Only Wisdom Awakened - Chapter 270

Chapter 270: Wilderness
When I woke up, I was greeted by my sister’s blurry face as she held my hands.

It took me a few minutes to recall what had happened, and a few more to process it, but when I finally realized that my nightmare had come true… my heart shattered.

The following months were the worst period of my life…

Every day seemed infinite as the constant thought of my father’s death haunted me all the time.

But most of all, they felt even worse than when I was young, because… the one and only person who had supported me wasn’t there anymore.

It was numbing… like living without any purpose…

I wanted to die, that’s what I was feeling… but being the coward that I had always been, I didn’t even find the courage to do that.

I just patiently waited for my death to come as the days passed…

A few months later, I made the decision to abandon everything… my work, my boyfriend whom I had barely seen during the previous months, and my sister….

I left it all and started traveling…

When I did that, I felt empty and satisfied at the same time.

I was wandering around without a meta and yet I felt free.

I went around the world, I watched as the people acted all over the world, and once again, I was found to believe humans aren’t worthy of what they have…

I saw all kinds of evil, I witnessed all kinds of incidents… and then I stopped…

As if I wanted to close my eyes even on that world, just like I had done with my previous life.

I stopped going around and watching humans, instead, I decided to live in a much simpler world… the world of the animals.

It was simple really… hunt, eat, sleep, repeat.

I lived like that for… a lot of time, too much maybe.

I traveled most of the forests and jungles around the world, and I came in contact with all kinds of beasts…

When I did that… I didn’t have to think about anything else.

Time went by quickly, and a few years later, while I was exploring one of the wildest and most undiscovered forests in the northern part of Russia…

I came across something unusual.

It shone brightly in the dark night, but it was on the ground, not in the sky like the other stars…

It wasn’t something done by a human, no, it looked majestic, divine…

For a second, I thought it might have been a fallen star…

I was bewitched by it…

Little did I know, the extraordinary beauty and attraction I felt when I looked at that thing was as much as the threats and the dangers lurking inside of it…

That was my first encounter with a gate, and as soon as the luster of blue light reflected in my widened eyes for the first time, a little window appeared in front of me, saying some strange things.

I read through the skills the window in front of me displayed with curiosity and amazement, and in the meantime, I couldn’t help but repeatedly ask myself if what I was seeing was the truth and if I could really do those things, or if I had just gone mad from staying inside the wilderness for too long.

The first skill I tried to use was {assimilation}… all those animals I had seen, all the time I had spent researching and living with some of them… I remembered them perfectly.

I lay my back on the cold snow, gazing at the distant stars as I heaved my breath in search of a switch to use my abilities… for the first few minutes, I thought I had just gone crazy, but as I tried to believe in what I had seen, I finally felt something moving inside of me…

Centimeter after centimeter, my left arm’s skin was peeled off as hundreds of yellow-brownish scales took its place… my fingers transformed, and instead, claws grew out of my arm.

Astonished, I admired my own body…

I could finally live like I wanted to… hunt, eat, sleep, and do it all over again… without a worry… without a thought… without a doubt.

In the following weeks, I came across many creatures I had never heard about before, I used their own strength against them, and I killed everything that stood in my way…

I just wanted to live a normal life like any animal would, but fighting strong enemies was also thrilling, so it didn’t bother me.

But that false peaceful life of mine came to an end when ‘he’ arrived.

One day, I was fighting as usual in the forest.

A pretty high-ranking gate had broken out, and I was battling the boss with all the strength I had left.

It was a great mammoth, or something similar to that… Its giant body and sharp tusks were difficult to keep at bay, and for that reason, we fought for over an hour, during which the whole forest trembled beneath us, shaking some of the snow off the trees every time we went close to them.

The fight was eventually about to come to an end, I had pierced the monster’s abdomen and the bleeding had already started slowing its movements, I thought the fight had already ended, when all of a sudden, the animal went mad, smashing his head against a huge tree just a few meters from what we had made out fighting arena.

Or that’s what I thought…

As the tree’s roots were eradicated from the ground, the enormous log befell the forest, causing a huge cloud of dust and pulverized snow.

Inside that foggy cloud, even if I was confused, I managed to spot a man… he looked like a beggar and he wore nothing but used rags, his hair was also messy, and his little stature helped him hide and quickly sneak away before I could react…

I wasn’t certain, but I realized that man might have been like me… someone with special powers.

I eventually ended up winning the fight, but the thought that someone had found me bothered me the entire night…

Reuniting with a human after such a long time made the disturbing thoughts I had always tried to avoid thinking about re-emerge inside my mind.

In the following days, I couldn’t live as I did before… whenever I tried to concentrate or relax, the image of my father’s face popped up in my mind.

I thought that maybe I should’ve gone and visited his tomb… that was the least I could do.

But just the thought of having to return to human society made my head hurt.

Putting an end to these disturbing thoughts of mine was a man… someone who came to find me and bring me out of that unending cycle…

Almost two weeks after I had fought the mammoth, as I woke up inside a cave I had been using as a base for the past few months, I found a mysterious man sitting right in front of me… he watched me through his squinted eyes as a subtle smile appeared on his lips.

He had long black hair, deep black eyes, and this constant feeling of being both invisible and a threat…

If only for the fact that no matter how much I stared at him he didn’t disappear, I would have thought he was a ghost.

I kept my eyes open for five seconds as I observed the man, and he stared back at me with the same gaze.

In the bat of an eye, I immediately got in a fighting position hoping not to get caught by surprise by any of the traps he might have set up.

But while I prepared for a fight, the man was still leisurely lying on the ground with his back against the stone wall and his elbows relaxed on his knees.

He watched me with curious eyes as if he had found an interesting toy, but the only reaction he got was me being even more careful…

A minute passed… two… three…. Maybe I really was just hallucinating… maybe it was just a ghost or an illusion…

But before I could answer those questions, the man did it for me by greeting me with peculiar information:

“You are Anna Lumi right?”

He asked, but I just bared my teeth… I had lost the habit of replying with words, and out of everything someone could have called me, that name was certainly not the one I preferred.

He chuckled seeing how I replied, and then continued…

Your father… or maybe I should say, your adoptive father and your mother died in a car accident together a while ago didn’t they?”

He talked as if he was about to say something funny… but that annoyed me even more…

He took a little piece of paper out of his jacket’s pocket and turned around so that I could see it…

“What would you do If I told you… that your parents are still alive?”