16: Wilt Cut Weed - [Requiem for the Lost Ones]
Something truly terrible had happened at Mountain Glenn long ago.
That much was clear, from the sheer number of ailing spirits left in the decayed city, anyone could tell that whatever had taken place here... had been horrific, to say the least.
The grimm were an afterthought; drawing Zangetsu's True shikai was like moving a finger to him at this point, and none of the creatures of the night lasted more than a fraction of a moment in his presence. Ichigo would've simply crushed them with his spiritual pressure, but the ghosts around would be wiped away too if he did.
The spirits he had encountered since he ran into the lady in the rainy street weren't any better than she was. Two men he'd found were completely unresponsive; not reacting at all even as he performed a konsō on them under a cracked alcove. Their vegetativeness was somehow even worse than the first woman's hysterics... it was screwed up, in all the wrong ways.
Flash-stepping through the driving rain, Ichigo moved fast enough that to him, the raindrops were static in the air. He closed his half-hollowed eyes, and felt. There...
A shunpo across the dead cityscape landed him right in front of a... building? They're probably inside, he guessed. Hopefully this person wouldn't be too out of it, but he wasn't placing bets. Decades, the woman had cried. No wonder they were all mostly catatonic. He couldn't blame them for it.
The building was cracked and broken in several places, a weather-worn four stories tall block of dreary rain-slick concrete. The door was still intact, and not all of the dirty windows were completely shattered, so there was that, at least. Walking up to the faded red door, with flaking paint the colour of dried blood, he found it left locked, with the handle rusted over. Knocking it down, as he was tempted to, might just collapse the whole thing, from the looks of it. Not a problem.
A single index finger tapped against the grimy keyhole, and the mechanisms behind the doorway were simply erased from existence entirely. The half-rotten wood swung in on creaking hinges, as Ichigo stepped inside. Spiritual pressure sure is handy for this sorta stuff. Not as if he knew how to pick locks. He was more the type to mostly just kick down doors, instead.
The interior of the ruined building was just as dilapidated as the outside suggested, leaving it unclear what the place was even used for, originally. Not that it mattered, he was just here on a ghost hunt, not to play forensics. The floor was tiled with cracked and marred white squares of porcelain, the hair-thin rifts in the ceramic growing and thickening the further he walked in, like a negative spider's web. As Ichigo walked inside, it became clear they were emanating from something, the cracks connecting more and more, and it looked like they were centred around—
Oh.
Well, there's the... spirit?
Ichigo wasn't really all that sure what he was looking at. There was definitely a soul, he could feel it right there, but the thing taking up a good third of the room definitely didn't look like a ghost at all. Hell, it was even corporeal, from the way that the leaky ceiling's droplets ran down its pitch-black, knotted surface. A man-sized, luminous green crystal, uneven yet smooth and jagged in its asymmetrical lustre lit the room aglow in its eerie, throbbing light. The soul he'd sensed... it was in there. The crystal sprouted, or rather, was embedded inside an even larger rough night-black tendril, that had pushed a massive hole though the wall, and sunk deep into the ground, straight through the stone foundations of the building. Its texture was firm and thick-hided, and the hardest ridges of it were tinged with bone-white thorns.
Black and white... a grimm? It'd explain why he couldn't even tell it was there, and thought this was just another spirit... but that crystal– what was it? How did it even catch a soul inside itself? He knew only a little about the grimm, since he didn't consider them a threat at all, just an oddity more than anything else. But if they could do this... maybe he should ask around?
A quick whip of his sword severed the side of the grimm that the crystal was on, and that was the side that began to disintegrate– so the main body is underground...
A mouth erupted from the cut tendril, striking at Ichigo with a bloodcurdling hiss.
He jumped back in shock, drawing his Quincy dagger and reflexively cutting it in half on instinct in a flash of soul-steel.
Toxic-green fluid, as luminescent as the crystal itself, splattered from the stem behind the severed head, steaming away in a glowing corrosive puddle on the flooring. He now noticed the 'head' resembled an ebony-black venus flytrap, with bioluminescent mouth-lobes on the inside.
Wait... now he got it. This wasn't just a tendril, or a grimm tentacle or whatever... it was a root. A grimm root. This was some kind of giant carnivorous plant.
