Miss Fairy, Please Hear Me Out

”Hah, finally! One hundred percent cleared...” Xu Yuan exhaled, leaning back slowly in his gaming chair.

His eyes, bloodshot from the hours of staring at the screen, reflected the scene of the boss collapsing to the floor. On the monitor in front of him, the ending game cinematic began to roll, followed by the credits. After more than a month of brutal late-night grinding, he had finally cleared Azure Point, the game hailed as having the most convoluted story of any domestic title, on every story branch and every ending.

For a 2.5D pixel-style game, Azure Point had an absurd amount of story packed into it. More than a thousand choices, 25 story branches, and dozens of wildly different endings made every playthrough feel like a completely new experience.

”With current technology, I guess only a 2.5D pixel game could carry a story this massive,” Xu Yuan mused to himself.

He watched every last scene with painstaking care. Only then, fully satisfied, did he shut off the computer, drag himself to the bathroom to wash up, then climb into bed, where he instinctively began replaying the game’s story in his head.

”At long last, it’s over. Still, the Chancellor got done dirty. In every ending where he becomes the final boss, the damn writers just force-kill him for the plot. And once you get familiar with the mechanics after a few runs, the game really isn’t that hard anymore.”

”Haaah...” Xu Yuan yawned, rubbing his eyes. ”So sleepy... Forget it. I still have to go help at the old man’s company tomorrow. I’ve been slacking off for over a month. He’s probably going to chew me out so hard I won’t survive it...”

As the exhaustion overtook him, he slowly drifted off...

Crackle... Crackle... BOOOM!

A thunderclap exploded, lightning tore across the sky as rain came down in sheets.

Somewhere in the haze, through the crackling pop of burning firewood, Xu Yuan opened his eyes with a pained groan.

”Is it raining... Damn, my head hurts. I think there’s still some ibuprofen at home...”

The splitting headache made him instinctively try to get up and find a painkiller from the medicine drawer. But when his vision finally focused, the dim surroundings made him freeze.

Where is this? Where’s my house?

The ceiling he knew so well was gone. In its place was a ruined, unfamiliar Buddhist hall. He saw old, weathered beams and wooden pillars; a stone Buddha seated on a lotus pedestal, one arm broken off; and a campfire swaying under the draft of the cold wind...

Then there was her, a woman in black, her face veiled in silk, sitting silently beside the fire.

The patter of rain came steadily from outside the hall, everything so quiet it felt wrong.

After two seconds of silence, Xu Yuan closed his eyes, then opened them again. But nothing changed.

He tried to make sense of what had happened to him. He thought for a long while, but he was drawing a complete blank. The only thing he could say for sure was that he seemed to have transmigrated. That said, the source of his headache was not some aftereffect from a clash of memories. It was a very real lump swollen high on the back of his head.

Without any inherited memories, Xu Yuan found everything around him utterly unfamiliar. His gaze swept cautiously across the ruined Buddhist hall. Rain poured in sheets, streaming off the old roof tiles like strings of beads from the eaves, splashing ripples across the puddles outside the temple. Beyond the perimeter of the campfire, however, the doorway opened onto a darkness so deep it seemed bottomless.

Like everyone else, Xu Yuan had fantasized about transmigration before. But that was just the classic case of loving the idea from a safe distance. He knew himself well enough. Without some kind of cheat ability, in certain stories he probably would not survive past chapter three.

And this place, with its eerie atmosphere and all, looked exactly like the kind of story where he would die before chapter three.

Winter rain had a nasty way of seeping into the bones. Waves of cold kept rising through him, one after another. By the faint glow of the campfire, Xu Yuan let his eyes roam the hall again and again.

The Buddhist hall was huge. But now that its incense and worshippers were long gone, even the once-majestic Buddha sitting in the gloom had become something strange and unsettling.

After sweeping the room once more, Xu Yuan’s gaze finally settled on the only other living thing in the temple besides himself.

