Moxian stands in the air, a peculiar smile on her face and a pensive look in her eyes as she tilts her head to the side. Blood still drips from the wound she inflicted on her palm and she sways lightly in the wind as she considers something.

“How strange,” she says quietly. “Did my soul brand work or did it not?”

From an immense distance, she can feel that a tiny fragment of her soul has taken up residence in her new pet’s body, but it doesn’t seem to her as though it left an indelible mark on his consciousness.

She focuses her thoughts on it and can feel a resonance between her main soul and her soul fragment, but when she sends a command through it she discovers that nothing happens.

What’s more, it feels as though her soul fragment is going through some sort of change that she can’t quite define.

Before she can discover what changes are occurring to her soul fragment, she feels a presence rapidly approaching her from afar. Turning around, she adopts a bored expression and looks at the woman approaching her.

“Qingshui,” she says calmly, a sharp look in her eyes.

“Moxian,” the newcomer says, her tone as placid as a frozen sea and her features unseen under her long white dress and matching veil. “Where is he?”

Moxian shrugs her shoulders and smirks at the other woman. “Who are you talking about?”

“I do not wish to play your games,” Qingshui warns. “This is the Bright Moon Immortal Palace’s territory. Your presence here goes against the Matriarch’s agreement. Tell me where he is and we can look past your presence here this time.”

“My presence here?” Moxian gives the other woman a smile full of venom. “Neither the Dark Moon Immortal Palace nor the Bright Moon Immortal Palace can lay claim to the River of Fate. No matter how close to the shore I am, I’m not on your territory.”

Moxian and Qingshui stare at each other from a distance. Moxian with a smile on her face while Qingshui’s expression is unknown.

Qingshui turns her head slightly to look at the nearby shore and scans into the distance before turning back to Moxian and glancing at her palm.

“The Bright Moon Immortal Palace’s Matriarch is already aware of the young man and is heading toward the Twin Moon Divine Palace to report his presence in the River of Fate. If you choose to hide him, I will inform my Matriarch that you invaded our territory and your presence allowed him to slip away.”

Moxian glares at Qingshui and giggles softly. “You’d lie to the Divine Palace? I wonder what your punishment will be.”

Qingshui calmly asks, “What lie? You are here and you are wounded. Clearly, you were involved in a battle and I only arrived after it finished. Since the only people in this area are mortals incapable of flight, you must have fought in our territory and, due to your arrogance and lack of ability, found yourself being wounded by a mortal.”

She shakes her head slowly. “Truly, I don’t know what fate is worse. The Twin Moon Divine Palace believing that you allowed an unknown person capable of swimming in the River of Fate to escape or your Dark Moon Immortal Palace’s Matriarch being humiliated when she learns her personal disciple was wounded by a bunch of mortal girls.”

A flash of anger burns behind Moxian’s eyes as she shouts, “You dare?”

Her palms both ignite with flames as she stares furiously at Qingshui, but she does not act.

“That depends on you,” Qingshui responds. “Who is he?”

Moxian clenches her fists and makes the flames on her palm disperse as she continues glaring at Qingshui, but eventually, she responds. “His name is Lan Jin.”

“Is that it?” Qingshui asks.

Moxian thinks for a while and smiles brightly before saying, “I’m sure he’s mortal.”

Qingshui stares at Moxian silently for several minutes before asking, “And your palm?”

Moxian’s smile turns vicious and says, “It seems that his fate belongs to me and my Dark Moon Immortal Palace and has nothing to do with you.”

***

When he returns to his body, the first thing he does is check his hand for any signs of blood. Seeing nothing, he recalls that he had only transferred to the River of Fate as a soul projection. So, if there’s something wrong with him, it would probably have to do with his soul. With his understanding of a soul being incredibly limited, all he can do is open up the Omega Browser’s Space and take a look around.

He quickly finds it was the right call, though, as he sees something that looks like a floating blood bubble rotating around within the Space.

“That’s… probably not good,” he says while thinking about the girl Moxian. She seemed tolerably weird up until she tried to make him her pet, but with the blood floating around in what he can only assume is part of his soul, he considers her in a new, terrifying light.

He doesn’t want to classify her based on her name alone but with her strange personality, red eyes, and apparently psychotic tendencies, he can’t help but wonder if her being named ‘Devil Fairy’ has some greater reason than someone being bad at naming.

