CHAPTER ONE—MERMONSTERS AND LUMINESCENT PEARLS
“Look out!” shouted Shiro, and he lunged with all the force of a top-tier adventurer as he cut the mermonster in half, his scaly body separating into two halves and red blood clouded into the water.
Turning his head, Shiro realized the Jinni was no longer there as wisps of blue vapor dissipated into nothingness.
Another mermonster squealed and snarled shrilly as it lunged forward, its body moving in quick undulations through the darkened waters.
Shiro raised his sword and spread his legs, every muscle in his body tensed for the impact. The creatures moved fast and this mermonster was enraged. He slithered through the water, splashing violently as it narrowed in toward him.
Suddenly something shot into the water next to him, causing such a violent splash as to send him flying onto his back. The water had hit him hard enough to sing his skin.
The last thing he saw was a ripple of soaking wet blue fabric before he squeezed his eyes shot.
Rising above the water, he glanced about, found that the mermonster that had lunged for him was no more—and in fact the pieces, for that’s what they were now, had sunk.
Dripping beads of water fell behind him as his face slackened, his amusement as gone as the vapor of the jinni who accompanied him. He turned, found Jessamine standing in the water with a smirk on her face and the back of her golden sword resting upon her narrow shoulder.
“You are quite satisfied with yourself, aren’t you?”
“You’re not the only blade master here, Shiro,” she said saucily.
“Hmph!”
Then she conveyed some words into his head. Come—don’t be jealous, my love.
“I am not jealous.”
“I am, hardly jealous,” he retorted, it being difficult not look at her below the neckline. Her thin dress of nearly-sheer fabric clung to her breasts, revealing the darkened outlines of her areolas.
The samurai swallowed nervously as he looked away, strode two paces, and then turned when he thought he heard a giggle.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said with a shrug. “Why do you always hear things that aren’t there, Shiro?”
“You are laughing at me.”
“Please,” she said, shrugging indulgently as she flexed her hand open, her golden sword, luminescent in the dark, vanishing like a crystal shattering in the dark into dust so fine he could not catch it in a cloth. “Why ever would I want to laugh at you?”
Shiro glanced around some more for any more signs of the mermonsters. There seemed to be none, and indeed they had cut through at least a dozen of the beasts, their blood and body parts lost to the current.
This area was filled with shallows and sandbars, palm trees and sheer rock formations that seemed to cling to the sky as if the kami spirits themselves had touched the earth with their fingertips.
“You like to play,” he finally said.
“Play?” she asked incredulously, but Shiro knew her feigned ignorance of what he spoke was nothing more than that—pretend.
Kami-sama, he thought. She does like to play with me.
She said nothing, and Shiro finally turned around, saw that she was peering off toward their relative north, though had they looked at a map, that would have been the west, toward their quest, Kalush.
They had managed to escape Avarnis and the pyramids there in the jungles, but only after slaughtering many of the savages trying to kill them. When they had rejoined the army at the river’s edge, they primitives had come after them with a small army, but having gone south in their boats, they had eventually discontinued their pursuit.
But why?
“What do you look at?” he asked.
“Do you not see it?” she asked. She lifted her hand and pointed with a delicate finger.
Squinting his eyes—Jessamine often told him not to do that for some reason—he thought he did see… something. Is it glowing?
She nodded. “There is magic there as well. I sense a natural aura of the surrounding Gaia.”
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“We should find out what it is,” said the isekai, for that was what Shiro was, an isekai—a man from another world. Before coming to these lands, or rather the Abassir Empire specifically, he had been far away, perhaps upon another world altogether.
In a duel he could hardly remember, and for what reason was even fuzzier to his recollection now, he had been prepared to take the edge of the much more experienced samurai’s blade, only to suddenly be falling, whereupon his body had slowed and then he had slammed into the desert.
Much time had passed and he had even learned the primary language of the empire—as though that helped in areas like this, where it seemed dozens of languages were spoken, where there were people.
“What are you waiting for, Samurai?” Jessamine asked, and as she said the words she twirled her body and evaporated into a plume of blue luminescent vapor.
He moved the jinni lamp from his back onto his hip, where it felt safer. The weight was a comfort, for that was Jessamine’s door into the mortal realm, outside of that of the void where her territory was located.
Finding the lamp had almost seemed like providence, the old man who gave him the map a glimpse of a memory. But who was that old man, and why had he helped Shiro and Ali?
You are very thoughtful, she conveyed inside his mind.
Stay out of my head, Jinni.
Amusement flooded back. And how many times have you told me to stay out of your head?
