The village dogs barked at nothing again.
To Hajin, that was normal; their crooked house always reeked of piss, iron, and ghost phlegm anyway.
If his father was shadow, then his mother was the one lamp that refused to go out even on windy days.
She smelled of steamed rice, scolded with hands still dusted in flour and at times she would laugh like someone who had been hurt but refused to admit it.
When father's back was turned, she'd slip Hajin sweets into his palm like contraband.
That night, his father sat in the dirt yard, carving sigils with blood into the ground somewhere akin to a schizophrenic scholar with rheumatoid arthritis; needless to say it was some oddly fascinating shit that you don't tend to see every day; atleast not on Thursdays.
To Hajin, it looked like madness. Like a retarded scholar scribbling nonsense probably no one else could read let alone comprehend and if they could they wouldn't believe it, the same way people with so much as a sliver of sense don't believe 13 to 18 year olds (of course older people that spam roids also do this, but atleast it's quite a bit more believable and achievable than those who are at an age where they can barely build any muscles over a certain size naturally) who claim to be natty on bikbok posting their biceps in public gyms toilets and posing like women after popping some trenbalogna sandwiches with mummy's credit card to fish for likes, views, easy money and overall approval that their absent and or present fathers never gave them and rightfully so.
Anyways enough of these 3rd or 5th rate male equivalents of female prostitutes on onlyFLANS (please don't copyright strike my balls straight to the frosty and unforgiving tundras of Yakh Zadeh), plugging their links to bikbok and begging innocent youths to steal their parents credit cards.
To subscribe to their onlyFLANS to stare at their ********, so they can pay rent this month and preferably the next as they're knee deep in debt, loan sharks are starting to nip their toes and earlobes intimidatingly but also (metaphorically speaking) poetically in a sense to remind them that the interest is only going up not down.
So their bitch-ass better pay pronto, and their few irl customers are tired of paying for their STD ridden holes that are looser than abcdefghijklmnop expired skittles of the rainbow variety club members and supporters ethics, sense of self and overall lack of self respect, but I digress.
Now back to Hajin's father being downright dodgy.
Mercenaries whispered otherwise; they said these weren't doodles. They were stolen seals, fragments scavenged from a sect library burned to ash and that each stroke was a grave marker, each carving a ledger of debts unpaid and things of that nature.
Minutes passed and Hajin cut the silence with his sudden curiousity.
"Why doesn't father ever smile?" asked Hajin
"Because smiling won't put food in the pot. Because every degenerate he's ever killed is still sitting on his shoulders, chewing at his ears. Don't ask him for smiles, son settle for mine, and focus on keeping yours." Hajin's mother whispered patiently.
Hajin shrugged at the time and tried to think nothing of it. Nonetheless he remembered, he always remembered..
Meanwhile, the ghosts were taking turns to nip at his earlobes while their gangly ghost arms reached out and around and bent to avoid the other ghosts arms in their ways to find other parts of his arm available for pinching as they argued with each other on who gets to bite either the left or right earlobe next; they'd usually use their other arm that was free and not occupied with pinching to draw cards
At times rock paper scissors and at times throwing a spectral coin in the air on who get's the next turn and at times they'd just slap each other silly with their free arms until one would surrender from the competition or get knocked out, until all of them surrendered except for the last remaining 2 which allowed one to go for the right earlobe and the other winner to go to the left earlobe which they would go to town on after working hard to win the competition and as they chewed or bit the earlobe and sometimes even shaking their heads while biting like a wild dog shaking its chew toy.
They would be grinning from ear to ear with the rest of their fucked up teeth showing and their smiles were very unsettling and ghoul like, hell they'd even be drooling while doing all this and their eyes rolling upwards in pleasure but still visible.
Sometimes they'd get temporarily bug eyed from the sheer excitement of it all (they aren't visible to normal humans, but Hajins mother is a clairvoyant; the only others that can see them are people who have atleast awoken their first dantian) and although Hajin's father couldn't see them he could feel it and boy oh boy oh boy could he feel it.
However, Hajins mother could see them due to the fact that she was born a rare child one of the few that could see ghosts and similar entities; some fellows called this clairvoyance although others would call it different things such as paranoia, hysteria, lack of friends or excessive boredom.
She saw the heinous; ghastly bastards cling to Randy on his back and shoulders like parasites.
Profoundly irritated Randy would swat like a full blown autist with a heavy helping of Tourette's; doused in itching powder (extremely frantic swatting) near his ears and arms but it would do him no good for they were impervious to his strikes.
It was a very peculiar sight; a real tricky situation, he even tried to coat his hands in qi to swat at them or punch them but that's not going to affect ghosts; for that one would either need yin yang energy control or antediluvian essence control, but Hajin's father wasn't powerful enough to have any mastery whatsoever in those areas.
Hell Randy barely even knew how to control qi so the ghosts would giggle and laugh bloodcurdling prolonged ululations clad in utter mirth; some would even scratch their slimy/flaky (depends on the ghost) corporeal skin sometimes until ectoplasm bled out as they'd go bug-eyed while their eyes were bloodshot from revelling in their twisted; awful revelrous merrymaking, mockery, spitting on his head, rubbing it ravenously and with purpose; as though they were owed a genie and 3 wishes.
