Grand Entrance

On the boundless sea, fierce winds swept up dark clouds. Between the clouds and the sea, a battered little boat struggled onward.

The churning waves carried the spirits of the drowned, while dense Black Mist rolled across the endless waters. It seemed like a curse, or perhaps a wail of grief.

The blazing sun overhead was hidden by the fog. Thousands of restless dead passed through it, surging over the vast, raging waves like bloodthirsty beasts as they charged toward the sea's edge.

This was Bilgewater's annual Harrowing. Every year, the dense fog set out from the Shadow Isles, forever shrouded in curses, and headed for the nearest gathering place of the living: Bilgewater Bay.

Every person who died during the Harrowing suffered the curse. As the Black Mist receded, their souls were dragged back to the Shadow Isles, adding to the Harrowing's strength.

For thousands of years, the Harrowing had devoured countless lives. But considering that Bilgewater was Runeterra's most notorious lawless region, teeming with murderers, con artists, political prisoners, and exiles, it was also doing the world a favor by taking out the trash...

The battered little boat was fairly lucky. It lay at the very edge of the Black Mist's path. The handsome young man aboard had spotted the Harrowing's approach and immediately tied himself up with a rope before jumping into the sea.

Strangely, when the man plunged into the water, the raging waves and currents around him didn't swallow him up. Instead, they wrapped tightly around him, occasionally even sending up a bubble to supply him with the oxygen he needed to survive.

Perhaps the currents were protecting him. Or perhaps the Harrowing, hungry for the souls of the living, had its attention fixed entirely on the feast at Bilgewater Harbor. Not a single cursed wraith noticed the man hiding beneath the surface...

"Looks like plenty of people in the NetEase 1 server are going to die again."

Once he was sure he was safe, the man crawled out from beneath the boat, raised its tattered sail again, and headed away from the Harrowing... It was still daytime, but beneath the Harrowing's shroud, it was as dark as night.

The primal terror of darkness that lurked in human nature didn't make the man feel uneasy at all. On the contrary, he even felt a little sick pleasure.

This man was named Xiao Shuai—

No, he couldn't even be called a nobody anymore.

Though he was aboard a battered little boat, short on food and water with a bleak future ahead, the man's face showed not the slightest trace of fear or confusion. Even his smile hadn't faded.

He took off his short-sleeved shirt, revealing its distinctly Ionian style. It was simple and unadorned, yet possessed a harmonious, understated beauty. Even after being soaked in seawater, it still had hardly any wrinkles.

He casually wrung it out and put it back on. The shirt was sleeveless, leaving the man's muscular arms fully exposed to the air.

The man was named Yuan Chen. He wasn't from this world—or rather, his soul came from another world... After a freak accident left him gravely injured, he woke up again only to be born into this world.

Yuan Chen knew exactly what this world was called... Runeterra, the setting of League of Legends, the game he had loved most in his previous life.

Although he had arrived in the world of his favorite game, Yuan Chen hadn't felt particularly excited at first. More often than not, he had been overwhelmed by a deep sense of helplessness... There were too many beings in this world who defied common sense.

There was no need to mention anything else. Among the future threats Yuan Chen knew could endanger his life and even the entire world were the Noxian invasion, the Iron Revenant's revenge, the Darkin War, and Aurelion Sol's retaliation against the Aspects...

And the Ruined Curse, which had been mocked to hell and back.

Though he felt helpless, he couldn't just sit around doing nothing while he was alive—and besides, he had been born in Placidium, in Navori Province, Ionia's heartland and one of the most sacred places in the First Lands.

Many people traveled great distances to study at its academies or meditate in its thriving, untamed magical gardens.

And Yuan Chen, unsettled by what the future might bring, had also studied traditional Ionian war dances there... They were a special kind of dance: extravagant and dazzling, brimming with a vitality as fierce as flames, and impossible to watch without stopping to cheer.

