8 Chapter 8

Venangs walked through the pitch-black hallway that had been carved out of stone. He held a burning torch in his raised hand that lit the way forward. He didn't like coming down here to bring out the prisoners meant for execution, but it was his job and he wasn't about to start complaining about it.

The air was stale and ever so often, at the periphery of the torches reach, he would catch a glimpse of a ganie, with its hairy body running across the stairs before disappearing into the darkness once more. Venangs shuddered, if there was anything he hated the most about his job, it was dealing with those creatures. But as it was his job and he was as efficient a yemeru as any other, he carried on, descending the stairs until it finally ended.

Before him stretched a long hall way, portions of the walls had carved out forming mini caves at intervals. In front of the carved-out caves were metal bars, that were supposed to stop the already chained prisoners from escaping.

Almost all the prisons were empty now. Nobody was dumb enough to do anything to warrant them being brought here, they were usually just thrown in a cell up above, but according to what Venangs heard from his predecessor, a long time ago each and every one of these caves were filled with at least 10 prisoners per cell, and even then there was still not enough space for all the prisoners. It was such a problem that a lot of prisoners died from suffocation before it was time for their execution, even despite the injection of air by the watcher above.

Venangs shivered at the thought of that, he was happy that he wasn't alive back then, that sort of thing gave him the creeps. Dragging a dead body up these stairs was bad as it was, he couldn't imagine dragging up hundreds almost every day.

He stopped in front of the first cave to his right and passed the torch to his other hand and unstrapped the key from the hanging belt he wore. He inserted the key into the lock and opened it. The metal door swung back and the light from his torch illuminated the yemephu in the cave, unimpeded by the metal bars that casted shadows on the figure, allowing him to see it in full.

The yemephu hung from the roof of the cave, suspended by a set of metal chains, attached with shackles to his wrist. A stone sat embedded in the centre of his chest with red lines spreading out from it, like the roots of a tree. Venangs looked him over once before shaking his head and sighing.

He glanced down and saw a ganie sitting before the yemephu, its long hairs covering the floor around it. It turned its head around to look at Venangs, its eyes reflecting back the light of the torch. Casually it turned back to face the yemephu, its head looking up to yemephu hanging from the roof.

Venangs shivered as he looked at the queer sight. He stopped for a moment, watching the two of them, before-while sticking to the wall as closely as he could-making his way to the back of the yemephu to begin his work.

He unhooked the chain from the place it was hung, causing the yemephu to drop to the ground like a bag full of sand. The ganie sat in front of the yemephu for a while before running directly into the yemephu. Venangs watched as the ganie attached its hair like appendages to the body of the yemephu. He shook his head, already giving up on the yemephu. Once a ganie got its hairs into you, there was no escape, extracting it was just as hard and painful as it getting in was.

He turned around to leave the cage, thinking the yemephu was resigned to its fate, until the ganie shot out from the body of the yemephu like a comet, smoking and flying at speeds his eyes almost couldn't keep up with.

Venangs was shocked. 'Since when did yemephu have bodies that could repel ganie?' he thought to himself as he ran to check the area where the ganie had tried to attach itself and he was even more shocked.

There were no signs that the ganie had even tried to attach itself to the yemephu, even more shocking was the fact that there were no signs of an explosion or burning. Neither on the floor nor on the body of the yemephu.

While this was a strange sight for Venangs who was witnessing this for the first time, for the two parties involved-the stone coincidentally named Jacquard and the ganie named Paul-it was somewhat of a normal occurrence.

It had started three days ago, just after Jean had been put into whatever hellhole this place was. Jacquard had been busy cultivating, seething in rage at the fact that he couldn't do anything to help Jean. His painstaking cultivation technique had allowed him to rapidly increase his field of vision, which in turn allowed him to view Jean's predicament in all its glory.

He was hung, like gutted pigs where hung in butcher shops, with his two hands shackled by some type of metal he couldn't identify. He had tried to wake him up at first, but no matter what he did Jean refused to wake up, hanging like a corpse from the roof of this dungeon.

Jacquard refused to believe that Jean was dead, but there was unfortunately nothing he could do to help him. He was unable to externalise his akram, making Jacquard laugh at his own foolishness. He had named it Almighty Akram yet the akram was less that useless when he needed it the most.

A short while later he thought up another idea, which he quickly implemented only to fail again. He had thought that maybe their physical connection would have been enough to overcome the problem of being unable to externalise the akram. It wasn't and Jacquard almost ran mad. There was nothing else he could think of. He hoped that with the connection he had formed with Jean he would know when he was dead.

So with nothing left to do he began to cultivate, hoping it would stave off the madness and depression he could feel coming on. It did, in fact cultivating allowed Jacquard to calm down more than he had expected, even making him feel relatively clear headed.

Shit only hit the fan when he had his first encounter with a ganie. Jacquard, of course , did not know what in God's name those things were, and had decided quite rightly to avoid them as best as he could. But the ganie didn't make the same decision.

This wasn't the ganie that was named Paul, he was much smarter than the rest, knowing not to attack a creature he had never seen the others attack before, after all it wasn't like he couldn't just join them once he was sure it was safe.

The first pioneering ganie had crept down the chains, heading towards the head, the part which most ganie had generally accepted to be the tastiest part. Its once dry hairs soon began to grow slimy as it made its way down the arms of the yemephu, its impatience already apparent.

Jacquard probably wouldn't have known what hit him, well more like what hit Jean, if the ganie had just been patient and waited until it was firmly placed on the head of the yemephu before secreting the enzymes through its hair like appendages; after all it wasn't all that came your way that was dangerous. Unfortunately it hadn't followed the procedure stated above and Jacquard noticed quite quickly how the enzymes in the slime trail had begun to eat away at the hairs of his one and only friend, and how it was quickly approaching the skin underneath.

'No!' Jacquard screamed internally and in a single moment of anguish released a jolt of energy that ran through Jean's body, healing all the minor injuries that it encountered. The jolt of energy entered into the body of the ganie, shooting it off of Jean's body with enough force to cause it to form a splatter on the wall nearby.