Side Omake: The Ghost and The Fool(Negaverse Good Seed)
yes. said:
I finally caught up! This quest is fantastic, and I'm so excited to join in with my own Good Seed.
Name: Alexander Pallikari
Age: 15
Cultivation: First Heavenstage of Qi Condensation(Effectve Cultivation Age: 20)
Current Goals: Twelfth Heavenstage, then Eight Pillars, then Twin-Souled
Cool Thing: The hilt of the Weeping Conqueror.
Alexander is bonded to the shattered remnants of what was once a mighty treasure, the personal weapon of the legendary Vermillion Cloud Hunter, Shen Zhihao. While the sword itself has been reduced to a rusted, broken hilt and nothing more, the ghost of Shen Zhihao dwells within it, trapped after a botched transmigration. He can speak to Alexander, offering him advice and counsel; in exchange, Alexander has sworn an oath to gain the power he needs to free his teacher from his prison.
Impact: None
Deafening roars seemed to shake the earth. Fire and wings filled the sky. A palpable, savage anger, so intense even the least spiritually aware mortals could feel it, bore down upon the people of Little Creek. One thousand Soul-Sucking Dragonflies, led by a massive insectoid demon with countless eyes and mouths, approached the town with bloodlust in their eyes, and no one could tell why.
As far as Alexander was concerned, it was the end of the world.
"Oh dear, this just won't do at all." Declared the voice of a man far less worried than he ought to be. Hundreds of eyes were on this man in an instant. He was covered in bandages and wearing nothiing but a borrowed pair of trousers, leaving his brawny, rippling physique on display. "Good doctors are hard to find, not just anyone could have saved my life. I have no money, so as payment I'll deal with those pests."
The confusion and mockery of the townsfolk was immediate. "What are you talking about? You look like you can barely stand!" One woman shouted. "There's no point in playing brave right now, we have to run." Challenged an old man.
"I said, I'll
deal with them!" the man insisted with a cocky smile as an intense aura, so thick that mortal eyes could clearly see it, swirled around him. Blood began to sluggishly ooze from the stranger's wounds in a few places, creating dark stains in the bandages that held him together, but if the strange man was worried, he didn't let it show.
Everyone fell silent as they realized they stood before an immortal. Not only that, but he was not like one the already mighty Legionairres who would pass through their part of the desert from time to time. This was the kind of being that legends and myths were written about.
Only one person dared to move or speak: a little girl, no more than five. She ran up to the man, presenting before him an ordinary kitchen knife. Large and heavy enough to kill a man, sure, but hilariously underwhelming before a huge spirit beast. "Mr. immortal, you don't have a sword, take this! Cut up all those big monsters and save us!"
The Cultivator chuckled and patted the little girl's head. "Why, with a mighty weapon like this, I can't lose, can I?" He joked, twirling the knife with effortless grace. "Thanks, kid. I'll be right back."
Through methods these mortals could not possibly hope to understand, the stranger tossed the knife up into the air, where it seemed to shimmer and melt into goo. By the time the mundane instrument came back down to the man's hand, it was a large and heavy saber, thrumming with raw power. Then, leaping a hundred feet into the air and making a strange gesture with his free hand, he made the blade change again, growing to dozens of times its previous size as he twirled it in his hand.
With a battle cry so big and powerful it seemed to shake the foundations of every house, the Cultivator brought down that building-sized saber and, simply put, obliterated everything in from of him. A wave of unfathomable power swallowed up a third of the approaching beast army and kept going, striking the hill behind them and blowing it to smithereens in an obscenely loud explosion that threw dust all the way to heaven. By the time the stranger touched back down on the ground, the saber was back to its previous size.
The immortal laughed joyously at the awed gazes of his audience. "It's a pretty cool trick, isn't it? Well keep watching, because I'm going to show you a whole lot more!" Dashing into the fray of battle without fear, the stranger glowed with an otherworldly light and-
----
"Alexander! Alexander, wake up!" a man's voice shouted, shaking the young man out of his pleasant dream.
He groaned, cracking open a pair of bleary eyes and reluctantly sitting up. A stocky young man with short hair and and brawny physique, he looked fairly unramarkable,`like the archetypal Golden Devil you might see in a textbook. "What do you want, man? Can't you let me sleep just a few minutes longer?"
"It's quarter to nine! You're going to be late to work again!" The other teenager yelled, pushing Alexander's broad body out of bed with all of his strength.
"Oh shit! Not again!" Alexander gasped, rushing about the room like a whirlwind as he got dressed and prepared for the day ahead of him.
"You're still so forgetful." His roommate, Jason, chided. "Shouldn't Basic Training have beaten that out of you already?"
"Oh, you know me. I'm always slow to change." Alexander noted, grapping a piece of salted meat and tearing into it as he laced up his boots. "Have a nice day!" He called out, running off toward his shift.
----
Alexander did not have a perfect internal clock by any means, but he believed he could probably make it exactly on time. Being only a Junior Aspirant in the First Heavenstage, he was no faster than a mortal, which was a real pain. He'd seen Legionairres rush from place to place so fast his eyes could barely follow them - he'd hardly ever be late if he could run that fast.
