Inside the wooden box were four crystals and a single piece of paper. From how orderly they were in the box, Ning was certain that the teachers had looked through the content and placed it all back accordingly.
He picked up the four crystals and looked at them. From what he could tell, they were all of the same quality as the last two crystals he was sent.
'4 this time huh? That's going to be a lot of help, honestly,' he thought. While nowhere near as good as the fruit he had gotten, the 4 crystals would last him a month and would help him improve his Essence rank quite a lot.
If he got these crystals every month, he could reach the reach Essence Manifestation realm in just 2 more months.
Ning quickly opened his closet and pulled out the earthen sword from within. Once out, he placed the four crystals into his bag and placed the sword right on top so that no one could steal from it.
He was starting to learn that he was maybe worrying a little too much about it all, as it seemed that people found these crystals all over the place in all of the Glacien continents, but he still wanted to be safe with his items.
Once he placed it all inside, he took the box and pulled out the letter from inside. It was a rather large letter with two pages entirely filled with words.
Ning was surprised at how much they had written on it and just how long it was overall. "The hell did they even write?" he wondered.
'Hello, Son.'
"Son?" Ning was surprised for a bit and kept reading.
'I hope you're doing well with your studies in the academy. We are very proud of what you've been able to achieve. Don't worry about back home, your father is still plenty capable of taking care of himself.'
Ning continued reaching through the first paragraph of the page and nodded to himself. 'I see,' he thought. 'They are still playing the role that I come from a small noble family in the Frolane empire, huh?'
Of course, that wasn't all there was to the letter at all. 'If they are going so far as to write this all, they must've used the secret code Clara was talking about,' he thought to himself.
"How did the decryption go again?" he wondered for a moment and started decrypting the code that was the letter.
"That's… F and an I, then an N and a D. FIND, that's the first word." Ning got one letter at a time, reading through the entire letter to find the actual letter that was sent to him.
Nearly 15 minutes later, he was finally done with decrypting the entire letter, and the real letter became apparent to him.
"Find out about the internal political situation in the Whiteowl region. Find out exactly why the Foremans haven't taken over the region just yet."
"The Whiteowl region?" Ning wondered for a bit.
There were 5 regions in the Blackhawk Dominion. The region he was currently in was of course the Blackhawk region. To its right on the map was the Bluesparrow region, and to its left was the Greendove region.
They were both ruled by great families. The Bluesparrow region was ruled by the Aurelus family, while the Greendove region was ruled by the Hass family, the one that Kaleb was from.
The three regions were separated from the rest of the two regions due to the massive mountain range that went between them. Beyond the mountain range lay the Redraven region to the left and the Whiteowl region to the right.
Ning knew that the Redraven region was ruled over by the Ulyrus family, while the Whiteowl was, while not officially, ruled by the Foreman family. However, it seemed that there was some reason why they weren't official yet.
'Damn girl, give me more information if you want my help. Stop hiding stuff,' Ning thought. Since she had asked, he would now have to help her as he had promised.
"The Foreman family, huh? I could ask Tenn, but that might be too direct," Ning thought to himself. "No, I need to be more informed about everything before I even try to find out anything from Tenn."
Ning decided to go visit the library for a change. He hoped there would be something in the books in the library regarding the Whiteowl region of the Blackhawk dominion.
His history classes talked about the way in the past and had yet to teach him anything about the current day at all.
Ning quickly went to the library where he had to spend a credit to read anything he wanted for the rest of the day. It didn't matter if he was going to be staying for 2 minutes or 2 hours. Everyone paid the same entry fee.
He went in and started looking for books that had to do with what he was asked to do. Unfortunately, there wasn't any book that had what he was looking for.
However, after asking the librarian there, she pointed him toward the back of the library where they kept stacks of newspapers. Reading those would give him a perfect idea of what sort of history had transpired in these places in the last few decades.
He got to the newspapers and started from the ones that were created 25 years ago. From the librarian, he understood that it was that time that the Whiteowl region went through a lot of changes.
As he started reading through the newspaper, he picked up one thing after another about the region and soon enough, he got a vague idea of what had happened.
One day, the Grazer family that used to rule over the Whiteowl region, all died in a fire that razed their house. From the article that Ning read, including the servants and caretakers, not a single person managed to survive the fire at all.
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