Happyland’s lights flickered and died out. Reinforced windows were opened. People streamed out, eyes widening at the natural splendor spread before us. Mist wandered between the needle-steep cliffs of the mountainous pillars, half-concealing the exotic jungles hundreds of meters beneath us. The world was like a snap-shot of China’s ‘Floating Mountains’, if someone had turned the scale and color saturation up to eleven and added actual floating pillar mountains for good measure.

“This is the place— this place,” Nelly tripped over her own words and feet as she scrambled to me, “Place where they came from! I can feel it. The place is bursting with Qi, although… It’s, eh, hmm. Kinda off. Off in an oops I slipped salt in my coffee instead of sugar kinda way.”

“Hm.” Unable to sense Qi, I simply nodded and munched over her observation. Though this place gave me odd tingles on my back, it did not seem immediately dangerous or hostile. A true testament to the power of First Gigachad.

That heroic bastard of a bruh must’ve punched a hole in the Jungle barrier with the Big Dick energy I gave him. Knowing he’d lose the fight, he’d used the last of his strength to punt us out of our reality and straight where the cultivators least expected. I didn’t like how the fight had played out. But Chad where Chadness is due, this was one of the few ways he could ensure both mine and Townberg’s survival.

My shock of wonderment mellowed to solemn appreciation of the First.

I’d hardly known the man, but the brief exchange with him had felt like a reunion with a long lost older brother. We had understood each other immediately as only fellow members of the Gigachad sect can.

Nelly, bless her soul, gave me a worried look and squeezed my fingers sympathetically. “Your elder bruh… He…” She frowned, then threw her arms around my torso and pulled me in a hug. “I’m sure he’s… Well, if he isn’t alright, you aren’t allowed to blame yourself, okay?”

“I won’t,” I assured her, stroking her hair. “Bruhs don’t disrespect the sacrifice of their elder bruhs. But I will mourn his loss.”

And I will remember the ones who’d slain him.

Vengeance rarely had a place on the Dao of Chadness, but it just so happened that my train to Earth liberation had three seats with the names of all lesser deity level cultivators already written on them. Upgrading them from the ‘inevitable enemies’ class to ‘vengeance’ was hardly an issue.

“Bruh…” Maxman jogged to us.

“Maxman! Glad to see you got caught inside…” I trailed off, noticing that my junior bruh’s eyes were glazed on something behind my shoulder.

“Bruh… turn around.”

I did, and though the sight provided an explanation to that odd tingling all over my back, it also blasted me with a buckshot of questions and answers I had not thought to ask.

World behind us was not a world. Opposite to the magical horizon stretched a fragmented mess of a dying world floating amidst fractal chaos. Pieces of the sky, jungle, mountains, and the very plates beneath continents floated in slow motion as if they were in process of being minced by an invisible lawn-mower the size of the world. No. Not just the world. Remnants of two moons hung amongst shattered stars. This wall of fractal destruction must’ve spanned the entire galaxy, if not this entire universe.

A great rainbow of Dao energies churned within the abstract chaos that filled the bits in between broken reality. Broken mountains, forests, buildings, and even people duplicated infinitely as an expanding fractal, forming a mosaic of infinite mountain ranges, infinite forests, and infinite corridors.

“Welp.” Nelly blinked and rubbed her eyes. “Sanity was cool while it lasted, but I think I’m crazy again.”

“You’re sane. That there is the Realm of Daos,” I said, having concluded it as the only possible answer after tapping to Big Brain mode.

“Realm of Daos. That’s a thing?” Maxman kept staring ahead.

“Daos are the reflections of the subconscious of all souls. I never expected the place to be this physical, but it could hardly be anything else. If you look closely, you can see that the branching fractals try to separate the physical object into its symbolic components.” I pointed out a floating shard with forest on top, of which the Realm of Dao reflected depictions of endless forests, endless underbrush, endless holes in the trees, and endless caverns under-roots — all similar near the core of the shard, but increasingly alien the further they stretched from it.