“The name definitely fits, though.” He shivers as the thought of becoming her pet runs through him. He hopes the blood bubble doesn’t do anything, but he isn’t about to poke and prod it because he’s worried that if it pops something bad will happen. So he watches it for a while and, realizing that nothing is likely to happen soon, he closes the Space and lies on his back while looking up at the stars.

Staring up at the sky, he realizes something. “The stars look nothing like back home. I can’t even recognize a single constellation here.”

After a while, he also says, “If I were to judge them, I would say that the sky in the River of Fate is best, this comes in at a distant second place, and back home…” He thinks about the nearly barren sky obscured by the light pollution of the city. “Back home kinda sucks.”

Eventually, he gets up to relieve himself before deciding he should take that nap he was thinking about earlier. Just the fact that it felt pretty pleasant out right now made him apprehensive for the coming day. After all, if he considered the temperature perfect now, then later on it could only be too hot or too cold.

Folding over a lot of tall grass to make a bed, he lays down again and falls asleep while making a list of priorities for the coming day.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

***

Waking up early in the morning, the first thing he does is stretch while laying down on the soft grass. He is slightly damp due to the morning dew, but otherwise, he feels excellent despite having slept on the ground for a night.

After opening his eyes, it takes him a minute to remember where he is and why he is outside, but when he does, he can’t really tell what emotions he is experiencing. He never really cared too much about his life in the USA and ‘home’ for him was always just a word that described where his stuff was. Now that he didn’t know how to go back, ‘home’ just became something ambiguous to him.

So, for him, between laying on the grass without any prospects for the future and spending years of his life in college just to learn a skill set of diminishing value before working his life away back on Earth, he couldn’t really determine if there was a better or worse between the two.

As for family, he had one but they were always distant even when they were in the same room. His dad used to be military before he lost his leg, and after that, he traveled the country advocating for youth groups and various charity organizations. Before he left the military, if he came home for one week out of the month, that was considered a good thing. These days, even if he was gone for a month, it wouldn’t be unusual.

With his mom, it was the same theme but a different story. She had her own business and was gone from the crack of dawn until late in the evening. If he saw her before going to bed he would say hello, but there were times when, despite her coming home every day, he wouldn’t see her for a few weeks at a time.

So neither of them would know he was gone unless either his university contacted them or a few weeks passed and they realized he hadn’t called or texted them in a while.

And it wasn’t even that he had any hard feelings for either of them, it was just that he was used to them working so hard that they forgot to call or check in on him.

“Man… thinking about that kinda ruined my day.” He sighs and looks up at the brightening sky above him before checking the Omega Browser’s Space.

Surprisingly, his little star had recovered!

“Fuck yeah!” He grins while looking at the energetic little guy and wonders why the star is full of energy. It probably wasn’t from the River of Fate because he had been watching the little star like a hawk for most of the time he was there.

He also doubts that it has anything to do with the bubble of blood floating around within the Space.

“Does napping restore the soul?” He wonders and then thinks it through. “The little star was pretty wimpy right before I went to sleep, but now it is full of energy. So either something happened while I was asleep, or…”

He looks at the bubble of blood and begins feeling like an idiot.

“Did I risk my safety trying to find a solution to restore the little star’s energy when all I had to do was crash for a bit?”

The more he thinks about it, the more he believes that sleep was all he needed to restore his soul.

He switches his attention to the image of a naked woman floating around within the space and begins feeling conflicted about the image’s continued existence within the Space.

“Can I even delete stuff?” He asks himself and wonders if he should give it a try. On the one hand, the River of Fate is obviously very dangerous because a girl like Moxian lives there. He doesn’t know much about her, but he is certain that she is dangerous. But on the other hand, he feels that the River of Fate holds some sort of value. He doesn’t know what that value is yet, but he’s certain it exists.

Looking more closely at the image of the woman frozen in time, he decides he won’t try to delete it.

Standing up, he looks around him. He’s still pretty close to the edge of the cliff, and it would seem that light or darkness made no difference toward the immensity of the cliff itself because he still couldn’t see its base, but he could at least see the land several thousand meters below where the cliff may have, at one point, been one piece of solid land before a ravine hundreds of miles long was formed between the two pieces of land.

