Chapter 19: Chapter 19. Is Orange Good for Health?
Excitement swept through me as I stood proudly looking at the translucent sword on my right hand. There was no blood attached to it at all. As if after the action was finished the sword went back to its transparent state. I used my fingers and poked the sword. It went through, like it was not there. The sword could recognize me as the owner, the origin of its power. I would never be accidentally hurt by it.
That was a terrific finding.
I deactivated the sword and picked up the marbles. I put them in the container I prepared from one of the stores in the airport. It would not satisfy hunger, but it would provide me with energy. And the energy these tiny marbles provide would be much better than any normal food, vitamins, etc.
Like this, I targeted two more groups.
The last two fights were slightly different as I changed my strategy. I didn't use Earth Breaker against these two groups because I found out that this art was a bit noisy. It produced some crackling noise when my feet were stomping on the ground. And that wasn't the only disadvantage. Earth Breaker had cooldown period. When I first used it, I found out that I couldn't immediately use it again. I had to wait for close to a minute. By then, the fight had finished. So, I thought that I should time it carefully.
Fiery Sword, however, was truly amazing. I admit that it was very eye-catching compared to the other physical weapons because of the greenish luminescent aura, but the sharpness was far beyond them as well. And no, it didn't look like light saber at all. I used a lot less effort to cut through the ordinary purgers with it, the fight ended faster than I anticipated.
Hm, Fiery Sword indeed consumed my stamina to use, but, at the same time, using it meant I could kill the purgers faster and thus helping me conserved my stamina from prolonged fight. Well, there's no free meal. To make a car runs you had to put fuel in it.
I arrived at what was previously the back of the refugee camp. I had to stop here because I was unable to move further. In front of me was no longer refugee camp, it's a camp for the purgers instead. There were so many of purgers it scared me. They were literally everywhere, as far as my eyes could see.
Fighting a group of five or ten purgers was fine for me, but I didn't want to try fighting thousands of them. I hid myself deep and took out my binoculars to check further.
Although some of the tents were damaged, most of them were still intact. I could see splattered blood everywhere. Not sure if I was weird or not, sometimes I wished that I could just see the dead bodies instead of a pool of blood only. Till now, I still could not easily stomach the fact that the blood owners had been fully eaten by the monsters.
If it's any consolation, it's probably a good thing that our heart was the part that the purger wanted the most. It's always their first target. That way, we would always have died before we got eaten. Imagine if their favorite was our left foot. I shuddered at the thought.
The purgers here were ordinary ones. All those that I just killed were ordinary ones. Further to the center, there were more and more yellow-eyed ones. Their number were not mere ten now, but tens.
'Wait a minute!' I stopped moving my binoculars and paid more focus to a certain area where a few purgers were gathering. I specifically paid more attention to the eyes of those few. The color of their eyes were not yellow. They had a deeper, darker hue.
It was orange. The color of their eyes were orange!
The treatment those yellow-eyed gave to these new type was definitely submission. Judging from that, it's safe to assume that those orange-eyed purgers were in higher hierarchy than the yellow-eyed ones. Which translated to me as they being stronger than the yellow-eyed.
Good thing I was careful. Even with Titan Armor and Fiery Sword, I highly doubt my current overall power was enough to handle them. Not to mention that these two skills consumed a lot of stamina.
I wondered if my Fiery Sword could hurt the orange-eyed. I got to try it one day for sure. But before that, I should look for the chance to try it on the yellow-eyed purger first. Not against many of them at once, of course.
Since the purgers needed to consume human to evolve, I assumed there were so many high levels purgers so fast after the Doom was because of the shiny platform created by the female god. The platform was like a cheat code, for both of our sides.
Thinking this far, I remembered Jeong Yewon, Davi, Traikun, Seo Daho, Lt. Yoon, little Han Wonseok, and all the people I met here. What happened to them? Did they make it out of here alive?
Even though I gave the marbles to Jeong and the other three, I didn't think they can make a difference against foes with such numerical advantageous. And I hadn't taken the orange-eyed into the equation yet. Even if it's me, I would be in grave danger and could only resort to running away.
Had I, instead of helping, ended up harming them? I hoped they survived somehow. The kindhearted Jeong Yewon, the strong Traikun and Davi, the nonchalant Seo Daho, the honest guy Lt. Yoon, all of them, I really wished they would be able to lead some people to safety. With them along.
Regarding Choi Dowon and Min Songhee, my hatred toward them was flamed further. I blamed them for what happened to the refugee here. Indeed, I admitted that I had benefited from this incident. Because of those two hateful action, the purgers were attracted to this place and I was able to find the magical platform in an empty camp. If I used my previous planned path, which was through North Korea, I probably wouldn't become a Braver this easy. There's a limit to what I would do, though. No matter how greedy I was about getting stronger, I wouldn't purposely use the innocent lives here as bait only so that I could enter the camp unobstructed.
Since I have no other way to know their whereabout I decided to continue with my own journey. It's not like I could break through a camp of so many purgers anyway. If I could make sure of my grandparents safety I might come back someday. Probably.
I retreated the same way I came. The sun was already setting when I reached the canyon. The far distance of red land was where I would be heading. According to the picture I saw, the land should be connected all the way to my home country.
I hoped the north in the compass was still the same north, otherwise I would be screwed once I was on the new land. Yes, the sun could help, but you see, I didn't plan on travelling much in daylight. The night was now my favorite time.