Slowly, he re-sheathed his short sword. "Phew..." He sighed, running a hand though his horned hair. Sure, it couldn't really hurt him, but that was kinda like having a spider jump on you; you can kill it easily, but you wouldn't want it all up in your face now, would you?
He turned to consider the fallen crystal. "Hmm..."
After thinking it over for a minute, he decided on just simply cracking it open. Walking up to it, he raised his right foot, up to chin-height, paused, then struck down in a swift axe-kick. The very building shuddered at the heavy impact, and the tiles below him cracked even further. The neon-green crystal itself was idle for a moment, then neatly broke in two. Either half fell side-to-side, and he realised that the crystals held their very own spiritual pressure. Reishi? Was it another form of dust?
Between the two split halves of green crystal, a goggled man in a white coat was crouched. He slowly stood up, wobbling on his feet, then scrambled back as soon as he caught sight of Ichigo.
"You– you!?" he pointed frantically. "Who are you!? And- and..." he breathed out deeply, stilling himself, then pulled his goggles off of his eyes, and up into his olive-green hair. "...I'm dead, aren't I?"
"I'm sorry." Ichigo confirmed. "You're... better than the rest I've met, at least?"
"The rest?"
"I'm a Soul Reaper. I've met a lot of ghosts today, none of them have had it as... together, as you do. I'll be sending you on to the afterlife, with the hilt of my sword here, y'see." he gestured to the longer Zangetsu on his back with his head. "Trust me, it's all good, Heaven is definitely real here." he reassured.
"The Grim Reaper?" he looked Ichigo up and down. "Hmm... Yes, that's all well and good, I expected as much, but- but where are we? I'd have thought I would've been buried, at least?" the man brushed off. Ah... He's eccentric, and the curious type... shame that Ichigo had no freaking clue at all what to tell the guy. He would've vastly preferred being the one asking the questions here.
"You know what happened to Mountain Glenn?" he tried asking.
"Our base city? We were attempting to infuse our Soul Dust with human auras." he clapped his hands. "Ah! Do you know what we've accomplished, Reaper?"
"We?" Ichigo prodded.
"Merlot Industries! We've achieved a complete infusion of dust and aura! Aura, being the soul itself manifest, is said to have come from humanity interacting with dust in an archaic era at the dawn of mankind. We've reunited the two!" he exclaimed proudly. "That's got to have earned a place in heaven, has it not?"
"When..." Ichigo's mouth suddenly felt dry. "...When was this?"
"Only last week! We've even begun clinical trials on people! –In fact, my last memory is of an experiment with my own aura, and a particularly large crystal–" he deflated slightly. "...Oh, so that's how it happened..." he uttered quietly.
"Still, my sacrifice was worth it in the end, wasn't it? It was all for the betterment of mankind, was it not?" the man sounded almost desperate, in his fervour.
He... didn't know? Was time lost, for a soul inside that crystal, like a suspended animation... or, more like a suspended death, for ghosts? How many more soul dust crystals were in the city?
Ichigo carefully decided to tell the truth... selectively. "Honestly, I have no clue." he shrugged. "I'm not the type to pay attention to your... stuff."
"Ah, I understand, you aren't meant to meddle in mortal affairs, I take it?" he nodded along. "Fair enough, then, I accept my time has come. Just... one last thing?"
"Yes?"
"Don't take my kids too soon, okay?" he requested. "It's, ahm, fine if you don't answer that."
Ichigo didn't say anything as he tapped the metallic hilt of White Zangetsu against the man's forehead, and watched him fade away with a halo above his head. The shallow, numb frown stayed stuck to his face, even as he stepped back out into the pouring rain without a word.
- –—{}—– -
Of the few spirits he'd met since then, only a handful were lucid enough to hold conversation. Most just stayed dead silent, cried, or a few even screamed and tried attacking him. They weren't a threat, but the damage to his mood was more than enough harm. Did Ozpin know what happened here? The man was thousands of years old... couldn't he have prevented whatever catastrophe happened here in the past?
The piecemeal bites of information he gathered from the few conversations he did have about the place, were vague, yet painted a morbid picture. Vague, because most actual conversations he had were with spirits whom the very last thing they wished to speak with him about, were the events that led to the collapse of the city, especially in lieu of their families and asking Ichigo questions instead. He didn't have the heart to steer them away from those topics.
Goddammit, some of them were so young...