Ionia valued harmony between tradition and all living spirits. The beauty of the human body's rhythms in dance was one way of achieving that harmony. In Ionia, dance and martial arts were intertwined—

Though Ionia was still flourishing in peace, its people seemed able to live prosperous, stable lives forever.

But Yuan Chen, who knew what the future held, understood that the peace wouldn't last. In Ionia, elegance and lethality were one and the same.

His junior, Irelia, a country girl from Zaan, would one day prove it with blood—and the arm of Noxus's most powerful ruler.

But for now, none of that mattered.

It had been about a month ago, he thought, though Yuan Chen wasn't sure how long he had been drifting at sea. He had set out from the estuary near Placidium with a group of dancers, heading for Sudaraya Island at Ionia's southernmost tip to contemplate the beauty of nature.

But along the way, a Hoarding Sea Serpent from Bilgewater's waters had attacked their fleet.

The Hoarding Sea Serpent was a giant sea monster native to Bilgewater's waters. It had a severe hoarding problem and loved to amass glittering treasures, so it often attacked ships on the surface.

Almost every old Bilgewater sailor knew that the treasures beneath the water far outnumbered those on the surface. But these monsters, often hundreds of meters long, were the nightmare of anyone who dared dive deep...

Yuan Chen hadn't understood why a Hoarding Sea Serpent that usually lurked in the depths of Bilgewater Bay had appeared near Ionia. Now he knew...

It was because of the Harrowing. Sensing danger, the serpent had decided to lie low and patiently headed for calmer waters, even if they had fewer treasures and glittering riches.

It was during this time that Yuan Chen lost contact with the fleet by accident—he had been swallowed whole by the giant sea serpent.

At first, Yuan Chen had thought he was about to kick the bucket, but, unexpectedly, he didn't die right away...

The serpent was enormous, and its stomach had plenty of room. Yuan Chen managed to survive for a while on the scraps of food left inside. It wasn't pleasant. The serpent's belly was pitch-black, lit only by a few scattered Night Luminous Stones.

They provided enough light to see his surroundings, but certainly not enough to tell how much time had passed.

It might have been five days, seven days, or even longer... Eventually, Yuan Chen saw the light again.

There was a woman, wearing a strange smile.

Her fight with the sea serpent was beyond the limits of human ability. In her hands, glittering Flowing Water became a whip-sword, and she raced across the shimmering sea.

Her presence and stature rivaled those of the massive monster, and her hunting technique was dazzling. In one fluid motion, she sliced the hundred-meter-long sea serpent into chunks of all sizes with blades of water.

She killed the sea serpent, and in the joy of surviving, Yuan Chen caught the woman's attention.

Yuan Chen knew her name: Nila, the Joy Unbound. A bookworm, and a poor soul blessed by the demon of joy, Oshirresh.

Yuan Chen knew all about her, so he called out to Nila.

He had once been fascinated by League of Legends and had carefully studied its lore. Yuan Chen knew Nila and Oshirresh's story.

In Runeterra, there were beings known as demons, and their powers varied greatly. But they all shared one thing: they were born from the emotions of every living thing in Runeterra, and fed on those emotions.

Pain, hatred, confusion, doubt, resentment, and more... Among them, the oldest were the demons born from the ten primordial emotions.

Yuan Chen was certain that Fiddlesticks was one of them: the primordial demon of fear.

By comparison, demons like Evelynn and Tahm Kench were a lesser tier. Though they represented the ultimate forms of certain emotions, they were nowhere near as primordial and ancient as fear.

The Azakana in Yone's story were merely lesser demons, weaker and lower-ranked than ordinary demons. As for Oshirresh, the demon who had blessed Nila, he was one of the ten primordial demons, equal to Fiddlesticks, the demon of fear.

Joy.

Oshirresh, known as the Lord of Joy, was said to be a monstrous beast with many limbs, who wreaked havoc on the world alongside nine equally vicious siblings. To taste the purest joy, Oshirresh had even plotted to devour the realm of the gods—

But the gods had cast him into the depths below, imprisoning him in a bottomless abyss on the seventh level, guarded by a mysterious order of brave warriors.

