Cultivation Through Artifacts

Chapter 1: Prologue

Pain… Regret… Disappointment… Grief.

Feelings that no matter how hard you try to forget about, at the end of your day, they will always find a way back to you.

The moment when there is no one else on your side, but only sheer silence and darkness, these kind of gray feelings will always break onto the surface and eat you alive.

Happiness?

That is nothing more than a ridiculous feeling in your life just to mask your real emotions. At the end of your life, all the things that you have thought would make you happy are nothing more but a huge lie… An illusion.

You are just hiding behind that false feeling to run away from the reality that you don’t want to face head-on, because you are too scared to do so.

You are pretending that you are happy, just not to confront the hard and cold reality that you are nothing more but an object, a speck of mere dust in the vast desert that no one cares about.

The heavy and painful truth that everything you did for others in the past was for nothing and everyone just used you as a disposable item which is only useful until they think so. Friends, teachers, strangers… Every single one of them.

Even your family, which you thought that will be always on your side no matter what, turned their backs on you because they hated you, but you still showed happiness because you still thought these were nothing more but just lies.

You showed them that you were happy and believed that they will love you, but no. You were wrong.

They just deluded you to think they love you, but in actuality, they just used you like a machine to achieve what they couldn’t in their yore.

And when things sadly turned to the worst and you finally realized all of these harsh facts, what will wait for you are exactly those kinds of dark feelings.

Or at least that was just how Cal was currently feeling…

He was just a boy who was only at the age of 17. Except for the idol appearance and mature look that he inherited from his parents, there was nothing special about him at all.

However, even with that appearance, which told others that he will have a great future before him, he was still standing at the edge of the highest building in his city.

Watching the buzzling people below his feet from that height, Cal slowly closed his eyes and with a deep sigh, he started to think back to the cause which led him all the way here.

He was just a normal teenage boy, who wanted to live a normal life with a normal future, but sadly this couldn’t happen with him at all.

During all of his time until now, what he did was to live not for him, but for his parents.

They made him do things he didn’t want to do even if he liked it or not, but if he denied any of their ‘order’ they would beat him up to the point where he could hardly move. And because he couldn’t ask for any help, because even his ‘friends’ used him as a piece of trash, he didn’t have any choice at all.

When he thought he will live his entire life under their chains, suddenly a girl popped up out of nowhere and came into his life.

She made his gray view of the world slowly turn colorful again and made him feel true happiness again, which he never felt for years.

He spent all of his time he could with her, and after a year and a half, he finally dared to confess to her.

And what was the girl’s answer? A returned love.

From that point on, they started to date as a couple and Cal’s life started to turn toward a future that he would have never dreamed of.

However, everything will come to an end sooner or later, and unfortunately, Cal’s happiness has come to and sooner in a very brutal way.

Just as he wanted to go over to his girlfriend and celebrate their second anniversary, shocking news hit him like a tsunami.

His girlfriend, Nancy Halford, was brutally killed by unknown murderers. Even Nancy’s parents and her little brother had been found cold dead, leaving none of them alive at all.

When Cal heard this, he couldn’t believe the news, so without hesitation, he ran all the way to Nancy’s house.

But the moment he arrived there, he needed to face the harsh truth.

Bystanders on the side surrounding the house and ambulance inside the house. Cal watched with pale expression as the medical people brought out four, blood-covered corpses one after another.

When he walked closer to the one the he recognized instantly and seeing that the dead body was truly hers, Cal felt as the whole world around him got destroyed in a single second.

“No… This… This can’t be…”, said Cal with teardrops slowly flowing down his cheek, and kneeled down powerlessly next to Nancy’s dead body.

Among huge drops of tears and pleading screams, suddenly Cal realized that something was stuffed into Nancy’s hand.

After taking a closer look, he discovered that there was a tightly held creased piece of paper in his hold that until now no one noticed.

“?”

Taking the paper away from her lifeless and cold grip, Cal opened it slowly and started to read the words that was written in it.

But the moment when he saw the quick and almost unreadable words, which was obviously because Nancy was in a noticeable hurry, his expression froze up instantly.

“Im… Impossible… This… can’t be true…”, mumbled Cal with disbelief, but suddenly he remembered something.

