The Ignorant Man

My life as an honorary piece of decoration persisted for a few more days. Just a faint desire to recover plus a bit of sleep turned out to conjure up enough mana to heal my injury. That or eating the sewer monsters actually benefited my recovery, a possibility I preferred not to entertain too seriously.

This morning, after another meal of those vile creatures that tasted annoyingly good, Hallie called off the vines that had been encasing my body from the neck down. I could already tell what she would suggest next. “Here’s an idea. Let’s set off to Meselaris. If any humans are still living and breathing, they’d probably be there, don’t you think?”

From what I had learned about the past world, that city was a paradise without even everyday arguments. A place where anyone was welcome and protected from the harsh outside world. A thriving center for merchants and travelers. So, I could see the reason for us to search for traces of humans there. However, a nagging sensation compelled me to argue. “But our underground village was hidden in the middle of nowhere.”

“Oh, but my triangulation pointed me to Meselaris, only Meselaris.”

Not this again… I ran my usual response. “You can’t possibly sense every human in the whole world.”

“At least in the known world.” Predictable. And a decent point, but I had an ultimate trick to beat her in this verbal battle.

“But what if you missed one?”

Hallie responded with a quiet smile. Actually, this hardly qualified as a reply because this had been her default expression since we had met. But an unease built in my stomach as I could feel confidence spilling from her lips.

As if on cue, a voice cut into our conversation. “It is too inefficient to go off on unlikely possibilities. We should check the most probable locations and then redirect our efforts to reviving the human race.”

It might have been my imagination but Hallie’s grin widened upon Minerva’s interjection.

“What if we missed someone?” I re-emphasized my point.

“We could. But should we prioritize such a remote possibility? Saving the whole species should be our main goal.”

“Since when do you care about restoring humans?”

“It is normal to want to bring back a lost species.”

After a few circular back-and-forths, I just couldn’t bring her to budge. All the while, Hallie patted my shoulder and added, “My, Minerva is making some good points. Maybe let’s listen to her.” The sincerity in her tone almost convinced me that she had no say in this matter and that I should blame Minerva for everything.

“Fine. Let’s check out Meselaris. Then we’ll decide what to do next,” I relented. Hallie had more words to say about how noble my decision was. I simply chose to not listen.

Our journey started anew in the afternoon. With this new beginning came the first time in over a week that I walked again. Needless to say, I stumbled and tripped as much as a newborn would. It took our slow trudge to the edge of the town for me to get reacclimated to basic movements, and the uneven path refused to make things easy. The debris piled up into mounds, and cracks in the stone ground preyed on my lack of coordination. A pity how Emperor Vandemar’s land ended up like this, but I pressed on. I had to.

Speaking of him… “May our journey be blessed like Emperor Vandemar’s battles,” I whispered the same prayer as always.

The rubble of the fractured outer wall had spread outward, making it difficult to pinpoint the border of the town, especially with the weeds growing in. It ended up as simply a gradual transition from disfigured buildings to the equally deformed wilderness. Trees floating or fractured, grass in a vomit of colors, bushes disfigured with unknown bones jutting out like flowers.

“Has the forest always been so scattered?” Minerva glanced at a broken tree as she said it. Even though the trunk had been detached from the stump, the upper part of the tree still levitated at a slant angle with no support, as if gravity didn’t exist.

“It wasn’t.” Hallie pointed upward at the expanse that looked eternally shrouded in a rainbow film. “Maybe it’s the change in the sky. Used to be a lot bluer during the day and darker at night. There used to be celestial bodies too. A bright circle called the sun, and a few less bright circles called moons.”

Now it was my turn to be confused, though I tried not to show it. The sky I knew had always been empty and colorful, only a little dimmer during nighttime. I thought the ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ I had read in books just resulted from mere imagination to fill the blank canvas above.

She kept asking questions during our trip, while also sharing some details of her world and her people, like how she could have a baby with herself, their realm had no nights, and their world had a parasite that could grant souls to plants. These conversations stayed between Minerva and Hallie, with me only as a listener. That wasn’t an intentional effort to exclude, but just the natural course when I had no interesting facts about my people to offer. Neither the lessons I’d gotten nor the books I’d read had anything better than what Hallie could say.

How much did I know about humans?

The peculiar greenery and the sound of the discourse faded away, and I was left with only the sense that I existed as an island to the rest of the world. Disconnected like the trees around me. Drifting meaninglessly without a purpose.

I could have asked Hallie to talk more about the world in the era before, even though every time she talked about past humans, I felt like I was listening to facts about creatures from another realm. Maybe I should have just followed her request and searched for the human essence. I totally could do that. After I got over the fact that I would be staining the glorious human history by being the one to revive the human race…

“Enos.” Hallie’s sweet voice and a pat on my shoulder lifted me from my toxic reverie. I blinked at her, still in a daze.

“What? What’s the matter?”

“Are you alright? I called you a few times already.” Even when she was supposedly showing concern, the cheer in her tone clung on and her smile refused to falter.

“Because you called me Hero.” I took a wild swing at an excuse, and from how Hallie stopped pursuing an explanation, I got it right and managed to justify my trance.

“No need to be so grumpy. Anyhow, we’re almost there,” she moved on to what might have been the reason she sought my attention in the first place, indicating with her finger a distant structure that had emerged from the foggy horizon.

It remained mostly blurry, but the rough shape already showed me an abundance of towers reaching towards the sky, situated along a mountain of sorts, with the tallest one at the very center. I could already spot hints of ramparts tracing the contour of the city, and unlike the town we had departed from, they seemed to have survived the years with no obvious damage. That, or a possibility that spoke increasingly louder in my mind—someone had been maintaining them.

The walls looked smooth at first, but after we pushed through enough of the fog, the wear and tear started to show. Groups of parallel lines etched on the stone from the bottom to the top, seemingly claw marks of unknown age. When the distance between us and the ramparts shrank to only a few steps, I could even notice the pores that riddled the surface.

Besides these blemishes, the basic shape of the walls stood proud and tall against years of weathering, all to shield the city within. The enormous mahogany gates caught my eye in the continuous gray, keeping us out but luring us to confront them at the same time. A final brief stretch of walking took us to the entrance. I ran my hand across the surface of the wood, trying to push it open with no success.

“And you said that the city is abandoned?” Minerva spoke my thoughts, and I had no good answer myself. Meeting another living human became a more plausible possibility the more I’d seen of the city.

Hallie reached out without a word. Vines spilled out from the gap between the doors and latched onto whatever they could. Then the gates were ripped open before my eyes saw them move.

“Why did you do that?” I shouted. Years of history must have been tossed away because of just that one action.

“Come on. We can always repair it later.” Hallie winked at me and stepped in to lead the way.

“She was right. Magic can easily repair this,” Minerva attempted a smile and followed Hallie into the city.

I pursed my lips and held in the flames burning in my chest. They would never get it. They couldn’t possibly understand even a fraction of how it felt. Venting the complaint in my head and taking a deep breath helped calm me a little, and then I crossed the entryway into the city.