Minutes pass and Lan Jin feels uncomfortable as Qingshui laughs. Eventually, he can’t help but ask, “So, can you tell me what a cultivation practice is? Is that what I need to start cultivating?”
Qingshui largely ignores him before wiping her eyes and letting out a short sigh. When she looks up at Lan Jin again, she seems to have had a shift in her personality as she replies, “No. I don’t think I will.”
After a short pause, she says, “You have invaded the Bright Moon Immortal Palace’s territory. Not only that, but you have offended me both with your words and your impropriety. If you come with me, I will allow you the opportunity to apologize and plead for mercy. If not, then you can only die here.”
Lan Jin is stunned, but when he remembers Moxian’s quick turnabout he quickly recovers and replies, “Okay, fuck you too then. Bye.”
He then dunks his head under the water and begins swimming away as he turns off the recording of the Three Realms Fate-Guiding Verse recording and waits to be cast out once again.
On the shoreline, Qingshui glares at his retreating figure before letting out a huff and reaching beneath her veil. When she lowers her hand, a silver ribbon appears inside it as long white hair falls to her waist and begins fluttering behind her. She takes a second to wrap her ribbon in her spiritual energy before it shoots toward Lan Jin.
“Don’t say I didn’t give you the opportunity to live,” she whispers quietly as she watches her ribbon move like a snake through the air before diving into the water and piercing directly through Lan Jin’s back. However, after that, she can no longer see what happens beneath the water as several miles of the river’s surface darkens and begins churning violently.
Waves as tall as buildings form like ripples, but instead of going outward they charge toward the Qingshui’s ribbon before crashing down above it. Seconds later, silence returns to the River of Fate as the darkness and waves disappear. Beneath its surface, Lan Jin and Qingshui’s ribbon have both disappeared.
Qingshui sighs as she considers her lost ribbon, but she quickly pushes it out of her mind as she turns her attention to other things.
***
Lan Jin rolls around on the ground, his knees pulled into his chest and his arms hugging his head tightly as he lets out a pained scream. Even the pain he felt when he had just received the Omega Browser wasn’t as bad as the pain he feels now. Knowing that all of this was because of Qingshui, he can’t help but repeatedly curse her.
It takes a long while for Lan Jin to settle down. Even then, it isn’t that the pain goes away, but that Lan Jin loses the energy to keep rolling around beneath the pear tree. Consequently, he lays down and covers his eyes with his right arm as he lets out whimpers, all the while wishing he could return to the River of Fate just to slap Qingshui across her face. He doesn’t do more than just think about it, though. After all, so far, 100% of the times he has used the Three Realms Fate-Guiding Verse, something bad has happened.
An hour later, Lan Jin groans and finally removes his arm from his face. He grimaces because he realizes it is sticky and sweaty, but he forgets about it as soon as he looks up at the light shining through the tree.
“If I was going to be incapacitated, why couldn’t I at least stay incapacitated until it wasn’t so hot?” He complains bitterly, not in the mood to do much, but not willing to waste however much time he has left in the day.
He had woken up at a decent time in the morning and then walked for a few hours before finding the pear tree. Then he spent maybe an hour in the River of Fate followed by another hour or two rolling around and being in misery. So, judging by the position of the sun in the sky, he probably still has a few hours until sunset.
Looking around, he realizes there isn’t too terribly much to do so he decides to just open the Omega Browser’s Space again and mess around with the Heaven and Earth Refining Spirit Fire jade. His plans immediately change when he notices that the purple fire from earlier hadn’t dissipated and was still floating nearby the blood bubble. Even more strangely, there was now a silver ribbon floating around the Omega Browser’s Space.
Lan Jin gets the chills looking at the ribbon because he can distinctly remember it piercing through his chest followed by strange waves crashing down around him in the river. He wants to get rid of it, but without knowing how he isn’t willing to mess around with it for now.
After all, he can still remember Moxian’s scream from earlier when he tried messing around with the blood bubble, and he viewed Qingshui as being far more insane and terrifying when compared to Moxian. So, if there was a possibility of contacting her, he wanted to avoid it. Thinking about it, he thinks that at least Moxian’s brand of crazy was personable and endearing— even if he never wanted to experience it again—, but Qingshui seemed more like a bipolar sociopath in Lan Jin’s mind after she threatened, and even attempted, to kill him.
He stops thinking about it before he can get too upset and instead turns his attention to the purple fire.
For better or worse, the fire seems stable now. But, since he still doesn’t know what to do with it, he decides to go with his original plan of messing with the jade.
When he activates the jade again, something unexpected happens and its contents have changed. Or rather, they go further.
“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!”
“DEVOURING RESENTMENT, SUBDUING EVIL, PURIFYING ALL THINGS! The BIRTH of PROVIDENCE, FORTUNE, PROSPERITY! GUIDING LIGHT! AUSPICIOUS TRI-COLORED FLAME!”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
The same voice sounds inside Lan Jin’s mind, his body trembles and the purple fire in the Omega Browser’s Space flickers like a candle in the wind as a new projection fills the empty space of the Omega Browser. A single, ancient man wearing a brown robe sits atop a mountain, and with a single movement, his hand raises up into the air and so does the mountain range surrounding him. Then, in another movement, a massive purple fire with red and gold streaks appears above him and the mountains all fly into it.
In less than a second, all of the mountains have disappeared and a strange purple mist fills the air. Once again, the man moves his hand and the mist condenses in his palm before he holds it to his lips and drinks it.
Lan Jin doesn’t know what happens after that as the scene ends and he finds himself staring at the jade once again, but he can’t help but be awed. He doesn’t know if what happened was an actual recording or not, but it looked really cool and he wanted to do it too.