He was, as it turned out, exactly one minute late, but the foreman didn't seem to notice. This foreman, an old man with a long green beard, was his favorite out of all of them, because he didn't sweat the small stuff. The man in question began to list off what trash they would be digging through today - namely, the refuse scavenged from an old battlefield in the Burnished Crags, discovered by a scouting force.
There wasn't too much of value here; just what couldn't be looted in the sloppy, hasty barbaroi warfare that left those bodies there to rot. The low and medium quality spirit steel would be cleaned of rust in an acidic solution, then melted down in forges to be repurposed. The rest would be disassembled for any useful raw materials, some of which would be doled out to poor mortal cities in need of wellfare.
The menial work of sorting through the massive pile of scrap was performed Junior Aspirants, as the work, while useful, was degrading and did not require superhuman attributes in the slightest. Alexander didn't exactly enjoy it - nobody did, really - but it was a good source of contribution points, and if he wanted to become a true Aspirant before he turned thirty, he had to bring in plenty of points.
The First Heavenstage was essentially free. As a cadet, a Golden Devil was not asked to do anything except train and cultivate, and they were provided with a carefully regulated income of spirit stones so as not to overwhelm their dormant meridians. After that, everyone from the lowliest Junior to the Elders themselves was expected to make themselves useful and earn their keep.
...in theory, at least. The truth was that, as among mortals, wealth begets more wealth, and those who came from powerful families would be provided far more resources by their relatives, climb the ranks faster, take on harder missions sooner and bring in a bigger income, on top of their family's resources. Alexander, being the son of mortal merchants without a single Cultivator in his ancestry as far as he knew, had no support. Still, he wasn't particularly competitive; he'd rather everyone do well, and the Contibution Board insured that even people like him could reliably advance if they had the talent and the drive for it.
He would become a savior, no matter what it took. The ideal of a heroic immortal who protects humanity frm the predations of evil - a childish notion, perhaps, but one worth aspiring towards. The look in that mysterious man's eyes as he dazzled onlookers and slew his enemies with style, power and flair, was one which he would never forget. If Alexander could do something like that, just once in his whole life, he would die without regrets.
"Alright kids, you know the drill. Get to work, and don't you slack off! We need this sorted in one hour." The foreman announced as he pushed a wheeled contraption onto the foundary floor. Atop it, a massive mound of salvage was piled high, likely weighing well over one ton. With no fanfare to speak of, the team of Juniors began to retrieve items, inspect them, and place them into one of many quickly-growing piles.
To an onlooker it might have seemed random, but there was a precise method to inspecting and grading salvage. On one extreme end was the pile of stuff so low-quality that it was fit only for a refuse heap, and on the other was materials judged to still be fully useable as-is, set aside for cleaning, maintenence and storage. Almost everything, however, went in the middle; either metal for the forge, leather for recycling or fabric for stitching. Alexander had gotten so accustomed to rating salvage that he could determine the right pile for each piece in under ten seconds every time.
For a while, the young man worked, head empty save for the occasional daydream about fighting demons and monsters. But then, something in the pile siezed the Junior Aspirant's attention. Perhaps it was some unusual gleam, suspicious sound, or just a flash of intuition, but Alexander was transfixed.
Something was wrong. Whenever Alexander's hand brushed against a particular part of the pile, a series of tingles rushed up his arm. He dug through the refuse for a bit, following whatever direction made him tingle the hardest. Finally, he pulled something out - this had to be it.
It was the hilt of a sword, he realized after a moment. No, half a hilt, and covered in rust at that. Beneath the damage, he could fintly make out graceful, swirling grooves in the metal, perhaps some kind of pattern. In what seemed to be the pommel there was simply an empty socket, perhaps having once held a large gemstone or something similar. It must have been beautiful once, but to his eyes it seemed no different now than any other piece of junk. Except... there was something about it that seemed to resonate with him. Alexander had no idea why, but the idea of letting this hilt get melted down disgusted him - he had to save it.
"This one's got a different feel to it, don't you think?" Alexander mused, turning the piece of scrap end over end in his hand and tracing the grooves with his finger.
"Don't handle that thing so carelessly, you might get Soul Tetanus." a coworker warned him playfully.
"Ain't Soul Tetanus just a myth?" Alexander shot back.
"Who knows? Though at our level, we can probably still get regular tetanus, so be careful."
"Yeah yeah, I understand." Alexander said dismissively, looking around for the foreman. "Senior! Can I buy this piece?"
The foreman in question barely even glanced at him. "Sure, keep it on you and talk to me after your shift, we'll negotiate a price."
The young man pumped his fist in triumph, tucking the broken hilt away in his pocket and continuing to sort through the haul.
The rest of the shift passed without any notable incident, and the Senior was nice enough to help him negotiate a good price in exchange for an hour of overtime the next day. Alexander agreed readily, as compared to the points the crafty foreman's haggling had saved him, an hour without pay was a pittance.
