This World Looked a Little Familiar...

"Hey, young man, are you all right?"

An elderly voice roused Pan Long. He opened his eyes to find a kindly old woman looking at him with concern.

But the first thing Pan Long noticed was what she wore.

Her outfit was nothing like Northern fashion. She wore a checked dress in red and black, ruffled lace at the sleeves and hem, a lace-trimmed shawl, a sash running from her chest to her waist, and a soft, puffy round hat... Together with her blond hair and blue eyes, it made Pan Long wonder for a moment whether he had traveled again, this time to the Europe of his previous life, in the middle of some village festival.

And, as it happened, he really could hear something like a festival.

"Thank you, merciful Moon Goddess! Thank you for blessing us with fair winds and timely rains! Thank you for granting us peace and happiness!" A middle-aged man was singing a hymn at the top of his lungs.

Between each pair of lines, a crowd of adults and children sang "Our thanks, our thanks!" in unison. Their voices were remarkably well coordinated. They clearly practiced often; this was no last-minute prayer at Buddha's feet.

What's going on?

Pan Long sat up and rubbed his forehead. Only after thinking back for a while did he manage to untangle his muddled thoughts.

Oh, I activated the Shanhai Jing fragment, and then it sucked me in... Is this an illusory world the fragment created? It's far too real! How is any of this supposed to be an illusion?

He looked around. Every blade of grass and every tree seemed utterly real, without the slightest hint of anything false.

Dad and Grandpa were right. Turning illusion into reality, creating an Illusory World... Once you're inside it, how could you tell true from false, illusion from reality?

Compared with this world, the VR games I played in my last life were so fake I could barely look at them!

He was fairly certain the Shanhai Jing fragment had drawn him into an illusory world. As for why its first activation had brought him here instead of to the empty world where he could only practice martial arts, that was easy enough to explain. Perhaps his father had already filled it with spiritual energy.

With that question settled, another immediately followed.

What sort of world was this, exactly?

He was puzzled.

The Shanhai Jing fragment could not create an illusory world entirely out of nothing. It had to work from its owner's conception. Only if the owner imagined a landscape could it create one; only if the owner imagined a city could it create one; only if the owner imagined a treasure could it create one... Everything depended on what its owner envisioned.

So whose imagination had shaped this world?

The first person who came to mind was his father, Pan Lei.

The Shanhai Jing fragment had been in his father's hands for the past few decades. That had still been true until just over ten days ago. Perhaps his father had long since imagined a world—or perhaps the fragment had already created it—and it had merely been waiting for its owner to open it.

That was the most reasonable possibility.

But after looking around, Pan Long felt it did not quite fit.

His father had once said that the most valuable world would be a grassland covered in exotic flowers and plants, or better yet, a medicinal garden planted with Spirit Medicine. You could eat and digest them right inside, exploiting a "system bug" to gain even more benefits. A lack of spiritual energy meant you could not produce the highest-grade Spirit Medicine, but quantity could make up for quality. If you ate ginseng, lingzhi, poria, fleeceflower root, and Solomon's seal like ordinary meals, they were bound to replenish your vitality and greatly aid your cultivation.

That was probably how his father had eaten his way to the Innate Realm in a mere dozen years or so.

Besides, you could never have too much Spirit Medicine. More than a hundred people in the Pan Lineage practiced martial arts, and their need for Spirit Medicine was enormous. No amount would be enough.

Yet all he saw around him was an ordinary village, without a trace of medicinal herbs. It was nothing like what his father had described.

Clearly, his father had not designed this world.

Then had Grandpa had a hand in it? He, too, had used the Shanhai Jing fragment for decades—longer than his father, in fact. And after living in the Central Plains all these years, he had learned a few things that sounded impressive, even if Pan Long did not understand them. Maybe he really could do something like this.

...No, that did not seem right either. The style was all wrong.

One look at the people here was enough to tell that no Northerner could have dreamed them up. Northerners admired sturdy, imposing builds in men and women alike. They aspired to dismount and fight jackals and wolves, to mount up and shoot wild geese. They dreamed of fists broad enough for a man to stand on and arms strong enough for a horse to race across. Refined manners and gentle, dignified features did not suit their tastes at all. They would only mock such people as "rabbit folk."

