"Ugh! Why does he snore so loud? Is that even physically possible with a 9-year-old body?"
I woke up with a weary body and huge bags under my eyes.
'now What?', I looked at the three kids still sleeping without a care in the world. The day which I thought I would spend simply shopping and learning about the world turned out to be a fight for life and now I was living in a hotel room with three orphans and their Yaksha protectors.
"Klei, come out, I know you are there"
~Talk to me with respect, boy. I'm not your servant~
Even though Klei was pouting, he wasn't acting as estranged as last night when he was ready to kill me at any moment.
"How did Kuryu gang even captured the kids with you there?"
Klei was strong; at least that's how it looked to me who was simply an L2 Sage. Even though the Kuryu Gang Leader was also L2, he was just slightly physically powerful than a Peak L1 Sage.
If Klei and the other two Yakshas were to fight, I had no doubt that the Yaksha would have had an overwhelming victory.
"We weren't there when Rudy and the kids were captured", Klei replied with a slight disappointment.
"didn't you say that Devarshies are decided upon birth?"
I was told that Devarishies, although they have to receive a Diksha in order to realize their powers, can still take help from their contracts.
"Even if being a Devarshi is pre-ordained by the great [way], 'contract' doesn't appear for every potential Devarshi..."
'way? Oh My Natraja, Is it the same as the [way]?' I probably looked like a guy who had just won a great lottery, but Klei ignored my expression and continued his story.
"...I found the kids in Dandakaranya Forest a week ago completely drenched in rain with open wounds and bruises all over their bodies. They probably had been tortured and were scared of even their own shadows."
As Klei continued to describe the story I felt a kind of dark energy swirling up inside me. It was in some way similar to the one Rudy had unknowingly released yesterday.
[*furniture shakes*]
"I should've killed all of them yesterday!!", my body was burning up with the rising anger as the image of the collarbone necklace from the day before came to mind.
~STOP IT HUMAN~, Klei exclaimed telepathically, his voice felt like a blackboard screech, harmless but irritating as hell.
"Huh!?... What!?... Ohh I'm sorry!"
"Keep your powers in control, boy. Jeez! you are like a walking bomb", Klei scolded, "I don't even understand how can someone like you have such dense Prana to begin with?"
"Sorry, I don't know what happened to me just now! I must be tired...", I gathered the rampant Prana into my Root Chakra by sitting in a meditating pose.
"...So you helped them and brought them to the city?", I said with one eye open, still concentrating half my focus on absorbing the Prana.
Klei waited and watched as I gathered all the Prana and absorbed it back into my Chakras, "Uhh hmm, but it wasn't us who helped them though..."
"What do you mean?"
"It was Maricha.", Klei said nonchalantly as if I was supposed to know who or what Maricha was.
'Wait a second! Nah! that can't be true...', an iconic ark of a well-known story flashed in my mind.
In Ramayana, a story of love and sacrifices, Rama, the main character, with his brother - Lakshman, goes to the Dandakaranya forest to capture a golden deer for his wife. However, it is later revealed that the golden deer was nothing but a Demon named 'Maricha', disguised as a Deer to distract two brothers from protecting Rama's wife - Sita.
"What is Maricha?", I asked Klei, not believing that demons were walking on Earth disguising themselves as deers, and even if they were, why would they help anyone?
"The Golden deer of the Dandakarnaya forest what else?", Klei said as if it was common knowledge.
"What?"
"THE. GOLDEN. DEER. OF. THE. GREAT. DANDAKARNAYA. FOREST", Klei mocked as he slowly reiterated his answer, "are you all right? are you losing your mind?"
'What the actual Fuck!?'
-----------
** SOMETIME LATER
"Are you sure, the children would be okay?", Klei spoke to me as soon as we stepped out into the Dandakaranya forest.
"What are you worried about! Your brothers are still there aren't they?", I replied.
"Yes, but I'm warning you human, if something happened to Rudy, You'll pay with life." Klei sounded really worried as if he was their mother.
"Don't worry, Polio will take good care of them, if nothing else, you can trust that he won't harm children."
"Why are you so sure? I could tell that that you two weren't acquainted."
"Will you stop being a worrywart..."
Indeed there was no guarantee that Polio (Bhondu) was the same guy as in my last life.
He was already thirty-plus in this timeline, whereas the first time I met him in my last life was when he was just a teenager. But, from what I had seen in one day, he was trustworthy enough to take care of few children.