What he did know, was that it wasn't just one day, out of the blue, that things went to hell. For years, since Mountain Glenn was built, the guards and defence systems had to fend off grimm from the doomed settlement's streets. But slowly, those grimm with dust shards embedded into their bodies began showing up, and the energy within the crystals warped and mutated the creatures into far too powerful and monstrous forms for the people to handle. Merlot Industries was to blame, and its higher-ups were already on his hit-list... if they were still alive, anyway.
The trapped employee he ran into in that building made it seem like most of the firm's scientists thought they were helping humanity with their research... but in that case, then how the hell did the grimm get involved, there? One spirit told him something about the underground, but that was all he knew; that they might have fled down there.
It wasn't much, but it was a lead, and he'd follow it. As soon as he cleared out the surface, first...
Huh?
He felt it... the stranger from before; –the living one, closing in on a spirit. Now this was something he should probably check out.
- –—{}—– -
Ichigo touched down in front of another building, this one an old restaurant on the corner of a street.
It was one of those diner-style joints, with a Nighthawks-esque curved glass wall looking out onto the cracked boulevard, under a faded green sign with unreadable yellowed lettering. What was left of a glass wall, anyway. The window was long-since smashed to pieces, apart from the one still-intact grimy pane, wet with the rainfall—
A figure smashed through it, the sudden defenestration shattering the last of the old diner's glass. The hooded man sprang out of a combat roll, stopping in a crouch facing the broken window. A snarling hiss came from the dark interior, before three more stalks of the black venus-flytrap grimm emerged into the rainy street, baring their gaping, neon-lit mouth-lobes.
Snaking a foot back, the man reached to his waist, poking a scabbard out from the side of his black coat. Black-red lightning flickered across his body, as he leaned forwards, into drawing his blade.
"Moonslice."
A thin, condensed blade-beam of pure reiatsu painted the air a vermillion red, soaked with black. The three grimm were completely wiped away in an instant, their fibrous hides nothing in the face of such force, but the attack didn't stop there. The projected slash cut the entire abandoned restaurant in half horizontally, causing it to collapse in on itself and kick up a column of dust and debris. Even the buildings beside the diner had their walls facing the epicentre carved out by the strike.
The falling-in of the roof exposed an eerie green glow to the damaged street. Another one of the crystals? So that's where the soul was...
But all that was sidelined in Ichigo's mind, by the man who now stood to his full height. A height that was slightly taller than Ichigo, though not by much.
He pulled back his hood, revealing a small white mask that covered only his eyes, leaving two thin diagonal slits for vision on each side. Like a red-patterned masquerade mask, it left his even, firm expression of suspicion show in the slight downwards tilt of his lips. His hair was a dark auburn red, brushed up into what was almost, but not quite, a quiff.
He wore a black double-breasted jacket, fastened slightly to the right of his chest, with a red-thorn-under-white-petal pattern on the upper-left side. The sleeves were slit, and it fell to his thighs, with a bright red lining on the inside of the coat, matching the pattern embroidered into the tail on his left side too. An emblem of a large carmine rose over a bed of white thorns emblazoned the back. It was worn over a crimson shirt, dark black trousers tied with a metal-buckled belt, and black gloves with the Greek omega symbol in... bright red, again. Even his shoes were black, with blood-red soles. As expected of Remnanti fashion culture.
The most prominent features of all, though, were the reddish-black horns spiking backwards from his temples. A faunus, then. Someone else here to clear the city?
"Are you a huntsman?" the man asked.
His voice was dark, but even. Even as he spoke, Ichigo could see him thumbing his scarlet sword, a black-hilted chokutō with a rain-dripping blade Ichigo could sense was forged with reishi. Dust? It's red, so it'd be fire...
"Not really... I guess?" Ichigo shrugged laxly. A threat only counted as one if you were actually threatened by it, after all. "Are you?"
The man seemed taken aback by that. "Not on my life."
"Well that's a funny coincidence." Ichigo crossed his wide-sleeved arms. Not as if he needed to be ready to reach for his swords or anything, after all. "I'd hate to be just another fed drone too. You got a name?"
"Adam..." he answered, then paused expectantly. Then, he gestured to his mask. "...Adam Taurus."
Was he expecting a reaction here? Not as if Ichigo knew any Remnanti celebrities... was he famous, or something? He kinda had that emo-popstar vibe...
