Only Wisdom Awakened - Chapter 268

Chapter 268: Withered
The old man’s hand gripped the leather armchair’s armrest with incredible strength, almost cracking it… his eyes, just like before, were widened, this time not because he was surprised… no, the information still hadn’t properly reached his brain.

He was more… annoyed, to the point of being enraged.

His aura, which had been perfectly controlled and managed up till that point, even when he was faced with really strong emotions felt as he reunited with his grandchild, began leaking out of his body… it wrapped around the things all over the room, even trying to grapple onto Hans… if felt strange, reassuring, and terrifying at the same time.

But what shook Hans the most was none other than the old man’s face…

He looked enraged… why?… was it because he hadn’t got the chance to get his revenge? Was it because he couldn’t kill her with his own hands?…

No…

It felt like a much deeper anger than that.

“Why so agitated?… didn’t you want her dead?”

Hans spoke coldly, questioning his grandfather.

As he said that, the slowly subsiding anger and aura retracted back into the man’s tired body, who lay on the backrest of the armchair.

He sighed….

After sighing, he finally gathered the strength to bring up what he had failed to do previously…

“I’m sure… your mother has told you the both of us are dead… Me and your grandma.

Truth is… we weren’t dead, at the time when we took the decision to fake our deaths, both of us were alive.

She wasn’t supposed to… but one day Elena, your mother… found out about it, she disapproved of this idea of mine, but deep inside, we all knew it was the only thing we could do to keep the two of them safe.”

At the mention of such a thing, the hair on Hans’s arms and neck stood up, and a shiver ran down his spine.

There might have been a chance that when talking about ‘the two of them’ his grandfather might have been referring to his parents, but this eerie feeling that continuously resounded in his mind told him… that something was wrong…

One missing piece from the puzzle was still left uncovered for all this to make sense… the identity of the crimson lady, the person other than his mother who his grandfather wanted to protect, and the one thing that Hans thought he would never say in his entire life…

“My… Aunt”

The old man flinched at the mention of such a person…

“That is right… something your mother probably never told you, and something that you should have never even been made aware of…

Elena…. Had an older sister.”

Hans’s heart skipped a beat when for a second, the thought that he had killed his aunt crossed his mind.

He almost lost control of his mana but barely managed to avoid letting leak out of his body.

A bit of sweat accumulated on his forehead, his breathing heaved, and his eyes were now fixed on the floor, staring at nothing.

“Your grandmother was a lawyer, she was mainly in charge of criminal cases that had to do with homicides and gruesome crimes, if the investigations on your dear’s deaths or other things suddenly stopped, and no one wanted to give you a concrete reason as to why, she was the person you would reach out to.

When she was active, the Italian mafia was a problem greater than most thought, it infiltrated most of the Italian great companies, public services, and even security personnel.

It was a withered nation, and that dark all came to light when awakened started appearing…

Now we have the strong and powerful awakened to take care of them, but before them… your grandmother and a few other courageous people were the only ones keeping their heads up to the Italian mafia.

When she received an offer to work for one of the most important groups that tried to fight against these criminal societies, she couldn’t simply stand by and do nothing.

Both her children were already past the age of eighteen, and she, even if already quite old, could contribute greatly with her righteous personality and quick-witted nature.

However, joining such an organization meant running the risk… of becoming the target of many dangerous groups…

She didn’t fear losing her life, but risking her children and the people she held dear… was unacceptable.

She took up the job, knowing about all these risks…. Because she had a simple plan in mind.

Dying.

Dying and being reborn in someone else… someone who didn’t have any emotional attachments, someone who didn’t have a family… someone whose life… could not be threatened by taking hostage anyone else.

We discussed it, and we came to the final decision to do such a thing together, at the time I used to manage a couple of little agencies, and my abilities in racking up a pretty penny could turn out useful since taking monetary help from the government, in which were planted many spies, meant revealing the organization to most of the mafia.

And so, even if reluctant about it, I followed her into this madness, leaving our childrens alone, without a father… or a mother.

That year… We officially died and changed our names.

Now I am back to using my name since most databases have been destroyed during the catastrophe, and with my daughter having escaped abroad, I didn’t run any risk of putting her in trouble.

Even if we were disheartened by the fact that we wouldn’t be able to see our children grow up, our lives continued, dealing with the same things for years… until…. The catastrophe hit.

Chaos… was the first reaction…

After the first month, most evil organizations had come to light, since with awakened powers, even the military, which was already occupied in trying to diminish civilian casualties as much as they could, wouldn’t have been able to stand up to them.

The whole country saw this as a terrible occurrence, while we…

We saw it as an opportunity…

The terrible acts they committed at the time had already been ongoing for years, but they had become public, meaning if we had the power to do so, we could track them down and exterminate every last one of them.

I awakened during that period, I awakened the rare class {fighting tycoon} I had some class skills that were scaled on the wealth I possessed.

That made me the perfect tool to use to exterminate them, so that’s what I began to do.

We didn’t kill any of them, we simply imprisoned them, but the associations becoming aware of us had already started laying low once again, avoiding our radars and our search.

Before they completely disappeared, we figured that would have been the perfect time to strike them, otherwise, everything would become more difficult as time passed.

But for our plan to work, we needed someone to act as bait…

Of course, I had to take that role.

I ambushed one of the little associations’ headquarters alone in order to draw all the other to me, but no matter how much time passed, no reinforcements seemed to arrive from their side.

And then… the news reached me.

A rising evil association had attacked our base, killing all of our agents… that of course, included your grandmother.

I was shocked, my head was out of oxygen to think, and the world was collapsing on me, even the sole thought of living in a world without her seemed to put such a strain on my body that it would’ve been enough to make me faint…

I was filled with remorse, sadness… and anger.

And that wasn’t all.

We managed to acquire some footage from the lost base, and what I saw scarred my soul for life…

My own daughter was raising her mother’s head to the crowd of hooligans and criminals.

Blood dripping down from her severed neck as her hair was pulled up by her own daughter, your grandmother’s face remained emotionless… Just… A tear was running down her cheek.”

As if it was a memory of what had happened, Hans saw a tear fall out of his grandfather’s open eyes, and the boy imagined his grandmother’s head in the same situation…

His lucid eyes were focused on the old man, he could now see him clearly…

Almost in tone with the house, he looked old… withered by the passage of time.

His face didn’t have a hint of happiness in it, and his wrinkles accentuated whenever he blinked.

“Thank you for telling me the truth… I will pass by tomorrow before I depart…

And…

I’m sorry for your loss”

Hans got out of that place as the information he had just acquired echoed in his mind.

He reached the hotel he had booked and went up to his room before throwing himself on the comfy bed as he stared at the white ceiling.

“Now let’s see it… the other side of the story…”

He said those words as he began feeding his mana to the darkness surrounding his heart and after just a few seconds…

Darkness was the only thing left surrounding him.