'Anyway he doesn't know that Rudy is a Devarshi, it should be fine.', I consoled myself.
"So where do you want to go?"
"To earn some money", I replied with a smile. "Take me to the camp where Rudy and the kids were captured"
As soon as I mentioned the Kuryu Gang's base, Klei's expression changed completely.
'There it is again.' The menacing Aura of red and black intertwining into complete chaos was visible all over the little Yaksha's body.
"Ohh Shit! Sorry. I got carried away. Kaekaekae!" Klei calmed down, as his evil grin turned into a normal smile, all the bloodlust was gone with it.
------------
The small cottage with broken walls and no roof was in complete shambles, it was as if no one had taken care of the cottage for a thousand years.
The vines covering the door frame from its base to the top were black in colour, but as we neared the door the vines turned out to be a shade of dark green I hadn't seen before.
[*eye glows golden*]
~I told you to not use your sixth sense, you are not ready yet!~
"It is fine", I said getting annoyed by the excessive worry Klei was showing. One moment he is ready to kill me, and the other he would act like I was someone important to him.
'Is he bipolar?', I thought.
There was no bleeding like last night, but I could still feel a slight irritation as I continued to use the eye.
"There is no one here!"
~I could have told you that.~ Klei was annoyed, maybe because I didn't heed his advice.
"Where is that Maricha? The only living beings I can sense are bugs and reptiles around here."
Because Klei had said that we can't do anything in the forest without Maricha's permission, he had first brought me to the cottage where we could meet Maricha.
~You think you can find a protector just like that? Thousands of people come to Dandakarnaya every month in search of Maricha, but the ones that have encountered him are less than a hundred in the last ten decades.~
"Didn't you say you knew Maricha?"
~Now you are asking the right questions, kaekaekae~ Klei grinned with an evil smile but didn't do anything except flying around the cottage.
~This place is really important to Maricha. It is the location where the first Golden deer died.~
"How did it die? How long does a Maricha live? Which generation is the current Maricha?"
~Calm down... Jeez! Why are you even interested in Maricha. Let me tell you, there is no way that you can be on friendly terms with Maricha, no human has done that before.~
"Why is that?"
"Tch! ..."
I heard Klei click his tongue as if he had said something he wasn't supposed to.
"Klei, why can't humans make contact with Maricha?", I asked again.
~You just can't, don't ask too many questions. You are annoying. Just know that you are safe, as long as you are with me.~
Klei flew around some more but didn't answer any of my questions. Klei, who otherwise always talked in a boasting tone, was being quiet and that made me worry a little bit.
Although it looked like the Yaksha was flying randomly there was one point in the air he would circle back to after every few seconds.
It looked as if he was doing some kind of ceremonious dance in the air to call Maricha, but I couldn't be sure.
'Why is he flying around that area?'
[*closes and opens eyes*]
The golden eye came out once more, but so came the blood with it.
"Aaahh!!", I screamed in pain right away before I could even deduce the mystery of Klei's flying pattern.
~What the fuck! I told you don't use your sixth sense here. FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! Back away now, QUICK!, GO!!~
Klei shouted, but the sudden pain in the eyes had impaired my hearing to make sense of his trembling voice.
~We are done now!~
~Maricha will be super mad at me for bringing a human here!~
"What...What are you saying Klei?"
I thought I had heard Klei's voice, but it got disrupted in between by weird noises from all around me.
The pain was bearing down on me like rain, slowly but surely drenching my whole body with it. The pain reminded me of the day I had first activated my third eye in the Hell dimension.
'What is happening? Why is my third eye acting out like this?'
The third eye had been quiet for more than a century and hadn't given me any problems when I lived on modern Earth.
[Third Eye] was a power which only I had in the whole of Earth. It was the power that had earned me the encounter with [Natraja] - The God of Art and Time.
It was a power that had taken painstaking training for a hundred years for me to get used to it.
'Why are you hurting me?' The pain kept on rising as if the Third Eye was trying to eat me from inside, I felt both of my Chakra's tremble as if they were being torn apart from within.
~Maricha STOP! You can't do this~
I could hear the muffled sound of Klei, but couldn't make out exactly what he was saying.
~I'm telling y..ou... You..shouldn't...hurt...him ..He.. might be....~
Before I could hear Klei's next words, my brain shut off due to the unimaginable pain. It was the defence mechanism my brain had thought of to deal with the excruciating pain destroying my mind.
*thud...collapses*
I fell facedown onto the ground.