The next day, Mannat’s father returned to the clearing in the evening. He brought bedding for Mannat, his clothes, and other utilities, like soap that Mannat was very happy to see. Mannat had never thought he would one day miss something so basic, but he did and it was grieving. Later, the two dug a pit together at some distance from the hut and created a semi-private stall for Mannat to do his private business. It had three planked walls, a hole in the ground with a bucket inside, and an open roof. The wind made him queasy the first time Mannat relieved himself there. The sound of the various living insets that he could hear was charming in its own way.

They ate dinner at seven while the sky was still bright. The witch had disappeared somewhere again and refused to join them, but a guest did. The raven arrived with the cart. At first, it irritated Bhadur and later joined them for early dinner. Raesh wasn’t surprised to learn that it was the Witch’s bird; It was too feisty and contentious.

So feisty that one time it stole a thick rib from Raesh’s hands and flew away to a distant safe zone—the hut’s roof. Gande sent the ribs, and the gesture made Mannat warm inside.

“How’s Pandit? Is he still bedridden?”

“No, not anymore; he’s brought the ribs if you want to know,” Raesh said. They were both eating, slurping the meat off the bones. Gande really knew how to cook meat. It was delicious and made Mannat want to return home just so he could eat such a thing every day. Raesh threw a clean bone into the pot and licked his fingers. “A beer would have been perfect,” he said and let out a short burp. He rubbed his hands together then remember he was forgetting something. “Oh, yes, the boy also sent a message. Do you want to hear?”

“Sure...” Mannat said nonchalantly. He was too late to notice the sneer on his father’s face and could not stop him. He knew the kind of filth that filled his friend's mind. The foolish boy couldn’t have said something shameful to his father… Mannat’s face grew pale.

Raesh started. “He said, and I quote, ‘Tell him to come back soon or I’ll make my move, and you won’t have a wife waiting for you no more.’ End quote.”

It is by no means an exaggeration to say Mannat was speechless. Even his father’s loud booming laughter couldn’t lighten his mood. He was crushed, depressed, hopeless, and blushing. Seeing his son so serious and thoughtful, Raesh decided to tell him the truth.

“He was making a joke, son. The old man wouldn’t let him be so despicable.”

Mannat blushed harder, and even his neck turned red. He didn’t want to have this discussion with his father. A teeny-tiny part of him wished the Witch could return. The other parts of him dug it a hole and buried it in the depths of his mind. That would teach it a lesson.

“I have to say,” Raesh said. “I never thought you would take the girl so seriously.”

Mannat looked away. There was melancholy in his voice when he spoke. “I promised to marry her if I became a blacksmith.”

Raesh felt conflicted. Things had changed. He could have helped the boy in the matters of blacksmithing. So that even if Mannat hadn’t gotten the job at that time Raesh could have helped him become a smith. Now the whole village knew the Witch had taken Mannat under her wing, and so did the old man.

This… he never thought his son would also have to face the world for love. He had brought this upon the two kids. Eventually, he sighed and held Mannat’s shoulders.

“It’ll be all right,” Raesh said. “Now finish the pot before the sun goes down. I have to go back soon.”

“You have to take the pot back?”

Raesh grinned and ruffled Mannat’s hair. “I have to tell Gande that you ate every single rib and you liked it.”

“How’s the shop?”

“It is busy,” Raesh said. “I did lose a very good helper after all. He was good enough to make the assistants sent by the guild seem like mere laborers. It doesn’t feel fair to the boy to take them in.”

Mannat was speechless. He knew his father was merely praising him to lift his mood. However, it only made him feel bad. He held a rib in his fingers, but no longer had the appetite. He would feed it to the raven when it comes back. The bird wasn’t bad company, only a bit scary.

“I’m sorry,” Mannat said.

Raesh slurped down the meat from the last rib and threw the cleaned bone in the extra pot. He then put his hands on the lower back and stretched his stomach. A pop came from his back and he moaned in pleasure. “It’s not that bad.” He told the boy. “It’s overtime and long night shifts until my helper returns. However, that is nothing new. I used to spend nights at the workshop before he joined me. You should know.”

Mannat wasn’t feeling him so he ruffled his hair. When the boy did not wake up from his trance, Raesh bent forward and picked him up. Mannat hiccupped in horror when he realized his father’s intentions.

“NO!” he screamed, but Raesh had made up his mind. “Yes,” said the man showing his yellow-tinted teeth, and started tickling him all over. He forced Mannat to laugh until he cried. He only left after making sure Mannat could spend the night alone there.

He would have stayed if not for the Witch, and the boy didn’t want him there either. What could he do?

“I’ll come back tomorrow at the same time,” Raesh said from the cart before waving goodbye and leaving for the night. Understanding he couldn’t help Mannat formally, he had decided to give the boy a sense of security. He would make sure the boy knew he wasn’t’ alone. His family and friends were waiting for him back in the village. He wouldn’t let the boy guard his heart so tight that he loses his sense of humanity. This was a father’s vigilance and love for his son. Thankfully, the Witch didn’t particularly care or disturb their time together.

