Region of Dragons and draconic beasts
In the dormitory that next morning, there was a funk in the air. In the eyes of everyone who walked past a certain room, there was a trace of pity and fear. The room seemed to be cloaked in darkness, and wails floated through the door, as if ghosts were being tortured unceasingly.
The sounds chilled the blood, and the boys in the dormitory power-walked past the room in avoidance of it. The room itself had an absence of light - despite it being just past dawn – as the curtains had been tightly drawn shut to keep out the peaceful light of the morning. There were four beds on the floor of the small room, and four forms were seen under the blankets; the shape seemed as if it were children lying down with their butts held high in the air.
These blurry forms were the source of the sounds that were travelling through the entirety of the boys’ dormitory. Suddenly, one of the forms started shifting around, threw the blanket off of itself and opened the curtains. Light flooded into the room like a blaze of glory, hitting the other three organisms under the bed, which then started wailing louder and louder until they too threw their blankets off and stood there, glaring at the one who opened the curtains.
“Jin, what are you doing? Pull the curtains back!” A chubby boy with red cheeks and a head full of golden curls somewhat groggily said as he rubbed his eyes which were full of sleep. He glared at Jin who was standing in front of the window.
“Yeah Jin, why have you woke us up like this, don’t you remember that we don’t have to go to class today?” a small, adorable boy, with chocolate brown eyes frowned at Jin with his soft brown eyebrows. His small, red lips were pulled into a pout as he was confused as to why Jin had pulled the curtains open.
Nergal was standing next to the other two who had complained, but he still glanced at Jin with a somewhat perplexed expression.
The chubby kid with an indignant expression across his cheeks opened his mouth,
“Did something happen to you last night? Did that old bitch hit your ass so hard your brain flew out of your mouth? Did you forget the torture we went through last night? Terminus’ ass is so ravaged that Terminus won’t be able to poop right for a month!”
He looked at the small, brown-haired boy with a trace of compassion in his jade eyes.
“Just because she thought his ass was the wrong shade of white! She said something like ‘a white butt isn’t good for strong men, let grandma change the colour for you’! She even beat him until he said thank you! What’s more, she even gave us all an extra twenty lashes because she just felt like it! Are you really going to give up the week off of lessons she gave us because she felt refreshed after the ‘good ol beating’ she gave us? Huh? Huh?”
The plump boy looked at Jin like he was insane.
Jin’s face paled as he remembered the wicked torment they as a four had been placed under that dark, dark night. That night, truly, the carpet could not soak up the rivers of ass-blood that were carved out by the demon-rod of darkness, ‘Anna-Mae’.
Jin shuddered, but looked to the orange-red glow of the sunrise, composed himself, and grinned,
“Gentlemen, what is the meaning of life?” Jin’s clever eyes darted between the three lads who were stood in front of him. Terminus and the golden-headed boy exchanged a knowing glance while Nergal rolled his eyes in irritation. He had heard all of this countless times. He could even state – word for word – what words Jin was going to use next in his speech.
Seeing that nobody was going to answer his obviously rhetoric question, Jin lifted a leg onto a chair and posed;
“It is to be rich! Gentlemen, boys, men, friends, I wish to be so rich that gold pours like waterfalls for me! I want to be so wealthy that women form queues miles long just to be with a chance of seeing my face! I wish to have mansions the width of continents and jewels as rocks beneath my feet!”
Jin paused to take a breath, his little chest rising up and down quickly as he panted for air, his eyes filled with excitement towards his fantasies for the future. He took his leg off the chair and looked at the boys in front of him.
“So, we must attend every lesson, soak in all the knowledge we can so we can go to the city and get a chance to work for the church or an auction house or a merchant’s!” Jin grabbed his little hand into a fist.
The chubby kid turned his head in disregard away from Jin and said to Nergal and Terminus in a groggy and tired voice,
“Let’s go back to bed, the wounds on my butt are about to reopen from all this standing.” The three then walked away to go back to sleep in the uncomfortable positions of having their bottoms held high in the air.
“Wait!” Jin flashed a wry smile and in a somewhat seductive voice said,
“I heard that Sister Margaret was going to be coming out of silent reflection today, and would be back to teaching her art class,”
Immediately, Nergal’s ears pricked. He glanced at the two boys who were currently futilely trying to get into bed without having their butts touch their mattresses and looked at them helplessly. He then started to get himself ready for going to class.
When Jin saw this he rejoiced inside. Nergal was so easy to manipulate. The only things he cared about were the stars, art and Sister Margaret. Sister Margaret was the art teacher sent by the branch of the Church in the nearest city, and Nergal had always looked at her with a strange gaze in his eyes from the first day he saw her.
She was a beauty, and a lot of the boys in the orphanage had child-like fantasies toward her, but Nergal seemed to be infatuated with her. She had previously gone into a scheduled silent reflection, so Nergal hadn’t seen her for months.
Jin’s face was filled with happiness as he then shifted his gaze to the other two. Terminus shook his head as he saw Nergal brushing his teeth frantically while looking at the sun outside.
