Chapter 614 Four Pillars: Freak Show
'Where... where am I?' Gradually returning to his senses after some time, Valyr briefly felt a bit of headache and confusion as he looked around. Though, after taking a brief glance at the sight before him, the headache he felt swiftly disappeared as he began to try getting a better grasp of his current situation.
Finally recalling that he had chosen to access the memories regarding the First Forger, the young man swiftly noticed how his current viewpoint was different than how he would normally view things, feeling as if he was staring at the scene from the edge of a tall cliff. Fortunately, his view was not just stuck to one perspective, finding out after a bit of experimentation that he could move around to get a better look at the scene, albeit within a limited range.
With this newfound knowledge, only then did Valyr finally look at the scene before him in greater detail, noting a few things here and there that awakened some information he had read in the past. 'Crudely built structures strewn about... orcs dragging along humans in some sort of crude rope... tons of half-eaten corpses on the sides of buildings...' n--Ovelb1n
'If I'm not mistaken... I'm currently witnessing what's going on in an orc settlement from the Age of Darkness.' As Valyr came to this thought, the young man's expression turned solemn as he looked at how the humans were being treated, recalling what he had read about the era he was currently witnessing firsthand.
With orcs being one of the five ruling races during the Age of Darkness, any human they could get their hands on had turned into their playthings. However, from what the young man saw before him, such a thing could not be further away from the truth, with most of the orcs treating them as livestock.
In fact, Valyr even saw some orcs hang a few humans on the walls of their buildings before rendering them lifeless, only to leave them in the sun to dry after that.
Seeing how the orcs did not even hesitate in doing these atrocities, the young man felt a bit of rage bubbling within him. Sadly, as he was only being shown memories of what was once the past, any movement he made against them seemed to pass through them as if it were nothing, causing him to let out a faint sigh as he focused on why he was being shown the memory in the first place.
"Feast your eyes, everyone!" Watching the orcs go through their daily lives during the Age of Darkness for a bit longer, Valyr started to move through the fairly large settlement, eventually stopping after seeing a crowd of orcs gather around a somewhat well-dressed orc that stood beside a human that looked to be in his early thirties. At first, the young man did not think too much about the situation, getting the feeling that the orc was possibly holding a bidding war to sell off the human beside it.
However, after looking at the human for a bit more, Valyr finally noticed a few things that were odd about him. For one, there seemed to be no trace of maltreatment on the human's body whatsoever, while the clothes that the human wore looked to be slightly better compared to the rags the humans he saw before wore, appearing to be a crude dress of some sort.
Then again, what truly piqued his interest was not any of those. Instead, it was the fact that the human did not fear looking at the crowd of orcs before him.
If anything, the man's gaze seemed like he was intent on fighting against them.
"Standing beside me is quite an odd variant of the creature we've been feeding on," said the orc in a loud voice, causing the crowd's attention to focus on it. As for Valyr, his eyes widened in slight surprise once he found out he could understand what the orc was saying, though he soon understood that it might be due to the fact that he was viewing memories of the past.
"Though some of the creatures we've hunted are quite resilient, needing a few hits from our axes to submit to us, this creature has shown a level of resiliency that stumps even me, Brh'zaak!" Saying these words to rouse the interest of the watching orcs, the orc named Brh'zaak unsheathed the shortsword around its waist, prompting the human to extend one of its arms out in response.
Whoosh!
Then, without hesitation, the orc slashed down on the human's arm with all its strength. Wondering what the orc meant by the human being extremely resilient, the crowd was disappointed when they saw that the sword was able to cut off the human's arm as it fell to the ground. However, not even a few seconds later, the crowd quickly understood why the orc made such a bold claim.
"Ngh..." As the man let out a muffled moan of pain, he took in a few deep breaths before grabbing the arm that had been cut off. After that, he placed the cut-off arm near the point of separation, only for tendrils of flesh to start extending out of his body as the arm swiftly reattached itself.
After the human balled up the hand on the cut-off arm into a fist a few times, the crowd of orcs looked at the sight before them with great shock evident in their eyes, their minds failing to comprehend what they had seen before him. Then, as if the same thought had clicked in their minds at the same time, they all approached Brh'zaak with the request to land a hit on the extremely resilient human, their faces filled with smiles after Brh'zaak told them they could do so after paying a small fee.
'What you see before you is the daily life of the man that would eventually be known as the First Forger during the Age of Darkness.' Frowning at the thought of the orc turning the human into a one-man freak show, Valyr's eyes slightly widened in surprise after hearing the disembodied voice from the Gates of Enlightenment resound in his mind all of a sudden. 'With his inhuman levels of self-recovery, he was able to save himself from being turned into food that would be eaten by a random orc, instead turning into a crude form of entertainment for the orcs to enjoy.'
'However, it won't take long for the man to become one of the most renowned humans in history, becoming the First Forger that we know of.' At these words, Valyr briefly wondered what the voice meant by that, only for him to recall the information he had read in the past once more. With that in mind, it did not take long for him to realize that the voice was referring to what was considered the most important event that turned the fates of humans around.
"The advent of the system."
