Surprised by the sudden shout, the young man trips over his feet and plunges into the water in front of him. He quickly gathers himself and swims back to the surface, but he is speechless when he turns around to look at the shoreline and sees a group of seven young women wearing long, light-blue dresses with white trimming and matching veils that cover their faces below their eyes.
They all have dark hair and dark eyes, and from the glimpse he catches of their hands and bare feet poking out from their dresses, their skin is creamy white.
He isn’t sure what he should say or who he should address when he turns to look at them, and he gets more uncomfortable when he remembers that he is currently completely naked and that the water is more clear than he would like.
“Uh…” he says dumbly while staring at the women. He doesn’t even know where they came from, but he is pretty sure he hadn’t seen any sign of people in the area earlier. He also doesn’t know how he is understanding them, but he just decides to lump this latest absurdity into the growing list of things he doesn’t understand since obtaining the Omega Browser.
“You!” One of the women points at him. “You are clearly not deaf. Answer my question!”
Looking at her, he chooses not to and asks, “Yeah, who are you?”
She blinks at him, and then, as though affronted, says, “How dare you question me! Report your name at once!”
“How bout no?” The young man says while shaking his head. “You’re not even telling me your name. Why would I tell my name to someone who doesn’t even appreciate common courtesy?”
“You!” She growls. “I order you to tell me your name immediately!”
He quickly responds, “And I order you to do the samba, but I doubt that’s going to happen!”
He begins laughing inwardly as the girl looks like she is about to have a fit.
Part of him wants to know who these girls are since their presence proves that he can at least communicate with the people he finds, but a larger part of him decides he wants to egg her on for being rude. So he says, “If you’re not going to answer any questions, do you mind going away? You’re loud and I’m trying to think.”
In response, she yells at him. “How dare you speak to me in that manner! Do you not know your crime?”
He wades back a little bit while wondering if these girls have anything to do with the Nine-Tailed Fox clan before asking, “You mean public indecency? I was the only one around until you guys showed up, so I’d say this is more on you than me.”
“Public indecency?” The girl responds and then lowers her eyes slightly. Almost instantly, her eyes widen and she screams.
“Ahhh!”
The rest of the girls join her as they all turn away screaming.
“You obscene scoundrel!” A different voice shouts out, but he can’t tell who it is with their backs turned. “How dare you expose us to such a thing?”
He feels somewhat satisfied with his nakedness now that he isn’t the only one uncomfortable, so he says, “You’re the ones that showed up and looked. All I was doing was standing in the water before you guys arrived. If anything, I should be the one complaining about a bunch of deviant women taking advantage of the situation to catch a peek!”
From behind, he checks to see if any of them have fluffy ears or tails, but they are either so well-hidden under their clothes and hair that he can’t tell or they don’t, so he assumes they have nothing to do with the Nine-Tailed Fox clan that the woman in the video was talking about earlier. He doesn’t know how reliable the woman’s words were, but given his state of undress and the fact that anyone who approaches him right now is unlikely to have warm and fluffy thoughts toward him, he hopes there actually is something that keeps people out of the water so they can’t approach him.
“Hey!” He calls out to the girls. “I’ll tell you my name if you answer some questions for me!”
Instead of replying, the girls quickly move away from him while the first voice shouts, “You just wait!”
“Wait for what?” He blinks and finds that the girls are already gone.
He looks to see if he can find where they went, but it is as though they vanished into thin air.
“What a weird bunch of girls.”
With no one else around, he finally turns around and begins swimming further into the water to try and find what is so special about this place.
In the treetops several miles from the shoreline, the group of girls turns to one another without prompt.
The girl who had spoken first says, “We need to quickly inform the elders about the intruder and receive our orders! Senior Sister Meng, I heard your master is about to reach the Elemental Overlord realm. Can you contact her directly?”
“Mmn,” another girl nods and pulls out a piece of carved jade. A couple of minutes later, she says, “It’s done, but…”
“What happened,” the first girl asks.
“My master directly pushed this information upward. She said that someone special will personally come in a little over one hour to take care of the boy. Until then, we are to watch from afar and ensure the intruder cannot leave and nobody else can approach him.”
