He asked himself, "What just happened here?"
He looked down at the girl lying behind the tree. Tears still shimmered in her eyes. She wasn't faking it. Her pain was real even if she was a scammer.
He sighed.
First, I'll help her. Then, once she wakes up, I'll chase her away.
Maybe this world had police. Or investigators. Or sects that enforced law. If she died on his mountain, someone might come. They could kill him. Or worse imprison him.
All because of a stranger.
So he picked her up and carried her back to the small house he'd built over the five years he had spent alone on this mountain.
Inside, he laid her gently on his bed.
She was still bleeding. Carefully, without touching more than necessary, he removed her top garments to expose the wound. He wasn't a healer far from it but he knew a few herbs, basic field remedies passed down by the land itself.
He crushed what he needed and applied the herbal paste to close the bleeding. Then he wrapped her side in cloth, tight but not suffocating.
When that was done, he went outside and slaughtered a chicken. He cooked a simple soup something warm, soft, easy to digest. A start-up meal.
Once she wakes up, I'll feed her. Then I'll send her away. That's it.
That's what he told himself.
But when the girl opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was him a boy standing over a clay stove, stirring soup. The scent made her stomach growl.
His face was calm. Strangely handsome. Focused on the cooking like it was sacred. The steam rising from the pot shimmered no, glowed with abundant spiritual energy.
She blinked. Something was wrong. Her body felt fine.
She had been poisoned. Her meridians were shattered. She should have been half-dead. But now now her body was whole. Not just healed renewed. Like nothing had ever happened.
She sat up.
No pain.
She stepped outside the wooden hut, stunned.
Everywhere she looked, she saw what cultivators could only dream of.
The air was thick with spiritual essence.
The soil hummed with power.
A small pond shimmered like liquid jade.
The stream was lined with spiritual carvings.
Pigs rooted nearby not ordinary beasts, but ones exuding auras from the Demon God Realm.
The chickens too. Ducks. Even the well radiated heavenly energy.
She couldn't believe it. This wasn't just a mountain.
This was a paradise.
But what shocked her the most what made her breath catch in her throat was him.
The boy.
He had no spiritual presence. Not even a ripple of aura. Like a mortal. An ordinary villager.
But when he turned his head, looked at her, and said:
"You're awake."
everything changed.
The pressure she had felt, the overwhelming spiritual suppression of the land… vanished.
Gone. Like it had never existed.
He hadn't done anything.
He just looked at her.
And everything bent around him.