"I see," Ning said.
He turned to look at Jangar and asked, "So his father lived with you guys?"
"Yes, Brother Yian lived with us for a few years," Jangar said.
"Oh, then you guys must've been quite close to each other," Ning asked.
"Oh no. I was maybe 6 years old when brother Yian came to live with us. He was around the same age as my late brother Nassi. Those two hit it off quite well," Jangar said with a melancholic voice.
"Late brother? How did he die?" Ning asked.
" He… was cutting a tree and the tree fell on him," Jangar said.
"Oh, that's quite sad. You have my condolences. Did you find your brother?" Ning asked.
"No, it was some other people who found him and carried his body back home. That was 3 years ago," Jangar said. " Let's stop talking about this. You guys want to go to the town right? Let's go," Jangar said and started walking.
Famir too would rather stop talking about the depressing talk, so he decided to start walking too.
Ning followed behind then, but a thought kept on running in his mind. 'A lumberjack dying from a tree crushing him? Another person falling from a tree that doesn't let you fall? These are too much of a coincidence for there to not be anything sinister behind them," Ning thought.
But he just couldn't pinpoint the motive. Then he thought… "the seal!"
"Hmm? What seal?" Famir turned around to ask.
"Uhh, the seal in the mountain, the Peak of Afterlife. How often does it open?" Ning asked.
"Umm… I don't know, once a month?" Famir said and looked towards Jangar for confirmation.
"Yes. Honestly, the village is cursed. Every month or two, someone dies here. I just want to leave the village already so I'm not the next one," Jangar said.
'There is definitely something going on here,' Ning thought. After an hour of walking, and crossing a 10-meter long wooden bridge, they finally reached the town.
Ning was quite surprised to see that the town was actually quite developed when compared to the village. There were a lot more people, and the buildings were a little more modern looking.
They were still not very different from the residential areas in Deepskull island. The place was just way too far away from the whole continent, so it was understandable it wasn't as developed.
He wanted to change his clothes, but turned out there were way too many people with color dresses here, so he was fine for now.
Famir took him to a small shop, which turned out to be the library. When Ning walked in, he was shocked.
'It's not even as big as my volunteer room,' he thought. The room was around 10 meters long and 6 meters wide, and it was the only floor.
There were a few desks inside and about 10 shelves with books on them.
Ning approached the shelves and looked at the books. 'The cover and binding are so good. This world must be quite advanced. Only this corner of the continent must be too far away to get the good stuff,' he thought.
Famir walked up to him and looked around for a few seconds, before choosing a book and taking it away. Ning looked at the spines of the books and didn't know if he should laugh or cry right now.
He only now remembered that he couldn't read at all, so coming to the library wasn't really the bright idea he thought he was.
"Whatever, I doubt his book is the best book out there," Ning thought. "System, how much does the max information about the subjects in this book cost?" h asked.
The system gave him a number that maxed at around 45 Billion energy. He didn't buy it immediately, however; that would be being too hasty, and he didn't have enough energy to splurge it around like that.
"Hmm… alright, let's try this. System, take every book that is in this library and place the global, nonrepetitive version of this information into my auto-buy list," Ning said.
<System will require a one time access of up to 2 Million energy to scan every single book in this room>
"Use it," Ning said.
The system stopped talking for a second and started scanning everything. After it was done, a bunch of new books got directly added to the auto-buy list.
"How many books are there?" Ning asked.
<Around 34.7% of the books were deleted due to overlapping information or other complications>
<12% of the books were deleted due to them being fiction>
<Remaining books have turned into 36 books>
<The books cost 18 Billion Energy>
"Huh, let me see the prices of each one?" Ning thought and went to check the list. He currently held about 6 Billion energy, so even if he wanted to buy it all, he couldn't.
"Let's see what exactly I can buy first… hmm… this book about Aether usages makes sense, oh, there are monsters in this continent as well. Flowers and fruits can be helpful."
Ning looked through every single book and in the end, decided to buy around 6 of them for now. It cost him nearly 3 billion since he chose the short books.
Once he was done with buying books, he took a random one and sat next to Famir, and acted like he was reading. Instead, what he did was try to understand the 6 of them that he had just learned.
The books had quite fascinating bits of information that Ning found quite fun to read. As he kept on reading them, his eyes turned a little sharp as he realized that he had been misunderstanding something about using Aether.
He referred back to own information he had gotten before and it told him the same thing. He just hadn't expected Aethers and by association, Aether users to be so unique when compared to Qi.
"If this is true… then learning might just be the way to becoming a great Aether user."