The group of girls looks confused and one of them opens their mouth, but their words are cut off by the girl named Sister Meng before she could speak them.
“I already asked my master about this. She said that person is someone I cannot afford to know about yet and that knowing might negatively affect my resolve.”
Sighing, she continues, “Though, it seems as though they care much more about him being in the river than they do about him being an intruder. Apparently, there is something special about it that the elders find value in, and even people with a terrifying background had to be alerted.”
“The river?” The girl who called the young man obscene questions. “But it doesn’t even have a trace of spirituality in it! It’s just a dead river!”
With the exception of Elder Sister Meng, the girls nod their heads and voice their agreement with this girl’s assessment.
Elder Sister Meng has a different opinion and reprimands the other girls.
“We have yet to even become Earth-Bound Immortals while our elders are at a height we cannot even begin to speculate on. Yet even they pushed the problem onto someone else. If there is value in the water, then that value is likely something only a powerful Earth-Bound Immortal can comprehend. People like us who lack qualifications should just obey orders and wait for it to be our turn to understand such things.”
Beneath their veils, the girls all seem unhappy with this response, but none of them utter another word as they sit down on the branches of tall trees and proceed to watch the area.
For the next forty minutes, they watch as the young man plays around in the water. His actions make no sense to them. Sometimes he swims around in circles, other times he tastes the water in different locations, and, worryingly, he will occasionally disappear as he dives beneath the surface of the water for some reason none of the girls can comprehend.
When he did it the first time, the girls all panicked and began considering the consequences they would face if he didn’t reappear, but thankfully their worries were unfounded as he surfaced again a minute later.
But, after worrying over it once, they grow used to his antics and their worry became boredom as they await the arrival of whoever it was they were expecting.
That is until one of them asks a question.
“Has there ever been a time when we’ve been allowed to wear red?”
Elder Sister Meng grows nervous as she looks at a new figure in the distance and quickly pulls out the same piece of jade she’d used to contact her master.
In the water, the young man feels disappointed in the effects of Three Realms Fate-Guiding Verse. Not only has he not managed to do anything about the little star, but he also feels as though he completely wasted his opportunity.
“Just judging by the fact that I got here basically by magic, there has to be something special about this water. But even if there is, I don’t know how to figure it out!”
He sighs discontentedly and floats on his back while staring up at the unusual sky above. Rather than a starry sky, he sees beautiful clouds formed of colorful mist far in the distance.
“This place is beautiful. Unnaturally so. Even if no one told me that it was magical, it would be my first thought after seeing it. But, then why can’t I get anything out of it? I’m sure that fox girl thought there was something special about it and it was one of the results that popped up during my search!”
After thinking about it for a while he decides he just doesn’t know enough to even begin speculating. He can come up with a bunch of excuses to let himself believe that he’d find a solution with a little more effort, but everything boils down to him randomly guessing and hoping something sticks.
In the end, he decides he should probably leave and try to figure out his circumstances back where his body is. If nothing else, maybe he could take a quick nap before the morning comes. He can already tell he is going to be doing a lot of walking and searching around once it’s bright enough for him to see. Though, that is still going to be a complicated task given that his body is currently located in grass taller than he is.
“Maybe I can tear the grass around my body out of the ground and then light the rest of it on fire. I’m right by the edge of a cliff, so if I give myself enough space, I should be fine. But I also don’t want the fire to get too out of control… what if people actually live around the area?”
He decides not to start a wildfire just yet then closes his eyes and opens the Omega Browser’s Space as he prepares to close the video. But, right as he is about to mentally prod it, he is interrupted by a girl’s voice.
“Hey, you! Are you planning on dying? Can I watch?”
‘Wasn’t I nearly a quarter-mile from the shoreline?’ He asks himself as his body jerks and he quickly opens his eyes to look around him.
Floating above him is a thin girl wearing a form-fitting, split-thigh dress that may have gone a bit too far. Rather than just revealing her legs, the split goes all the way up to her bustline and reveals two thin lines of skin on either side of her chest leading down her legs and to her feet. Under normal circumstances, the dress looks like it would cover enough that, despite being sexy, he wouldn’t put it past any of the girls he knows to wear something like it in class.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
It’s hard to tell how old she is. She doesn’t look like a child, but her face doesn’t have any of the maturity he associates with adults; with her long black hair, bright red eyes, rosebud lips, fair skin, and the fact that she’s squatting down mid-air with her hands crossed over her knees, she takes the dress and makes it look obscene.