Mannat’s days passed working out the same routine. Every day, for the next four days, Raesh joined him at the clearing in the evening with cooked meat. They would have early dinner together before Raesh would leave for the night. They talked about meaningless things and talked about work.

Raesh told him about the wandering group of performers performing in the town and asked if he wanted to go look. Mannat politely declined.

On the seventh morning in the garden, Mannat pulled a juicy and plum carrot from the ground and threw it into the pot he was using as a container. The pot had almost no baby carrots. Including the one just now, Mannat had harvested ten carrots out of which only two were the size of a thumb. An efficiency rate of 80% was enough to graduate him from the garden.

The difficulty was much lower than he first anticipated and it had only gotten lower as he figured out the details. He only needed to check three things. The carrots age, the size of their stem, and the amount of mana it held. The biggest problem he faced was in differentiating a carrot that had a mana value of 1/1, and one with mana value over 10. Common sense dictated, the more mana there was in the root, the bigger it should be. He thought so too until he realized the value was an indication of mana surplus, not of quantity absorbed by the root.

Age was just a number for the carrots in the garden. The mana absorbed and digested by them was the only factor contributing to their growth. This was the reason why he kept finding baby carrots with an age of over seven weeks and mana value above thirty. Such roots were diseased and rotting. They only survived thanks to the constant stream of mana entering their nerves every day. Otherwise, they would have simply plopped over and died.

The result of this weeklong training was best visible through his increased Willpower. The cold and the night no longer disturbed him. The Witch and her antics no longer disturbed him. That was the biggest boon he had received from his increased mental attributes.

The skill ‘Inspection’ comfortably sat at level six. He was proud of the result but not jovial about it. Unfortunately, the garden had lost its value for him in the short run. His skill growth had stagnated. He knew his efficiency in gathering healthy carrots wouldn’t have a serious jump for a while, and he didn’t have time to waste.

Sighing, Mannat inspected another carrot. He looked at it and a transparent blue box appeared floating in front of his eyes. Inspection evolved when it reached level six, and now he no longer needed to touch objects to ‘Inspect’ them.

[Carrot] [Root plant] [Edible]

[Age: 5 day] [Mana: 1/1] [Status: Healthy]

He decided to leave it alone for now. With the capacity to absorb only one point of mana every day, there was a high chance of it being a baby carrot.

Finally, he ended the training for the day, picked up the pot, and walked out of the garden.

He washed his loot with water from the bucket and prepared himself a meal. With enough seasoning and the chops he had learned in the past few days, the broth he cooked was no longer a simple mix of boiled vegetables. A thick smell of spices and flavor wafted out from it. The soup had a healthy brown color and flashed red when it caught light cause of the spices.

Mannat turned a large wooden spoon inside to mix all the flavors. Seeing that the vegetables had softened and looked cooked, he pulled out half a spoon full of the boiling, enriched gravy and slurped it down after blowing on it two-three times.

“Needs some salt,” He mumbled and dropped the spoon back inside the pot. He added salt and let it simmer to thicken the gravy while taking a seat right beside the fire.

He was starting to like his life there, away from the dirt and the noise of the village where people, carts, and animals always kept the narrow traveling veins clogged. He was getting addicted to the sweet and cold air there and had delusions of being in withdrawal once he left. Yes, he was thinking of going back to the village to search for another way to advance his skills. He was still thinking and hadn’t gotten the Witch’s permission yet. He was not worried of her disapproval, however. She had no reason to keep him there.

Mannat watched the open blue sky above the clearing. A circular ring of trees surrounded enclosed it from the rest of the world. He had doubts about his safety in the first few days, but the truth remained that no animal dared venture close to the clearing, much less appear near the hut. He hadn’t seen anything bigger than a raven around. Though he could sometimes hear predatory snarls and howls in the distance at night.

He watched the sun as it waved him a good morning and colored the garden golden. He still had some room for improvement in recognizing the carrot's nutrition value, but he needed a different challenge to shake ‘Inspect’ into action.

Inside the hut, the raven slept on its stand. It had kept him company for the last couple of days, especially whenever he was inside the hut. Perhaps, it was keeping a watch on him. The bird was definitely smart enough for that. It came awoke at the sound of Mannat’s deliberate footsteps, ruffled its wings at the sight of him, then went back to sleep. That was the most interaction he had with the bird. It stayed around him like a living reminder telling him to ‘Stay vigilant,' but kept to itself otherwise.

Mannat glanced over and his sight fell on the table. He had grown fond of the bird actually. It wasn’t the rabid beast he believed at first but was a gentle and prideful creature – much like the Witch, and him.

There was no longer a picture book was on the table. At least in that department, he was making rapid progress. He had wasted countless yellow pages to figure out the sounds of the letters, and the result was a single, but detailed list of all the alphabets and the ways to pronounce them.

A was to be spoken as ‘Eh’ with emphasis on the first letter. B was tricky as it sounded more like ‘boo’ than ‘bee’. He had figured out the sound for all 26 of the characters and moved on to the next stage of learning the language.

