“Have you met any new beasts in the woods?”

“Forget beasts, even normal rabbits are far and in-between. Deer long migrated deeper into the woods, now even boars have stopped coming to the edge of the forest. It’s like the animals are scared of something.” Pandit said. There was a pause, then he asked a question. “When do you think the woods are the scariest?”

“…at night?” Mannat said. It made him wonder if that past incident from half a decade ago did leave a shadow in his heart.

“NO!” Pandit’s voice dialed up by a few notches. Stressed and anxious, he didn’t catch Mannat’s slipup. He had too much on his mind. “The woods are the scariest when they are silent. There should be birds tweeting, fighting each other, singing and taking, squirrels jumping in the branches, rodents in the foliage, broken plants, paw prints in the mud, scratch marks on the tree trunks. Now there is nothing going on. Even the wind is uninterested to play in the forest. The woods are as silent as a graveyard. It’s like they are haunted.” Pandit lamented in vehemence.

Mannat listened without uttering a peep.

“Yesterday, we returned home empty-handed; not because we messed up and couldn’t catch a prey. We simply didn’t find any prey to catch.” Pandit gnashed his teeth and faced Mannat, hands in his pockets, which was very unusual for the boy. “Do you think there could be other things in the woods?” he asked, softly, almost in a whisper.

“You mean demons?”

Yes, the first pair of demonic rabbits was dead. It still raised questions about the latest demonic rabbit that Pandit’s team buried in the forest. No way the thing that plundered its body was normal. Mannat couldn’t help share his friend's worry.

“I can’t tell if the woods are really haunted,” Mannat admitted. “But the Witch might know something.”

His words made Pandit visibly shudder.

“That’s all right,” Pandit dropped the topic.

Mannat remembered. His friend had kept his distance from the clearing since the night they took his mother to see the Witch. He had never gone to visit him there. They never even breached the topic actually.

Guess we are both broken in some way. Mannat thought.

Pandit had asked him once about that fateful dark night, but Mannat hadn’t told him.

“Do you still want to know what happened that night?”Mannat said.

“Which night--” Pandit asked. Mannat knew from the pause which accompanied the question that his friend knew the answer.

Pandit looked away again. “There is no need.” He said catatonically.

Mannat didn’t want to leave Pandit in the dark space he was, but also couldn’t guide him to the light. He could only stand in the grey shadow spreading from the darkness and keep an eye on him.

The walk back to the village wasn’t quiet or squeamish. Pandit pestered Mannat with questions about his love life. Of course, he also shared his experiences or rather bragged about them. Pandit’s false bravado didn’t ease Mannat’s mind but worried him toward the approaching dark currents and what they might have in store for them.

They were quickly approaching their workshops when Mannat saw his father leaving the smithy accompanied by a group of people.

“Isn’t that the Sarpanch?” Pandit commented.

The man was easily distinguishable amid the hard-working villagers on the road. The white of his shirt and the shine of his pants made him look like an outsider among the villager who all wore similar threadbare clothes whose colors had long faded and become indistinguishable from one another.

“Does he not have another set of clothes?” Mannat blurted out.

Pandit couldn’t help raise an eye to his friend's statement. “That’s his official attire. The man likes to wear white clothes to show his peaceful ways, just and pure nature.” He nodded toward the Sarpanch for Mannat to follow his sight. “Do you see the smile and the hands joined in appreciation? It’s all a disguise. The man is a rat. ”

“I know.”

Pandit couldn’t help squinting. “I thought you only knew a few people in the village.” He ignored Mannat’s raised eyebrow and its implication. No need to answer for the thing he didn’t see. “Why do you suddenly know the Sarpanch? Did you meet him somewhere?”

“I met him at the old man’s manor while we were trying to catch the mole in his fields.”

Pandit gave a few nods in understanding. “Yeah, he has been there a lot these days.”

“For what?” Mannat asked, suddenly curious. Was the man again trying to extort money from the old man?

Pandit smiled slyly. “The last I heard…” Mannat’s ears twitched in eagerness. “You are the one who got in bed with his granddaughter. You should know more than I do about things that go down in the manor. Say, how was it? Did you last long enough to see her eyes roll to the back of her head? Don’t tell me even Larkhar has been nothing but a blue-balled liar all these years!”

“We kissed,” Mannat blurted out as if pointing toward a pig in the crowd. It didn’t matter that he was supposed to keep it secret. Pandit believed what he wanted to believe.

“Like hell you did. You might have overtaken me in a different race, but you will never win against me on the road!”Pandit grinned from the lips while his eyes reddened in sadness, and then he ran away.

However, Pandit wasn’t finished yet. He looked back near the smithy and yelled at the top of his lungs. “You wait for me! I’ll catch up with you soon enough!”

No one paid attention to his words, but Mannat’s face had a shallow change before it reverted to normal.

The Sarpanch tersely looked his way and greeted him with a wave before he also left with his party of people.

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Mannat didn’t pay much attention to the Sarpanch’s followers, but he worried that the man might have been looking for him. If Pandit was right, the reason why the Sarpanch frequently visited the old man might also have the same roots.