Just looking at her makes him feel as though any second now the wind will blow in just the wrong way and he will see something that will get him in trouble.
“Just this little bit and already such an effect?” She chuckles while touching her lips with a curled-up finger.
She looks at him and gives him a wicked smile. “You shouldn’t be here just to die. Do you want to help me make a mess?”
He stares up at her, his brain feeling stuffy and confused, but seeing how beautiful she is, the wicked gleam in her eyes, and hearing the words coming out of her mouth, he can’t help but ask, “What do you mean I’m not here to die? And make a mess?”
She grins down at him and says, “What else could I mean?” She lowers one of her eyes before raising her eyebrow. Then she says, “You clearly aren’t thinking about dying and making a mess is making a mess. But, you should already know that, right? Since you’re not here to die, aren’t you here to make a mess too?
“I’m not here to… er… to make a mess.” He calls out. “I’m just swimming for a bit before leaving.”
“I don’t believe you!” She sings each word slowly. “Even I wouldn’t sneak here for something that simple. Are you really not here to make a mess?”
“I’m telling the truth! I just happen to think swimming would be a good idea.” He feels defensive while talking to her. With her talk of making a mess, he feels like he’s talking to a child while looking at someone with the body of a young adult. He isn’t sure if she’s just toying around with him, but judging by the look in her eyes, he feels that she’s probably just being honest with him.
“Nope! I don’t accept that answer so you have to tell me the truth or you have to help me make a mess.”
She doesn’t seem to care that he’s naked. Or rather, she might even be amused by it. Adding that to the fact that she’s here to ‘make a mess’, she either wants to jump his bones, which he doubts because she breaks the scale and he’s pretty average, or she wants to cause problems for someone else. And since she is capable of flight, he feels that he’d be the one saddled with the consequences of whatever she does if he decided to help her.
But, then again, he is able to leave at any time. Supposedly. Though he hasn’t tried turning off the video yet, he’s pretty confident it will work the way he expects seeing as the music it is playing is the only reason he is here in the first place.
He wonders why he doesn’t just open the Omega Browser’s Space and turn off the video so he can return to his body. That had been his plan after all, and it hadn’t even been a minute since he decided to do it.
When he looks at the girl flying several feet above him he can’t help but gulp when he realizes how close she is and how much of her legs he can see.
‘Oh. That’s why,’ he thinks to himself.
“Uh… If I helped you make a mess, what would we be doing?” He asks slowly, pretty sure that he is getting himself in deep over his head.
She grins brightly and whispers conspiratorially, “Did you know there are some mortal girls peeping on you right now?”
He shakes his head in response, both out of honesty and because he’s confused about the way she phrased the question.
‘Girls? Maybe the ones from earlier?’ At first, he can’t help but consider the group from earlier that was a little obnoxious, but then his thoughts drift off toward the golden scroll and its contents. ‘I was ascended from a mortal world and consider myself a normal person. Which means normal people should be considered mortals. Then, if this girl is calling normal people mortals, it should mean she isn’t mortal. Then she’s immortal? Or is there another category? Does that even make sense?’
Not caring about his internal monologue, she continues, “The Bright Moon Immortal Palace likes to play pretend that they are so far detached from everything they can consider to be lesser. Not only them but their tributary sects also! They bathe themselves in nothing but spiritual water, dare not touch unclean things, hide their faces from everyone, and even prohibit themselves from coitus!”
She scoffs while shaking her head. “Don’t you know that most people are born from coitus? It’s as if they don’t know that they themselves are a consequence of such a union in the first place! So I want to play a little prank on them.”
Unfortunately for her narrative, he was lost and distracted from the second he started wondering about alternatives to mortality. And though he doesn’t realize it, she scowls as she watches his absent-mindedness and her eyes brighten and darken quickly as she examines his body.