Another book titled ‘Around the world by J. Banjara’ had replaced the picture book. It was four fingers thick and twice the size of his previous materials. Beside it was a mammoth-sized dictionary, and a stack of paper he used to practice his letters. The last one he was working with laid flat in front of the empty chair. Unworldly squiggles covered half of the yellow page.

Mannat avoided it like the plague and went to the shelves to find something light-hearted. There were not only knowledge books there, but also some stories tucked away in the corners, waiting for him to find them.

He picked one of the thinner books and went to the table. He did very much wanted to read it outside, in the sunlight amidst the greenery, but the Witch had advised him to keep the books inside the hut. Since she had been straightforward, he was definitely not going to contest her over such a small thing. It would be a tragedy to lose the books.

There were five stories in the book. The first one was about a pigeon that made his nest in the roof of a house that belonged to a shallow-minded old widow.

Mannat raised a brow when he finished reading the sentence. It was awfully familiar to his situation, wasn’t it? He noted his understanding of sentence structure on a paper and went back to reading.

The widow lived alone in the house and was not fond of the pigeon. The woman wanted nothing to do with it. The pigeon’s loud and irritating calls gave her a headache. She worried it would invite its friends and destroyed the nest it was making. The bird flew away and she happily descended the stairs, picked them up, and put them back in the storeroom.

She had a nice sleep that night but woke up the next day to familiar pigeon calls. She went outside and looked at the roof. The bird had returned and built another nest.

She was seething and cursed the bird for barging into her life. Her neighbors told her to be sensitive and let the bird live in peace. It wasn’t going to hurt her. However, she cursed them too, causing them to ignore her. The confrontation between the Widow and the pigeon continued for months until she got used to it -- not the pigeon, but the idea of waking up every day and cleaning the roof.

Then one day after five months, the woman –like every other day-- sat the stairs under the roof and climbed to the top while screaming at the top of her lungs. The bird ignored her like always. However, in anger, she coincidently struck the pigeon with the stick that had previously destroyed its nest countless times.

The bird fell lifeless to the ground. The woman was shocked. She hurriedly descended the stairs and got to the bird to help it, but it was already dead by the time she reached the floor. Unknowingly, the bird had become her companion, and the loss hurt her deeply. She used to scream at everyone, but after that day she stopped screaming and shouting at others.

A few days later, she suddenly pulled out the stairs from the storeroom in the evening and set it under the roof to get rid of the pigeon. She climbed to the top empty-handed and got confused upon finding the roof empty. There was no pigeon or nest there, yet she could hear its cooing in her ears. It took one of her neighbors to reminded her that she had already killed the pigeon. Sadness suddenly washed her heart in sorrow.

Countless thoughts passed through her mind, as she remembered the way she had behaved in the latter years of her life. She had driven every loved one away with her anger. In the daze, she looked over and she saw a group of kids playing ball on the road.

They were shouting and screaming, but for the first time in forever, she didn’t feel annoyed by their ruckus. Coincidently, one of the kids knocked the ball over. They screamed as it flew in an arc over the woman’s head and got stuck on her roof. The boys looked at each other and ran away before the old woman could start screaming at them. As for the ball… the kids were more interested in saving their belongings.

They hurried away before the old woman could speak. She wasn’t angry but smiled in pity. There was a time when she was also full of compassion. Although she knew it was impossible for others to forgive her for years of mistreatment, she could at least let others live in peace. Therefore, she decided to retrieve the ball and return it to the kids tomorrow. This was how she decided to change. Smiling in anticipation to see the kid’s reaction, she climbed over the slanted roof and picked the ball, but then the tiles slipped and she fell to her death.

Mannat sat straight in the chair. The end was so abrupt, just like her death. He looked back and forth between his notes and the last sentence of the page to make sure he had understood the meaning correctly. He didn’t find any mistakes. She really died, just like that. He couldn’t figure out what to say. What kind of story was this? He thought the woman learned a lesson and she would have a happy ever after. To think the woman would die never even crossed his mind.

He shook his head and smiled in pity, like the woman. “She never had a chance to change. Her fate was sealed when she decided to contest the pigeon instead of letting it live on her roof.”

Mannat sat back in the chair for some time and looked at the roof, lost in thoughts. The old woman’s house was old as the Witch’s hut. He wondered if there was a chance of the roof above his head caving in for no reason. A chill climbed its way down his head and it shook him awake.

“That was powerful.” He uttered, still feeling a cold clenching his bones. He gently closed the book and stretched his head about the neck to relieve the soreness. He had one again spent the whole afternoon studying. Usually, his focus keeps him going, but this time the story kept him glued to the chair.

There was still some light dancing in the corner. It had lost most of its brightness and the strands looked more like shadows rather than ripples in water, but it was there and Mannat couldn’t deny its presence.

He thanked the dictionary for making his life easier and gently closed it too. He wouldn’t have made any progress whatsoever without its help. It was the real treasure trove of words, and Mannat loved every page of it. He had learned a few words from it and would be learning more afterward. He just needed to deal with something first. There was a ghostly blue dot faintly flashing in the left corner of his sight.