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Chapter 212: The Unusual Within The Unusual
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The peculiar thing about this is the fact that they're all empty and what the people in the room doing is simply looking in front of them.
This is a ritual Yasuo is used to by this point because he has gone through it many times... They are eating dinner.
Of course, there is no food within the underground town, thus no dinner to have which only makes it even more peculiar.
The strange scene is something that could be noticed all over the town as each of its people does the same.
They assemble around the dining table and just sit there looking in front of them without a single change in their expression.
Yasuo also noticed something else, it doesn't matter how close the people of the town seem to each other, they rarely interact if ever.
Except for the sound of their footsteps around the town, no other sound could be heard, It was pure bizarre silence.
Well, there is an exception. Yasuo noticed one location where different kinds of sounds could be heard.
He noticed it a long ago, the moment he set foot in the town because the same exact scene was repeating itself since then.
The strange scene of a middle-aged man who looks drunk despite the lack of any wine within the town, he was screaming and spitting a strange dark substance at the other person within the house.
The house wasn't that far from the house Yasuo is living in, and two people live within it.
According to Yasuo's observation through his domain, it's certainly the strangest place in the town with the most unusual people within.
A father abusing his child isn't really that strange because it happens a lot, but it's certainly strange in this town.
Every other person within it has a pattern they follow, seemingly programmed to follow that design perfectly but the exception is the father and his child.
They also follow a pattern but it's completely different from everyone else's behavior, especially once one sees the thing hidden inside the basement of that house.
The father has a simple routine of simply abusing his child, spitting, and hitting the child using a whip with little to no mercy for no particular reason.
After doing so for a while, he carries the unconscious child and throws him into the basement.
Once the child regains consciousness, all he does is crawling towards the thing hidden in the basement.
A naked dead body with an obvious red mark all around its neck, and several whips marks all over its body.
Yasuo knows the body has survived the test of time as it remained in the same shape and form for all the time he has been here and he also knows it remained intact through thousands of years.
That is the body of a dark-haired woman who seems to have a strange face, completely disfigured and broken, not naturally but by what seems to be the hands of her husband.
The child crawled desperately to his mother without a hint of whimpering or any sound to protest the astonishing amount of pain he's feeling.
He held her cold dead hand and slept next to her for the whole day and that small gesture seemed to bring a bright radiance to his existence and a reason to live.
The radiance however wasn't strong enough to overshadow the darkness that is his body because, in contrast to every other netizen of the town who at least have skin, he has none.
The boy was but a bag of darkness without skin to hide the ugliness inside because amidst the darkness is what looks like numerous snake-like bugs crawling around, petite but seems to be multiplying.
At least for the next few hours, that radiance brings a bit of light to the dark house, to the basement, a sense of peacefulness and warmness.
It was however short-lived because the father didn't seem to have any appreciation for that light.
After throwing his child into the basement, he goes to his room to sleep, well, it's not exactly sleeping because the only people that sleep in the town are the boy and his dead mother.
Everyone else simply rests down on their body and looks at the ceiling for a few hours before 'waking up'.
They don't close their eyes or they don't seem to be able to do so, they can't even blink. Their inky eyes are always open.
And that's exactly what the father always does before waking up and going down to the basement.
He opens the door only for the scene of his dead wife and his child warmly sleeping next to each other in an eternal slumber.
That seems to trigger a violent response from him as he stutters his steps to the two and starts hitting them ruthlessly with his whip, the dead mother and the child both.
That seems to always bring the child to the realms of the living as he starts to desperately protect the lifeless body of his mother, at the cost of receiving all of his father's blows.
The father then kicks the child away and focuses on hitting the dead body while shouting some incoherent words, jibberish with no understandable meaning.
The child however doesn't seem to give up as he again hopelessly crawls towards the dead light in his life only to be kicked again.
However, the child never gives up and continues to crawl towards her until the father finally snaps and carries the child out of the basement, closing the door behind him.
He brings the child above and starts to hit him solely for the rest of the day with little to no mercy and attention to the child's life.
Yasuo can however notice something the father doesn't seem to notice. He can see hints of relief within the child's vague and dark face... At least his father won't hit his mother anymore.