Life didn't get easier, even in another world

345 Treasure

50 years ago, in a vast and dry land in the central parts of Hainston.

A young man in his twenties was walking in front of a group of similar youngsters. In the vast plain, they were moving forward while checking the map and were carrying different tools with themselves.

The young man in the front brushed back his disheveled blonde hair and held the map under the bright rays of the sun. He narrowed his eyes a little bit and read the map, putting more attention on the special marks drawn by the red ink instead of the real map.

“Hey, are you sure this really is the correct map?”

Someone among the group broke the silence, speaking his opinion with an exhausted voice.

“What do you mean? You sucker! Are you doubting me?”

The blonde boy in the front retorted so harshly that the one who had spoken shrank back from shock and fear and closed his mouth.

“Huh? You all, do you doubt me?”

The whole group froze for a second before they all shook their heads at the same time without spitting out a single word.

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“Tsk!”

The leader of the team clicked his tongue and continued to walk forward according to the map. No one said anything after that and just kept following him in silence.

They kept going and going until the sun gradually sank and the moon took its place. Even after walking for such a long time, they hadn’t reached their destination.

“We’ll camp here.”

Plop

The leader threw his backpack to the ground as soon as he said that and sat down right away. The others watched him lean back on a large stone before they also put down their stuff and started preparing food and a fire.

“Um... Sir sorry but... Why didn’t we bring at least some horses... or donkey... to travel faster, I mean...”

While eating their dinner, someone asked in a shaky voice. The leader answered him without even looking up.

“I never said you couldn’t bring any. It was only that you didn’t have the money to buy or rent them. Heh!”

The young man chuckled before stuffing a spoonful of food into his mouth. The others didn’t object to him. He was right. They couldn’t afford to buy even three animals to carry them, so they had to come all the way here on foot.

They didn’t have money. They were poor. The only thing they had in their lives was despair. The only thing they could do was constant struggles in order to live.

However, there was someone different among them. In the miserable alleys of the outskirts of the village that they lived in, inside one of the countless filthy half-destroyed buildings, a boy lived who was different than the others.

His goal was not like the others. His work was not only to feed his stomach. His mind was not only set on surviving.

The boy with blonde hair and deep green eyes was not from the village. He had moved here with his mother and had been living in the suburbs since then.

His father was said to be a great professor in the academy. The same academy that trained those special people. To the people of the village who were dying of hunger, such a thing was not something really wonderful. To them, someone with great wealth was more amazing than a professor or someone knowledgeable. The boy’s father, however, had died in an unfortunate accident when he was still 10. Their family lost most of their money and they had no choice but to come to this village, which was the place where his mother’s parents were born.

The boy’s father had left him a great number of books and any kind of information the boy would ever want. The child’s mother was said to have worked in a great military organization for a while. She and her husband were classmates in the academy who chose different career paths but ended up together in the end.

The mother of the boy kept doing different jobs in the village and nearby cities to earn money. As someone who had been working in ‘that’ military organization, she was capable of doing things that ordinary people couldn’t, thus, she could earn enough to live with his son.

As for the said son, he was always busy reading the books his father had left behind. He took lessons from his mother when she was free and also practiced his ‘special power’ all the time.

Little by little, he turned into someone who was both feared and admired by the villagers. He could do ‘magic’ after all! He could also answer all of the questions asked of him! Wasn’t he wonderful? All of the kids his age were in awe of his abilities and intelligence, all of them wanting to somehow get close to him. It was no wonder all of them obeyed him and did anything he wanted without any doubt.

It didn’t take long for the kid to start earning money using his ability and knowledge. And by earning money... That mostly depended on his luck.

On his luck in finding any ancient treasures from the suspected locations.

For him, finding and marking the places where mansions and castles, old cities, or any important structures were built hundreds of years ago was not a problem. The only problem he faced was the lack of manpower to dig those places and find the treasure, and that was easily solved with the help of his ‘friends’.

The boy had been doing this job for the past few years. He was earning enough to feed himself, his mom, and his ‘friends’. The money he got for selling each relic was so high that the people of the village gradually started seeing him in another color, regarding him as a respectful and probably the head of the village, and heeding his every word.

It was not a surprise that all of the youngsters in the village wanted to work under him even if he treated them harshly. He paid them well so why would they refuse?

Little by little, his business expanded to the other villages and even small villages around the place they lived. No one knew when and how, but one day they realized that there was now a band, a gang, who saw the same boy as their leader. A group that found, dug out, transported, and sold ancient treasures.

A little while ago, the boy, the leader of the gang, claimed that he had found a great, big, unimaginable treasure that no one knew about. He claimed to have found a temple! A great, ancient temple!