The woman in black sat cross-legged by the fire with her eyes closed, perfectly still. A sword lay flat at her side. The glow of the fire flickered over her skin, pale as fresh snow. A black veil covered her face, though it did little to hide her bearing. Her long black hair spilled down her back like a waterfall, and as the cold wind stirred her robe, it traced the soft outline of her figure beneath.

A rainy night, a ruined temple deep in the mountains, a beautiful woman dressed in black. Put all that together, and it was honestly hard for Xu Yuan not to think of something weird.

In the heavy silence, he slowly pushed himself up from the ground. Over the years, while helping with the family business, his old man had dragged him along to see all sorts of people and all sorts of things, clean and dirty alike. So although the surroundings were undeniably creepy, once Xu Yuan accepted reality, he knew perfectly well that he had to do something.

This body seemed to be injured, and the clothes on him were far too thin. At the very least, he needed to get closer to the fire. The damp chill of the winter night was already freezing him stiff.

Keeping his eyes on the woman, Xu Yuan walked toward her one step at a time. She seemed not to hear his footsteps at all, remaining seated quietly beside the fire, resting with her eyes closed. Even with the silk veil covering half her face, her presence was impossible to miss. Quiet, poised, beautiful in a way that felt almost unreal.

But the moment he drew near, Xu Yuan’s pupils suddenly shrank. Lying on the ground beside her was a massive arm. He stopped at once. His heartbeat kicked into a sprint, then just as suddenly eased. The arm looked startlingly lifelike, but it was not human. It had the texture of stone. He glanced back at the huge Buddha statue he had noticed earlier, the one missing an arm.

So that was where it had come from...

Using the broken stone arm as a stool, Xu Yuan sat down and looked at the woman’s flawless profile behind the veil.

Two seconds passed in the bleak wind.

Then the woman in black slowly opened her eyes, cold and dark as ink, and looked at him...

BOOOM!

Thunder split across the night sky, and lightning flashed, illuminating the ruined temple inside and out in a single instant.

The light vanished as quickly as it came. But in that brief moment, while meeting the woman’s eyes, Xu Yuan caught sight of something outside the temple doors with the corner of his vision. Corpses...

In the fleeting flash of lightning that came with the thunder, Xu Yuan saw the open ground outside the temple gate in full for a single instant. The puddles out there were choked with mangled bodies, and thick blood kept spreading and running with the rain.

Whatever haze still lingered in Xu Yuan’s mind vanished on the spot. His heartbeat sped up out of control, and the hand hidden inside his sleeve began trembling before he could stop it. His family did business, sure, but not the kind that treated human life so cheaply. That level of brazenness was only possible in certain other parts of the world. A yard full of corpses was a little beyond what he could casually process.

He bit down hard on the tip of his tongue, forcing himself to suppress the panic rising in his chest and think through the situation with whatever reason he had left. The sharp sting finally helped. Xu Yuan calmed down a little, steadied his breathing by force, and fixed his eyes on the woman in black before him.

The lightning faded. Darkness swallowed the temple entrance once again, leaving the outside world black and unreadable. But that one glance had already burned itself into his mind. Every corpse outside had been dressed alike, weapons still in hand. Their wounds and expressions in death differed, but almost all their toes had been pointed toward the ancient temple when they died. That meant they came from the same place, and for some unknown reason, they had all been trying to force their way into this temple.

That single shocking glimpse had told him plenty. Xu Yuan turned stiffly toward the woman beside him. He had apparently sat down next to a very dangerous woman. There were only two living people in this temple, him and her. And with how obviously weak and injured this body was, there was no way the pile of dead men outside had anything to do with him.

Thunder rolled through the black sky outside. Cold wind kept slipping in through the shattered temple doors. The woman dressed in ink-black robes and the finely dressed young master sat by the campfire together, while beyond the doorway lay a blood-soaked mess hidden in shadow.

”You’re blocking me.” Her voice was cool as frost, calm and indifferent.

Blocking you...?

Xu Yuan froze.A second later, he realized the woman was not looking at him at all. She was looking behind him.

