Year 1673

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"Say, have you ever wanted to go to the capital? There's a chance we could!" The boy, Woohyun, who is sitting across Wonwoo excitedly points at a piece of fraying cloth, the words so faded one could barely discern them.

A murmur rustles through everyone.

"Read it out, you know over half of us can't read and write." Another boy by the name of Myungsoo speaks up.

"Well, it's the crown prince Vernon's engagement party, and his royal majesty has sent out the invitation to everyone - even the hunters staying in the faraway mountains, the other royal families, all of them!" Woohyun can barely contain his excitement at this point. Some citizens had never had the chance to enter the main city, thus it was an honor for those not of the capital to even set foot into the area.

Woohyun's sentence sends the group of children and teenagers sitting around the long wooden dinner table into a hushed frenzy, exchanging words amongst themselves, faces lighting up. They don't even have to send a glance at each other - it's obvious what every one of them is thinking. This had been their goal since the very beginning.

It was to escape. To escape the depths of the hellhole they were in, the hellhole that they had spent the majority of their lives suffering in.

"But," Wonwoo opens his mouth for the first time today, "would they even be going to the capital?"

"Ah, that's the part I'm getting to. Just this morning, I overheard Silver and Mercury discussing transport arrangements to the capital. "

"Do they have any plans of bringing us along?" Eunji, one of the oldest amongst the girls, asks scooping a spoonful of gruel from her ceramic bowl and shoving it into .

"Well that," hopeful eyes fix themselves on Woohyun, yet he replies with a disappointing "I don't know. We'll have to see."

Sighs ripple across the room, the animated chattering from before dying down to the mere sound of metal spoons clinking against ceramic bowls, everyone once again absorbed into their own worlds.

Wonwoo casts a glance at the people who are sitting around him. Every one of them is dressed the same, all of them slurping up the watery and tasteless gruel, which was one of the two measly meals they received daily.

He is no different. He, too, is decked in a beige, canvas-like sleeveless top with matching drawstring pants, both articles of clothing dirtied and patched, clearly not in their best condition. He had been living this lifestyle for as long as he could remember - sitting at the roadside everyday, begging for money to be placed woven basket set in front of him, which would be passed along at the end of the day to the two men they all knew as Silver and Mercury. Every few months, maybe even weeks, they would be transported to another village to beg, as this meant more money since the villagers have not seen these bunch of pitiful, starved children and would spare them a few more coins.

There was once - just once - when one of the children had stolen some of the coins in the basket, and had lied about the amount he had garnered for that day. Wonwoo can still vividly remember how Silver had cruelly beaten the boy up, leaving bruises everytime his fist mercilessly came into contact with the tender flesh. Mercury had then dumped the poor child into a huge sack, before striding off towards the nearby river whilst the kid was still screaming and crying, pleading for forgiveness.

The boy never came back. No one pried into the matter either - they knew better than to do so.

Wonwoo had known some of the children since they were young, and they had grown up together, under the harsh enviroment they had no choice but to call "home". There was a total of eleven of them - six boys and five girls. Many of them were mere children aged between eight to ten, and the others (including Wonwoo himself) were barely on the cusp of adolescence.

The dim kerosene lamp hanging beside th