The skill points that were saved were finally spent. Ajay used his points to update his 'cloud ship' and Dhvani used the points to buy a simulated illusion house. Now she lived in the magnificent white space but unlike the previous times, she had a beautiful courtyard house. But the furniture in it was lacking. How much can she expect to buy from 10000 points anyway?
Ajay was very much satisfied with the cloud upgrade. The cloud was like a cute cat, fluffy and soft, it acted coquettishly, played with him, and it changed colors too. It was too comfortable. He just wanted to lay on it and watch some movies. But it would take a long time for that to happen as he couldn't take it to the real world.
Satisfied, with the rewards, both of them started their work. Ajay visited the Supernatural base for his imminent briefing. It was boring for Dhvani, so she decided to shut herself in for quite a long time. She only came out when she received a strange signal.
She noticed Ajay sitting with another guy and they happened to be asking a girl something. It felt like they were interrogating about some strange sightings. She wasn't as interested in their interrogation as the new colleague she found.
It was like a system signal but unlike her, it was not artificial intelligence. She was instantly fond of it because of the soft voice transmitted to her in the signal. As she opened the communication channel with it, they entered a common system space. She found him, a chubby boy of five, wearing leaves as an article of clothing. So her hunch was wrong. Not a system but a human. Though he looked rather cute in his designer leaf clothes, Dhvani decided to give him clothes of this era. She had a large collection. The system perks gave her unlimited access to clothing after she joined the server, it was a kind of server benefit, so she found him a little suit. He looked adorable and she didn't have any resistance to his looks. He was a cute child. Considering that he was still learning about the world, he wouldn't act like a bad kid.
He had large green eyes and golden hair and he looked like a doll honestly. If she braided his hair, he would be the prettiest angel in the world.
"What is your name?" She asked him after getting him to sit on the armchair.
"I don't know. But I gave myself a name. Am I good?"He said with childish arrogance.
This spiked her interest even more.
"Tell me, then!" she urged him.
"My name is Tarsh, "He jumped from the chair, answered her, and then gave her a bow.
She picked him up and settled him once again on the armchair.
"What are you doing here?" she gently asked what was on her mind.
"I don't know. I woke up and I was in this deep white place and I was bored. I waited and waited and waited. After going out a few times, I decided to wait if someone answered my signal. Now I saw you answered it so I came out to talk."
So he was in his system space-like thing and never bound himself.
"How did you stay with that lady then?" She asked thinking about the girl who was responsible for their meeting.
"I felt good with her so I followed her through her family heirloom. I am right."
"What can you do then? You said you went out a few times?"
"I can see people everywhere. Some are black, red, and white. They follow me and become gold and then poof, they burst into flowers and leave." He talked while nibbling some biscuits he got out of nowhere. She was feeling envious that he could still eat when his words suddenly dawned on her.
"Who do you see?"
Even becoming a system would not lessen her fear of ghosts. It is the unknown that always haunts us. That's why the kid looked at her with a kind of 'I can't believe what you are saying?' expression.
She never wanted to see the other side of the visual world in the Metaphysics sense. It is funny how much you never know about your world. It is like being surrounded by air. It doesn't mean it is not there if you can't see it. She saw many ghost movies but she only considered them while sleeping at night. Daytime seemed to dilute all these fears.
She just felt that the life she lived before was utterly secluded. She never knew the existence of systems, spirits, and parallel worlds. She knew them in a fictional way, like in books and movies. There are theories of their existence but she never got proof. So she thought of them as a fantasy. But getting these facts thrown in the face was sort of unreal. You never acknowledge these things even if they smacked you right in the face. You can ignore it once, twice, or even hundreds of times, but it will still keep smacking you till you try to face it.
"So who are those spirits? Did you ever talk to them?"
She dreaded the answer almost as much as she expected it.
"Yes. Only a few of them know how to speak but I like Sister Feather. She knew so much. She told me many things."
"What did she say?"She seemed to be brought into the conversation and was invested in this particular topic.
"She gave me food and asked me to not wander outside. She also told me that my job was to guide spirits to the otherworld so I should study hard. And then she left me a book and then she went away in a flash of light," he said in a sad tone.
She could see how much he liked this Feather sister.
"Do you still have the book?"
He then waved his hands and a book appeared in front of her. He could also control space and levitate things. She needed skill points for these powers.
The book was nothing but a set of longitudinal leaves shaped like pages and held together by a brittle gold wire. It was not clear to her how the thin wire held those heavy pages. And as she touched it, she felt a buzzing in her mind, and soon she saw the words getting highlighted line by line on the green leaf. She also saw that the leaves were still intact even after the passage of centuries.
The life and work of Sage Anant
She found she could only read the life part of this book. The cute boy, on the other hand, could read the other part too. As she turned the pages, he kept reading to her aloud. But when she reached the empty pages, he still kept reading. She first thought that he was making up words because children have these quirks. So she asked him not to talk gibbering when he gave a confused look.
"I'm reading the book, sister."
"You are talking meaningless words," she answered back.
"But I'm reading the words in the book."
"There are no words in the book."
"There are. See the first chapter is about spirits."
Now, it finally dawned on her that she can't read the book and even if someone read it to her, it wouldn't make any sense to her. Double insurance from spying on the book from people who had not gotten permission from the book.
Considering it had knowledge related to spirits, she didn't feel bad about her not being able to look. It should be that Tarsh could see spirits which was a requirement for the book to open. She believed her talents lay somewhere else.
So she gave him the book back. He happily put it somewhere, maybe in space. She then asked the million-dollar question.
"Where did you get these biscuits and chips?"
"I took it from a rack?" He had a question mark on his face.
"You can go out?"
She thought he was like her, confined to system space. But now he says that he can go out. She never thought someday she would be insanely jealous of a five-year-old kid. And that's when she understood that he wasn't a system like her but something completely different. He was a boy who could see spirits. He could make them reincarnate or strengthen them. But who he was exactly, she didn't know.
"Did you pay for it?" She then asked the next question.
The kid didn't look like someone who had money.
Seeing the continuous puzzled look on him, she finally concluded that she should teach him how things work.
And that's how they made a ten-page list of places he took food from for the past two years. Dhvani facepalmed when she found them on the internet because those places became well-known haunting places. The haunting incidents only described how food went missing from the racks. It was even photographed on camera. Many people complained that it was the trick of the light or that it was photoshopped or something. The truth was like this in the era of information burst. People believed or did not believe. That's why they were easily manipulated. Now even if the hanging was true, it will not be trusted. But she bet that the people who experienced it in person were very much shaken.
This kid wreaked havoc everywhere.