“Man, I feel sorry for my bed and my phone… and I kinda wonder if they’re still falling. They should have hit the ground by now, right?”

Looking into the ravine, he’s not so sure. He remembers the old saying ‘When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.’ He can’t see anything, but just looking at it fills him with a strange sense of dread that he can’t quite place. But what he does know is that the land he is standing on and the land far below seem to match up at points, so he can’t help but wonder if the difference in elevation was caused by something natural or unnatural.

After a moment, he turns around and says, “Well, at least I know what direction I don’t need to go. Even if there was something beyond the ravine that I could see, there is no way in hell that I’m ever going to reach it.”

Unfortunately, all there is in front of him is tall grass so thick that he can’t even see five feet in front of him.

Sighing, he takes a step forward while wondering what he should search for next.

He thinks things over for a little while before deciding he should try to look up the ‘soul cultivation’ stuff that Moxian had mentioned. Even if she did turn out to be an unreliable psycho in the end, she seemed knowledgeable enough and, since she was planning on catching him, she likely didn’t have any reason to lie to him. Hell, she was even telling the truth about forming a ‘connection’ with him, it just turned out that he definitely wouldn’t have liked the type of connection she was talking about.

“Man,” he grumbles. “That girl was something else…”

He shakes his head to clear it and opens the Omega Browser’s Space while slowly walking forward. Knowing that he is about to be in a bit of pain, he sighs unhappily and uses the little star to write one letter at a time while frequently checking to make sure he isn’t about to find the one tree in a mile with his face.

Just like the first time, he experiences mental strain and a bit of pain when writing out the letters, but having been mentally prepared for it this time, he finds that he is able to push past it more easily than during the night.

A few minutes later, he prepares to finish writing down ‘soul cultivation’ and notices that the little star still has some energy. He considers writing something else to make his search better, but he honestly doesn’t know what he should write. When he remembers that searching for results also takes up the energy of the star, he sighs and just finishes writing down his search terms.

Just like before, the Omega Browser’s Space begins writhing and churning and he pays close attention to everything happening as he awaits the appearance of the images.

He is momentarily distracted by the fact that the Omega Browser’s Space seems to be wrapping around the blood bubble and he becomes momentarily nervous, but when the first images appear he regains his focus and watches them with rapt attention.

Within seconds, he sees hundreds then thousands of images. He sees bells, hears voices, watches strange colors flying through the air, listens to the chanting of men and women alike in different languages, watches ghosts and things he can only describe as monsters walking along on the ground, and so much more.

All the while, the little star is losing energy quickly and he begins to grow nervous. It’s clear that the little star doesn’t have enough energy for him to make the best choice he possibly can, but he hopes he can at least make a good choice if he has a second to look at the images in front of him.

In the end, he finds that even that is too much to hope for as the little star grows too dim for his comfort and he reaches out with his mind to grab the first image that at least looks like it might have value.

The reason for that is simple: Out of all of the images he had seen, regardless of their content, he found them to be either too bland or too fantastic. He didn’t know which ones were possible and which ones would just waste his time.

The only one that gave him any semblance of hope was an image that showed an old man holding a silver flame between his palms, and the reason for that hope was that he remembered Moxian and her ability to create fire.

“Let’s hope this is worth downloading,” he mutters while watching the image fully form within the Space.

He is shocked when, unlike earlier, the image isn’t a recording of a video, but rather a rectangular piece of jade with a few characters written on the back of it.

“Heaven and Earth Refining Spirit Flame, huh?” He mumbles while examining every inch of the piece of jade floating within the Space.

Not seeing anything else, he prods it with his mind and is surprised when a strange sensation fills his head. Then, ethereal words and peculiar images of different kinds of translucent fire slowly fill his thoughts as he continues walking.

“The FIRE that BURNS brightest is not the one that IGNITES within the Earth nor the one that FORMS within the Heart, but the FIRE that ORIGINATES FROM ONE’S OWN WILL!”

Nearly falling over due to a strange, invisible force that presses against his mind, the young man gasps as he flails about wildly. When he stands steadily again, he blinks in confusion. He waits patiently for the voice to come again, but it never does, and neither do the images.

“Is that it?” He asks, feeling dumbfounded and underwhelmed.