Chapter 165
Ashita, who stood beside him, could feel the hand supporting her grandfather's arm beginning to tremble.
Not because of the weight, but because she, who had only just learned that she was a descendant of this family, could feel the vibrations of history flowing through her blood, vibrations telling her that she had inherited not only a name, but also wounds that had never healed.
"Racism, discrimination, rejection—they were like the air we breathed every single day. But the worst part… was when they decided that we did not deserve to live."
The old man closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, no tears flowed down his wrinkled cheeks—perhaps because he had run out of tears centuries ago, or perhaps because wounds that deep no longer needed tears to prove they existed.
"They hunted us," he whispered, his voice almost inaudible amidst the wind that suddenly felt colder than before, "and anyone who was captured would be turned into… flesh paste. Impaled, mutilated, violated in ways I cannot describe without vomiting in front of all of you."
He opened his eyes, and for the first time, Nirma saw something she had never seen in anyone else's eyes.
Not sadness, not anger, but an emptiness so deep that it felt like staring into a black hole that had swallowed every light that had ever existed.
"There were several billion pillars driven into the ground, Nirma. And on every single sharpened pillar—so tall they could reach the sky—there were not just one or two mutilated bodies of Abnormals. But hundreds. Perhaps thousands. They piled us together like garbage on the same pillar, because they could not even be bothered to make a new one for each corpse."
Hearing that, Arya felt his stomach churn, and unconsciously, the hand holding his wooden staff dropped to his side.
Not because he was weak, but because he realized that the wood he carried from the slopes of the Mount of Olives, which he had once thought was merely a dead branch, was nowhere near as heavy as the history he had just heard.
"And the Abnormals back then," the old man continued, his voice growing softer, like someone running out of breath halfway down an endless road, "had no power. No authority. Nothing that allowed them to defend themselves. They were simply different. And because of that difference, they were punished in ways that should not even be called punishment—because punishment at least acknowledges that the one being punished is human. But we… we were not even considered life. We were merely pests that needed to be exterminated in the cruelest ways imaginable."
Yet in the midst of the darkness that nearly swallowed them all, when those sharpened pillars had recorded more names than even the indifferent sky could remember, something happened that no one had ever expected—not even the Abnormals who had already resigned themselves to the belief that the only end awaiting difference was a death without dignity.
The old man exhaled slowly, and for the first time since he had begun speaking, his eyes were no longer empty.
They burned, not with a gentle light like before, but with a cold fire, a fire born from despair that had transformed into something that could no longer be called hope or hatred, but something in between, something that had no name in any language of any world.
"One of us," he said, his voice now sounding strange—not sad, not angry, but flat in a way that made the hairs on the back of Tegar's neck stand up without him understanding why, "obtained something. A mandate. A prayer. Or perhaps a curse—I do not know which word is more fitting. What is certain is that he touched something foreign, something that did not originate from any universe, something that in the novel Abnormality is referred to as 'Faith.'"
Hearing that, Nirma felt the bandage over her right eye throb so violently that she had to close her left eye for a moment, because the pulse was no longer merely a vibration.
It felt as though something was knocking from behind the white cloth, knocking with the same rhythm as a heartbeat racing too fast, like someone trying to crawl out of hiding after spending so long hearing voices from outside without ever being able to see the light.
Arya, standing beside her, gripped his wooden staff with both hands.
Not to strike with it, but to steady himself, because the story he was hearing felt like the ground shaking beneath his feet—he could feel everything he believed about the world, about history, about who was right and who was wrong, beginning to crack like spring ice he had never expected to thaw.
"That Faith spread," the old man continued, his eyes staring into the distance toward the hills of Uhud that were beginning to glow red beneath the morning sun, as though he were looking at something none of them could see—perhaps fragments of a past he had buried too deeply, or perhaps shadows of a future he would never live long enough to reach, "spreading through every descendant of the Ningsih bloodline, then to all Abnormals—even those from entirely different families. And when it touched us, we changed. Not physically, but somewhere deeper than flesh and bone. We gained power. Each of us different, each possessing our own way of wielding it freely. And for the first time in a history never recorded in any book, we were no longer the victims."
He paused, and within that silence, the blowing wind seemed to grow warmer—not the warmth of comfort, but the warmth of a beast's breath after it finally realized it had teeth and claws, and no longer needed to run.
"But power," the old man said, his voice quiet yet echoing like a sound across an empty valley, "has never made anyone better. We who were once hunted became the hunters. We who were once mutilated became the mutilators. The cruelty never stopped, Nirma. It simply changed targets."
Ashita, standing beside him, felt the hand supporting her grandfather's arm turn cold.
Not because of the temperature, but because she realized that the blood flowing through her body—the blood of the Ningsih lineage she had only just learned about—was the same blood that had once flowed through hands capable of doing things so horrific that imagining them alone made her nauseous.
"Now it was the Abnormals who ruled," the old man whispered, his eyes fixed upon the ground beneath his feet, as though he could no longer bear to look at Nirma, Arya, Ashita, or Tegar while speaking these words. "We discriminated against every civilization that had once called us pests. We mutilated them in ways perhaps even crueler than what they had done to us—because revenge, unlike fear, never knows when to stop. On nearly every road, in every corner, there were remains of flesh with the skin peeled away. Not one or two. But piles upon piles. Rotting. Left there as a warning that now, it was our turn to hold power."
To be continued…