Chapter 688 - 29: The Caller, Full Firepower

This is a story from many years ago, about a strange boy.

The year it happened, the boy was six. His father was a town guard, and his mother worked at a clinic. He also had a best friend who had been with him since early childhood; the two were always inseparable.

But the boy was different. He was strange. In the dead of night, he would faintly see hazy apparitions and hear mysterious, dizzying sounds.

The boy was convinced these were the voices and temptations of Wizards and Witches. He told others what he thought, but they always laughed at him and denied it. Many people thought he was a compulsive liar, making up stories just to get attention.

They isolated the boy, calling him ’the weirdo’.

’Did I want attention? Maybe so.’ That was indeed what he thought. After all, this was the only thing about him that could be called special, the only thing that could get him noticed. So even if others treated him like a joke, the boy continued to tell people what he saw and heard. But no one believed him, except for his childhood best friend.

’Why wouldn’t they believe him?’ Whenever the boy got discouraged, his friend would always cheer him up. He even took him to the town bookstore to buy strange Kaidan—legends about Witches and Monsters in the woods. The two little boys even spent all their allowance on a small telescope to gaze at the distant forested hills and the stars in the sky.

And so passed an unremarkable childhood. It wasn’t exactly happy, but it was full enough.

As the boy grew into a teenager, his Hallucinations and Auditory Hallucinations worsened. They began to seriously affect his daily life. He would sometimes zone out, start spouting gibberish, and then look up at the moon, muttering things like, "They’re watching me," or "They’re waiting for me."

He grew increasingly strange and withdrawn. Aside from his one friend, the teen had no one else. For his sake, his friend took it upon himself to start a club at their school—the ’Dawn Stargazing Club’—and would take him stargazing with the telescope to help ease his condition.

"They’re calling out to everyone. Why am I the only one who can hear them?"

The teen would often confide in his friend, confused. In response, his friend could only offer a wry smile and try to comfort him. "It means you’re the chosen one, bro."

’That’s right!’ The thought instantly excited the teen. He lifted his head and gazed at the moon. "Yeah! Whether it’s Wizards or Ghosts, or those voices from the sky, they’re all watching me... I’m the chosen one, the one they’re watching, right?!"

"Superpower Users, Aliens, Magic, Elves, Wizards, and Witches—they all exist, right?!"

"Yeah, yeah," his friend replied, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. He could only play along. "They all exist. They all exist."

The days passed, and time trickled by. The teen grew into a young man, and his friend grew up alongside him.

And then, on the day they both came of age, the young man learned that his friend had been accepted into a prestigious university and would soon be leaving their small town. He, on the other hand, had become so obsessed with stargazing and various Secret Ceremonies that his grades were abysmal. He would have to repeat a year.

’Are you going to leave me, too?’

With this thought weighing on his mind, during their last summer vacation together, the young man and his friend got completely drunk on a cloudless night. In his stupor, he thought he heard a voice coming from the distant moon.

[...Monitoring...Creator destroyed...Autonomous combat unit...Searching for matching life-form...]

It was a language utterly alien to human speech, a system of communication altogether different. It was broadcast through scattered bursts of Spiritual Power, and only a very few with an exceptionally high Talent for Spiritual Energy resonance could hear its call and respond to its search.

The young man couldn’t understand the meaning of this bizarre language. He just laughed manically as he used wine, mixed with his own blood, to draw an Array on the floor for summoning an ’Elf.’ He had drawn this Array countless times before, but never once had an ’Elf’ responded. This was, of course, perfectly normal. In a world devoid of Spiritual Qi, where would one find Natural Spirits? But the young man didn’t know that. Fueled by his anger over his friend’s impending departure, his uncertainty about his own future, and the deep-seated conviction that ’I am absolutely special’ and ’Everyone should be watching me,’ he began the ’summoning.’

Then, on that day, a ’creature’ from beyond the stars descended between the two drunken youths.

Accompanied by a dim flash of light and a flurry of radiant Spiritual Power, a ball of unknown matter appeared in the very center of the Array.

It was a strange, silver creature. It looked gelatinous, but it wasn’t the least bit wet or sticky. It was only about the size of a palm, and inside it were several small, golden, eye-like spheres. At first, likely due to arriving in an unfamiliar environment, the creature seemed to mimic its original master, curling up like a snail and retracting into a ’shell’.

But it soon sensed that its new surroundings weren’t hostile, so it relaxed back into its original, jelly-like form.

"I... I did it?!"

The drunken young man had shivered violently at the flash of light, which sobered him up slightly. His eyes went wide, his mouth fell open, and he stared at the tiny creature before him. A crazed smile spread across his face. "Deer, look! Deer! I did it! I really summoned an Elf!"