"Ichigo Kurosaki. You wanna tell me what you're doing here? This isn't exactly the best spot for an evening stroll. In fact, I'd say it looks like a downright nasty part of town."
A flash lit up the sky, following by the rolling rumble of thunder. The storm wouldn't be letting up any time soon. Ichigo had already allowed the rain to start hitting him again, as soon as he arrived, and he was soon drenched.
"You first." the other demanded, still holding his red sword at his side. Not towards Ichigo, but not sheathed, either.
"I'm clearing out Mountain Glenn. Every grimm here's got to go." he began. "I was dropped off by an airship from Beacon—"
The scarlet blade's edge rocketed forwards, Adam pulling in a two-handed swing right at the other man's neck.
The sword left a haze of flames in its wake. The evaporating droplets of boiling rain around the two were almost still in the air, in comparison. An afterimage of Adam, cloaked in black-red thunder, would've been seen by any mortal onlooker, the actual bull faunus himself moving too swiftly for the human eye to keep up.
Too bad for him, then, that he wasn't really facing a human at all.
One finger.
A single finger, raised to stop his sword. Had stopped his sword. The top of the man's index finger lowered slowly, and gently touched the blazing steel, steaming away in the rain, as though it were a lone blade of grass.
"Oh man..." Ichigo muttered.
Behind the mask, Adam Taurus's eyes were dinner plates of bewilderment. He felt an impossible weight of nothingness upon his shoulders, like– like hers.
Only, that woman, Cinder's pressure from that second, fateful meeting couldn't even begin to compare to the monster he was up against now. Reality swirled with a faint tinge of static. It almost– he could swear he saw a skull behind the man. It spelled death itself, like an unseen blade against his throat. The intent was enough.
Even though he'd put more force into the blow than against the auraless grimm just before... the ground didn't even budge, and the air wasn't affected at all. No cracks in the asphalt; no wind in the air. There wasn't even any noise or sensation of impact. It was as if his opponent was barely even there. Like he was a ghost.
He was frozen in place, a statue carved out of petrified shock. Struck dumb. A finger...? A single finger?
A gust of wind picked up, pushing Ichigo's black-and-white waistcloth against his legs from behind. His armour was slick with wet rain, and the water pooled in the shallow indents for his coral-red pauldrons, irritatingly enough. The weather had gotten to his hair as well, pressing it down with dampness until his wet hair gave him a fringe like when he'd stepped out of the Dangai.
"...major déjà vu, right here." Ichigo remarked. "You some sort of copycat?"
"...What?" Adam asked blankly.
"You're a redhead with a katana; dressed in all black; wearing a white and red mask... who uses an attack named after the moon; and just got his sword stopped by a single finger... hell, you've even got horns..."
"..."
He didn't answer. Shakily, Adam instead elected to retract his blade, and made to sheathe it, fumbling twice. He pivoted on the spot, and began to walk away without a further word.
A black-marked hand on his shoulder stopped him.
He turned, to find Ichigo, but now in a different outfit. His white armour was gone, along with his waistcloth, and in place of his twin swords of white and black was just one big greatsword, wrapped in cloth. Most strange of all, one of his horns was missing, and only the pale horn on the side over his black-yellow eye remained.
His observations were cut off with a fist to his face.
"The hell!? Don't even pretend to try and walk off all coolly when you've just tried something like that!" Ichigo yelled.
The punch sent him sailing down the ruined street, crashing into the scuffed concrete and rolling over. Hurriedly, he got to his feet, a hand up to his face feeling the ache in his jaw even through his aura. His hands unconsciously fell to Wilt and Blush—
"Nuh-uh." Ichigo was right by his side again, giving Adam no time to even think. His speed-!
He made to react, but Ichigo just held up an empty palm placatingly. "Chill out. I was just getting you back for trying to decapitate me. Y'know, if I was being fair, you wouldn't have a head right now." he gave an obviously-sarcastic smile, one with a sadistic slant. "So play nice."
"You– you're working for Beacon?"
"I'm getting paid for clearing out this city. So it's like a contract, I guess?" Ichigo clarified. "I'm a little 'lost', and Ozpin's gonna help me out. At least, I hope he will."
"You would be surprised." Adam groused. "Humans are hardly the reliable sort, to our kind and their own. Don't fall for their empty promises."