It was safe to say he needed to talk with his father. Mannat had only taken a few steps into the smithy when his father followed him inside and threw a question at him out of the blue.

“The Sarpanch was looking for you.”

“I understand.” Mannat answer didn’t satisfy his father and another blunt question was thrown at him.

“What did you do to earn the man’s ire?”

Raesh was worried for him. Mannat would have told his father the truth even if he hadn’t asked. “I might have caused him to lose some money. He wanted to extort money from the old man to help him take care of his farm problem.” Mannat didn’t say which problem. His father obviously knew, but he showed no reaction. They had a silent agreement, a tactical understanding regarding the matter.

Raesh clicked his tongue in annoyance and turned away. “Stay as far away from him as possible. He becomes a venomous snake whenever money is involved. Don’t give him the chance to bite you.”

“What did he want?” Mannat asked back.

“Nothing that concerns you,” Raesh heavily dropped a hand on the tabletop and it rang a deep vibrating beat like a war drum. “Let’s get to work,” Raesh added and stepped into the corridor that separated the worldly troubles from the matter of iron and fire.

Mannat dropped the topic since his father was reluctant to tell him. He made the decision to do the things in his hands to the best of his ability, and let the adults handle adult matters.

The month had passed, but their job hadn’t changed. They were still making arrowheads. The furnace explosion had put things on a slow burner for a while, and now things were slowly getting back on track. There was a lull in the workshop as they waited for the block of iron to heat up. Mannat, against Raesh’s urge and wish, was once again at the furnace and working the bellow. Raesh worried because he had checked and double-checked but not found the cause of the explosion. Not like, there was anything else to do in the shop. They hadn’t forged any arrows and the villagers hadn’t commissioned new jobs.

Raesh, as a father and an adult, stuck a conversation with Mannat since they both were free at that time.

“Has the Witch given you any problems?” Raesh asked, not knowing what else to ask. Fathers rarely know what’s happening in their child’s life. Noor would have known what to ask. He knew that too, but he couldn’t ask her to hold his hand now could he?

Mannat didn’t take his eye off the furnace and casually replied. “No. She’s rarely there in the first place. I sometimes feel like I’m the owner of the hut, and she’s the guest staying there.” a pause and he added, “I have finally graduated from carrots.” He let out a chuckle. “Now I’m eating bell peppers.”

“Are they anything like the carrots?” Raesh said gulping a mouthful of imaginary carrots.

“They are much better.” Mannat heard his father groan and his smile grew wider. Of course, he would not tell Raesh about the aided mana recovery that comes with the soul-soothing taste. His father shouldered too many worries. He didn’t want to add the weight of a potential future calamity to it.

“I wish I could give you some, but I can barely get enough for myself.” Mannat turned the block of iron in the furnace with a tong. It was no easy to keep his eyes peeled on the bright fire, but he didn’t take his eyes off. The accident might have physically marred his father, but it had also psychologically affected him.

“Don’t worry about me, but don’t forget to eat some meat with the vegetables,” Raesh said. “Other parents would force their children to eat vegetables and I have to advise you to eat meat.” Raesh joked, and then quickly added at the end, “Say… has your ‘vigor’ evolved yet?”

Mannat shook his head. “It had not. The skill’s stubbornly stuck at level nine, and is refusing to budge.” Saying so, he pulled the glowing hot iron ingot job out of the furnace with a tong and placed it on the anvil before pulled back to get out of harm’s way. Raesh checked his gloves and grabbed the block of iron with a tong. He also checked his grip on the hammer and started drawing a coin-sized piece of metal from the metal block.

Rash quickly separated the lump of metal from the ingot, while Mannat picked up the rest of it and fitted it back in the furnace to keep it hot while his father shaped the arrowhead. The hammer barely struck the coin-sized lump of metal a handful of times, and a new arrowhead was forged. Raesh quenched the glowing weapon in the vat of tempering oil while Mannat grabbed the iron block from the furnace and presented it upon the anvil for dissection.

The boring mechanical work was the reason most labor-intense jobs had high ‘focus’ requirements.

“Are you tired already?”

Mannat raised his head and passed a smile to his father before getting absorbed in watching the fire rage inside the furnace.

“I know it gets boring when you have to watch others work.” Raesh dropped the forged arrowhead in the crate below the anvil. “Why don’t you do something else? I don’t really need you here. Don’t you have any new ideas to try?”

Raesh didn’t get a response so he fell back into the rhythm of forging new ‘duplicates’ of the arrowhead. His skill was developing nicely. There was a huge chance of it leveling up again by the end of the month. He hadn’t experienced new skill messages for such a long-long time, now each and every notification he received was a joy to read.

He was cleaning another tempered arrowhead when Mannat suddenly sprung up into action.

“Father!” The boy explained with madness in his eyes, making Raesh wonder if his few words had awakened the sleeping giant. The boy didn’t disappoint. Mannat said exactly what Raesh hoped to hear so he could keep the boy away from the furnace for a few days.

“I have an idea!” Mannat said. "Let's create white iron!"