BETSO88 Register
Once upon a time – or was it a long time ago? Or somewhere in between? – in a land where legends were many and history wouldn’t be recorded for centuries – there was a man named Joshua. He walked the Earth long, long ago in the Philippines, a land heavy with unrepressed legends, where folklore and mysticism had not yet given way to exorcized spirits. This is the story of a man who lived not a life as mortals know it, but a life of quests, battles, demon-slaying and shadow-fighting.
betso88 register was born in a village that clung to the brown shoulders of Luzon’s lush hills, where sprawling bamboo huts overlooked the belting fields of gold, rice swishing under light. Nothing here whispered of the otherworldly: old women cackled at the market; schoolchildren chased each other home; water buffalo knelt to sneeze. But outside that village one moonless night, beneath the hissing of bamboo, a young betso88 register faced his first tikbalang. The Tikbalang was horse-sized and horselike, its countenance a mixture of malice and mirth. Tikbalangs were half-man, half-animal: they liked to trick wayfarers. betso88 register had a bolo knife that his grandfather, an old warrior whose forefathers had breathed fire through bamboo pipes, liked to say had always belonged, beautiful and sharp, to the oldest of the human race. With the whirling knockout swordsmanship that approached genius, betso88 register drove the tikbalang back into the shadows.
The news of Joshua’s courage had spread to the other islands and the farthest outposts. The villagers had whispered about him, not because the news of his action was being gossiped about publicly, but because they feared and they hoped for the same thing. They said it was Joshua who would burn all the outlying islands, kill off the bad spirits and save the land.
And from there, he made his way to Mindanao’s jungle-choked interior, where the air was heavy with the smells of mud and rot, and the cries of unseen creatures. With its great heaving abdomen, Joshua faced the Manananggal, the creature that separated its upper body from its lower body, wings bursting from its back to hunt for human hearts by night. And then, with an elders’-knowledge of healing and his youthful heart, he would wait until the Manananggal split itself asunder, before pouring salt and ash into its severed lower body, and forcing it to perish without reuniting itself before the rising sun.