And everyone in this village, young or old, man or woman, was the sort Northerners would call "rabbit folk."

If he did not have memories from two lives and experience far beyond that of an ordinary Northerner, he would probably have thought, as most Northerners would, that everyone in the village belonged to one big rabbit Lineage.

Their clothes, too, were steeped in the European style of his previous life, utterly unlike anything Northerners wore. Pan Long had not even seen clothing like this in any painting or illustration in this world.

Grandpa might have lived in the Central Plains for years and learned a great deal there, but he was still a Northerner to the bone. Northern tastes, Northern habits of dress... Those should not have changed.

In other words, Grandpa probably had not designed this world either.

If neither of them had, whose imagination had it come from?

His own?

He studied the village, trying to find something in his memory that matched it.

It was a small village of perhaps forty or fifty houses, enclosed by a wooden fence. Judging by that fence, the area must have been fairly safe; the most dangerous animals commonly found nearby were probably no worse than jackals or wolves.

The villagers dressed much like the old woman before him, in an unmistakably European style. Their features matched, too: blond hair and blue eyes were everywhere, while he had not spotted a single person with black hair.

More interestingly, he had glanced over at least twenty or thirty faces without seeing a single one that was crooked or homely. Even the relatively unattractive ones had regular features. Quite a few were genuinely good-looking. Take the old woman: though her temples were streaked with gray, the contours of her face and the grace in her eyes and brows showed that she must have been a great beauty in her youth.

She was no exception. Among the people Pan Long could see at a glance, there were at least three or four other men and women just as striking.

That all but settled it. He must have imagined this world himself.

A great man had once said that so-called flights of fancy merely amounted to adding an eye to an ordinary human body or stretching its neck by two or three feet. No one's imagination could reach beyond their own experience. No one was an exception.

It was like people who made up stories. In a scholar's story, the protagonist was usually a scholar; in a warrior's, usually a warrior. Even if the events did not match their lives, the little details were bound to be things they knew.

He had almost no recollection of this nameless village. But the villagers' looks clearly matched his tastes, and their clothing was something only he would know. Plainly, this world had come from his memories.

Which meant something in this world had to match something he had encountered across his two lives.

"Hey, young man, are you all right?"

Only then did Pan Long notice that the old woman was still watching him with concern. He hurriedly smiled and told her he was fine. Reassured, she turned and walked toward the gathering on the other side of the village.

Pan Long's gaze naturally followed her. Two or three hundred people had gathered in a small square, and more villagers were making their way there.

Men and women, young and old, wore rather simple clothes, but every face was cheerful. They really were celebrating some sort of festival.

He also noticed something about their faces... They looked strangely familiar.

Why do their faces and the lines of their bodies look so familiar? I must have seen this kind of... art style somewhere.

He thought in silence, but no matter how he tried, he could not remember where he had seen people who looked like them.

It looked a little like a European festival, but he had never been to Europe in his previous life!

He shook his head and kept thinking.

What bothered him most was still the way these people looked.

Everyone he had seen was remarkably attractive. Among two or three hundred people, there was not a single ugly face, while handsome men and beautiful women were everywhere.

More importantly, their appearances had something in common. It was not that they looked alike, but that their bearing—the quality hidden in the lines of their faces and bodies, something he could only call an "art style"—was unmistakably similar.

The resemblance had a hint of "the same Lineage" about it, yet was subtly different... It was more like a series of works painted by one artist following the same broad vision. And he was certain he had seen this style somewhere. At one time, he had even known it well...

Just then, he noticed a statue toward the back of the little square, and the person standing before it.

The statue depicted a goddess holding a moon disc in both hands, surrounded by Hua. A transparent gem set in its chest glittered in the Sunlight.

And the young girl standing amid the crowd with her back to the stone statue—her face, her figure—looked as if she and the statue had come from the same mold. People might even believe the statue had come to life.

His eyes suddenly lit up.

I remember!

Like a bolt of lightning cutting through chaos, the answer finally came to him.

This was Luna Village, the first level of the VR game Heroes: Swords and Laments, which he had played in his previous life!

It had been so long since I started a new book that I actually forgot to post an update... Hahahahaha (awkward laughter)...

(End of chapter)