"The entrance fee is 3 gold coins per person" Said an imposing voice. Zane could see the person's mana core and the bulky outline told Zane that it was a guard wearing armour.
"Ohh come on Jeff! we are good friends we have come a long way. Remember i am the one who carried your daughter to the physician when she was sick, on this very carriage?" Chris said
"Of course i remember. Chris we are very good friends i could even call you my brother. The price is 3 gold coins per person" Jeff said with a straight face.
Chris and Jeff then participated in a staring contest with each other for half a minute.
"Fine, here take them" Chris conceded as he put 6 coins into Jeff's outstretched hand.
"Thank you friend" Jeff smugly smiled "Open the gate!" he shouted before the giant gate opened, causing the ground to vibrate a little.
The gate was the same height as the wall so it was quite heavy. It was designed to block an attack from a grade three mana beast after all.
Zane flinched as he heard the gate open. The sound wasn't a problem for anyone else but for Zane it was a few decibels short of being pure torture.
When the duo drove into the city and the gate slammed shut, Zane had to cover his ears. 'This is going to be a problem' he thought. He was already hearing to many loud noises from the buildings in the distance.
"Something wrong?" Chris asked.
"My hearing is extremely sensitive" Zane explained
"Well you have a problem because the actual city is not this quiet." Chris said.
"Drive back to the wall" Zane covered his ears. 'What's going on ?. This has never happened before' he thought.
Zane could hear pretty much every conversation happening in a radius of 200 meters around him. It was like being inside a room full of speakers, all playing a different song at full blast.
"Hey what are you doin' over there? move it along!" One of the guards shouted from atop the wall. They had seen Chris's carriage park beside the wall.
"Don't worry we won't be here for long just give us a few minutes!" Chris shouted. Causing a painful moan to escape Zane's mouth.
The guards heard Chris and just let him be.
"Sorry" Chris whispered to Zane after seeing the look he was being given.
Zane sighed as he concentrated on the sounds, trying his best to shut them out. Zane remembered listening to music in his previous life, he remembered that sometimes when his mind was occupied by something else he would stop paying attention to the music automatically.
The music would still be there but his mind would just shut it off in order to focus on the matter at hand. However right now he didn't have any important programming issues to distract his mind.
No matter how much he tried he couldn't remove the voices from his head. 'If only i had something like noise canceling headphones' Zane thought. Suddenly he got an idea.
"Chris sing a song" he said.
"What!?" Chris was confused.
'Let me guess, songs aren't invented yet' Zane thought.
"Softly tap you hand on your legs" He told Chris.
Chris still had a confused expression in his face but he complied either way.
TAP!
TAP!
TAP!
TAP!
Zane closed his eyes as he focused on that sound. He tried his best not to hear any other sounds another than Chris's tapping.
"Hey this actually sounds good" Chris said. After 2 minutes of non stop tapping he had naturally got into a rythm.
TAP!...TAP!....TAP!TAP!TAP.....TAP!
Zane chuckled at how funny Chris looked as he bobbed his head up and down. 'He might be the first person on the planet to feel music' he thought.
That's when Zane noticed that the sound of the city was almost completely gone. He could still hear it but it was faint. Two more minutes later and Zane couldn't hear anything voice any more. Only Chris's 'beats', which where starting to be annoying.
"Stop" Zane told. Chris thought that Zane said that because of his experiments, however Zane was just tired of his 'song'.
When Chris stopped tapping, Zane started hearing the voices again, but this time they where distant and not nearly as loud as before.
Zane took a piece of cloth and covered his eyes as well as his ears. The cloth didn't block out all of the noise but it was better than nothing.
"Let's go" Zane said.
"Have you found a solution to your problem?" Chris inquired as he drove towards the main city.
"Yes, I can now block out most of the noise." Zane explained.
'What's going on with me ?' he thought to himself.
'You know Aurora, you could really help me out sometimes' Zane thought.
'You are seriously asking me that?, you owe me'
'I am blind, my body doesn't have it's own mana, and i don't have an element' Zane said.
However, Aurora didn't bother to talk after that. Zane didn't know whether this was because she didn't want to or she couldn't.
'At least I now know that this has something to do with the Body Cultivation thing' he thought as they entered the city.
Zane could see a lot of floating mana cores, however his main priority was shutting off the voices of the many people in his vicinity.
"Tomatoes!! get your freshly picked tom--"
"Antelope meat hunted t----"
"Fuck you bitch get your own chick"
"What! he said that!?"
"But mother--"
"Come on my love you know i love you,,,"
"Hey! what are you--"
"How much for the night?"
"Hey dick! get your--"
Zane started sweating profusely as he tried his best to stop the noise. The voices where now bearable but he wanted to stop hearing them completely, there where some conversations he would rather not listen to....
Eventually Zane managed to only hear one voice at a time. Even if it took some concentration on his part.
Zane could now finally pay attention to his surroundings....or rather his one meter surroundings. Zane couldn't see much, however he could still see all the mages in the city.
'Wow there is a lot of them' he thought. Zane had figured that since it was rather hard to become a mage, there would only be a handful of them.
Even though he couldn't see normal people, the amount of mages he could see was surprising.
"Chris how many mages are there in the town" Zane asked absent mindedly
"I don't exactly know but more than a thousand" Chris answered.
"How big is this city!?" Zame asked in surprise.
"Two thousand kilometers from end to end" Chris answered, shocking Zane.
"And the wall goes around the whole City ?"
"Yes" Chris said.
"It must have taken years to build" Zane commented.
"Actually it was built in ten seconds...well at least that's what the legends say"
"How?" Zane had an inkling of how the massive wall was built.
"It was built by Grandmaster Willow. He is a High Magus" Chris explained.
Zane nodded his head as he tried to grasp the power of magic.
'A wall capable of surrounding an area of Two thousand square kilometers was built in seconds.....' he thought.
"Where are we going ?" Zane asked after some time.
"Well... since a bear ripped out a part of my carriage, we should get it fixed first"