“That dude looks gnarly.” Nelly cringed at the sight of a cultivator split into roughly a million pieces, each of which continued to move even. His reflections each showed a thousand faces of agony, all subtly different.

Maxman and I agreed that the sight was indeed rather gnarly.

Why did the H*-Man figurine not mention this? What caused all this? Questions kept peppering my mind like a hailstorm, but I set them aside for now, turning towards the crowd of curious friends crawling out of Happyland.

“Mr. Maxson, Dr. Edelfelt, Annie, friends, family…” I looked them all in the eye simultaneously and equipped a powerful Chad Smile to calm their fears. “Take a deep breath and be at ease. My elder bruh punched us into the cultivator’s old world, and though the sky may look goofy, we’re safe for the moment. While we figure out a way to return home, let’s leverage this place for maximum gains. If we use our time right, the Happyland that returns to Earth might be ready to become the center of Earth’s resistance.”

Cheers erupted. Even the more cautious among our friends beamed with hopeful smiles. I smiled with approval.

Whether it be in cultivation or accidental isekai situations, It’s always good to set up goals asap — both long-term and short-term — to avoid the mind’s tendency to drift towards dead ends.

“That’s right,” I continued. “We’ve got a goal and we’ll be alright, so relax and take it all in. We’ll hammer out a plan at lunch.”

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Personally, I took a trip around the edges of the cliff with Nelly and listened to her squees of joy while she bounced from one curiosity to another.

***

Adding up the patients, staff, few neighbors, and our animal friends, we numbered seventy-three in total. Dese Nuts was already devastated over the fact that he’d been separated from his harem. Masculine tears ran down the little squirrel’s cheeks as he stared off into the distance, utilizing a stoic Chad posture to sort out his emotions. My junior bruh and his girlfriend Rose sat beside the squirrel, offering him support.

Meanwhile, the task of organizing decent living conditions was left to Mr. Maxson and Sergei Ivanov. We had supplies for almost half a year and a brook on the mountain to provide water. However, plumbing, electricity, and the internet were gone.

Several of the patients were already suffering from the acute withdrawal symptoms. To make matters worse, we were running low on various medicines required to keep the older patients alive.

I was confident that cultivation resources in the world below offered an answer to that, while the cultivators themselves could likely help enlighten us to what exactly was happening with the Realm of Dao.

After spotting what looked to be a distant village hidden amongst the jungle, I walked off the cliff.

Despite reaching terminal velocity after a few hundred meters, my body remained oddly calm. My new freshly evolved heart thumped with a slow beat. All my organs worked together in perfect harmony, piloting my body as if I were a Chad sized mecha of muscles.

What’s more, my sensitivity to Big Dick energy had grown tenfold. Before the energy had felt like water, heavy, requiring an effort of will to manipulate. Now it flowed within me like the wind. I felt its slightest variations, its minute fluctuations. Even the birds I fell past added to my Big Dick energy generation. And while the raw amount of Big Dick energy was not much, the efficiency with which my body converted it to pure Chadness had changed drastically.

As the ground approached, I casually reached out to the cliffside beside me. My fingers slid into stone like it was clay, slowing my descent to a gentle and controlled landing.

Three seconds later, Bonko landed beside me, with Nelly on top.

“Wowowow. Look at the trees. And the everything! Why’d they ever want to leave this for Earth, well, aside from the wall of weirdness in the sky, but still!”

“It is beautiful,” I agreed.

The canopy wove above us an artwork of lacy leaves and floral vines. Each tree was a different species, each bush uniquely bushy, and each flower different. All of them grew with primordial vibrance, suffusing every breath with a heady scent of life and earth.

“Hey! That one there. That has a whole bunch of Qi!” Nelly rode Bonko half-way up a wide grey-barked conifer of some kind and plucked what looked like a large peacock-colored pine cone. She licked it and smacked her lips ponderously. “Tastes like… hmm. Like it has prettifying nature Qi in it. Heh. Heheheh…” She began gathering more of them into a duffel bag, muttering something about prettifying Grog.

