Chapter 119. National Foundation Day (3)
The old woman knelt down and bowed her head.
“I sincerely apologize. My foolish grandson has made such a huge mistake. I didn’t know that he would play a stupid trick like this.”
She earnestly apologized while staring daggers at Davinachon from the corner of her eyes. Davinachon felt her glance and all he could do was rub the back of his head out of embarrassment.
“Well, it’s all fine. You even refunded the money. I don’t really have anything to say.”
“Thanks for understanding. If you give me a chance, I can read your future precisely. We tell fortunes using a song passed down by our ancestors. Would you allow me to tell your fortune to expunge our shame?”
“A song?”
Desir was very curious about it. He had never heard about reading futures through the use of a song. When Desir looked at Adjest, she nodded her head in agreement.
“Thank you so much. We’ll try our best. I think to properly convey our sincerity, my grandson should read your future. I’ll supervise him from right here, so you don’t have to worry about anything.”
Davinachon suddenly felt very tired, hearing that he would be reading to that creepy song. “Gr… Grandma?”
“Shut your mouth! You better make it up to them double and triple! I’ll sing the song and you read. You learned how to read over my shoulder.”
She announced her decision with utter determination. Her tone left no room for negotiation. “Alright. I’ll try.”
“I’ll bury you in the ground if you don’t do it well!”
“That’s enough. I’m not the douchebag you think I am.”
Davinachon swept all the trinkets on the table off to the side, and then lit up a stick of incense before immediately blowing it out. He then brought another stick of incense wrapped up in something red. The scent filled up the room entirely. Meanwhile, the old woman arranged some symbolic figures in the cardinal directions.
Desir and Adjest looked at what they were doing with gazes filled with curiosity. This was definitely quite a novel experience for them.
“I’m sorry that you had to wait.”
The incense immediately ignited into a big flame. Davinachon changed into a red robe. In his hands, he was holding an old worn-out stack of leather cards instead of the fancy golden tarot cards he had before. He deeply gazed at Desir and Adjest before sitting down in front of them. “I’ll read your relationship. Before I start, I need a strand of hair from both of you.”
This wasn’t a hard task. Both Desir and Adjest handed him a strand of hair. Davinachon twisted and knotted the hair. He dropped the string of hair into the flame.
“A person’s hair represents their destiny. The knot represents an intertwining of destiny: the relationship.”
Dark smoke spilt out from the flame and settled on the desk. Davinachon laid out the leathered cards. Within a moment, the cards were covered by the smoke and disappeared from view. “Now then, I need to spiritually connect your souls to the cards. For this, we need the song.” The old woman started singing in a deep and low tone.
“DeNa Lado, Kalips. DneLanKaniWai… ”
Desir thought that this turn wasn’t too surprising at all. The song had nothing special going for it excluding the use of an ancient language for its lyrics. She was just reading words out loud.
That was all, he thought. However, there was some strange energy building up in the room that appeared to be related to the song.
“…DeMoon, LaSiGal, CheBe,” and the old woman finished the song.
“Now, your souls and the cards are connected. You can select a card, but don’t flip it yet. Just look straight ahead.”
Adjest followed his directions. Desir was just sitting down, staring at the cards blankly, so Adjest had to poke his knee to wake him up. Desir quickly selected a card.
Davinachon received both cards and flipped them.
One of the cards had a picture of multiple swords.
“This card represents alliance, strong bond, or a concentration.” Davinachon solemnly told them.
He, then, sighed and closed his eyes. After a while, he loudly exhaled out and opened his eyes. “But, these swords have subtly disconnected. You can see the deviation. Each sword is blocking the word ahead. It is difficult to see positively.”
“…”
Adjest’s face tensed up.
Davinachon continued. He now flipped the card Adjest had selected. This card showed a collapsed world. Amongst the pieces of debris, there was a pillar of a temple standing. If the pillar wasn’t there, the card would have looked like a pile of stones and rocks.
“No matter how solid a temple is built, it will someday collapse. There will be decay due to time, rain, snow, and wind. And when it hits its limit, it will collapse. It will lose its purpose and become a pile of rocks.”
Davinachon took a breath before continuing.
“Humans are no different from this. We have a downfall at least once in our life. The heavier the ceiling we support, the heavier burdens and responsibilities we hold. And this makes it all the easier to fall.”
