Chapter 7: The Real World
***
"The little yellow flowers in the story~"
"Have been drifting since the year I was born~"
"The childhood swing~"
"Sways, swaying along with memories all the way to now~"
Su Ling leaned back against the wooden chair, humming the melody of Sunny Day, and after becoming a silver dragon, her voice had changed too, clear, ethereal, just missing that storytelling quality.
But she never really had much of a story to tell in the first place, so not being able to sing with that storytelling quality was, for her, actually the normal thing.
She shook her wet hair behind her. Going from short hair to long hair, that heavy, soaked feeling made her a bit uncomfortable. There was no such thing as a hair dryer in Isha's bedroom, if she wanted to dry her hair, the only options were to hold it over a fire or just let it air dry.
Having already finished her bath, she had changed into the sleep dress Isha had prepared for her. As for Isha herself, she was over setting up the floor bedding. Isha couldn't quite bring herself to make Su Ling sleep on the long bench, but having Su Ling sleep in the same bed as her was also... a bit much.
After all, Isha was very clear that Su Ling had changed over from being a guy. Even if the person in front of her was now a genuine girl through and through, she still couldn't quite accept it psychologically. Casual contact was one thing, but sleeping together was just too intimate.
She couldn't do it.
"Maybe I should cut it short when I get back? This long hair is such a pain." Su Ling gathered her hair behind her. She never noticed when it was short, but now that it was long, everything about it was a hassle.
Washing it was like doing laundry, drying it took forever, and even if she had a dryer, blow-drying wasn't exactly a light task either, nothing like short hair where you wipe it once and you're done.
Lu was sitting on the table in front of Su Ling, holding a book she had gotten from somewhere at some point. Hearing Su Ling's complaints, her hand paused mid-page, then she lifted her gaze toward her.
"I wouldn't especially recommend doing that."
Su Ling blinked at that, and instinctively asked, "Why?"
"Because your hair can also be a weapon, it's just that you can't use it yet." Lu's tone carried a rare hint of seriousness. Su Ling brought her hair around to the front and examined it carefully.
Hmm... aside from the blood-red tips, she didn't see anything particularly special about it. Could this thing really be used as a weapon? Su Ling was skeptical.
But since Lu had already said so, and being someone who takes advice fairly well, Su Ling shelved the idea of cutting it short for the time being. Right then, Isha walked over carrying a medical kit and began carefully tending to her wounds.
"The song you were just singing was really pretty, does it have a name?" The sensation from the wound was cool and icy. Isha's voice was soft and gentle, a complete contrast to her strictness on the training ground, it was like she was a different person entirely.
Su Ling stopped humming and thought about it for a moment, deciding there was no reason to hide it: "It's called Sunny Day, it's a song I really like."
"A song you really like~" Isha's tone was like coaxing a little kid, perhaps because Su Ling's image of crying while fighting earlier in the day had quietly shifted her impression of her: "Then when you have time later, would you be willing to teach me? I really like this song too."
"That should be... fine..." Su Ling's voice trailed off smaller and smaller, and by the time she finished that sentence, all that remained was the steady sound of her breathing.
She was exhausted. From the moment she got shot up until now, she had basically not rested at all. Isha's hands were incredibly gentle as she applied the medicine, and the effects were nothing short of immediate. As her body gradually relaxed, the fatigue that had been building surged up, and Su Ling finally couldn't hold back the drowsiness any longer.
Click.
The medicine kit snapped shut. Looking at Su Ling's adorable, peaceful sleeping face, a helpless smile surfaced on Isha's face. She couldn't bring herself to wake her up, so she gently scooped her up and carefully laid her down on the floor bedding she had prepared, tucking the blanket over her.
She could tell that Su Ling was exhausted, and she also knew that Su Ling was hiding certain things. But she hadn't sensed any malice from Su Ling whatsoever, and the sword had chosen her, so she decided to act as if she knew nothing.
Of course, there was another reason too: Isha was far too lonely. She had been living alone in this church for nearly 10 years. In all that time, she hadn't seen a single human being, the only things that ever wandered into the church were twisted, grotesque monsters, not even a small animal.
She didn't know what had been keeping her going, holding on to life. The only thing she looked forward to was that when she came of age, she could finally leave.