He growled. “At least a thousand,” he murmured in the darkness as he pushed forward, the water up to his waist. He had lost his sandals, and his pantaloons he kept rolled up to above his knees.
The short jacket that didn’t reach his beltline was kept unbuttoned and open, revealing his bare and smooth chest. It was cooler that way.
When he reached the dry earth of the small island, Shiro glanced about again as Jessamine materialized before him, her blue skirts now dry and her feet adorned with white slippers with upturned points and trimmed with thread of silver.
“What?” asked Shiro with a smirk, “you are not going to race me to the top?”
She snorted, but in a way that was endearing and attractive. How did the jinni do that? Everything she did seemed to be like that.
Or was that just the effect she had upon him?
“I want to find out as much as you do,” she said. “But with you, not before you.”
He smiled, nodded. “Then let us find out what is above this hill.” He climbed up the steep hill and realized the ground was black and rough. Very rough. “Is this…”
The samurai would have finished his question had he not crested the edge of the hill where a large hollow filled with luminescent water awaited.
With his breath instantly stolen away, he glanced to Jessamine, who raised an eyebrow, though if she was conveying skepticism or some kind of lascivious intent, he did not know.
“The water is glowing!” he exclaimed.
“No,” said Jessamine. “Look closer, my love.”
Then he saw them. Glowing pearls underneath the water, hundreds of them—no, thousands of them.
“Kami-sama,” he breathed.
“This is a place of magic, Shiro.”
He nodded, climbing up over the lip of the bowl, for that was what the pool was shaped like. Why were the pearls only in here?
“It is warm,” he said.
“Perhaps there is magma underneath the water,” Jessamine said. “Go. Get me a pearl.”
He looked at her. “So commanding.”
“I am waiting,” she said sweetly.
Shiro sniffed with amusement, but also affection, for this woman was intoxicating, and he would have, even at that moment, liked nothing more than to fetch his jinni a pearl.
With a smirk, he moved to an outstretch of rock and he realized the top was smooth. Below was a sheer drop from what jutted out. He glanced back at her.
Jessamine shrugged as if to say “well?”
Then he jumped, diving into the luminescent water. With his hands forward, he cut through the water and opened his eyes as he held his breath. He approached one of the bright luminescent pearls and grabbed it with two fingers.
The water splashed behind him and he was surprised she had dove in behind him. He kicked his feet and swam toward a shallower portion of the warm water and then surfaced.
He glanced about, but Jessamine was still under the water, fetching some of the pearls herself, no doubt. Shiro lifted the little jewel to his face and looked at it, it’s luminescent properties seeming to dim now that the pearl was out of the water.
Jessamine surfaced behind him and he turned, his eyes widening as she sauntered to him, her hips swaying with every step and her wet dress, like before, sticking closely to her curves.
Shiro’s heart started beating fast and she looked on at him with an insolvent and amused air. As she lifted her arms to ring her hair of the water, her breasts moved in such an enticing way as to make the samurai need to exhale.
He forced himself to look at something else.
“Shiro,” she said.
He looked at her again as she leaned onto one hip, a subtle rising of the hot water vapors going up into the air between them.
“What is is?”
She flourished her hand and like her sword before, her dress vanished, revealing to Shiro all of her feminine delights.
Kami-sama.
She moved most enticingly and he almost groaned audible.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “There could be monsters nearby.”
“Please,” she said as she took two steps toward him, “they are all dead—and we would know if there were more.”
“And the others?” he asked, knowing that Ali and Raz had gone off toward the north, with Debaku farther south as they had all spread out to do advanced scouting. The army needed food.
“I would sense any of their auras a league away,” she said, touching his bare shoulder with her finger and holding it there as she sauntered around him. He tried to follow her with his gaze, but he was forced to turn his neck in an awkward angle.
She giggled melodically.
“We should not,” he said.
Her smiled deepened and she took hold of his chin, pulled his face closer to hers. Then she leaned in and kissed him. When she pushed a pearl into his mouth with her tongue, he could sense that it was suddenly becoming brighter in their mouths.
Shiro smiled.
How Jessamine managed such magic, he did not know.
Then she took his jacked at the shoulders and pulled it off, along with the lamp which hung over Shiro’s shoulder by way of a rope he had fastened to it. The lamp sunk harmlessly in the shallow water and neither of them gave anymore thought to it.
They had not made love since they had become bonded in Darshuun. Shiro broke their kiss and looked into her big brown eyes, down at her body. He took the pearl out of his mouth and it continued to glow. “You are a wonder,” he said.
She smiled with a mixed air of insolence and affection. “I know.”