9 years have passed since that fatefull day and not much has happened to Everfall city. The days have been calm in the city people could be seen buying and selling things on the street. Anywhere between candy to potions to weapons could be seen being sold.
The common currency between the common folk is copper, silver and gold. ( 1 silver= 100 copper and 1 gold = 100 silver) For the cultivators they use beast cores. Typically only level 1 beast cores are used because highed level cores are hard to come by for the adverage cultivators.
On the streets if one looked closer enough they could see a child walking through the crowd with weird hair and scary looking eyes. This was Aurthur, he had recently turned 9 and was given some pocket money from his father to get some candy.
When Aurthur walked up to one of the stalls he went to pay the man for candy when he heard behind him someone say "Eww look at that child, he must be that adopted son of the Roland family." "Shut it! if someone hears you we could be in big trouble, let's go."
Aurthur looked behind him and watched them walk away with sad look. He always look like this when he was by himself. As the adopted son of a big clan people ridiculed him from him not being a legitimate son and his weird looks.
These days he was starting to get used to the verbal abuse. starting from young Aurthur has always been put through abuse of this kind and much worse. After his eldest brother awakened his martial heart of steal, Harlet went to the martial military school to practice more profound martial arts.
His second older brother Michael had dirt brown hair with browns eyes, and he was at a adverage height. He has been bored ever since he left and would often find Aurthur and "play" with him. During these times Michael would beat him up to release his stress. He often came out bruised from head to toe.
Michael always left a strict warning to him saying " If you tell father or anyone else about this you will wish you were dead." But somehow his older sister Scarlet would find out and thrash Michael.
"How could you Michael! Aurthur is but 9 years old and hasn't even awakened his martial heart yet! you on the other hand are already 17 and have awakened your heart of earth." Scarlet berated him.
Scarlet was a great sister that helped him out whenever possible, with red hair down to her shoulders and bright yellow eyes she was only slightly taller than himself. After she awakened her heart of pure fire on her 10th birthday she was treated like a genius. The family nurtured he extravagantly.
Pure martials hearts were extremely rare. one must know that for the common martial artists they have to go through a cycle to get to there martial hearts. From stained, dirty, watered, clean, fired, then pure martial arts would spend years to get to that stage. So for Scarlet to have one from the start everyone was thrilled.
These days she had less and less time to spend around him and play. Michael took advantage of this and kept beating him up.
Whenever he got away and could escape from everything he would often go over to the Everfall cliff and play around. He always wondered what could be down there. All that he could see was endless darkness.
It always made him curious looking down the cliff. It gave him a weird sense of calm and easiness. The place around Everfall had very few people going near it so it was always peaceful.