Tala looked at the rubble, a look of fear flashing across his eyes. “Are you hurt?” he asked, finally looking down at Alex.
“I’m fine,” Alex said. “I wasn’t hurt.”
“Did you really defeat the Sun Wraith?” Gorang asked.
“Whatever it was, I did defeat it,” Alex said. “Why? Is that surprising?”
“Surprising? That’s unheard of. We need dozens of warriors working together to defeat a single Sun Wraith in the desert. The fact that you did it all by yourself is quite surprising.”
“It must’ve been a very weak one,” Tala said from the side, and Gorang nodded.
Alex wondered if he should have explained to them that it was in fact quite strong. Strong enough, at least, to easily kill a saint if they made a mistake. But he kept that to himself.
Touting his strength wasn’t something he liked doing.
People began speculating where the Sun Wraith came from, while Alex tried to figure out what it was exactly. He hadn’t heard of anyone talking about it before today, so he had been very surprised to see it.
His first thought was that it was some sort of soul of a beast, but the way it was full of Yang, that didn’t make sense to Alex. Besides, a beast with True realm cultivation base should never have a soul in the first place. It should barely even have a spirit in the first place.
“What is a Sun Wraith exactly?” Alex asked.
Tala turned toward him. “You’ve never heard of— of course, I keep forgetting you are new to the desert and don’t know much about it. A Sun Wraith is a beast reborn with the power of the sun.”
“It is pretty much the same beast as it was alive, only now it is too hot for anyone to physically interact with, so we have to use our techniques to kill it. You must have used a rather strong technique to be able to defeat one all by yourself, even if it were a weaker one.”
Alex hadn’t used any techniques and just his physical strength to kill it, which he could understand why that hadn’t been so effective now. He raised an eyebrow at something else. “How does a beast get reborn?” he asked. “This one I killed was a scorpion that we—”
“Is everyone okay?” a voice called out from far away, turning heads toward it.
The young chief arrived along with a group of warriors following him. He asked around about the Sun Wraith and was quickly pointed to Alex, who was sitting to the side with Tala and Gorang.
“Are you alright, young friend? They say you fought a Sun Wraith all by yourself and defeated it, is that true?” the chief asked.
“I did,” Alex said. “We are lucky that it first attacked me, since I have means of defending myself. It would have been dangerous had the beast targeted someone else.”
“I must apologize, young friend,” the chief said. “I was not familiar with your capability. I thought of you as merely just another outsider.”
“I am just another outsider,” Alex said.
“Tala, take our friend somewhere else to stay,” the chief said.
Tala obeyed the command.
“Come, let us go to my place. You can rest there while I get some people to take care of this place. It will take a day or two to remake.”
Alex nodded. “Actually, I need to search for my storage bags first. I dropped them somewhere in the rubble.”
“Oh, let me help you then.”
Alex began scouring the rubble along with Tala and Gorang, while the chief began commanding everyone else to assist the wounded.
Alex could hear the chief in the distance, shouting at the warriors for their lax guarding. A Sun Wraith had managed to invade this deep into the city, and no one had been able to notice it after all.
Alex himself wondered where the Sun Wraith came from.
“Oh right, I was asking earlier. How do the beasts get reborn into Sun Wraiths?” he asked. “Do you just leave their body in the sun for a day or two and it does that to them?”
“No, that’s not it,” Gorang said. “Sun Wraiths form when you… hmm?”
“When you what?” Alex asked, turning around.
As he did, he saw the man holding something in his palm that he had just picked up. Alex looked at it, a small sphere with glowing yellow light. The light was as though a liquid, spinning inside this sphere.
Alex frowned. “What’s that?” he asked, but no answer came. He looked at Gorang, wondering why he wasn’t answering, only to find a look of pure shock on his face. It wasn’t just shock, but fear as well.
“What’s… going on? What is that you’re holding?”
Tala walked past Alex, going closer to the sphere. When he did, he gasped too.
“How could this be?” Gorang asked his father-in-law. “Do you think someone did this on purpose?”
Tala shook his head. “I cannot see why anyone would be stupid enough to do it on purpose. Everyone knows the dangers of a Sun Wraith. Someone must have mistakenly placed both… both…”
Tala’s voice grew further away as he came to a complete stop. He looked at the sphere, and then turned around toward Alex.
“You…” he said softly. “Where are they?”
Alex frowned. “Where is what?”
“The thing I gave you the other day. Your payment.”
“My pa— you mean the Sunheart and beast cores?” Alex asked. “They should be in my storage bag that I dropped.”
A million emotions passed through Tala right at that moment. He took a deep breath. “I gave those things to you in two different storage bags. Please tell me you did not place them together.”
Alex paused for a long moment as he saw what Tala was getting to. He slowly turned, looking at the glowing sphere on Gorang’s palm.
“Is that…”
“So you did,” Tala said, placing a palm on his face. “It’s my mistake. I should have told you to never ever place a Sunheart and a beast core in close proximity, for that is what gives birth to a Sun Wraith.”
