Chapter 371: City Of Stars...
Antarctica had taught him many things. Strength was one of them.
Next time, he intended to be strong enough that survival wouldn’t need to depend upon luck or the contents of the System Shop.
Shaking his head, Stan forced those thoughts from his mind and returned his attention to the mirror before him.
The skin along his chest and arms was flawless in the specific way that skin was only flawless in photographs or on the cover of a fashion magazine. Every small imperfection he had lived with since adolescence had quietly disappeared. The small scar along his ribs from a childhood bike accident had been smoothed away entirely, while the faint stress lines that had begun gathering at the corners of his eyes over the past year of life in Wanhai simply weren’t there anymore.
The line of his shoulders was cleaner. The definition along his stomach was sharper and more pronounced without appearing unnatural, every muscle seeming perfectly proportioned as though sculpted by an obsessive artist. Even his complexion appeared healthier than before.
His hair, still a little longer than he usually wore it, fell across his forehead with the small annoying wave it had always possessed, though now it somehow seemed to obey gravity in a slightly more cinematic manner.
For a moment, he simply stared at himself in silence.
If someone had shown him this reflection a month ago and claimed it was him, he would have assumed it had been edited beyond recognition.
He looked better than he ever had in his entire life.
No, better wasn’t quite the right word.
He looked like an edited, perfected version of himself, as though someone had taken every good feature he possessed and quietly refined it to the absolute limit without changing who he was.
It was still unmistakably Stan Harrison standing before the mirror, but at the same time, it almost didn’t feel entirely real.
His strength had increased. His body had changed. He had walked through Antarctica, survived things that should have remained nothing more than myths and conspiracy theories, inherited an ancient Sovereign’s legacy, and come frighteningly close to death more than once.
Sometimes, it was difficult to believe that all of that had happened within the span of a few short weeks.
His lips curved into a faint smile before he shook his head helplessly.
His life had become absurd a long time ago.
And somehow, he had a feeling things were only just beginning.
He was not sure how he felt about that.
Sighing softly, he turned on the shower. The rainhead came alive with the low, steady rush of pressurized water striking stone, the specific sound of a modern shower running at full pressure, a soft, continuous roar that would carry through a closed door into a quiet apartment with the ease of any other sustained mechanical noise.
Stan stepped in and ler water hit him.
He closed his eyes and simply, for a moment, stood beneath it.
The warmth slowly washed away the lingering exhaustion buried deep within his muscles. The past several days had been absurd even by the increasingly ridiculous standards his life had begun to operate on. Antarctica. Ancient inheritances. Near-death experiences. Cultivation techniques. Werewolves. An ancient Royal Blood vampire currently sitting in his living room.
Sometimes, saying it aloud made it sound even more unbelievable.
He exhaled quietly and allowed himself to relax for the first time since returning home.
For now, everything else could wait.
In the living room, Camilla lifted her head very slightly at the sound.
The soft, continuous rush was, unmistakably, water.
It sounded like a small waterfall.
But it was not the sound she associated with any form of bathing she had ever experienced, not the small, polite sluice of a servant pouring from a jar over the shoulders of a bathing noblewoman, not the deep, slow lap of an ornate cultivator’s bathing pool, nor the crisp splash of a mountain stream diverted through an ancient stone channel.
It was steady. Endlessly, evenly, unhurriedly steady.
Like a waterfall.
As though some artifact hidden within the walls had, upon command, opened a permanent channel to a river and simply allowed that river to run for as long as it was asked to.
Her red eyes narrowed very slightly.
’What have they built?’ she wondered. ’What form of small, clever mechanism produces such a flow on such demand from the wall of a private residence?’
The more time she spent among modern humanity, the stranger they became.
They possessed neither spirit veins nor cultivation arts worthy of mention, and yet they had somehow filled their cities with countless small miracles that most cultivators of ancient times would have found absurd.
They had conquered the sky without wings, spoken across continents through small rectangles of glass and metal, preserved food for months within cold boxes that consumed neither ice nor spiritual energy, and illuminated entire cities brighter than the stars themselves without so much as a formation engraved upon the ground.
Humanity was, she had slowly begun to realize, extraordinarily clever.
Dangerously so. She stood in the middle of the living room and listened for another moment.
The instinct rose within her before she consciously registered it, the small, automatic pulse of a cultivator of her rank preparing to extend her spirit sense through the intervening walls to observe the mechanism directly. The same spirit sense she had extended across an entire continent of ice not twenty-four hours ago, cataloguing the werewolf pack, every scientific outpost, and every part of the surface for hundreds of kilometers in every direction.
She caught the instinct at the very edge of forming.
A small pale flush rose along the line of her jaw.
She had, in her hurry to satisfy her curiosity, been approximately half a heartbeat away from casually extending her spirit sense into the bathroom of a man who was, she reminded herself with the small, offended dignity of a woman who prided herself on never being caught uncomposed, currently inside it and decidedly unclothed.
The flush deepened by exactly one shade.
’What am I even thinking?’ she scolded herself very firmly in the private courtroom of her own thoughts. ’My intention was entirely to observe the mechanism. The mechanism. I have observed a great many things in my lifetime and I am not about to disgrace myself by fumbling my discretion over a bathroom in an apartment.’
She paused briefly before adding, somewhat less confidently,
’A very fascinating mechanism, admittedly.’
There was absolutely no reason for her curiosity to extend any further than that.
None whatsoever.
She turned very deliberately away from the direction of the bathroom.
She walked, with what she considered admirable composure, towards the tall glass wall overlooking the city beyond the penthouse.
The sight before her was beautiful in a way entirely different from the world she remembered.
No towering immortal mountains draped in clouds. No ancient palaces suspended amongst the heavens. No spirit rivers flowing across floating continents.
Instead, there were countless lights stretching endlessly towards the horizon like stars scattered across the earth itself. Glass towers pierced the night sky while the distant glow of countless vehicles flowed through the streets below like rivers of light.
Humanity had built its own stars. For all their weakness as individuals, there was something strangely magnificent about that.
The soft sound of the shower continued quietly in the background, unhurried, endless, and cheerfully unaware of the small internal argument taking place in the middle of the living room.
After a moment, having successfully redirected herself, Camilla permitted a more measured thought to surface.
’When he is finished, I will bathe as well,’ she decided solemnly. ’I shall inspect the mechanism directly. In person. From within the room. As a civilized observer.’
After all, firsthand observation was the foundation of proper scholarship.
There was nothing strange about that.
She nodded once to herself. Composure restored.
Her gaze returned to the magnificent city stretching before her as a small smile unknowingly found its way onto her lips.
The world had changed far more than she had imagined she thought, it’s nothing like her ancestors said it was...
And perhaps that was not such a terrible thing after all.