He realizes that he doesn’t know about everything she is talking about, but there are some parts where it correlates with things that might be important to him like her talk about spiritual water, so he decides he might as well take the opportunity to clarify them if she’s willing.
“Hey, uh, can I ask you a couple questions?”
“Mn!” She nods her head cutely. “I might even answer them if I find them interesting.”
He pauses, not knowing what to think about that before posing his first question.
“Okay, so, are you mortal?”
“Pfft!” The girl quickly covers her mouth, her eyes wide as she looks down at him and then toward her feet as if that should mean something to him. When she realizes he has no clue what she is trying to get across, she can no longer help but laugh loudly.
He feels awkward as she visibly dips multiple times while floating in the air, occasionally her toes come within a few inches of the surface of the water without ever touching. But for the next thirty seconds, she does nothing but laughs at him.
When she looks at him again, her eyes are even brighter than they had been and her grin could give the Cheshire Cat a run for its money.
“Do you see my feet?” She asks him coyly.
He nods his head in confusion as his eyes drop to look at her small feet.
“Do you think a mortal can stand on air?” She asks, her voice dripping with humor.
His eyes widen as he figures it out and starts feeling dumb. He’d thought that her flying was just something people could learn and may not be too different from his Omega Browser, but apparently, there is a lot more behind it than just the acquisition of knowledge.
Thinking about the women on the shoreline he had seen earlier, he finds that he might have already been in trouble if they could do what this girl is capable of.
As she watches him go through the process of realization, she loosens her posture slightly, being careful to keep everything that should be, covered, but otherwise, she drops her shoulders, relaxes her expression, and begins breathing more deeply as she incrementally closes the distance between the two of them.
Unaware, he considers what he wants to know most and asks, “Do you know of a type of energy that can let people do something like magic?”
She blinks her eyes at him slowly and visibly struggles not to laugh again.
After a minute, she forces out, “I may.”
He realizes he probably just asked a very dumb question seeing as, unless there is a cheat involved, she is probably using some kind of energy to fly.
She taps her chin a couple of times before lifting up her palm and igniting a flame on it.
“Is it this kind of power you are seeking,” she asks sweetly, being careful to monitor the heat of the flame closely as she holds it out to him.
His eyes widen as he stares at the fire and he backs away slightly from the heat, but although he is very impressed, he’s seen things that are, at least visually, more impressive online and in theaters. He’s not sure that what she is doing and what he wants to accomplish are the same thing.
Looking at his face and thoughtful eyes, the girl considers that it didn’t take long for him to find the heat uncomfortable so she disperses the flame, but she also finds his reaction underwhelming so she changes tact.
“It seems you are not looking for this kind of power then. Maybe you could describe a little of what you are searching for and I can see if it fits anything in my understanding?”
He pauses for a minute. First, he wonders how much he should say to her. Then he realizes he might not even have enough to say to her even without hiding anything. Struggling to find the words without directly exposing his situation, he quickly finds himself stuck.
Lamely, and feeling awkward about his guess now that he’s saying it aloud, he finally says, “I’m not sure how to describe it, but I think I am looking for something that would strengthen my soul.”
A genuine look of surprise flashes across the girl’s face as she blinks rapidly for a moment. Her eyes flash down and look at the water in confusion before looking back up at him. She seems to make a decision as she says, “Cultivating the soul is both easy and difficult. Easy because there is a popular saying that describes the most perfect method to increase the power of one’s soul. Difficult because the path of cultivating one’s soul is often the path that intersects most with death. I can tell you the saying, but…”
She shakes her head before placing her chin on her knees and adopts a thoughtful look while glimpsing at him beneath lowered eyelashes.
He feels nervous when she says the part about it intersecting with death, but even more when she stops talking. Feeling like she is on the verge of saying something that he needs, he wants to do something to encourage her to continue speaking but quickly finds it is unneeded.
“If you would like, I could teach you the saying, but my clan has certain rules. Even if the knowledge is widely known in other circles and even freely available to most people, we cannot pass it along to outsiders. Therefore, if you want, I can tell you the saying and give you a few pointers, but in turn, we will have to form a certain connection.”
