Chapter 1623: Family
Ning and Shara sat opposite each other in a reclusive diner that served some good barbeque and a load of other dishes.
They ordered what they could eat, which came to around 36 copper coins, and began eating.
The entire meal was in one place in the center and they picked what they wanted to eat. Shara had never tasted something so rich and delicious in a long time.
“Grandma used to cook this type of fried meat on different occasions when I was small. It was the tastiest thing I ever tasted,” Shara said, tears filling her eyes. “These remind me of those.”
“When was that?” Ning asked.
“A long time ago,” Shara said. “Nearly 6 years ago.”
Ning thought for a moment and nodded. For a kid like her, 6 years would be a long time indeed.
“Why did she stop cooking?” Ning asked.
“She fell from the stairs one day and broke her hip. The doctor said she couldn’t walk anymore after that. She was already very old at that time, so that only made her weaker.”
“I had to take care of her after that, and she started catching diseases. We didn’t have the money to…” Shara paused. “She would’ve been fine if she told me we had money.”
The realization made the situation worse for her. If only she knew there were gold coins in her home, she could’ve taken her grandmother to a healer. Alas, she never knew.
“Why did grandma never tell me?” she asked.
“She most likely wanted you to make the most with those gold coins. She loved you, so she decided to let you use it,” Ning said. “Make your life better.”
“But… I would’ve been okay with being poor if she was still alive,” Shara said.
Ning sighed. There was no way to say what the grandma did wasn’t right. But there was no way to say that it wasn’t wrong either. She loved her granddaughter so much that she turned into a Spirit to let her know about the gold coins.
“Don’t worry about it now,” Ning said. “Your grandma left something for you, so make the most of it.”
Shara nodded.
“Speaking of that, what about your parents? Are they not around?” Ning asked.
“I don’t know my parents. They died in an accident when I was young,” she said.
“What sort?” Ning asked.
“I’m not sure,” Shara said. “Grandma said something about their carriage falling off a cliff in the south near the Kingdom of Lenes.”
“Oh,” Ning said. “They were travelers? Merchants?”
Shara shrugged. “Grandma never told me much about them. She would change the topic every time I asked, so I stopped asking altogether.”
“And your grandma only had one child?” Ning asked.
“Yeah,” Shara said. “Apparently grandfather died after my father was born too, so he was all she had.”
“I see,” Ning said. He felt so very bad for the poor girl.
“Let us stop talking about these depressing matters for now. We should be enjoying ourselves. Dig in. I know you are hungry, have some more of this.”
Ning pushed some more food onto her plate, pulled a chicken leg for himself, and started chomping on it.
Shara chuckled and started eating just the same as Ning as well.
* * * * * * *
Back in the Spirit Department, the white-haired old man sat in a room, thinking. He had confirmed that Frank was in fact gone. From what he could tell, he had been gotten rid of entirely. It was not even Exorcism at that point.
An Exorcist was supposed to soothe and heal a broken or vicious Spirit and then get rid of it. For that, the Exorcist needed to be able to sense spirits, which the girl could not.
“She cannot see spirits, so that takes out Spirit Detective and Spirit Channelers too,” he thought. “Not a Necromancer either, and Frank was destroyed when we tried to test if she was an Overtaker, which shouldn’t have happened.”
He frowned. “What is she then?”
The door opened and the bald man from before walked in, carrying a few different books. “These are all the books I could find that have anything to do with what we are looking for.”
The old man looked at the books one by one. Some were records about the past, some were information about the Spirits themselves.
Looking through, he flipped the books one by one, looking for a specific set of conditions that could make it true.
Someone who could destroy Spirits, but could not sense it see it, and could get powers like a regular Spirit Awakener. Those conditions had to label something specific.
They searched back and forth, searching for it.
“I found something,” the bald man said, quickly taking the book to the old man. “Here!”
He pointed to a paragraph that spoke of a man on a battlefield. The context surrounding the man was slightly different from a regular Spirit Awakener, but the old man could see that the man had powers but could not see or sense spirits.
There was no part in destroying spirits, but that part was somehow less important than the other two. The old man read the place where the battlefield had been and frowned.
This was tens of thousands of kilometers away, in another country entirely.
“Let’s keep searching. Maybe, we can find anything else,” the old man said and went back to work. The bald man nodded and kept searching, but even at the end of the day, he could not find anything at all.
“This is the best thing we’ve found,” the bald man said, referring to the individual on the battlefield.
The old man nodded. “But this man was alive during the war nearly 70 years ago. He must be dead by now,” he said, with a frown. “Whatever, see if you can contact the Spirit Department in the Golhlog Empire. Ask them about this war and see if the young lady’s power is something similar to this man.”
The bald man nodded and got to work.
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