We took our time meandering through the jungle, enjoying the chirps and chitter of the alien creatures. Besides the myriad of birds inhabiting the place, tree climbing crabs the size of dogs and large herbivore sloths looked to be candidates for our future meat sources.

Nelly kept on stuffing her duffel bags with various Qi infused fruits and plants, identifying the slight variations in their properties and Qi by sniffing or licking. She was having the time of her life, grinning and showing her best finds to me with unending excitement.

Responsibility and purpose that our circumstances thrust on her shoulders made her flourish like never before. I was happy for my woman. Happy and proud.

We arrived at the village at around four P.M. local time.

A short portly man with thick arms and weird hairdo waved at us and spoke utter gibberish.

Nelly smiled and replied in similar nonsense.

I raised a brow. “You understand the language? Impressive.”

“Not in the slightest. I just make some noises! Like this.” She turned back to the man and waved. “Bing-bong-bongbong!”

Against all odds, he replied as if they were engaged in a friendly conversation and kept on talking, gesturing at the village, and the clouds while miming how his back hurt. I didn’t need Big Brain mode to tell me that he was a bizarre individual.

We proceeded further into the small village. Besides the moss-painted temple at the center, all the buildings stood on tall stilts with bridges crossing between them at canopy level. A communal workshop and several warehouses at ground level were connected by more traditional paths.

Locals busied themselves in work, sculpting clay into ceramics, weaving fiber into matts, and cooking freshly caught game. Kids played in the trees.

No one noticed us.

[Eyes of the Alpha] made them acknowledge my eye-contact, for a brief moment after which the villagers returned to work. This was not merely odd, but downright impossible. Only the most powerful cultivators could ignore my levels of Chadness, yet I sensed not a speck of Dao from these folk.

“They are cultivators, are they not?” I asked Nelly.

“Yea. They’re all kinda weak tho. Like, that hunter guy with big bone bow’s the best and even he’s juuuuuust about Silent Feather level,” Nelly said.

I approached one of the clay-spinners, letting my previously earned Big Dick energy empower my voice with the [Universal Alpha Language]. “Hello. Me big man. You small man. What’s up?”

The man wiped his clay-drenched hands on his apron, gave me a smile, and continued working while humming a strange tune. His finished urn went into a pile of over a hundred others.

Something wasn’t right.

“Titan, what’s going ooonnnn…”

Nelly’s voice stretched out. Time slowed as I tapped into Big Brain mode. I took in the scene of idyllic village life. The mountains of finished artwork, the mountain of fiber matts, piles of cooked meat rotting right next to fresh game. Everyone was working, focused intently on their craft or activity. So intently in fact that they barely acknowledged each other, as if each person was a cardboard cut-out of a person, simply acting out their most basic descriptions…

“...you think it’d help if I slapped one of them?” she asked.

“Hop on Bonko. We need to run back.”

“Why, what’s wrong?” Nelly whistled for Bonko and the large monster lowered its head to let her on its back.

I glanced at the looming wall of abstract chaos. “Realm of Dao has changed these people. Happyland may not be far enough from it to be safe. We’ll need to move it further inland before—”

Realm of Dao breathed.

A ripple traversed across the great tapestry of concepts made manifest, and erupted. A great tsunami washed over us too fast for me to do more than a step before Nelly and activate [Unlimited Abworks]. Symbolic forces of various Daos flowed around us. Like an avalanche, the fractal reflections rainbow reality washed over the village, Happyland, up and past the two titanic dragons engaged in their duel.

When the tide subsided, I saw the receding forces rip pieces of reality away on a conceptual level. Tiny shreds of plants, Qi, and the villager were sucked away, leaving everything a little more focused, a little more specialized, a little more flat.

Realm of Dao was consuming the world, slowly turning everything into two-dimensional caricatures of themselves.

“Oh no! Happyland!” Nelly and I bolted into the jungle, rushing towards the Asylum.