“A… connection?” He looks at her, dumbfounded, and his mind goes to all sorts of places. He wonders if he’s going to get lucky enough to be ‘forced’ to marry her in order to learn something amazing, but she doesn’t give him too much time to think it over.
She clearly notices his thoughts as her eyes dip down toward the water again and she hides her smug smile behind her knees as she nods her head.
“Mn. It’s nothing too much, and all the effort would be on my part. But, if you’re willing to do it, then I’d be more than happy to help you.”
“Things like what?” He asks, feeling concerned and excited at once.
He wants to believe her in large part because it’s information he needs, but he’d be lying if he said that a good part of him hadn’t already chosen to believe in her because of how attractive he found her.
She smiles at him. “It’s really simple! All I have to do is give you a little bit of my spiritual energy. That way, I can make sure you don’t pass on anything I tell you to someone else.”
She starts rocking back and forth on her heels while staring down at him with an excited look on her face.
Though he’s not sure if he’s reading her right, he’s pretty sure she is being genuine and he even thinks it might be reasonable for her clan not to want their information getting out there since he imagines something that can allow people to use magic is incredibly valuable. He doesn’t know why she’s so excited or so friendly to him, but when he thinks about how one of the first things she said to him was that she wanted to make a mess, he figures she might be a bit of an outcast and is just enjoying the attention.
Ultimately, he decides he is going to give it a shot. He’s certain this girl is special in some way he doesn’t understand and he thinks anything he can learn from her, even if it’s something basic like she is suggesting, is something he probably doesn’t know anything about in any case.
“Alright,” he nods his head. “I’m willing to do it.”
Though he says that, he also opens up the Omega Browser’s Space and focuses on the video as he prepares to stop it at a moment’s notice.
The girl beams at him and holds out her finger before saying, “Hold out your hand! I just need to condense my spiritual energy and write my name then I can answer anything you want.”
“Write your name?” He asks but doesn’t hesitate to hold out his hand and watch as the girl’s finger glows red and she begins to write in the air.
“Mn!” She nods while focusing on the characters that slowly appear under the movement of her finger.
He focuses on them also, curious to see if he would be able to understand them, and is happy to find that their meaning is clear to him.
Magic. Ghost. Fairy. Girl.
The four characters seem to translate separately inside his mind as he looks at them above his hand. When he tries to say them aloud, their meaning changes.
“Mogui Xiannu? Devil Fairy?” He asks and his face pales as a terrible idea fills his head and he quickly turns off the video. Unfortunately, he finds that even though he can feel something quickly loosening around him, he isn’t instantly transferred out of this place.
Then he feels a strong grip pulling at his wrist and notices that one of the girl’s hands is holding onto him tightly as the other one grasps the characters she wrote.
“Not Mogui Xiannu. Moxian. And from now on you are my pet Lan Jin and we will make a lot of messes together! I will treat you the best, but you better not betray me or I will punish you!” She smiles at him, her eyes full of joy as she forces the characters down onto his palm. When the characters land on him, they fall into his skin like a drop of water entering the ocean.
A look of horror alights on his face as he stares at the girl, but his horror turns to confusion as he watches a Moxian experience a much larger number of emotions than his own in an even shorter period of time. He can’t tell if she is sad, angry, or afraid as all these things seem to be present on her face within a short period of time.
“You are projecting your soul here?” She asks, a quiet tremor in her voice.
Not knowing how to respond to her now that she seems to be having some sort of episode, he just nods his head once. Her response is to look miserable and then confused and excited again.
“You’re leaving!” She realizes as she looks at his fading form. “You can come to and leave this place at will?” He shrugs his shoulders at her as best he can with his wrist still controlled by her, but she doesn’t seem to be disappointed by his departure.
Instead, he’s the one who feels disappointed by her lack of disappointment. Then he feels nervous as her smile reappears and she seems to be thinking about something.
Finally, he is terrified when she viciously bites her own palm and forces it against his palm. He doesn’t know what she is doing, but when black veins appear beneath her skin, he is absolutely certain it is nothing good for him.
Thankfully, he feels the effects of the Three Realms Fate-Guiding Verse end as he is forced away from the river, but unlike the first time, this one isn’t a quick and comfortable trip.
Because, unlike the first time, he doesn’t know if he got away in time.