"Geez, someone's bitter." Ichigo jabbed. "I'm not really the 'loyal soldier' type, anyway. A faceless organisation doesn't really compare to actual people in the flesh."
"A faceless organisation...?"
"You know, Huntsmanning, and all that stuff. I don't really need to get paid to protect people, do I? You get me?"
Despite himself, Adam did get it. The White Fang weren't exactly profit-oriented, after all.
"I... know the feeling."
"So... you wanna tell me what you're doing here?" Ichigo suggested.
Adam considered for a moment, then decided to just be forthright... mostly. Not as if he could deny the man, from the sheer power he'd displayed just now. He'd thought of himself as strong, but Ichigo... he was eye-opening. If he could somehow recruit the man... Cinder wouldn't stand a chance.
"My organisation aims to set up a base in this area. We sent scouts, to survey the land, but they all lost contact in days. I was the one who volunteered to investigate."
"You're setting up a base here?" Ichigo gestured with his arms, to the cracked walls, smashed windows and fallen lamp posts lining the street. "It's not exactly got the nicest properties on the market."
"That is true..." Adam acknowledged, "but it is on the 'market', as you said."
"You mentioned an organisation... so who're they?"
"Just a group for the faunus, by the faunus." he alluded.
"So... like a charity group? What, you're looking to set up a shelter here, or something?"
Alright, this went beyond just not recognising himself now. Did this Kurosaki not even know what the White Fang was? Sure, he hadn't outright told him... and he wasn't wearing the logo... maybe he did know, but just wasn't very familiar with its members?
"You know what this is, don't you?" he said, gesturing to his mask.
"What, that mask thing?" Ichigo narrowed his mismatched eyes. "It sorta rings a bell..." where had he... "–oh." Ichigo made a flat face. "You're White Fang, aren't you?"
"Yep."
"So you're a terrorist."
"Slander. The trumpets of the media love a boogeyman." Adam denied.
"A criminal, then, at least. I really feel like I should be... arresting you, or something?" Ichigo proposed.
"If you are a dog of the state, you would feel that way, yes." he nodded along. "Luckily, you are free to make your own choices, Ichigo."
What was he even supposed to do with someone he arrested? Ichigo didn't know, and he really didn't feel like lugging around someone all across the city. Maybe he wasn't that important?
"Say... Adam? You're what, just a regular guy in the White Fang, right? Since you're only a scout."
Adam felt the smouldering anger boil and froth in his gut, but fought it down. He'd had to get better at that, after that scroll call. Charging Cinder as he is, was tantamount to suicide, no matter how very much he wished to stick the whore's corpse on a pike and parade it around. One day...
"...Yes..." he grit out, "...just a regular man, a down on his luck, thrust into the cause with nothing to lose and everything to gain."
Ichigo watched his face, but the mask concealed his fleeting eye movements, and hid the tension in his face. It protected his lie, and so protected Adam.
Ichigo nodded.
"Alright then. I'll let you off the hook for now, anyway. Maybe if you were a higher up... but it's not worth messing up my day to try and deal with a small fry like you."
Small fry!? Adam clenched his teeth. That was the first time he'd been called that. The usual insults, monster, and beast, at least sounded strong. He almost reached for Wilt, but stayed his hand when he realised Kurosaki was no longer even there.
Behind him, Ichigo had already flickered away, and was instantly standing amidst the rubble of the diner, over the lambent crystal of viridian soul dust.
Breaking this one with a chop of his hand, revealed a kneeling woman in what looked to be a waitress uniform.
"I... I thought I was g-gone..."
Ichigo frowned.
"I'm sorry, but you are... I'm a Soul Reaper, here to send you on."
He spoke lowly, so Adam couldn't hear against the pitter-patter of the rainfall, even as the man watched on curiously. From his perspective, it must've looked as though Ichigo was merely inspecting the crystal shards.
The woman wept, rubbing at her eyes, her face wet even as the rain passed through her.
"Just, just allow me a moment..." she pleaded.
"Take as long as you need. I'll wait." Ichigo accepted warmly.
She stayed like that for a minute, before entering a short prayer. When she was done, she nodded up at him with reddened eyes.
"Don't worry... you're good person, I'm sure. Just rest well."
He leaned over, and in a swift movement, tapped at her with his zanpakutō's hilt, and re-sheathed it before she could react. She returned to her prayers, even as she faded away with a halo on her head.
