Having met a whole group of figurine-like Flower Fairies, Du Ke was naturally delighted. However, communication between the two sides remained an obstacle.
After gesturing for ages, they had only managed to learn each other's names.
Du Ke guessed that these palm-sized Flower Fairies probably had limited intelligence. After all, small bodies and small heads naturally meant smaller brains. Not only these Flower Fairies—those Mushroom People living in mushrooms were probably the same, species with a little intelligence but incapable of developing civilization. Still, no matter what, these Flower Fairies were natives of the Fantasy World and worth communicating with.
He and Shawa Shawa continued laboriously gesturing, trying to understand each other's meaning.
The other Flower Fairies had already lowered their guard against Du Ke. Curious, they flew into the bird's-nest dwelling, looking and touching everything, filled with curiosity toward these items from Earth. With Flower Fairies all over the room and more flying about outside, the scene had quite a unique charm. Du Ke had considered treating them to some drinks from Earth—Mind Armor could replicate them.
It was just that once the drinks entered their stomachs, they would not be digested and would immediately dissipate.
In the end, however, he did not replicate any drinks for them. The reason was simple: he did not know whether food from Earth might be poisonous to the Flower Fairies.
After another quarter of an hour of fruitless gesturing, Du Ke decided to give up on this method of communication. The Flower Fairies' intelligence was limited; they really were not good conversation partners. He gestured to Shawa Shawa. "Wait a moment. I'll use Mind Power to communicate with you." Then he closed his eyes and activated Touch of Mind, seeing the Flower Fairies in the mental world.
In Touch of Mind's perception, every Flower Fairy was a flower. It was a very unusual sensation.
He used Touch of Mind to touch the largest flower, Shawa Shawa. In an instant, he sensed faint thoughts coming from within it. Unlike when he had sensed the beautiful women in the villa on Earth, what he felt was not chaotic thoughts, but a pure, natural current of thought. It carried a clear meaning: How strange. Shawa Shawa found Du Ke before her very strange.
"Shawa Shawa, can you 'hear' me speaking?"
"Hm?" Shawa Shawa sent back a startled emotion.
"Can you hear me?"
"Yes." Shawa Shawa stood on the windowsill, her eyes wide as she curiously watched Du Ke. She could not understand why Du Ke's voice had appeared in her head when he clearly had not opened his mouth.
"I came from far away, and this is my first time meeting your people. Shawa Shawa, what are you? Flower Fairies?"
"You are Du Ke?"
"Yes, I'm Du Ke." After replying, Du Ke asked again, trying to make Touch of Mind convey clearer thoughts so they could communicate. Compared with his chaotic and disordered mental communication with the beautiful women in the villa, communicating with Shawa Shawa was unexpectedly simple. Flower Fairies might have low intelligence, but at least they did not possess complicated thoughts.
"Flower Fairy. I am a Flower Fairy, a Flower Fairy of the Sea of Flowers Tribe, living in the Sea of Flowers." Shawa Shawa spoke aloud, her voice and thoughts entering Du Ke's mind at the same time.
Naturally, she was speaking the Flower Fairies' language, but with the thoughts translating in sync, Du Ke could understand her. It was a marvelous experience that made his heart surge with excitement, even more convenient than machine translation. Of course, "Flower Fairy" was Du Ke's interpretation. Shawa Shawa's own term for herself meant something like "spirit among flowers" or "dancing flower."
"Sea of Flowers?"
"This is the Sea of Flowers." Shawa Shawa pointed toward South Lake beneath the moonlight. The lake reflected the hazy image of the crescent moon, while the blue reeds along the shore still bloomed with radiant flowers of every color. It truly resembled a sea of flowers.
"You are Flower Fairies of the Sea of Flowers Tribe. Then are there other Flower Fairy tribes?"
"I don't know."
"Have you seen other 'people'?"
"I don't know."
"Have you seen a Displacer Beast?" Du Ke changed the question, forming the image of a Displacer Beast in his thoughts.
Shawa Shawa immediately sent back frightened emotions. "They kill Flower Fairies. They eat Flower Fairies. Flower Fairies fight back, but cannot kill Displacer Beasts. Flower Fairies can hide, hide inside flowers and not come out."
"Do you know magic?"
"Magic?"
"Yes, like this." Du Ke began imagining the battle between the Behemoth and the Stegosaurus Lizard, with magic flying everywhere.
Shawa Shawa nodded, then raised her hand and gave a light wave toward Du Ke. In an instant, a faint white glow appeared over his body. Then Du Ke snapped out of Touch of Mind and found that his body seemed much more refreshed. It was as though, after several days without bathing, he had suddenly soaked in a hot spring. Not only had the grime on his body been washed away, but even the dust in his soul seemed to have been cleansed a little.
"What magic was that?" He reactivated Touch of Mind and spoke with Shawa Shawa.
"Purification. It can remove magic."
"Hm?"
Du Ke opened his eyes. Displacer Beasts came with Blink, while Flower Fairies came with Purification. This Fantasy World was quite interesting. Previously, he had thought magic should be divided into categories—water, fire, earth, wind, lightning, light, ice, darkness, plus space and time. A Displacer Beast's Blink could still be understood as spatial magic, but a Flower Fairy's Purification was much harder to understand. He truly had no idea what attribute it belonged to.
"Can you teach me Purification?"
"Just like this." Shawa Shawa raised her hand again and cast Purification once more.
But Du Ke had no idea how she had cast Purification, and Shawa Shawa did not know how to teach it either. She had known Purification Magic from birth. This talent for casting magic was perhaps an instinct of Fantasy World creatures, engraved in their genes. So Du Ke stopped dwelling on magic and continued communicating with Shawa Shawa, hoping to obtain more information.
But Shawa Shawa's intelligence was limited, and her understanding of the outside world was even more limited. Aside from seeing the outside world when she had first been born, she had never left the Sea of Flowers.
"How were you born?" Du Ke was especially curious.
"Um..."
According to Shawa Shawa's vague account, the Flower Fairy race was born from flowers. It did not matter what kind of flower or where the flower was. After being born, they would cautiously hide and sneak away from their birthplace, heading toward a settlement of their kind. It was an instinctive pull that guided them to the nearest tribe, which was the tribe here in the Sea of Flowers.
They could alter plants, growing a flower upon them to serve as their homes.
It was a very magical way of life.
"How old are you, Shawa Shawa?"
Shawa Shawa tilted her head, thought seriously, then answered, "Five winters and four summers."
"That means you were born in autumn or winter, and four and a half years have passed. You are four and a half years old this year, Shawa Shawa." Du Ke did the calculation for her, though he did not know how many days there were in a year in the Fantasy World. "By the way, Shawa Shawa, is it summer now?"
"It is spring now. Summer is very, very hot. The Sea of Flowers dries up, and Flower Fairies hide beneath the roots of large trees to sleep."
"It is still spring?" Du Ke was astonished. Today had been overcast, but the daytime temperature had already reached thirty-six degrees Celsius. Even now at night, it remained at thirty-two degrees Celsius, no different from summer on Earth.
Yet in the Fantasy World, this was only spring. And according to Shawa Shawa, when true summer arrived, even South Lake would evaporate. He looked at the vast waters of South Lake and found it hard to imagine such a huge lake being completely dried up.
Before you continue