So Su Ling's arrival had been a pleasant surprise to her. She hoped Su Ling would stay a while longer, until the day she came of age, so they could go see the outside world together.
The light went off. Isha lay back down in her own bed and slowly closed her eyes. And once her breathing too became slow and steady, Lu, who had been sitting on the table, set down the book in her hand. Those crimson eyes of hers shifted to look at both Isha and Su Ling.
She didn't know whether the way things had unfolded so far was correct. Only that slight, helpless sigh inevitably slipped from her lips anyway.
Isha's real name was not Isha, it was just that from the moment she was chosen, she became Isha, and could only be Isha.
Lu walked over to the window. The sun had just risen, the most beautiful moment of the day. But the world right now was utterly silent. The town had reverted from its nighttime liveliness back to that eerie, dead stillness, as if everything seen last night had been nothing but a dream.
As a sword spirit, Lu had no need for sleep. She actually had a way to keep Su Ling's body resting while having her mind continue training, but that method wasn't suitable for right now. After all, knowing when to push and when to rest gets twice the results for half the effort, mindlessly piling on more training wasn't inherently good.
In the span of just 1 day, Su Ling had gone through far too much. From getting shot to being chosen by the World Tree. From being thrown into this world called Planet Isha, to arriving in the town and personally experiencing both its eeriness and its liveliness.
And finally, being turned into a girl, then going through Isha's sword training. Even though her body still had stamina to spare, her mind was already completely drained, so compared to more training, what Su Ling needed right now was undeniably rest.
Her gaze returned to the book in her hand. After reading for a few more minutes, Lu seemed unable to settle her thoughts any longer and set the book aside.
She conjured a pen and a notebook out of thin air and began writing and sketching. Su Ling was genuinely talented, but she was still just getting started. If she wanted to quickly adapt to her current identity and power, there was no way she was escaping an intense training regimen.
The dragon physique had given her tremendous resilience. The only real concern was mental fatigue, and the only current remedy for that was sleep.
"Spirit Eye, Dragon Form, both need to be put on the schedule sooner rather than later. Today's training showed she's more or less fully adapted to her burst speed, but her movements when dodging attacks were clearly still half a beat too slow. Is her reaction time not keeping up?"
The back end of the pen tapped lightly against her chin. Lu muttered to herself while replaying Su Ling's earlier performance in her mind. There had been quite a few counterattacks from Isha that Su Ling's brain had actually already registered in time, but the feedback reaching her body to execute the dodge was half a beat behind.
This caused attacks she could have fully avoided or blocked to become half-baked messes because of that one lost half-beat. Some of them even looked like she was deliberately walking into the strike.
"No, relying on the brain to react to attacks is just too slow after all."
Lu didn't dwell on the issue of reaction time, because she realized she had just fallen into a misconception, which was that no matter how much Isha was holding back and feeding her moves, the two of them were fundamentally not on equal footing.
Isha's reaction speed, the speed at which she threw out her moves, these were simply not things the current Su Ling should have been facing. If it had been an opponent on Su Ling's level, her reaction time couldn't possibly have fallen behind like this, even if she was processing it all through her brain.
Even so, Lu still wasn't satisfied, because she intended to cultivate Su Ling into someone who surpassed even herself. Thoughts like "good enough" or "average is fine" had never occupied her mind for even a single second.
And for the sake of that goal, she had even given Su Ling all of her own power. Su Ling might look weak right now, but that was purely because her body still couldn't handle it.
To describe it in gaming terms: Su Ling actually already had a full skill tree, she just currently could only light up the most basic skills, and hadn't even finished unlocking all of those yet.
"Getting her body to sense danger on its own... that needs to be scheduled too..."
Time always passes fast when you're sleeping. By the time Su Ling woke up, night had fallen once again. Lu had also finished preparing Su Ling's dedicated training plan, though it wouldn't come into play just yet.
For now, having Isha guide her was enough. Su Ling was still in the foundational stage, there was no rush to raise the training intensity.
Eat, get beaten up, bathe, get patched up, sleep. That was how Su Ling had spent these past 2 days. Painful and grueling as it was, her progress had been remarkable. Not only had she completely mastered the sword knowledge granted by Sword Mastery, she had already fully internalized and made it her own.