It was a conversation between his father and an unknown man in the past that he overheard by accident before their house. Remembering back at his father’s words which at that time seemed totally innocent, made him feel the rage instantly flow through his whole body.

“That p*ece of old sh*t! I will… I will…”

Without further hesitation, he stood up and ran all the way back home, while his mind was filled with only one thing. And it was pure anger.

“I will… I will…”

***

*BAM!*

With a loud bang, the door into the living room got burst wide open, making a fat old man and an old woman instantly startled by the sudden happenings.

“Cal? What are you doing? Oh my God! Your suit! It is covered with full of mud! Cal! Do you have an idea just how expensive that cloth on you have cost?”

Hearing what his father was saying, Cal’s expression darkened even more, and said calmly, “Shut up you pig…”

“Huh? What did you say?”, asked the man with surprise, but the next second he turned angry and after standing up, he walked closer to Cal and was ready to hit him in the face.

“Just you wait! Who do you think I a-.”

*Squeak!*

However just before the man could have slapped Cal on the face, suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his chest, making him to look down with widened eyes.

“Huh?”

*Paff!*

Falling heavily onto the ground, the man looked at the pierced knife in his chest with disbelief.

“You…”, started to say the man and wanted to pull out the weapon from his chest, but before he could have done so, Cal stepped powerfully on the knife’s hilt, pushing it deeper into the man’s chest.

“Argh!! Why… Ha…”

The man wanted to say something, but after a few seconds, the life started to disappeared from his eyes, and the only emotion that was still visible on his face was sheer fear and disbelief.

“OH MY GOODNESS! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?”

With a loud scream, the woman on the side ran next to her husband and started to inspect his body. However, seeing that it was already too late, the woman looked up with tearful eyes and said with clenched teeth, “You will pay for all of this, that is for sure!”

Cal seeing his mother’s expressionless face started to slowly walk toward her.

Seeing as Cal was walking closer to her without a word, the woman started to panic and shouted, “STAY AWAY FROM ME YOU MONST-, Huh?”

However just before she could have finished her scream, Cal placed both of his palms gently on her mother’s cheeks and just looked deep into her eyes.

Looking at those eyes that lied to him every single day, Cal felt disgusted instantly, so without any hesitation, he placed his thumbs on the woman’s eyes.

With a powerful and sudden press, he squashed her eyes, making the room to be filled with blood and painful screams in an instant.

“AAAARRRGGGHHH!! MY… MY EYES!!”

Amongst loud screams and flowing blood, the woman struggled to escape away from Cal’s hold, but in the end, because she was blind, she couldn’t.

Hearing her mother’s painful voice, Cal’s expression looked annoyed, so as a result he walked slowly behind her and grabbed her by the head again.

“P…please… Please have mercy…”

The moment Cal heard this, he instantly remembered back at Nancy’s corpse, making him to feel indescribable rage throughout his body.

“Have mercy? Mercy? Ha! Don’t make me laugh! Do you think she got any back then? Do you have any idea what she had gone through just because of the two of you??! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA?!”

“We didn-.”

*CRACK!*

*Paff!*

However Cal didn’t care about the woman’s respond.

With a smooth movement, he snapped his mother’s neck around, making her lifeless carcass to fall into the blood, right next to his father’s corpse.

And that is what happened exactly with him. Under a single day, he lost everything.

Opening his eyes slowly, Cal looked at the strange-looking iron bracelet that he got from Nancy for their first anniversary. Since the moment he got it, he didn’t take it off not even once.

“There is no longer a reason for me to stay in this world…”

With that in mind, Cal stepped forward, throwing himself off the building without a single hesitation.

100 meters, 90 meters, 70 meters, 45 meters…

Cal’s body was falling toward the ground at a rapid pace, while his life until this moment was flashing before his eyes one after another.

“Ah… So this is how this feels… Amazing indeed…”, said Cal with surprising calmness and watched as the ground below him was now only a few meters away from him.

“I hope that if there is a next life, I can meet with you again…”

And just as he thought about this, suddenly the bracelet on his wrist lit up.

Looking at it, Cal wanted to figure out what could have just happened, but he couldn’t, because his body hit the ground powerfully, making his vision to turn dark in an instant…