Chapter 1568: The Truth
Nirun cried from the pain he felt in his body and the fear he felt in his heart. He was in too shocked to even properly think of anything else but just nod.
“Great!” Ning dropped the man onto the bed. “Then tell me, how did you fix your issue?”
Nirun took two short breaths before asking, “What issue?”
“Sparkless. I was told you were Sparkless just 2 years ago, and now you are completely healed, moving around rocks as though it is nothing. I need to know how you did it.”
Ning hoped he would get an answer from this man and not some ‘a mysterious figure did it.’ He wanted to heal Katie and then go from there to heal other people too.
Too many people killed themselves after becoming Sparkless and Ning wanted to fix that, if that was the only other thing he did in the 6 years he would be staying here.
“I didn’t…” the man trembled as he answered. “I didn’t get healed.”
“Huh?” Ning looked down at him. “What do you mean? You’re clearly healed.”
“No!” the man quickly shook his head. “I was never Sparkless. I lied. We lied.”
Ning paused and looked down at the man with all seriousness. “Explain.”
“It was a ruse. We made it seem like I had become Sparkless so that I could go help make Dust without anyone questioning my whereabouts. I was never actually Sparkless.”
Ning stared at the man with complete disbelief. “What the fuck? So everything was a lie?”
How many people had this man managed to spread the lie to? Even Captain Redaime remembered his name and could tell that he had once been Sparkless. The news had traveled through many channels reaching far and wide.
And it had all been a sham.
“You said ‘we’,” Ning repeated. “Who is we?”
“My captain and the leader you met. They worked together to come up with the plan,” the man answered, hiding nothing.
“Your captain…” Ning said slowly. “Captain Dalaan?”
“Yes!”
“Very well,” Ning said. “I have received the answer I needed. You can go back to sleep.”
The man stared at Ning, unable to come to terms with what had just happened.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Ning said. “Go to sleep on your soft bed. You won’t be getting that starting tomorrow. Today is your last free day in this world.”
Ning walked over to a mound of rock and lifted one away to sit on it. He leaned next to it and looked at the man. “What’s wrong? I told you to sleep,” he said.
The man gulped slowly, unable to maintain any consistent thoughts in his mind. The fear alone made everything that was about to reach his mouth vanish from his mind.
“Don’t worry,” Ning said. “You won’t miss me. I will be right here when you wake up again.”
There was no way Nirun could sleep now. He lay on his bed, trying to close his eyes, but the entire bed shook as he trembled in fear. He didn’t know if at any moment the man would come and kill him.
There was no safety here, no assurance that he would be alive by the time he woke up if he went to sleep now. Not with this monster inside his room.
Perhaps because he was on his toes the entire time, Nirun’s tired body gave out at some point and he ended up falling asleep.
When he woke up next, it was because someone shook him away. When he slowly opened his eyes, Ning’s face was above him.
“Aaah!” he screamed out loud the moment he saw Ning. And then he screamed some more as he remembered what had happened earlier today.
Ning waited for the man to calm down and finally said, “Dress up quickly. It’s almost night.”
Ning turned to leave, but before he got out of the door, he turned back around one last time. “I will be around at all times. Any word of what happened here leaks out and you don’t want to know what the next thing will happen to you.”
He gave a wicked little smile. “Maybe I’ll turn your heart into stone so you slowly die. Or your lungs into lead so you cannot breathe,” he said. “So many possibilities.”
He finally left.
Virun remained in the room for a while, simply stunned. He didn’t know whether to believe everything that had occurred today was real or not. After a while, regardless of what had happened, he needed to leave.
Virun quietly arrived at the leader’s place and entered the alleyway to the side. He quickly pulled out of the ground from there, entering the secret underground room.
No one had come just yet, so he sat there, letting his mind process everything he had seen happen today. How could he have lived? How could he have been so strong? How was any of that possible?
He wanted to warn everyone about Ning, but his final threat got him shaken. He did not want to say anything at all. Not to a man that powerful.
Nirun waited around for a while and finally heard loud thumps from above him. He opened up the ceiling and let four people into the room.
The leader clapped his hands. “Alright, let’s get started.”
The clumps of Dust were ready to be processed. They all took large metal picks and broke apart parts from the clump before putting it into the machine at the side.
It pulverized the clumps, bringing out fine Dust that they could sell. The two girls began gathering the Dust that came out and weighing it on another machine to the side.
Once all 50 kilos were gathered, they stopped.
“That’s it for today,” the leader said. “Let’s go get these things to City 8. You can then take the rest of the night off.”
Nirun grabbed one of the bags and the other man who had finally come after all these days grabbed the other one, and then they left the underground.
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