It's a weird ritual they do when they laugh at someone and mock someone it's similar to how humans end up pushing the person or hitting the person that made them laugh from a good joke they said when it was very funny.
Hajin's father eventually grew numb to it all from the sheer rage burning his entire nervous system in fact there were times he'd be on fire (accidentally while cooking or something and not noticing the pain due to his nervous system getting burned out; thereby numb, all the constant torture from those deranged, foul gang of reprobates.
Earlobe biting shoulder and back squatters, vitiated shades who refused to leave Hajins father and refused to pay rent leading Randy's nervous system obsolete; a thing of the past no longer welcome in the present nor future.
Plus every time Randy would catch fire in those unfortunate mishaps his wife would scream in a hurry and worry until she'd drown it out with water while scolding him to be more careful and him saying that he can't help it he can't feel anything due to the incident and he'd even get a few burn marks on his hand from touching the pan while it was still hot etc and his wife aka Hajin's mother would continue scolding and nagging saying something along the lines of your eyes still work don't they so if you'd just look around more carefully it wouldn't happen anymore even if you cant sense pain.
On another hand it helped him in fights to ignore the pain with 0 delays or reaction and go straight for counterattacks which most opponents weren't used to, but that's not to say thet that would matter if he'd ever have the misfortune of going up against someone who has awakened their first dantian.
Be it human or any other creatures let alone one that has awakened their 2nd dantian, he'd still get effortlessly curb-stomped into very fine meat paste or perhaps into literal nothingness a state where all of his atoms get obliterated and removed from existence permanently; with such swiftness that the mere scent of what little of him left wouldn't even get a chance to permeate in the air, not even a little bit.
To Hajin it looked pointless. But mercenaries whispered those sigils weren't inkwork — they were seals from a sect library long since burned, smuggled into backwater hands
Nevertheless, it made him quite the fearsome bastard in battle he walked into blades with the ferocity of a rabid single mother named karen with dyed blue hair a nose piercing and a massive flaming metaphorical stick up her ass after having her sandycrusho ("Don't squeeze and twist my balls counter-clockwise to the figure of 8 with copyright strikes... Please for the love of all that's holy." Mumbled the narrator before saying "Dangnabbit I wasn't supposed to read that part was I?" Shortly after) progress wiped out due to a glitch or whatever other reason like the game shutting down due to company bankruptcy or some jazz.
Counterstrikes landing as if pain were merely a social construct.
Thankfully he didn't run into any martial artists who have ascended into the early stages of cultivation such as awakening their 1st dantian & God forbid if he ever met one who had their 2nd and or 3rd dantian awakened, it wouldn't be a pleasant sound nor sight at all.
The world called it obsession, his mother called it madness and the majority of mercenaries, local drunks and or junkies called it futility.
Hajin, at seven years old, didn't know what to call it yet. Not to mention the fact that his parents were not only too poor to buy him a dictionary, but were also too far away from the nearest shop/ merchant who sold such things.
You see here the citizens in piss-fuck nowhere; raw-dogging jack-shit-avenue on the daily with no lube, no c**dom and no tom-tom.
Were many things; perhaps anything except normal and or sober. Needless to say civility in this place was a rarity; almost non-existent akin to the education system of this forsaken place.
Rife with hoodlums, riff-raffs, junkies, alcoholics, depravity & overall degeneracy; most of which were imbeciles that either lacked a formal education or entirely lacked any semblance of education.
Some of the most notorious country bumpkins of this God awful residence are:
Old Man Doru — a half-deaf blacksmith whose hammer always fell a beat too late, like his brain lagged behind his arm.
Hajin called him "Rusty Metronome." Yim the Drunk — staggered around with a wineskin at all hours, once mistook Hajin for a stray goat and tried to milk him; Hajin never forgave him.
Sura the Gossip — fat woman with some sort of makeshift primitive rollerskates (what most assume so that she'd move less because not only was she a gluttonous chunk of blubber, she was also slothful and only ever exercised her big mouth via gossipping) and teeth like a fence missing every third post, traded rumors for radishes, salami and chunks of allerazom (the only cheese available in that area).
Hajin privately dubbed her "Fence-Mouth." The kids — his age, more or less. Koro, who picked his nose until it bled; Meeya, who tripped over air; Jin, who bragged about his father's chickens like they were war beasts.
One morning, Randy dragged Hajin out for training again. The yard still smelled of piss and ghost-breath, but the village hummed beyond the walls. "Cow-With-Haemorrhoids stance," Hajin muttered, dropping low.
"Horse stance," Randy corrected, smacking the back of his head.
From the alley came Yim the Drunk, wobbling, shouting: "Randy! Still raising your boy like a scarecrow? Hah! Let him drink! Builds character!" He said in-between burps and coughs while slapping his chest thinking that'd stop it, anything except drinking water.
Randy ignored him. Hajin didn't. "Builds cirrhosis, you piss-scented wineskin," he spat, legs trembling.
The other kids nearby could be heard arguing which of their chickens won the race that they secretly gambled on with some of their parents money that they stole.
Yim staggered, muttering curses as he walked away defeated, sipping away his humiliation only to realize it wasn't working so he began chugging; that did the trick.