Though, as he opens his eyes and looks in the direction of the mountains behind the bamboo forest in the distance, he can’t help but shift his eyes to the pears above him instead.
“I think I’m gonna try for pear juice instead of mountain juice.”
***
Lan Jin quickly climbs the tree and grabs another pear before descending to the ground again and sitting down with his legs crossed like the man in the jade.
Looking inward, Lan Jin focuses on the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame and tries to figure out how he can bring it out of the Omega Browser’s Space.
When he mentally prods it, he finds that it moves around like normal. Within the space, he can do pretty much anything with it— he can even change its shape at will. But he can’t quite figure out how he’s supposed to bring it out.
He assumes it’s possible since he saw the old man do it, but since he doesn’t know how he did it he chooses to watch the recording again.
When watching it once isn’t enough, he watches it again, then two more times, three more times, and several dozen more times. Eventually, he realizes that he isn’t figuring anything out like this.
Not wanting to give up, Lan Jin looks at his Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame as he plays the jade and pays close attention to how it flickers. When he plays the jade again, he moves the purple fire until it overlaps with the old man’s purple fire and is impressed when the purple fire flows like water and takes the same shape as its larger cousin.
It’s much, much smaller, but the shape is there and Lan Jin pays close attention to this fact as he stops the jade and plays it again.
This time, when the old man is summoning his own Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame, Lan Jin feels something. He isn’t sure what exactly it is, but he immediately stops the jade and starts it up again.
After repeating this several dozen times, Lan Jin has memorized the feeling of the old man summoning his own fire and so Lan Jin stops using the Omega Browser Space and starts focusing on the feeling of his body.
Several minutes later, Lan Jin yelps in surprise as a small purple fire flickers into life above his hand. A wide grin covers his face as he looks down at the fire, happy that he managed to replicate some of what the old man did in the jade, but he’s also a little disappointed. From the looks of the fire, the only thing he could cook with it is a cigarette, and even that is a big maybe.
Frowning now, Lan Jin considers the pear in his hands and bites off a small piece of it before spitting it back into his hand and holding it gingerly above the purple fire. Even as he watches closely, he can hardly tell that anything is happening.
Lan Jin doesn’t feel any heat coming from the fire at all, but he thinks there is something strange about it as tiny black bubbles boil on the surface of the pear before popping. He doesn’t see any purple mist, but he doesn’t give up just yet as he slowly boils the piece he bit off of the pear.
A minute later, Lan Jin watches as the piece of pear is fully incinerated and a tiny, insignificant wisp of purple mist vanishes in the air before he has a chance to do anything.
When he tries again, he decides to hollow out the pear and hold it directly above the fire in the hopes that the mist gets trapped inside the hollow. To see if it works, he holds both of his hands above his head, one with the fire burning dimly and the other holding the hollowed pear.
Unlike with the smaller piece, several minutes pass before anything seems to happen. Lan Jin even begins to wonder if the pear is just too big for the tiny flame to do anything to, but he doesn’t give up.
Close to ten minutes later, the insides of the pear have completely blackened and Lan Jin watches with a hawk’s gaze for any sign of the purple mist. Not knowing how the old man was able to control the mist and make it form a sphere in his hand, Lan Jin has no choice but to try and catch it as it is released.
After five more minutes, he finally gets his chance and, as a small wisp of purple mist forms, his hand holding the fire immediately drops and he puts his mouth close to the pear and breathes in with his mouth.
He is immediately assaulted by a strange mixture of nasty, burnt pear, but his eyes also dilate and he feels momentarily dizzy as he looks around him and sees that the world seems different to him somehow.
He’s not sure what the change is, and it only lasts a second before everything goes back to normal, but he knows something happened.
Not sure if what happened was to his body or his soul, he quickly opens the Omega Browser’s Space again and looks around.
Inside, it is difficult to see but there is a tiny, almost insignificant strand of purple mist floating around freely.
Lan Jin doesn’t know whether to be happy or not as he looks at the purple mist that has less substance to it than a single thread, but he delights in the fact that he was at least able to, albeit in a much-reduced manner, replicate the accomplishments of the old man in the jade.
Looking at the purple fire inside the Omega Browser, though, he notices that it seems even wimpier than before.
“Fuck, how am I supposed to make it grow?” He wonders aloud.
His first thought is the purple mist, so he mentally shoves it into the purple fire and waits to see if anything happens. Unfortunately, he sees no results.
“Okay, well, it grew in the first place when I basically incubated it with a bunch of other purple fires in Moxian’s blood bubble, right?”
He turns his gaze to the blood bubble again and wonders if it would be alright to use it, but, remembering Moxian’s scream, he holds off on that idea.
“What if I just let my fire sit in the fire from the jade for a bit? It clearly did something earlier.”
After thinking about it for a few minutes, he shrugs his shoulders and begins to try.
When he starts the jade up again, he waits for the old man’s fire to reappear and makes sure his fire is inside it. Once again, the little purple fire takes up the same shape as the larger purple fire, but it is so small it is difficult to tell if anything is happening.
He feels that, compared to its larger cousin, his little fire looks like it is coming from a malfunctioning lighter whereas the larger one is several times larger than the mountains that were thrown into it. Consequently, even if something is happening, he definitely wouldn’t be able to tell.
But, since he had nothing better to do, he decides to spend the rest of his afternoon lazing about under the tree while constantly playing the jade on repeat. If nothing else, he quickly grows familiar with the feeling of summoning the fire into his hand, even when he chooses not to replicate it personally.