The trade-off was that the injuries on her body had multiplied. But dragons were naturally tough-skinned and durable, so the physical wounds weren't a real issue. What was still out of her control was the water pump. Over these 2 days, Su Ling felt like she had cried more than in the past 20 years of her life combined.
"With how much I've been crying, if I went somewhere hit by a drought, they'd probably enshrine me as a water deity." On the evening of the third day, the freshly-woken Su Ling leaned against the wall and muttered to herself with a look of exasperation.
There was no training today, because tonight at midnight was Isha's birthday. She had promised Isha that the moment the clock struck, they would leave the church together and go see the outside world.
Lu had no particular comment on this. A normal person crying like that would probably have their eyes swollen up like pig trotters, but Su Ling looked perfectly fine, her eyes still clear, not even a hint of crow's feet at the corners.
"Your tears really are something else. Look on the bright side, maybe they could even help you hide your real emotions."
Hearing Lu say that, Su Ling actually thought it made a fair bit of sense. If the only trigger for these tears was physical pain, then didn't that mean she could cry whenever she wanted and stop whenever she didn't?
"I think there's actually some room to work with there." Su Ling stroked her chin and answered with a straight face.
"Su Ling, what do you think of this outfit?" Isha's voice cut into Su Ling's thoughts about the practical applications of her tears. She looked over, Isha was holding a light pink dress up against herself for comparison, and compared to her usual look, the dress did add a touch of girlish charm.
That said, Su Ling personally felt the dress was too cutesy, and didn't quite suit Isha's vibe. Isha was a female knight, but the emphasis was on the knight part. That rosy, delicate dress clashed a little with her natural air of valiance.
"Personally, I'd go with white." Su Ling thought about it for a moment and gave her honest opinion.
Isha looked at herself in the mirror and murmured, "White, huh?"
She pulled out another white dress for comparison, and after looking between the two, she found that yes, white did look better. She wasn't the type to get stuck choosing, once she decided white was the better option, she simply tossed the other dress aside.
As for Su Ling, her outfit was still the same one Isha had picked out for her back then. Not that she had been wearing it for 3 days straight, it had been washed and dried since.
Seeing that Isha was about to change, Su Ling tactfully slipped out of the room. That was just how the two of them had been operating these past few days, whenever one needed to change, the other would step out on their own.
"How come you seem a little distracted?" Coming to the window in the hallway, Su Ling looked over at Lu, who was gazing out at the scenery below, at the town that had started to come alive again.
"Yeah." Lu nodded, and actually admitted it outright. After those words, neither of them spoke again. The atmosphere fell into a strange silence.
"You should know the name of this world, right?" Lu was the first to break the silence, though the question she raised left Su Ling a little puzzled.
Su Ling was confused, but she answered with a nod anyway: "Yeah, it's Planet Isha."
"Isha watches over this world, so every generation's Saintess has been called Isha." Lu seemed to be talking to herself, or perhaps sighing to herself. Su Ling didn't reply, because she could tell Lu's words weren't done yet. Sure enough, not even 3 seconds later, Lu's voice came again.
"But you know what? Every Saintess across all generations has only ever been 18 years old. They... are all only 18."
Lu's voice was very soft, soft as a feather drifting gently down onto the heart. But the words she spoke were so heavy, so heavy that Su Ling momentarily couldn't quite breathe.
"Su Ling, how do I look? Pretty?" The bedroom door was pushed open from inside, and Isha's excited voice temporarily scattered Su Ling's unease, but the seed had already been planted, and sprouting was only a matter of time.
Su Ling responded to Isha's excitement and anticipation, and even though her heart was unsettled, she didn't let a single trace of it show on her face. Lu stood in the shadows watching the two of them, and the emotion in those blood-colored eyes was something called grief and reluctance.
The two carried on as usual, washing up, eating dinner. The only difference was that today there was no training session. Instead, they spent the time chatting while waiting for midnight to arrive.
Every Saintess across all generations has only ever been 18. They are all only 18.
That line kept echoing through Su Ling's mind. She listened to Isha talk about her hopes for the future, wanting to say something but not knowing what, because the answer had already appeared somewhere in Isha's own story, and Isha herself didn't know it either.