I climbed down pretty much the same way I did climbing up a few hours ago. After that, I travel northwest. It took me less than an hour to reach the outskirt of the next camp, right after the first abandoned camp. By this time it was totally dark already. Even though I was still a few hundred meters away from their camp, I was very careful. The appearances of those orange-eyed purgers scared me.
I scouted this camp, wanting to know their level of strength. I found out that it was not far from my guess. Many of them were ordinary purgers. Apart from those ordinary ones I could see more than a hundred yellow-eyed purgers. And at the last, several orange-eyed ones. So this was how their group was composed of.
Such composition pretty much shut down any thought I had of farming the marbles from the low level purgers. Why farming? Simple, I needed to level up. Even though the marbles from the ordinary ones weren't as good as the higher level ones for the current me, they're still not totally useless. It's just that the number was staggeringly high. I reckon might need ten thousand of them, if my calculation was correct.
The stronger I became, the bigger my chance to get to my grandparents in one piece. Unfortunately no matter how hard I racked my brain I couldn't find better strategy to get to them faster. I tried calling the landline to talk to them but it wasn't connecting. I got the same result when trying to call our neighbor's landline number.
All this time, I believed that I had a calm personality, but my failure to contact my grandparents drove me nuts. It had been a thorn in my mind.
"Calm down," I told myself. Let's face the problem one at a time. Worrying too much won't do me any good. For now, I should just focus on getting home first.
Since the start of my journey in this new land, it was pretty easy for me to travel without the purgers knowing. I was in the dark, they were the opposite. The fire totems were lighting their camps in abundance. The purgers were usually grouped inside or near the fire totems. Some wandered a bit further, but still within the light. As for me, I made use of the surrounding landscape to my benefit. Be it trees, large rocks, small hills, shrubs, practically anything, I used them to hide my presence.
A curious thought entered my mind. How did they spend their time when they're not purging us? I wondered what exactly were they doing. Were they busy doing it? You know, making little purgers. Were they simply playing cards or practising golf?
Hm, now that I thought of it, I had never saw a female purger before. At least, based on their clothing and physical appearance, they're all male. I couldn't be a 100% sure since I had never taken the time to strip them and checked in more detail. If there were no female purger then where were all the new purger came from? There's so much I didn't know about them.
With the help of the binoculars I could see further into the camp. At the center of the camp, many of those purgers were sitting in circular pattern. There must be more than a thousand. Their lips were moving, as if murmuring something. I could not hear anything of worth from this distance. A yellow-eyed purger were standing at the center. The third and fourth row of circles, encircling the yellow-eyed purger, were consisted of all the other yellow-eyed. The second circle consisted of four orange-eyed purgers.
Shhhh! Shhhh! The wind carried some of their chant when they became louder and louder. However, it's still like a broken whisper to me.
They were certainly doing something, I was sure of it. There something about this activity that somehow attracted my attention, I thought I need to know about it so I kept observing them.
Since they were sitting in a circular pattern, I could only see the faces of some of them. The orange-eyed's hands dipped onto something in front of them and then painted half of their face with brownish color substance.
Hm, this color looked familiar. What was it?
I looked for a tree and climbed up. Now, with more height, I could see better. The moment I saw where they got the brownish substance from, I almost lost my grip on the tree. There were three purgers laying down on the ground between the single yellow-eyed in the middle and the four orange-eyed. That substance was the blood of the three purgers. It was taken from their opened abdomens.
What a freakish ritual!
Aside from being used as paint, the blood from the abdomens of the three purgers were magically swirling in the air, close to the ground, and then crept up into that single yellow-eyed's body. I couldn't tell what level of purger those three belonged to, they had their eyes closed. They're most probably dead with their stomachs opened like this and losing a tremendous amount of blood.
I didn't know how long they have been doing this before I arrived. About three hours after I spotted them doing this, something happened. The amount of blood from the dead purgers had diminished now, nothing else came out and the corpses shriveled like every drop of liquid had been subtracted out of them. The yellow-eyed at the center suddenly screamed. I could hear the scream from where I hid. Its body was trembling. It was probably in agony, but I couldn't be sure since I didn't recognize their expressions that well, I was only deducing based on the scream. And then the purger fell down to the floor, face down.
It took about a minute before the yellow-eyed rised up. Now, it had orange eyes.
'They can do that?' I almost froze. Shaking my head and blinking my eyes didn't change it, the yellow-eyed had became orange-eyed.
Was this really a predetermine advantage the purgers had over us? Which was the reason why the male god, our creator, said that we originally didn't stand a chance to survive. The magical platform was the doing of the female god. It was created after the female god found out about our creator god's meddling. So, I didn't think it was her that did this. Their consuming our hearts and bodies was equivalent to our consuming the marbles from their dead. So, my guess would be that this ritual was their natural way of evolving.
Another explanation was that there existed another god playing with us aside from the two I already knew. Still, the first explanation made more sense to me. Whatever it was, I felt my mood just gotten worse.
I left my hiding spot and walked away. The temperature of the night was actually moderate, but somehow I felt like being plunged into the abyss of ice. It felt really cold. I shivered involuntarily. It wasn't my body that felt the cold, it was my heart. What a screw up world.
After leaving the vicinity of the camp, I checked my direction again and then I started running, taking advantage of the darkness of the night. Sometimes, when my path was near a camp, I switch to walking. Being alone in this new land, the last thing I wanted to face was a group of hungry purgers. This was a bit embarrassing, I realized, but I didn't want to nurture the idiot complex in me where I charged at every obstacle in front of me. What's wrong with avoiding dangers or hiding from stronger enemies, anyway?
For hours, I kept running and walking alternately. I ate a marble when I felt my stamina was near exhaustion.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone