Volume-1: Chapter-3: A Strange New Place
Cave in Great Demon Law Forest
Qing woke up feeling groggy.
What was the last thing she remembered...?
‘Ah! My brother, where is he!?’
She quickly looked around only to find him sleeping like a baby beside her.
‘Pheeww, at least he’s fine… Speaking of fine, where in the world are we?’
Qing started thinking as she looked at her surroundings.
She was feeling weak, so she couldn’t use qi to aid her in investigating the room. But from what she could see with her own eyes, it didn’t look like anything she had seen before.
She had been to royal palaces on tasks from her sect elders and herself lived in a noble household since birth.
This place didn’t look even half as luxurious, at least not in that sense.
Noble households and royal palaces had this feeling of showing off their wealth in the sort of luxury they had. Everything inlaid with precious gems, coated in gold and had expensive fabrics with intricate designs.
This place had none of that. But it had a completely different type of luxury.
When Qing looked around, she saw just how finely each item was crafted.
There weren't any rough-looking items in the room.
Now, very high-levelled practitioners can do this level of work. Even she had one or two things with this level of craftsmanship.
But that’s the thing. She had ONLY one or two things with this level of craftsmanship.
This was because, if the practitioner had this level of cultivation, he wouldn’t waste much time on making furniture. Sure, he might make a few things himself if he didn’t find them satisfactory, but that was only for his own use and few in number.
Only a fool would be that powerful and waste time on menial tasks like crafting furniture.
But in the room she was in, not only were major things like the bed finely crafted, even the little things like the handles of doors looked like pieces of art to her.
Damn! Did she die?
Because there was no way that such luxury could exist outside of heaven. And forget having enough cultivation to ascend there, her dantian looked like someone had hit it against a wall and glued it back together.
The only way she could have been in such a heavenly room was if she died and her soul ascended to heaven for her afterlife.
The only thing she felt sad about was that her elder brother also seemed to be with her, though asleep.
So the heavenly beings had finally decided that her idiot of an older brother was too stupid to live any longer…
Just as she was contemplating how she would face the gods, the door to her room opened and a man stepped in.
Now she was sure that she had died!
Because the man in front of her was none other than the prince Kalong from the Heavenly Si family who died last month.
She clearly remembered that last month, some big processions were going on throughout the city of Tian-Si.
Big portraits were made by the queen and the 10th concubine, the late prince’s mother.
That’s how she recognised him the moment she looked at him.
His clothes did look unusual and his long hair had been cut off, leaving him with only a little bit of hair. (That was just Harry getting sick of the long hair and cutting it himself back to his normal style back on earth, that is, just a normal boy cut.)
Maybe that was him starting afresh in heaven and the clothes might be normal in the afterlife.
After all, she and her older brother Shin were also wearing similar-looking clothes.
“Ah, you’re up! It seems that your conditions seem stable, so your brother should be waking up in some time.”
After saying this, the prince suddenly got a very embarrassed look on his face.
“Umm… So as that one guy said, ‘I can diffuse a bomb in the pitch dar…’ Right, you wouldn’t get it.
So, umm, I can fight like fifty of those guys who were after you earlier, while blindfolded and come out without a scratch, okay?”
Qing was confused. What was this prince saying?
Bomb, as in explosive. But how can you “diffuse” an explosive charm? Wasn’t that stuff made to blow up if tampered with?
And why was he suddenly telling her about his strength? Did he mean to scare her?
He continued, “So, uh, what I’m trying to say is that… umm… I definitely can change your clothes with my eyes closed and while barely touching you, you understand? Your clothes were soaked, so I had no choice. Please try to understand...”
‘Change my clothes? What did he-’
Qing suddenly looked inside her clothes.
All her old clothes weren’t there. She was wearing a weird piece of cloth around her chest.
And as this man said, h-h-h-he c-ch-cha-CHANGED HER CLOTHES!!!???
***
Harry looked at the girl in fear as he told her about the fact that he had to change their clothes while they slept.
He couldn’t exactly leave them in clothes soaked in pee, right?
It felt like their bladder had exploded after not going to the washroom for a week!
They were soaked and he was soaked because of them. So, he had to make everyone take a bath.
By everyone, he meant that he took a bath by himself and left the two of them under the shower after ensuring that their ears, noses and mouths wouldn’t let water seep in.
All the rest of the stuff like changing clothes, he really did with his eyes closed. As for how he did it, he took the system’s help, with the system guiding him through the process.
After that, the duo had slept for two straight days until today when the girl woke up.
After he told her about what happened, she seemed to be confused.
Harry guessed that she was just trying to process everything that had happened.
Suddenly, it looked like realization struck her about what exactly had happened to her so far.
After which her face distorted while looking at Harry in disgust.
The amount of change in her face was something that Harry hadn’t thought was humanly possible.
If he were to compare it, the closest example would be how in Dr. Stone, Suika’s face used to distort when she tried seeing without her glasses.
Yes, that level of facial muscle contraction was what he was seeing.
The girl had looked like a cute angel who had descended upon Earth from the heavens at one moment and a disgusted grandma with a shrivelled up face the next.
And before he could think any further, the pen he had kept on the bedside table came flying at him at impossible speeds and lodged itself in the wall.
He didn’t even see the pen disappear from the table when it was suddenly stuck on the wall, about the height where his heart would have been.
Crap!!!
He ran out of the room like the wind, closing the door behind himself… Only for a memo pad to appear stuck halfway on the outside of the door.
Kyaaaaa!!!!!!
A very girly scream almost left his mouth.
He had heard and seen people throw playing cards and speeds that they pierced walls or broke glass. But never would he have thought that someone could throw an entire 60 paged memo pad not only into a door but halfway through on the other side. And the girl had just woken up after 2 days of sleep!
Life lessons for guys 101: Never, not in your wildest dreams, change a girl’s clothes in secret! Even if you do, change them back or at least make sure she doesn’t find out that you did. Because if she finds out, not even God can save you from dying out.
Harry, who hadn’t spoken to another human for basically three straight years, got so scared that he hid in his own room for an hour before coming back.
As for his earlier fiasco with the group of guys, they were saying predictable stuff and he had been practising the conversation with them for a long time. Coupled with the adrenaline rush he got, that conversation and fight went quite well.
But what he could not have predicted was how the girl would react to him.
All right! Time to explain the situation to her and hope that he doesn’t get killed in the process…
When he walked back in, the girl was showing a mixture of disgust, anger and embarrassment.
Thankfully she didn’t seem like she would throw anything else.
The pen and the memo pad still had smoke coming from them and remained stuck.
Gulp, fingers crossed.
“You’re Prince Kalong, right?”
Harry was a bit stunned.
This girl knew him.
But then again, he was a prince. At least some people had to know him.
“Prince who??”, said Harry as he tried to play dumb.
“Prince Kalong! The son of the tenth concubine of the Patriarch of the Heavenly Si family! The one who was supposed to have died a month ago!”
“Prince Kalong? Never heard of him...”
“You’re lying! You’re Prince Kalong! Your face looks exactly like him!”
“Ma’am, look, I’m a mortal. I’ve lived my entire life in this cursed forest and so far I haven’t met any ‘Prince Kalong’. You’re saying that I’m that guy? I don’t even have a dantian! That guy was a prince, so, naturally, he must be a cultivator, right?
How can you say that I’m some cultivator prince when I don’t even have a dantian? If it’s based on my face, I can assure you that look-alikes do exist in this world. I must be the prince’s look-alike. That’s why you’re confusing me with him.
Plus, you only said that he died a month back, right?”
Harry started giving her a lecture to try to fool her.
“...Yeah, you seem to be telling the truth… Of course, the prince can’t be alive… How foolish of me…”
Finally, the girl had calmed down.
‘Phew, I thought that my entire plan of making anime went out of the window just because of her.’
[The system corrects the host's words. The host should say ‘My entire plan of advancing the technology of this world’...]
‘Shut up for now, please!’
Just then the guy lying beside her started stirring.
“Ah, my elder brother’s waking up!”
The guy woke up, looked around in awe at the room.
He saw his sister, saw her clothes, saw his clothes and finally looked at Harry.
“KYAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”
Then he started screaming like a female knight who just saw an orc, only to stop after his sister smacked him hard on the face.
‘Oof! Poor guy, the first thing that happens to him after waking up is getting slapped by his own younger sister… Oooh, he’s even got a sharp red handprint...’
“I’m sorry about my elder brother’s behaviour. He tends to get scared easily. So, please don’t mind him…”, said the girl in a very soft and polite manner.
“Uhm… Uh-huh… Sure...”
Harry replied, holding his own cheek and with sweat dripping from the side of his head.
After this little drama, the time for formal introductions finally came.
Harry found out that the boy was called Shin Long and the girl was called Qing Long.
They had lived as medium level nobles before joining the Heavenly Tribulation Sect.
Their life hadn’t exactly been a walk in the park in the sect since, due to their noble background, they were bullied by their seniors who had been commoners.
But this was normal. The sect valued skill over background. So, even though they held more power in terms of their background, they were still considered below their seniors even if the seniors were of commoner backgrounds.
However, once their cultivation picked up speed, all the bullying dropped.
They were seen as geniuses and considered very important to the sect.
So, no one but the sect elders held the right to punish them.
But, naturally, their lives couldn’t be straight sailing from there.
They ended up getting so strong so quickly, that the same person who had invited them into the sect, Elder Zheng, started feeling jealous of them and started plotting to get rid of them.
Harry neither had the strength nor the wish to do anything unnecessary like going over to fight this Zheng dude as revenge or something. But, he knew that when the time comes, he’ll be stuffing some radioactive plutonium in the guy’s mouth and then watching him suffer while sitting in a see-through radiation-proof bunker or something.
So, anyway, what the guy did was the clichéd route. Send the two along with a bunch of his goons to some dangerous spot under the guise of something normal, get them killed and blame it on the location.
Well, too bad!!!
Because Harry happened to be there!
So, this was his first time going against these arrogant cultivators.
And he did it splendidly! Well, almost, since these two ended up fainting and leaking…
The thing was that after listening about how arrogant a lot of the people of this world were and how this place never developed (enough to get internet and anime), Harry was furious and ended up making it his life’s mission to flip this world upside down using tech and tech only!
The system also liked his attitude. But the reasoning behind his attitude did annoy it a lot!
[Now, it is finally time for some Brainwashing…]
‘Aren’t you getting a bit too shameless there, system?’