Yuta looked at the vast, sprawling, dark-blue universe of the sky, which had hidden so much within itself.
So he had decided; his sharp black eyes and straight back told that he had made up his mind and now he wasn't going to turn back.
Yuta stood up, slipped down the grass with deep thoughts, and slowly looked at the farm before taking a step into it.
The farm had improved compared to before; even in his absence, they could manage the farm work, and Yuta was proud of this.
"They will do their work, I will do mine," Yuta thought, and planting his feet in the loose and scattered soil, he came over to his mother, scratched his head for a second, and then said in a soft, undisturbed voice—he didn't want to distract her attention, so he used such chosen words so that she could continue her work:
"Mom, I am going outside the Death Garden for a little while, is there anything to bring from the market?"
His mother kept her eyes closed, controlled the blue vines in the ground, targeted the cooling and comforting energy, and keeping up the work, controlled them as well. And her ordinary yet a mother's loving voice replied—due to the environment around her, there was a chill in her voice which to anyone else might have felt cold, but for Yuta, it wasn't something he couldn't understand.
His mother didn't put much strain on her mind and simply gave him a chore to handle:
"Yes, while coming back, bring the ingredients for dinner!" She didn't speak much. Yuta too had intentionally chosen this timing so that she couldn't say much. Yuta gave a slight smile.
"I'll be right back!" Saying this much to his mother, he quickly stepped out, carefully keeping his feet away from the vines, and coming back near the light brown grass, he looked at them one last time—both of them were working hard.
Yuta had to go to a graveyard located near the Death Garden. To tell the truth, he had forgotten the name of that scientist or whoever he was. He had only remembered the necessary information.
Yuta didn't know what the atmosphere of that area would be like because he was going there for the first time himself. He saw that some paths were quiet and empty. The guards stayed only around the residential terminals in the dome areas, which is why only passing, weird-looking aliens were seen here, and occasionally by mistake a patrolling guard might be spotted.
Hiding and sneaking a bit, he quickly reached the graveyard on foot, where the soil was brown like the Earth he had heard of, black, and there was other weird grass. Every day, the dying different species were buried right here, but nowadays, with the trend of burials decreasing, people only came here to visit old folks.
Yuta saw that there were no sensors or towers here. This place was already far away from the population, and the absence of anything like that here was the best oversight in the world for him.
Yes, it was possible that there might be a satellite in the sky keeping watch, but he couldn't do anything about that; yet this also meant that if so, the box might have already been found.
Yuta thought, "Out of these thousands of graves, where on earth could this man named Ronaljes be?"
Yuta started walking; he had to filter. First, he had to search for a grave of a human's size, and second, among those too, he had to look for human graves. If he went looking for all of them, there were so many graves here that he would have kept searching for months, but now the information he had was—
First, his name, and second, that he was a human.
The work began.
His palms were cleaning every old inscription, smeared with soil, and repeatedly dusting off the dirt. On his blue sanitation worker's/slave's clothes, there were slight marks of dust.
"Such jobs are really troublesome!"
He felt as if he were a new employee of the graveyard cleaning up for their peace, but only he knew why he was actually doing this.
After cleaning more than 100 human-like graves, finally his foot tripped over a vine. As his balance wobbled, he looked at that old root with a scowl, but then he spotted an old plaque in the ground near that root, broken and embedded.
"Ah, so that's it!" A strange yet understanding smile appeared on his face.
His mind clicked—this graveyard was very old and forgotten due to the tremors hitting Planet Num, causing the grave plaques to break or sink deep into the soil over time.
Yes, now this had become even harder. Yuta bent down, cleaned that plaque, and checked the name—it wasn't him. He paid a bit more attention to the ground, looking for any new or old burials or edges visible buried in the soil.
The gray stone's color seemed to have coated his hands, his clothes down to his pajama hems were stained with dirt; now he wasn't shaking off his hands like before nor was he worrying about the filth. He was slipping into a bit of despair when suddenly another gray plaque was cleared. After the soil was removed from it, the name on that plaque became clear, and his eyes stayed fixed on the first letter, then the second letter, and then the full name—it was him!
"Ronaljes." He read it twice, letter by letter. Out of thousands, he had checked only some searches. Well, it was also a bit irritating and disheartening—cleaning each one and losing hope again and again.
Yuta sat down there with a mild peace and peacefully stared at that grave for a few moments, as if thinking about that person before moving forward with his work.
"Alright, let's do it!" No shovel, no tool was used—just hands. He removed the dirt in the middle on the right side as told in the video, with the soil getting harder as he went from top to bottom.
Despite his near-superhuman strength, it took some time—about 1 hour. Due to Planet Num's unnatural humid atmosphere, he was drenched in sweat multiple times; an ordinary person would have gotten dehydrated, but for Yuta, everything was still normal. He scraped away the final dirt with the sharp end of a broken grave marker he had found somewhere, which served as a small weapon for him.
With a final jerk and a clinking sound, Yuta stopped, took a breath, and a wave of true victory rushed through him. "It's right here, right beneath my feet!" He outlined the edges and removed the surrounding soil. That iron box was quite large and still looked as if it had just come out of some brand-new company.
Even after remaining buried underground for years, it still looked brand new! Yuta thought that this box itself must be worth hundreds of thousands (lakhs), so the value of the things inside it must genuinely be that high.
He lifted it—a box one foot long and just as wide. There was no space for a key visible on it. Yuta brought it up, sat down right there, and looked around; in the open, spooky graveyard, apart from crawling ants, there was no one else.
He stroked the box gently, with his back turned to Ronaljes' grave, rested a bit, and then looked back at the pit. He couldn't just leave it like that; he spent some time refilling it.
And he covered it up with dry soil; within a short while, grass would grow back over it.
Yuta cleaned the dirt off the box and quietly went to another place where hardly anyone would be. Planet Num was a kind of open prison where, along with slavery, this was now the home of those living here, which is why guards weren't present everywhere.