“Who cares about Sister Margaret? She’s pretty of course, but I care more about the state of my ass than beauty.” The two boys snorted, and then pulled the blankets over back over their heads as their bodies resembled camels’ humps. Jin sighed, but snickered as he called out innocently,
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“The cultivation class starts today...” The humps twitched a little, but didn’t move. Jin then walked to his bed and started getting ready for class.
“Ouch,” he said, as he pulled his grey robe on and it lightly brushed against his bottom. His grimace changed to a mocking look as he playfully laughed,
“I heard that we were going to be shown magical techniques from someone in the 6th level of Qi Condensation,”
Jin glanced over at the humps and it almost seemed as though they were trembling slightly. His voice changed to one of helplessness,
“but I guess you don’t want to see the might of magical techniques. I guess I really misjudged you guys.” With a disdainful smirk, he finished getting changed and nodded to Nergal as they both prepared to leave.
Suddenly, two flashes came out from under the blankets and Terminus and the chubby kid stood there with bright red faces. The chubby kid was somehow fully changed and as if oblivious to what had happened previously, he said, while opening the door,
“Well what are you all waiting for, let’s go!”
The church that functioned as an orphanage and a nunnery was one of many scattered across the Divine Shi Huang continent and was one of the orphanages belonging to the Heavenly Light Church of the Purple Jade Empire.
Orphanages like these were quite important to the Church as they were places where future workers were educated, and some children may even grow up to be part of the armies of the Church or even bishops and cardinals. In the case that the child wanted to work for someone else, the Church would get 10% of their salary over the first ten years, so it was quite profitable for the Church.
If anything went wrong, it may be a bit cold-hearted, but the general view was that they were only orphans so it didn’t matter much. It was mostly win-win for the Church and the orphans because one, the orphans had a place to stay and a somewhat bright future, and two, the Church had no shortage of future workers, and some may grow up to be geniuses in art, war or scholarly studies.
The classes started at 5:30 in the morning, so the quartet dashed to the mess hall to eat a quick breakfast and ran to their first ‘lesson’ which was Mass. Mass was given in the manor’s rear gardens where there were stone benches set up and mostly consisted of the Head Sister reading a few passages from the Holy Book of Heavenly Light. The four were quite late and limped towards the rear gardens.
Panting, and all clutching their asses like they were about to fall off, they walked to the stone benches until they stopped. Collectively their faces paled, and they started whispering,
“What are we going to do? We can’t sit down!” the chubby kid glared at Jin and looked at fear towards the supposedly harmless stone bench. It was evil. Jin looked helpless as he said,
“We stand, Beans, we stand” Jin looked noble as he stood and faced the dastardly Head Sister with a defiant look on his face to hide the fear he was feeling in the depths of his soul.
“But it’s a 4 hour service, our legs and asses will burn! The pain will be unimaginable! One time, Oliver tried standing after a beating from Head Sister, but they had to pick him off the ground after twenty minutes! He was wasted!” Beans’ chubby face lit up the horror as he recalled what had happened that day. Two nuns had to carry him off in a stretcher. He still remembered the scarlet hue Oliver’s calves had turned as a result of standing during the long-winded Mass. He shuddered. It was as if the words out of the book contained a special power that made your legs unable to bear your own weight.
Jin stood his ground and said,
“We endure!”
After a long four hours, countless gazes from other young boys filled with horror, fear, admiration and pity, as well as crushing heavenly torment, with knees shaking, the boys walked towards their first lesson.
“Phew, I can’t believe we got through that,” Terminus wiped beads of sweat off of his brow.
“Yeah, I thought I was going to die there. After about an hour of standing, I was calling to the sovereign to take my life as I stood!” Beans panted. He resembled an old man as he trembled towards the church and their classroom.
“Thank goodness the next lesson had cushions on the seats, or we would have had our souls taken today.” Jin sighed in relief. Even the passive Nergal had a bead of sweat on his forehead and his teeth were clenched as he endured the pain their legs were in.
The next lesson was Geography, taught by the second eldest nun in the nunnery. There were about thirty children in the class. The four entered, and took seats at the very back of the class. The cushions were the most comfortable there. The teacher looked at them with sympathy and pity and then started the class.
Jin was by far the most studious out of the four, and frequently raised his hand to answer questions in class. The other three had various stages of disinterest, culminating in Nergal who was staring out of the window toward the sky as if his gaze penetrated to the stars.
“So children, we live in the Cyan province, the easternmost province of the Purple Jade Empire. We are on the border of the empire, and the volcanic region of Dragons and draconic beasts. There are a lot of active volcanoes, but the most dangerous one, that swept through the lands countless millennia ago, had been dormant ever since, and the other volcanoes rarely erupt strongly enough for any harm to come to anything outside of the volcanic region.”
The old woman looked around and asked, “In what year did the last volcano erupt?”
Jin’s hand flew toward the ceiling of the room. The elderly woman sighed, and then looked toward the other students in the class. After a few minutes of students avoiding her gaze, she reluctantly picked on Jin.
“The last recorded eruption was six years ago, in the year of our sovereign, 12982 when the lesser volcano, codenamed, Gyvarra erupted. No lives were lost, but it could have been seen as a major eruption for that volcano, and it immediately went dormant as a result.”