When she was still a bookworm, a girl who longed for heroic tales had unraveled layer after layer of mystery and discovered that this order lay beneath her feet, deep below the heart of her hometown.

Excited beyond measure, she rushed out of her home. She wanted to find them and learn more of the untold stories. She even hoped to become a hero herself...

After that, the girl vanished. Everything about her—

Her face, her voice, her real name—

It was all erased from the memories of the living. Documents disappeared without a trace; the writing on walls and paper vanished. Her family and friends could no longer speak of anything about her past. It was as if Nila had never existed.

Ten years later, a woman reappeared in Kashkan, like a complete stranger. She seemed detached from the world, wore a strange smile that never left her face, and radiated an apparently endless joy that never changed...

No one knew anything about her past. They only knew that she called herself Nila, after the legendary River of Fate.

If that were all, it would have been fine...

After all, the girl's name had long since been forgotten. But the problem was, this was Nila's first time leaving her hometown of Kashkan. And Kashkan itself had been cut off from the outside world for nearly seven or eight hundred years.

Under the circumstances, Yuan Chen's voice caught Nila's attention—or rather, the attention of the Lord of Joy, Oshirresh, who accompanied her.

Noticing that Yuan Chen's soul was different, Oshirresh found him extremely interesting. But having only just arrived in the Outside World, Oshirresh was desperate to get more joyful emotions to satisfy his ravenous appetite, so he placed a curse of joy on Yuan Chen.

The curse greatly enhanced Yuan Chen's strength, stamina, and agility. It even granted him the power to control "water"...

But as the price, whenever his connection to Oshirresh deepened, Yuan Chen would feel joy beyond his control. Sorrow, pain, anger, or hatred would all eventually turn into a pathological sense of happiness and delight.

This was a real pain in the ass... The uncontrollable joy always left Yuan Chen feeling profoundly empty. Normally, happiness came from doing something and gaining something as a result.

For example, going to a restaurant, enjoying a delicious meal, and feeling happy. But the joy brought by the curse skipped the beginning and the process, leaving him feeling happy right away. Being happy all the time would only make a person lose their sanity.

And to keep himself from losing his mind, Yuan Chen had to immediately do something to fill in the process that had been skipped...

That missing cause of happiness could be anything... Even self-harm.

Yuan Chen strongly suspected that Oshirresh had once plotted to devour the realm of the gods because his mind had been warped by boundless joy and delight...

Seriously, rather than the Lord of Joy, he was more like the Lord of Slaanesh.

Feeling the joy that had emerged in his emotions for no reason, Yuan Chen danced to the rhythm of the currents, despite his helplessness.

Thanks to his fear of the future, Yuan Chen had trained diligently in war dances to protect himself.

Just like now, as his limbs moved in sweeping arcs, droplets slid from his black hair. An indescribable vitality surged through every part of Yuan Chen's body, and muscles bulged across his powerful frame.

His build wasn't bulky, but harmoniously sleek, with a fluid beauty. He didn't feel like a rigid warrior, but a graceful dancer. A white Curse Seal stood out on his skin, while a vine-woven armlet encircled his upper arm, elegant and understated.

An armlet was a kind of bracelet. One worn around the wrist was called a bracelet, while one worn on the upper arm was called an armlet or armband. The arm was one of the parts of the body people noticed most easily, especially in summer and autumn.

The arm's importance and appeal sometimes rivaled the face. That was why every dancer devoted great effort to their arms, and Yuan Chen, who had inherited Ionia's traditions, was no exception.

As he danced, the jade ornaments hanging from his Vine Armlet clinked together with a clear, ethereal sound.

The surrounding water began to dance along with this joy, rising into the air. In a harmonious, vibrant rhythm, it swirled around Yuan Chen like little serpents of green jade.

Watching this indescribably harmonious, beautiful rhythm, even the mages of Ixialia who had set their sights on Yuan Chen held their breath.