Adam Taurus walked up to the diner's rubble, following in when he saw Ichigo draw his sword for a moment.
"What's caught your attention?"
"This dust crystal here..." Ichigo turned a luminous shard of solid reishi over with his black-sandalled foot. "What's it doing in Mountain Glenn? It was in a similar sort of grimm all the way across the city, as well."
"Not another grimm; the same grimm." Adam informed. "The Creeping Venus is a Leviathan Class Creature of Grimm. Its roots have ensnared the entire city, from what I can tell."
"The entire city?" Ichigo turned to face him, an eyebrow raised incredulously. "It's that big?"
"It's probably the main reason the settlement was deemed a lost cause." Adam hypothesised, "Our drones we sent in to surveil the city found just how many of its blooms have sprouted to the surface." he motioned at the rubble they stood in.
Ichigo sighed, a hand on his face. Just my luck... A massive pain like this, something that he couldn't sense at all, that was holding multiple souls captive, across the whole damn city... It meant that the souls he thought were just in basements were actually so much deeper, to boot.
"Those Vennids I just took care of are just the tip of the iceberg. Taking care of it means going underground. It's more like a plant than an animal; there isn't any one place you can just cut off to kill it; you've got to completely destroy all of its bulbs."
"We, you mean."
"We?"
"Yep, we. You're gonna help me out here. You got a problem with that?"
"Don't you?" Adam asked disbelievingly. "I just tried to..."
"Kill me?" Ichigo finished.
"Yes, exactly. You must be a touch insane."
"Only half." Ichigo waved off. "You're sorry, aren't you?"
"It seems I have no choice but to be sorry..." Adam grouched.
"Good enough for me." Ichigo smiled. Despite the rain, the sombre mood, the fallen city around him, strangled by an apparent literal root of evil, despite the sheer amount of death and despair he'd seen and met in one day, he smiled.
He held up a fist. "C'mon, we've got a whole city to weed. You said your drones staked out the area, right? So I'm guessing the reason why you even turned up here to begin with was because you've got a map on your scroll-phone thing."
Adam didn't return the gesture, instead shouldering past Ichigo to lead the way.
"You're smarter than you look–"
"-Hey!"-
"–So yes, I do happen to have a map handy. Follow me. I guess some help will be appreciated after all, given that no one else in the Vale branch can keep up with me. Let's get to work."
Ichigo grumbled, burning holes into the back of the man's head and giving his new 'partner' the stink-eye.
"Tch. I'm not splitting the reward with you, just so you know."
NEXT: 17 - CONCRETE JUNGLE - [Attack On The Beat]
I started a new parody-crack series! Check it out on my profile!
Author notes:
ENTER ADAM, did you expect to see him so early? Ichigo has no idea who he is, and thinks he's just a regular footsoldier. Don't worry, he won't be 'behaving', or anything. Don't expect him to get tamed in like 1 chapter, lol. He's nicer here because Ichigo is a 'faunus', he just flexed on him to an absurd degree, and he's trying to recruit him (good luck with that lol). He's here to try and carve out a base for an attack on Vale (and Cinder), because imagine how hard it was to set up the Breach base in canon? The effects of Chapter 12 will 100% be expanded on. I think his design is pretty cool, and I have some big plans for him in this story.
There's some Eclipse stuff mentioned here, I never played the game so I'm just gonna read the wiki for it and adapt it sparingly, ha. Tell me some important lore for it in the reviews, if you want. The actual giant plant Grimm itself underneath the entire city is an OC thing like the Kraken in the first chapter, but I don't think OC grimm are as big of a deal as OC'ing characters. It's just there to be a thing to fight, after all, not a character with dialogue. Imagine it's gonna be like that one episode of OG Ben 10, with the alien fungus.
This chapter's shorter than most of my others, and originally I intended to start the quest to slay the giant plant with Adam & Ichigo here, but I've got a final exam on Monday. I've decided to post what I've got, and sit down to properly revise. I've got a couple weeks before my next paper after that, so I'll try writing the next chapter then. I think I'll stick with "Remnanti" for people from Remnant.
To Shatter Fate has passed 1000 favourites, thanks a lot to everyone reading!
I'm more than motivated to continue, and I find it really fun to write this story. The biggest plot twist, the central pillar of the story is approaching, very very soon...