Wait... Behind me?

A flicker of confusion rose in his heart. He had already checked. The hall was large, yes, but from this angle, behind him there should have been nothing except that enormous one-armed Buddha statue. Confusion made him glance back on instinct. And the moment he did, a chill shot straight from the base of his spine to the top of his head.

Xu Yuan saw a pair of legs, shins as tall as he was standing up. His gaze moved upward little by little. At some point without making the slightest sound, the giant stone Buddha had stepped down from its lotus pedestal and come up behind him. Its cracked, grotesque face was hidden in the shadows beneath the roof. It seemed to be smiling as it looked down at him and the woman beside him.

His brain blanked for a moment. Everything he believed about science was utterly useless in explaining what he was seeing. Fear of the unknown exploded inside him at once, too violent to suppress any longer, His breathing turned ragged. The bizarre giant Buddha, almost eight meters tall, was right in front of him now. His whole body went rigid, as if he had fallen into an ice pit.

Xu Yuan stood there stunned for several seconds before finally forcing his stiff body to start inching sideways. He...he had to get out of the way, like right now. His heart pounded so hard it felt ready to burst out of his chest. This scene was too bizarre, too far outside anything his mind could explain or accept.

Then, from the corner of his eye, Xu Yuan caught sight of the woman in black. Even with the giant Buddha looming near, she did not rise. She remained seated exactly where she was, calm and still. She did not even reach for the sword lying beside her. Behind the thin veil, her flawless face showed no change at all. She simply looked at the statue with cold, quiet indifference.

That composure, that almost casual calm, gradually gave Xu Yuan something he desperately needed. A little peace of mind. As he edged back toward the corner of the hall, trying to calm the panic in his chest, he kept watching the woman and the Buddha in the middle of the temple with utmost caution.

Thank God she’s here... His mind flashed back to the field of corpses outside. The very thing that had terrified him moments ago had now become the only reason he was not completely falling apart. He did not even want to imagine facing that creepy living Buddha alone in this ruined mountain temple.

The woman and the Buddha remained locked in silence for two seconds. A murderous chill slowly spread through the hall, and Xu Yuan used that brief opening to retreat carefully all the way into a corner.

Then suddenly, the bizarre living Buddha moved. Its enormous size did nothing to slow it down. So fast Xu Yuan could barely see it, the giant palm came crashing down.

CRASH! The entire Buddhist hall and the ground beneath it shuddered violently at the same time. The giant hand slammed into the floor and snuffed out the campfire, the only source of light in the room.

Xu Yuan’s vision was swallowed at once by total darkness. Without light, sound became the only thing left. One deafening crash after another merged into a continuous storm of tremors and roars, rising and falling through the darkness.

Curled in the corner, he listened to the battle unfolding not far away, his heart hammering wildly. His fists were clenched so hard his nails bit into his palms, but he did not feel it at all. Then,the clear hum of a sword rang out, sharp and bright, echoing through the temple and the mountain beyond.

A streak of blue light flashed through the darkness. And in the next instant, everything fell still. Another peal of thunder rolled across the sky, and lightning lit up the temple once more.

At last, Xu Yuan saw what had happened. The woman’s black robe remained spotless, not a trace of dust on it. Her expression was calm as ever as she slid her sword back into its sheath. As for the giant living Buddha she had been facing, its head was gone.

Xu Yuan was still staring blankly, only to hear a loud thud!

A huge dark shape crashed down right in front of him. Dust billowed up, making him frown as he instinctively stepped back. It was the giant head of the living Buddha. And those benevolent-looking eyes on its face were glowing faintly in the dark as they stared straight at him.

Xu Yuan’s first instinct was to run back to the woman in black. That kind of creepy thing was obviously far too dangerous to be near.

After the thunder passed, darkness swallowed everything again. As he walked toward where the woman had been just moments ago, he quietly turned over his words in his mind, thinking about how to ask her what in the world was going on.

And then, from the darkness in front of him came a weak murmur.

”Third Young Master, run...!”