Rifts of indistinct chatter showered Caidie and Aza'zel as the two walked hand in hand into the town. There was no main street, entrance gate, or any semblance of civilized structure in the town.
A few creaking houses circled the outer perimeter.
Open windows and prying eyes glittered within the confines of each windowsill, not to mention the rough grunting, cursing, and heavy yet intermittent breathing laden with a heavy stench of beer.
Aza'zel tilted his head up, the hood over his head reeling back just a bit to reveal his face. Immature cheeks and a soft chin, yet the most crucial of his features from the bridge of his nose and above were covered under a tight fabric decorated with incomprehensible markings.
"Too many voices," Aza'zel murmured to Caidie, a puzzled tone to his remark. "Is this… normal?"
Caidie paused for a moment and said, "This is far from normal, but it is as close to normal as things could get in a world with no order. The fall of the imperial structure, the death of the supernatural totemic warriors, and the disappearance of the imperial family brought about this change…"
As she spoke, Caidie's black eyes rippled, taking in the slouching figures of fat, tired, and lanky men who huddled on the paved roadside, by the walls, and on the muddy ground.
Some were eating raw flesh, some were gasping their last breath, some were walking… Rather, swaying unsteadily with flushed faces, and some were indulging in carnal desires with the illusions that a dimly lit alley could shield them from the curious eyes.
Caidie felt sad and disgusted all the same.
Caidie whispered to Aza'zel, "I say they're as close to normal as it could get because these people haven't condensed any source crystals nor have they awakened their totemic bloodlines. They're the lowest of the low, not even worthy of being slaves to the strong in this new world."
Aza'zel subconsciously reached and touched his solar plexus… More accurately, the multicolored gem inlaid within, beneath his clothes.
"What are we going to do here?" Aza'zel asked.
Caidie smiled. "You mean, what are you going to do here… I'm not going to openly accompany you around these corners, while you have to learn human nature on your own."
As she spoke, she tugged on his hand and pushed him into the town, her voice lingering by his ear, "People can change the way they think and act, but they can't change who they truly are. Going forward, you need to know that while the weak struggle to survive, the strong have their struggles, too."
Caidie and Rebecca haven't taught Aza'zel how to operate his source crystal, manipulate source energy, or how to accumulate it for better or worse.
They feared his lack of experience and mortal wisdom might bring about his downfall in the future. Thus, no matter how they educated him as a prince behind closed doors, it was no more than hollow shells if a prince had no concept of the mundanity entrenched in the lives of commoners.
As Aza'zel tumbled to the ground and fell face flat into the muddy ground, a small rusty knife sank through the earth's surface by his cheek.
Caidie said, "Next to your left cheek is a knife, a life, and also a future. Take care of it."
Her voice quickly faded, together with her presence that disappeared. Caidie soundlessly and seamlessly blended into the shadows.
Many pedestrians with shifty eyes brought their calloused hands to their wrinkled faces and rubbed furiously at their eyelids, questioning their very sanity.
They could swear in the names of demons and gods that a young, beautiful woman stood at the center of 7th Street just a moment ago.
Aza'zel had not anticipated Caidie leaving him to his own devices out of the blue. Scrambling to his feet with the knife in hand, his rapid and shallow breathing slowly levelled even, a mixture of chaotic sounds bombarding his senses.
"Kid! Don't just stand there like a fool!"
An immature voice echoed close to his left flank, followed by strong yet small arms hugging his left arm and hauling him along. Aza'zel was shocked, and unknowingly, he allowed himself to be dragged along.
The incessant yanking left Aza'zel dizzy, not due to uncontrollable inertia but because in his perceptive world of fleeting echoes and short-lived fragmented images, he 'saw' many things form and crumble to the aftereffects of invisible sound waves.
How much did Aza'zel desire to stand in place and get accustomed to the barrage of sounds that left him lost and helpless, but the person pulling him along seemed way too enthusiastic.
The person suddenly stopped after turning past a couple of corners, annoyed by how clumsy the entire voyage through the crowded streets had been.
He turned around irritability, as he couldn't understand why this kid's footwork was so messy and discoordinated.
It was only after turning around that this person noticed the thick cloth covering the other's eyes beneath the hood.
He instinctively blurted out, "You're blind?! Fuck! Another useless product! Damn it, you're too young to fetch a good liver, too… Sigh, such a waste of time!"
The person seemed exasperated.
With a hint of regret, he shoved Aza'zel into a nearby wall, quite roughly I might add, and proceeded to run away with shifty eyes.
Aza'zel smashed hard into a wet wall, feeling his organs jostled about as he couched a few mouthfuls of turbid air.
What just happened?
The young boy questioned the sequence of events with no answers. Then, listening carefully, he felt dreadfully aware of the fact that his surroundings went silent—too silent.
Undoubtedly, he was all alone at the moment.
Aza'zel's expression changed, and as expected, a flood of uncontrollable, maniacal laughter tormented his mind. He clutched at his head, his knees buckled, and he crouched down while throwing his head back.
Muffled thuds accompanied each intimate collision between his head and the wall behind, but it did little to silence the whispers in his head.
Desperate, Aza'zel wobbled to his feet and traced along the wall, one step at a time, while incessantly shouting words of 'shut up', and 'leave me be', in his mind.
There seemed to be some invisible claws scraping the dome of his mind, and once he stepped into the bustling sidewalks, the whispers vanished like the fog during the early hours of dawn.
"C-Caidie…"
Aza'zel mumbled, wearily looking around with his head tilted, attempting to adjust to the multitude of sounds with hopes of locating Caidie through her unique footsteps. However, he knew it was useless, because someone like her could easily move about soundlessly.
Not to mention footsteps, the myriad sounds of singing, shouting, crying, laughing, arguing, moaning, cursing, metallic clanging, splashing waters, grating construction, and hammering… All of it twisted Aza'zel's perceived world of echoes.
He unknowingly began to sweat from the confusion, slumping to the ground by the roadside with his hands on his ears, a futile attempt to filter out this painful noise.
No one spared the blind, lonely boy by the roadside a glance. This is Raksha, infested with hundreds of children, most of them suffering from liabilities, and one random child by the road was nothing special at all.
However, there was one pair of confused eyes staring intently at the child from a nearby high building, the coldness within incapable of completely overshadowing a profoundly deep worry.