Ever since being brought to this church at 8 years old, Isha had spent the entire 10 years that followed within these walls. She didn't know why she had been brought here, only that she was forbidden from leaving until she turned 18.
She had of course thought about leaving, had even tried. But every attempt, without exception, had failed. The church's doors looked dilapidated, yet seemed to be protected by some kind of seal. Like an invisible wall, Isha had never been able to get through no matter what she tried.
As for daily necessities including food, they were delivered inside the church's entrance every Monday. Isha had lived this way for a full 10 years. Fortunately, at midnight tonight, everything was about to change.
The minutes and seconds ticked by. Yet the two of them experienced the passage of time in completely different ways. When midnight finally arrived, Isha still looked like she had more to say, seeming completely unaware of how much time had passed.
Su Ling, on the other hand, felt like it had finally come. She had been turning Lu's words over in her mind this whole time, barely taking in anything Isha said. And no matter how she turned it over, those words didn't seem to carry any good meaning.
When the midnight bell rang out, all speculation became meaningless, because the answer was right before her eyes. She only needed to witness it alongside Isha, and she would understand what Lu's words meant.
"Let's go. We'll head out together and take a look at the outside world." Isha reached out her hand and extended the invitation to Su Ling.
Looking at Isha's bright, radiant smile, the words of dissuasion stuck in her throat and wouldn't come out. Su Ling quietly took that hand, and followed her all the way to the church entrance. As if sensing something, she turned back and glanced at the goddess statue that served as the light source.
She wasn't sure if it was just her imagination, but the life-sized goddess statue seemed to be giving off far less light than when she had first seen it. It looked as if it were being swallowed by darkness, and its serene, sleeping expression seemed to have shifted into something pained and sorrowful.
Su Ling's eyes shifted from round pupils to vertical slits. She could see black thorns coiled around the body of the goddess statue. Those eyes remained closed, but the smile was gone, and at the corner of its eye, a single black teardrop was slowly falling toward the ground.
Isha pushed open the doors of the church. But the bright and lively scene she had imagined never appeared. The bustling, vibrant town Su Ling had described seemed to belong to a distant past, or perhaps it had all just been a dream.
What greeted their eyes was a town that was worn-down and desolate. Those wooden structures that were barely distinguishable from ruins and crumbling buildings swayed on the verge of collapse with every gust of wind. And a nauseating, gut-turning stench permeated every inch of the air.
Humans? There were no humans. The only "creatures" Isha could see that were capable of movement were those humanoid monsters, some standing, some crawling, with twisted limbs and horrifying appearances.
Their near-rotten faces, the fangs long enough to pierce through a neck, every detail declared their inhuman nature.
The town was still the town, but it was not a human town. It was... a monster town.
"What... is going on?"
Seeing this, Su Ling couldn't help but swallow. This shouldn't be right, this couldn't be right. She had clearly seen that vibrant, lively scene with her own eyes. It was clearly still nighttime right now, so why...
Why was this the image before her — a scene straight out of hell?
Those monsters crawling along the ground on all fours, moving like spiders. Others writhing along the ground, as if imitating the way snakes move. And then there were those that seemed to have been stitched together by some unknown means, resembling giant centipedes.
A single glance was enough to cause physical discomfort, as if one's very mind had been contaminated.
Was this the true face of this world? Was this the real appearance of this town? Su Ling didn't know, because unease had already wrapped around her completely. Every single monster within her line of sight posed a lethal threat to her.
"Isha, Saintess, root of corruption... only 18 years old?"
Su Ling murmured to herself and her breath suddenly caught. She had thought of a possibility, one that filled her with sorrow and anger, one that could explain what Lu had said.
"Su Ling, step back a little, you can't handle these monsters. Leave them to me."
Isha drew the knight sword at her waist. She calmly assessed the threats around her. These monsters might be lethal to Su Ling, but to her they were nothing more than small fries.
The ugliness in front of her hadn't extinguished her longing for the outside world, because the memories from her childhood told her that this world was vast and beautiful. What had appeared now was nothing more than a small obstacle, one she could handle.
Besides, the church could no longer hold her now. Whether she fought her way through or slipped around them, as long as she could leave this town, the sky was the limit. She could still go wherever she wanted to go, and see with her own eyes the world she had longed for and thought of for so long.
As long as... she could leave this place.