Chapter 328: The story of Xander of the league of assassins.
Only very few people knew of the early stages of Xander’s life, and fewer knew about the complete story of his life.
Xander was the product of an affair with 2 married members of both the Karius and Ulrik families. When he was delivered none of the families wanted to accept the infant, not only was his birth disgraceful, but they were both rival families.
His parents had 2 options; raising him and getting kicked out of their respective families, or they found a way to dispose of him.
They could bear the shame and punishments that would surely come to them, but they couldn’t abandon all the perks that came from being members of 2 of the top 3 families in the empire, so they easily chose the second option.
Since the only legal way to get rid of a child was when it was still in the womb, his parents had decided to abandon him at an orphanage. Usually, this was the start of a good story, but things slowly got worse.
Orphanages on infinite realm weren’t functioning and were worse than those on earth. Unlike those on Earth where people of different classes and races could adopt any child they liked, those on infinite realm had no customers from the upper bracket because no noble would want the child of a commoner, talk less of abandoned ones.
This meant their only customers were from mid-range families because the lower bracket could hardly fend for themselves. The only problem with the mid-class was that very few of them were infertile and even at that, it didn’t mean they all wanted extra mouths to feed.
…..
Luckily, the orphanage had taken Xander in and had nurtured him for some years but unfortunately for him, when he clocked 7 years the orphanage head who was secretly a child trafficker in the underworld had sold him off alongside other kids into child slavery.
Slave stones were implanted into every child slave, allowing the traffickers to be able to track them even if they decided to run.
The children didn’t know of this and many of them had tried escaping on multiple occasions, but ended up being caught and seriously punished. They were continuously punished to the point that they stopped trying to escape. 𝓫𝓭𝓸𝓋𝓁．𝓬𝓸𝓂
The kids were sent into different kinds of child labor, but Xander was terrible at anything that required strength and endurance. This got him continuously punished to the point where the trafficker decided it was better to utilize him in another way than to end up killing him.
Xander was moved to begging on the streets, and because of his charming face, he had made quite a sizable amount of money for his trafficker.
Deciding to capitalize on his cuteness, the trafficker began teaching him techniques required to steal, and it turned out that Xander had a talent for stealing. In a short period of time, Xander had gone from masterminding stealing with his fellow child slaves to being a professional at pickpocketing.
After a few years, the child slaves had increased considerably in size, giving them a new avenue to increase their hauls.
Having proven himself to be more than capable to be their leader due to his plans and strategy that rarely failed, Xander led the now teen slaves in raiding shops and cornering people in alleyways, and robbing them.
This continued till one faithful night when the group had tracked and cornered a dark-skinned middle-class man who didn’t have any other distinctive features. It turned out that the man was a very strong mage, and he ended up killing everyone in the group except for Xander.
Being only a helpless teen, Xander was scared the shit out of his soul as he watched the other teen slaves get gruesomely murdered one by one He couldn’t escape because the man had sealed all possible exits with mana barriers, so all he could do was stand and watch until it finally got to his turn.
“A particular group of people sees fate as unfair, while another group says otherwise. I believe fate doesn’t give a shit about what we think, that is why we should complain less and get ready to take hold of any opportunity that presents itself.” These were the words the dark-skinned man said before shooting a concentrated mana beam the width of a pen at Xander’s heart.
The thin beam of mana pierced through Xander’s shivering body but stopped after it had destroyed the slave stone that had been put into his body.
“I have been watching you from the moment you were traded into the underworld, and I have decided to give you a chance to change your fate since you have been preparing for it.” The dark-skinned man said as he disabled the mana barriers.
“Although I have taken care of those monitoring your group, you can’t stay here forever because they should be on their way here.”
With the slave stone being connected to their hearts, it was able to read the location and life status of the slave. So since they were dead, the slavers that were close by monitoring the group would surely receive notifications, but they were also dead.
This meant that those at the main hideout would be the ones to act, but it would take some time before they arrived.
Seeing that the dark-skinned man no longer had plans of killing him and that the barriers had been lifted, the still shivering Xander took to his heels out of instinct while continuously turning back to see that the man wasn’t chasing him.
It was after a few minutes of running, Xander had run out of breath and had stopped running. It was then that he began recounting the event that had happened a few minutes ago.
Now that he was relatively calm, Xander thought of the things the man had said. He was a free man now, but he still had to make sure it stayed that way.