Matthews understood the phrase "eat horse" well enough, but he shook his head. Since arriving in this world, he had once drunk water straight from a river. It had given him such a stomachache that he'd passed out. No matter what anyone said, he wasn't going to eat anything from this place again!
Matthews went to the riverbank and picked up some dry branches, then started a fire. He caught a few fish, roasted them, and offered them to the little girl who had saved him.
"Mm."
The little girl took the roasted fish Matthews offered and began wolfing them down, tears streaming down her face.
The little girl had once been the apple of her parents' eye. They were both mages, and had taught her many manners and much about the continent from an early age. But not long ago, her parents had died on a mission.
Her parents had had no other relatives, and a seven-year-old girl naturally couldn't live on her own. In time, she had ended up by the river.
The little girl had gone from heaven to hell, only to be treated gently by Matthews. She threw herself into his arms and cried, "Big Brother, Mia doesn't have parents anymore. Will you be my daddy?"
"Ah!"
Matthews didn't understand her, and could only awkwardly try to comfort the little girl, who was crying her eyes out.
The little girl cried as she said, "Mia's so silly. I forgot you can't read. You can't understand what I'm saying!"
Matthews had a hard time soothing the little girl, who had cried herself to sleep. To be honest, he had no idea what the future held for him. As a college student in the modern era, he had naturally read novels.
In all the novels he'd read online, the protagonist was amazing, slaughtering every villain from the moment he appeared. Matthews, on the other hand, had been much less lucky.
First, he'd gotten sick from eating something. Then, after thinking he'd found a good person, he'd been betrayed and lost the only thing he'd found that might have been worth anything: a scythe. Later, he'd even been auctioned off. Had anyone ever heard of a protagonist being auctioned off as a slave right at the start?
He didn't know why he'd been rescued, but while escaping, he'd been knocked unconscious in the river by a dead tree. Now, although a seven-year-old girl had saved him, he wasn't sure he could keep them both alive with her tagging along.
After all these blows, Matthews had come to his senses. This was a dangerous, real world—not the sort of novel where the protagonist could crush the heavens, the earth, and everything in between.
The next morning, a commanding little girl's voice rang out from beneath the riverbank cliff.
"You, I, he—"
Matthews repeated after her, "You, I, he—"
Matthews felt a little embarrassed. He was a fine young man of twenty, and here he was, being taught to read face-to-face by a seven-year-old little girl with a branch. It was hard not to feel a little awkward.
"Smack—"
A branch cracked against the ground, followed by a childish voice: "Pay attention!"
The two-hour lesson soon passed. In the morning, the little girl taught Matthews to read, after which he practiced the rudimentary martial arts he'd learned before. In the afternoon, he continued studying.
A month later, Matthews could more or less understand most of the language spoken in this world.
"Do you have anywhere to go?"
When Matthews asked, Mia thought he was going to leave her behind.
She grabbed his arm and said, "Don't leave me. You promised me back then."
"When did I ever promise you that?"
Mia insisted, "You clearly promised me back then!"
Seeing that the little girl looked ready to burst into tears at any moment, Matthews quickly said, "All right, I swear I won't leave you."
When Mia saw that Matthews was willing to swear, she let go of his arm.
"It's getting cold at this time of year. Do you have somewhere to live?"
When Mia shook her head, Matthews asked, unwilling to give up, "What about your old home?"
"I can't go back. There's nothing left in the house."
Matthews asked Mia uncertainly, "You're really not lying to me?"
"No."
Still unwilling to give up, Matthews asked, "Didn't you say your parents were both mages?"
When he'd been rescued from the ship earlier, he'd caught a glimpse of dazzling magic from far away. In Matthews's mind, mages were incredibly powerful. Surely they couldn't have been so poor they didn't even have a house?
After that, Mia took Matthews to the village where she'd lived before. He helped her clear the grass that had grown in the yard, along with the cobwebs covering the house.
It was a rather backward little mountain village, tucked between hills beyond the river. The scenery was quite serene, and the surroundings were quiet and secluded. It was a perfect place to live in hiding!
So Matthews and Mia settled there. In the mornings, Matthews taught Mia some of the martial arts he knew, and then Mia taught him what she knew about the continent.
"The continent we live on is called the Oya Continent. The Bright Empire in the west is ruled by the Church of Light. The Dark Empire in the far east is ruled by the Dark Court."
"We live in the Furio Empire. The emperor is a powerful ninth-level warrior who worships the great Four Divine Beasts Sovereign."
As Matthews recited what Mia had taught him, he thought through the details. When he'd arrived in this world, he'd passed through Spatial Turbulence. Later, he'd found the corpse of an unknown beast wearing a Golden Crown, along with a Death Scythe.
Now, considering the Church of Light, the Dark Church, and the Four Divine Beasts Sovereign, Matthews couldn't help suspecting that the beast he'd found had been a Chief God's corpse from the Spatial Turbulence. He just didn't know whether it still had a Sovereign Spark.
If he could find out the names of the Four Divine Beasts Sovereigns, he could be certain he'd come to the Coiling Dragon Universe.
Then the Death Scythe he'd lost had to be a Sovereign Artifact. As for the corpse that might have contained a Sovereign Spark, it was probably still inside the golden lotus that had brought him here.
When Mia saw Matthews zoning out again, she rapped his hand with the branch she was using as a pointer.
"We're in class. Don't get distracted."
Looking at the little girl pretending to be stern, Matthews pinched her cheek.
"Stop it! If you don't pay attention, Teacher Mia will smack your palm!"
"Okay, okay. Big Brother will pay attention. Go on, Mia."
After talking for a while, Matthews asked, "You mentioned the Four Divine Beasts Sovereign just now. Who are they?"
Mia shook her head and answered in her childish voice, "The Four Divine Beasts Sovereign is just the Sovereign."
"I mean, what are their names?"
"Mia doesn't know either."
Matthews thought it over and didn't ask again. In the original Coiling Dragon story, the Chief Gods spread their faith across the material planes, but they wouldn't let ordinary mortals know their names. Just as in the Yulan Plane, if Beirut hadn't become a Chief God, the protagonist could have reached godhood without ever knowing who his true enemy was.
So how could a little girl like Mia, who wasn't even a mage, know the names of the Four Divine Beast Sovereigns?
"Mia, can you use magic?"
Mia's mood turned downcast. "No. My father only taught me a little about the continent."
"Then he said I was too young and didn't teach me any magic."
Matthews sighed when he heard that. By now, he was fairly sure he'd come to the Coiling Dragon World, but he still didn't know which material plane he was on.
Since he'd come to this world, how could he not cultivate magic? Reaching the Saint Realm meant gaining eternal life—the lifelong goal of so many novel protagonists. What's more, no man could resist the temptation of immortality, or the allure of dazzling magic.
The most important thing now was to make money. Matthews remembered that the original story said it cost ten gold coins to test one's talent. Just as the Buddha wouldn't save the poor, what good was magic if you had no money?
Even the protagonist's family in the original story had been nobles, but they'd still had to sell their possessions just to get by. Matthews had transmigrated here with obviously no money at all.
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