Kalon opened his eyes and felt himself falling. In fact, he did fall against the corner where the roof and wall met. Jagger stared from below, defeated by reality, taciturnly waiting for his owner to stop bending gravity due to his stupidity. Kalon woke up still groggy, walked along the wall, stepping on a picture of a fat king that Big Jay had bought for cheap to a traveling merchant, slipped on it, and fell, this time towards the opposite wall.

“Thank god nobody taught him about the other fundamental forces,” Big Jay muttered.

Brunhilda had managed to perform the first successful act of conversion therapy in history, enacting it upon her gastrointestinal tract, setting her stomach straight as it should always have been.

Kalon fell a last time, landing on his feet and upon the actual floor this time, finally behaving like an object with mass ought to.

He immediately curled his fists and looked around, not taking in his surroundings because his mind was still too busy checking that the sphincters were held tight and the diaphragm working properly, as every time he woke up.

Three seconds later, his minute mind decided to begin to process visual information. “Where’s Cutbastra? I shall take revenge for what he did!”

“He beat you in a single hit and left. Then I brought you here so the ravens wouldn’t feast on you too.”

Jagger stood frozen in place, and Kalon noticed, getting distracted from his newfound quest for revenge.

“Jagger, what happens?”

“It comes.” The puppy said, cryptically, looking at the window and wincing.

Big Jay picked Jagger up like he was a grenade wose pin has been off a while, and cast the puppy straight out the window. Then, he ducked.

A woman screamed, children bowled away in fear, and the local stoic spoke in a voice that revealed a vein of terror. “How can a mortal puppy hold so much diarrhea inside?”

Eventually, the last spurt of liquid shit propelled Jagger back through the window, sparing us from the description of the scene outside, which, to put it simply, was a browner and rape-less variant of the Grimdark genre.

“We avoided a disaster.” Big jay said, sliding the curtains to hide the nefarious sight. “And Jagger somehow avoided staining himself."

Jagger bowed curtly, cupping his ears. “I have a lifetime of practice in the ancient art of shitting myself.”

“Well, Kalon, do you feel good enough to go home? You can’t stay in the house of a random neighbor for long without your mother getting worried, you know?”

“I won’t return home until I beat Cutbastra,” He boldly declared.

Jagger felt a single tear rolling down his facial fur. “Does that mean I am now the dog of a hobo? It’s… I am moving up in life.”

“No cultivator is a hobo!” Kalon contested.

Big Jay clapped to garner the attention of the pair. “in fact, many are. For example, let me tell you about this man I met in a bar, back in my days as a sailor.”

“Well, fat floats, it’s no surprise you were a sailor,” said Jagger.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Jagger, little thing, don’t talk like that when you are one meal away from developing meridians.”

“Spiritual?” The dog asked.

“Geographical.”

Kalon sat on the bed and then raised his hand “How did you meet a guy in a bar? Bars are too thin. He had to sport a great balance to stand on it.”

“Bar is the given name of an establishment that sells depression and unwanted children and disguises it by posing as a dealer of spirits.” Big Jay finished his sentence and Kalon raised his hand again. “Spirits means alcoholic drinks, not ghosts.” Big Jay explained before even hearing the question. Kalon lowered the hand. “May I continue with the story?”

Jagger sat down and nodded enthusiastically.

“This guy, much like me, was a young cultivator back then. Me, a smoking cultivator. He, a body cultivator.”

“So he grew in power by working out?” Kalon asked.

Big Jay ignited his pipe and gave a long puff. “Well, somewhat like that. Looting graves does require some heavy lifting, after all...”

Jagger stared blankly at a wall. “I think my erythrocytes went on a strike. Wait, no… stroke, they went on a stroke.” However, this was a lie, because the blood inside the puppy was too dumbed down with cholesterol to unionize.

“May I go on?”

Jagger fell on his side, rear leg twitching due to an excess of drama. Brunhilda dignified a few steps and graced him with a heavy paw to the head.

“Well. As I was saying, there was this body cultivator, and we had our differences. You know, we both followed this book series about campy girls with bouncy personalities. For me, the blonde was best girl. For him, it was the brunette.” he kept on reminiscing those horrid days were people he held dear dared to be wrong. “Anyway, despite all the things wrong with him, we were good friends, but we had our fights.”

“What did you fight over?

Big Jay leaned against the back of his chair and closed his eyes. Those were the golden years. “A whale.”

“You fought for a whale?” Asked Jagger, incredulous.

“What’s a whale?”

Jagger thought about the most sensible explanation to give his clueless owner. “A big fish that breathes air. They live in the ocean. The ocean is a gigantic lake that surrounds the continents. Continents are like big islands. Islands are like godly dumps amidst a river, but made of earth and sand and all things…” Jagger spun his forepaw in the air, looking for the right words. There were none “…Landy.”

The god of genealogy woke up from his nap in his cloudy bed in heaven and searched his back for a dagger, because he felt himself being backstabbed. Moments later, the words of Jagger resonated inside his mind. “I regret saving that little treacherous pest!” he uttered, slamming his fist against his golden night table. “Fish? How he dares call my whales fish? How he dares?!” Then he shrugged and got back to sleep, because he was not one to hold grudges.

Back at Big Jay’s house, Kalon was processing the words heard. Air-breathing-fish was a concept hard enough to grasp, but what the fuck was amidst. Probably a stupid mist. He felt proud of this deduction. Kalon you are a genius, girls will want to call the stork to bring you cabbages one day, you stud.

Big Jay coughed a little and continued blessing the youngsters with his story. “Well, no, we fought over a whale. The whole bar was, or probably still is, built upon the back of a massive blue whale and — “

Jagger raised a paw as a signal to either pause the narration or hail the local Führer.

“Am I on drugs? Are you real?” Jagger asked.

“No. Yes,” Big Jay answered both questions in order

“Proceed.”

“As I said, the bar was atop a whale, and I found it while traveling through the mountainside, as a place of respite for tired mountaineers… Yes, Jagger?”

Jagger’s paw was aloft once more. “So the bar was in the mountainside. On top of a whale.”

“Yes, the rock had been carved to insert the whale and the bar on the face of the mountain.”

“Why was the bar on top of a whale?” Kalon, pressured by Jagger’s active participation, formulated a randomly generated question that, for surprise of everybody present, made absolute sense.

“The owners knew sailors love to drink, and first thought about opening it on an island. But trade routes change with the come and go of seasons, epic cultivator battles ‘over there where we will hurt nobody’ and politics. This makes an island, being something immobile , a bad emplacement for a bar. But a whale? A whale can move!” Jay argued, shaking his finger.

Jagger felt his brain about to drain through his ears. “But you said they went and nailed the whale into a mountain.”

“Well, yes, but only because the cellar was getting all flooded when the whale decided to dive.”

Then Brunhilda picked Jagger up from the lose skin of his neck and carried him to safety —say what you want about her, she had that maternal instinct when a puppy needed to be preserved from her owner’s tales.