He pointed at the pillar.
“But even though everything falls, there is a pillar that perseveres until the end. We know that this card is a temple because of this pillar. A thing that still exists even after everything in the world collapses. Either of you will be this pillar when the other faces a downfall. The person will be the support.”
Davinachon turned to face Adjest squarely.
“This kind of reading is very rare. I can foresee many hardships in your relationship, but as you two overcome each of them, one by one, your relationship will be all the stronger for it.” “…”
After this, Adjest finally made a small smile.
A strong relationship. She couldn’t figure out what kind of relationship Davinachon was talking about, but she was pretty satisfied with this result.
The incense was all burnt. The smoke began to swiftly fade away. The reading was done. Without hesitation, Adjest took out a gold coin from her pocket. The old woman refused to receive the gold, saying the reading was an apology for the slight they made before, but Adjest insisted that they take it.
Out of the blue… “Hahaha!”
Desir laughed. He seemed very happy.
The old woman and Davinachon were surprised and looked at Desir. After a long time, Desir stopped laughing.
“It was a really great reading. The song was very impressive.” Davinachon’s eyes widened. Desir put 10 gold in the box.
“…”
“Alright, we’ll go ahead. Thank you for the song.”
As they bid their farewell, Desir and Adjest took off leaving behind a wagon that had been stunned into silence.
‘What the hell just happened?’
The old woman picked up a coin in the box. She observed it carefully and it was a real gold coin. And she found nine more of the pure gold coins in the box.
No fortune-teller in the central part of the city could make this in an entire day.
“Grandma, I had thought that your song was helpless. I hated it. I couldn’t care less if this tradition was cut off in your generation. I was a fool. I was stupid to believe that the song was meaningless.”
Davinachon broke the silence with his rambling.
“So… What you are saying is that you want to carry this tradition on?”
“Yes, I do. I finally realized how important it is. If you teach me, I’ll be honored to learn and carry on our tradition.”
“I’ve longed for the day when you would ask this of me.” “There’s only me who can inherit this. Is there anyone else?” “Oh, dear… ”
They looked at each other with eyes filled with emotion. When the connection spanning the two generations was finally about to happen, the old woman suddenly frowned.
“Hell to you!” *Thud*
“What? Why are you mad? I thought you’d be happy!”
“Screw you! Do you think I’d believe you? You only care about money!”
* * *
Desir surely overpaid the fortune-tellers with 10 gold. Precisely, he paid this much not because he liked the reading, but the method of fortune-telling. Specifically, he liked the ritual and the song that it was based around. Once the old woman started singing, Desir couldn’t pay any attention to the reading, focusing entirely on the song.
It was a very mysterious song. According to what the old woman said, the song must have been passed down, generation to generation, over a long period of time. The song had the power to shake his emotions.
‘How?’
The melody of the song was very ordinary. It didn’t have any special passage, nor could it be described with any particular color. The lyrics were not unique at all, although Desir couldn’t understand the meaning of them.
‘They were just ancient words… ”
But the ancient words definitely moved Desir’s heart.
‘They were just regular words in isolation, but the energy in the room completely changed when they were expressed together in those particular phrases.’
If the words were arranged in a different order, Desir might have felt differently. ‘The arrangement of words, harmony… ’
Desir suddenly felt enlightened. His thoughts suddenly raced in a particular direction and he ended up thinking about magic.
‘I’d never thought about things in this perspective.’
He quickly thought about the magic structures he used.
Inversion, dragon language, and the tesseract structure. Desir’s magic structure that he newly invented was converting the dragon language into spells.
‘The song is very similar to the tesseract in terms of its structure.’
Both the song and the tesseract magic combined lower levelled spells (words) to create upper levelled spells (verses). But Desir had never thought about the arrangement of these building blocks when he cast a spell using this new magical system. It was as if he was randomly making verses without any concern for the arrangement of the words.
‘When you currently sing it, it’s just words put together meaninglessly.’ As a result, Desir could finish a phrase, but the phrase was pointless.
‘I really can improve my magic!’
If he could find the best combination of magic that he could cast in the tesseract structure simultaneously…
‘This could be the most brilliant innovation in this world.’
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