He appeared from pixels that binded together and shaped his in-game avatar. Surprisingly, Lu turned out to be exactly as he expected, which was inadvertently, at the same time, what he did not expect.
Looking closely at his reflection in the water, he did not look like his avatar from the game, but looked like himself. Lu shrugged off the unsettling fact and gazed ahead of him, and found that the terrain was the same as Monitum as well, though it did not surprise him for "what else could it have appeared like?", he thought.
The trees dotted the plains of medium-sized grass, and stones littered as much as the brown patches untouched by nature. The only item out of place was the girl hacking down the innocent trees using her scythe while roaring as loud as she could with each strike.
"Hi..." Lu silently crept up to her, not knowing what to say, or how.
After Autumn realized who the source of the voice was, she instantly dashed to where he was and pointed the tip of her weapon on his throat.
The boy did not move an inch.
"Go ahead. In here, you can kill me as many times as you'd like. I'll be respawning over there so if you want you can kill me over and over again in that same spot" Lu pointed at where he appeared.
Autumn thought for a moment before she dropped her scythe and it evaporated shortly after. She turned away from Lu and started walking the other direction.
"Hey...um, can I show you something?" Lu asked politely.
She stopped on her tracks and turned back to him with an uninterested expression.
"Here let me just..." Lu shot seven feathers into the ground which dissolved as if the dirt turned into magma. In place of the feathers, seven symbols created a perfectly circular glyph, glowing blue for a short time before turning into a part of the ground.
"Follow me" he said, jumping in and disappearing as soon as his feet landed inside the small circle.
Naturally curious, Autumn followed his lead. She felt blinded by a white abyss for a moment, and when her sight returned, she was in a completely different location.
What she witnessed widened her eyes and took her breath away. The skies were painted orange and the clouds lined up in beautiful natural patterns, mostly like fluffy popcorns. The sun sat on the heart of the horizon and gave the waters in front of it a beautiful hue.
Autumn was standing on nothing but a long, thin layer of rock branching out from a tall, rock mountain. The strong but gentle breeze caressed her, and even the trees around her made her feel comforted.
"Welcome to Eversunset cliff...or so I called it" Lu took back his grand presentation.
Autumn did not not utter a word, but almost in awe. She walked to the edge of the rock and sat, letting her legs hang from the edge of a thousand-meter drop.
Lu sat a little distant from her. "Even back in my world, almost nobody has seen this place. To get here you must go through trials that do not make sense, each one extremely difficult to clear, and is meant to feel like it the challenges never end. One day I thought I would try to last as long as I could and ended up here. There's no reward or anything, but the view is cool. You get only one place to stamp your teleport waypoint so it made sense that many set it up on their houses. I decided to stamp mine here. That meant I could no longer set up a house anywhere even though it would be highly impractical, but I'd say it was well worth the exchange. The time of day here never changes and it's good for when I need to take a breather and run away from everything for a little while, you know what I mean?"
YOU ARE READING
Project: iaseki
FantasyShot by his own sister, to death or whatever, he knows not. All Lu knows is that he was transported to the world of Monitum, the first full-dive videogame created by his own sister Leila. Lu, being one of the best players in the world, thought it's...
