the what were those monster core that he was referring the way i asked he looked at me in silence for a while and then he asked, "Are you not from here ?"
"Aha we are but...aha..we are " jaipa said this words then
Without answering him, I stared at him After a while, then he moved on from that question as he had gasped my intentions, as he explained what a monster core is
" It a crystal that exists in a monster's body as there life source slaughtering it you can extract it from its body and sell them
Then i asked him if a monster cores could increase physical abilities or anything like that. He denied it, saying monster cores can only be used by a magician of the magic tower and that's when I came to understand
Monster cores and mir stones had completely different concepts. For monster cores, we could extract them after a monster's death, but for mir stones, we needed to get them out while the monster was still alive for its essence to remain intact.
I asked him about a few more items, like a charm and a flute as the charm was leaking energy, on other hand that flute didn't have any energy at all even then, I just wanted to have something like that
Talking of that old man he was a weird one. Knowing we didn't have those monster cores, he kept explaining the things I asked him about, and the weird thing was he had a smile on his face
Most of the time, I wouldn't even care even if a person was dying right before my eyes, but right now, I was about to ask him why he was smiling and so I did
"Why do you keep smiling even after knowing we couldn't buy anything from you?"
He smiled and gave me a answer a simple yet complicated words, saying, "Looking at you, I remember my grandchildren. They resemble you quite a bit, asking me again and again about stuff."
"Was that the reason for your smile?" I asked with flat tone
"That's the only reason for my life seeing someone's you love smiling is worth living for " he said
I muttered his words. "That's the only reason for his life, huh... What a weird old man." With that one sentence i remembered how much different of a person I am , when i was about to head forward, but before I moved thinking i could just ask this old man about the well.
"Hey, old man " Ha !
"Me ? That old man looked suprised by my words
" Me a old man... brat?"
" Humans and there fantasy over there old age " muttering to myself i asked
"Do you know any wells nearby by any chance?"
That old man looked at me for a while,then he gave me few directions to all the wells in the city and of course, I could remember them perfectly " my memory and face are the most good-looking things there are "
"What's he doing now auditioning for a horror drama ?"
With the directions, we headed toward our first well.
As we walked for a while, Jaipa called out, "Rudra!"
"Hm?"
"Aha...How are we going to know ? Which is the right well ?"
"I don't know. We'll just find the most unusual-looking one." With that, we came across our first well. It was a round, waist-high stone structure, weathered by time and covered in moss and ivy. A wooden or iron pulley hung above it, holding a rope tied to a cracked bucket. The stones were rough, damp to the touch. With these details, I knew it wasn't our well—it was just too normal.
In search of another well, we headed off to find a new one. After coming across it, it was also a normal one. That's how we searched most of the wells in the city, and none of them looked unusual. With a few remaining wells, we headed their way.
While wandering around, we found a well beside a fallen house it was in a middle of ground could i even call it a ground it was like a little battlefield
As we got close to the well, it looked
normal !... Too normal, not like the rest of the world. When we looked at it that specific place looked different not painted in red colour like rest of this word, it looked how it should look in the real world like were i came from.
As we got closer to it, I became confident this was the well we were searching for as we got there and looked inside, it wasn't that deep of a well , but still, it was at least fifteen feet deep and two meters wide and It didn't even had a drop of water
I looked at Jaipa and said, "This is the well ! "