Still Alive

Zheng Yichen had tried making small changes to the Magic Array Pattern etched into his mind, but the pattern had collapsed. His mental power had been too weak to stop it, leaving him with a headache for half a day. He had failed partly because he did not understand array magic well enough, and partly because he lacked mental power...

Lolise said he could meet the mental power requirement in a short time. What he needed now was to build up his knowledge of array magic. Once he met both conditions, he could advance to the next rank.

If he could not safely improve the Magic Array Pattern etched into his mind, why not work on one outside his body? His mental power fell a little short of a ranked mage's in quantity, but it recovered incredibly fast!

More importantly, his imagination as a transmigrator was bursting with ideas!

Now that he was in this world, he ought to leave something distinctive behind, right? To turn his ideas into reality, there was one thing Zheng Yichen wanted to declare above all else... I love studying!

"Looks like... I can't develop Battle Qi." Holding up a barbell he had made himself, Zheng Yichen glanced at the bands around his arms and spoke with some frustration.

Battle Qi was tied to physical strength. Zheng Yichen had long since surpassed the threshold at which a human warrior could develop it, yet despite training for ages and trying all sorts of punishing exercises, he had gotten nowhere.

"If you can't develop it, then keep training your body. That will strengthen your mental power."

"...All right." Zheng Yichen nodded and said no more. Grueling training did improve mental power, after all; it was a test of will. He checked the time, tossed the barbell aside, and headed out of town.

During their training and study sessions, Lolise had taken him through the forest to challenge its powerful monsters one by one. The giant python seemed to have appeared there by chance, and they had encountered nothing else like it since.

Lolise said Zheng Yichen now had a forty-percent chance of beating that python... He was not convinced. He trained relentlessly under enhanced gravity every day, and his physique was improving rapidly, even if he still had not grown any taller.

He hooked a claw under a stone and flicked it away. It struck a rabbit in the distance squarely on the head. After the novelty of magic had worn off, Zheng Yichen had returned to his usual way of hunting.

"Hmm... what's this?" After picking up the rabbit, Zheng Yichen spotted something on the forest floor in the distance and narrowed his eyes. Plenty of new species had appeared in the forest, but very few of them could fly!

Yet there was an unusual feather on the ground, far larger than anything from the ordinary birds living in the forest. Had some huge bird flown over and shed it? Or had it been killed while passing through?

He picked up the feather and gave it a gentle sniff. The trace of warmth on it was fresh; it could not have fallen more than half a day ago. He also sensed a faint pulse of magic from it.

Some kind of bird-type magical beast?

Feather in hand, Zheng Yichen carried his prey back into town, only to find that Lolise, who waited for him every day, was nowhere to be seen. He set the prey aside and waited a while. With nothing to do, he went from house to house, peeking through the windows.

He rubbed his claws together and glanced around like a thief. When Lolise still had not returned, he looked toward parts of town he had yet to explore.

Just as he took a few small steps toward one of them, Lolise's voice sounded abruptly behind him.

"We're leaving."

"Huh? Where to?"

"Anywhere. We can't stay here."

"What happened?" Zheng Yichen's dragon mouth twitched as he watched Lolise turn a piece of tableware to ash with a touch of her finger. She had cast Disintegration without a sound!

Zheng Yichen recognized the spell only because its effects interested him. It could reduce an object to powder; to him, that was decomposition.

"People from the Church have arrived."

"The Church...?" He scratched his head. Did other worlds have churches too?

"What are you thinking?"

"Uh, is this Church the kind that acts righteous and respectable in public but is treacherous behind the scenes, using every dirty trick it can?"

"You're overthinking it again."

Lolise hopped lightly onto Zheng Yichen's back and spoke calmly.

"Then... are there gods in this world?" Zheng Yichen asked. With a church around, and given the supernatural powers of this world, gods did not seem impossible. Lolise shook her head.

"So there aren't?"

"It's not that there aren't any. They simply haven't appeared in the world for a long time," she explained. "Gods descended in the past, but there's no sign of that happening now. They're still connected to this world, though."

Zheng Yichen clicked his tongue. The pressure suddenly felt much greater. The Dragon Race was one thing; now gods had entered the picture too.

"Just ignore them. It's difficult for them to interfere with this world," Lolise said, still calm. "As you would put it, treat them like mascots."

Easy for you to say. If I had your strength, maybe I could do that too. Grumbling to himself, Zheng Yichen headed in the direction Lolise pointed.

As they crossed a rise, he spotted a fully armed group approaching in the distance. "They're here to investigate the town, aren't they?"

No matter how remote the town was or how poor communication was in this world, enough time had passed for someone to notice that something was wrong.

If everyone had left because of some accident, that would have been one thing. But the entire population had vanished. It looked less like an accident and more like they had disappeared into thin air. Zheng Yichen had long suspected that Lolise, riding on his back, had something to do with it.

"Those missing townspeople are still alive, right?" After hesitating for a while, Zheng Yichen finally asked the question that had been weighing on him.

"They're alive."

Phew. He let out a long breath of relief. If Lolise had somehow made everyone in the town vanish, Zheng Yichen would not have known how to face her afterward.

She might be indifferent to human life; she had lived for so long, after all. But Zheng Yichen could not accept something like that so easily. His outlook and values were still largely those he had held before crossing over. Twenty years of living that way could not be undone overnight.

Call him softhearted if you wanted. For now, at least, that was not something he could change.