Dropping his newfound trinket off at the meager apartment he shared with Jason, he made sure to delicately wrap the thing in a bundle of cloth. It wasn't like Jason was a thief; he just couldn't help but want to treat his new treasure as nicely as he could. Leaving all thoughts of this development for later, Alexander left to go attend weapons training.
----
In the dark, something stirred. Someone, even, if only barely. This tiny, wretched tangle of thoughts writhed and squirmed, reaching out in search of sapience. It shook off a sleep so deep it was like the darkness of outer space, like the bottom of an ocean trench, like the bowels of the Turtle Emperor.
"How many years has it been this time? In whose hands do I rest today?"
Awareness returned, bit by bit, only to cut off after a few feet. He was on a dark wooden desk of unremarkable quality. Off to the side was a window, through which the yellow light of the sun was beginning to shift to the crimson of dusk. Next to him sat a single notebook, and atop that book sat the sad remains of a half-completed puzzle box. All in all, precious little information.
"My senses should go farther than this, even with a weak wielder. Are my powers being sealed?"
Powerless to do anything else, that dark consciousness instead focused its attention on a thread of qi, too fine and too sophisticated for anyone below Core Formation to even detect. Through it, an agonizingly thin and slow stream of qi was drip-fed to him, like blood through an artery. This puny amount of qi... this wasn't the tense, strangled feeling of a sealed connection, this was an entirely unmolested flow!
"That can't be right. This is... First Heavenstage? That's impossible, someone that weak wouldn't be able to link with my vessel."
Well, there was no way to progress without communication - he couldn't even see far enough to tell who was on the other end of this thread - Time to discuss things. Sending out a miniscule trickle of qi to vibrate his blade and produce audible sound, Shen Zhihao announced his presence.
"Greetings. Rejoice, for you have discovered the great Weeping Conqueror! Tell me your name, so I might come to know its new wielder."
...no response. The ghost cleared his theoretical throat.
"Excuse me, I must not have been heard. I said, you have disovered the Weeping Conqueror! You are now its wielder! What is your name!?"
Still nothing. Was this person weak
and deaf? Wait. The ancient being hadn't noticed at first, what with having not heard anything in so long, but he wasn't actually making any sound. Was his qi not reaching the blade?
...there was no blade. What he dwelled within was merely the bottom half of a hilt.
Fuck.
"Fuck."
Nothing to do but stew in his frustration and wait, then. Regenerating from this much damage would take a tremendous amount of qi, or a smaller amount over a very long time. How in the world had his vessel been so badly shattered? He couldn't recall precisely what happened the last time he was awake; his most recent memory was being used by that pompous fool from the Saber Palace, who had decent swordplay but an incorrigible personality. He'd been getting to some Elder or another, right? Not like it mattered now. When he had moved so far south, he had no idea.
After a few hours, Shen Zhihao heard a door creak open, and approaching footsteps. A man - or a boy, rather; not even twenty yet most likely - stepped into his limited view. A fairly ordinary boy, if more thickyly muscled than most, this Junior didn't leave much of a first impression at first glance. With all of his meager might, the ghost tugged on the string connecting them, resonating slightly within the tiny pool of qi in the Junior's dantian.
The boy responded, though whether he consciously felt the pull, the broken treasure couldn't be sure. "Come on, there's gotta be something here. My instincts wouldn't make so much noise over nothing, right?" He rambled, shaking the piece of scrap and gently knocking it against a corner of his bedframe. "What sort of magic are you hiding, Mr. Salvage? I'm Alexander, I saved you."
After spending several minutes screaming at the top of his metaphorical lungs, Shen Zhihao accepted that he couldn't send any telepathic communication through this pathetic qi thread. In that case the only thing he could do was wait for it to be strengthened.
"Figure it out already, you fool..." he grumbled, feeling around for any kind of influence he could exert in the physical world.
"I'll tell you what. I'm pretty tired right now from training, and I don't have much qi, so I need what I've got left right now to live." Alexander chuckled. "I'm gonna cultivate for ten hours and then go to sleep. Once I wake up I should have enough to experiment."
So the boy wasn't completely stupid after all! Yes, this was perfect. If Shen Zhihao could open a dialogue, then he could get this youngster to hand him off to someone competent. From there he could work on restoring himself once more over the next few centuries. It would no doubt be an infuriatingly slow process, but he wouldn't have become the Vermillion Cloud Hunter if he didn't know how to play the long game.
----
Unfortunately, it was even slower going than the old piece of junk had anticipated. The boy's qi reserves were so meager that it took ten days of investing bits and pieces of qi into the ruined treasure, which drank it like the desert sand takes rain, until the connection was strengthened.
"Hello? Can you hear me yet?" A strange voice called out, seeming to resonate inside of Alexander's head. He yelped and dropped the little hunk of spirit steel.
"Be careful! My vessel is in terrible shape already!" The voice scolded.
"Er... I'm guessing it worked, then? Wow, I knew you'd be something awesome but I didn't know you'd talk to me..." Alexander marvelled, holding the treasure reverently.
"The sword itself has no intelligence, it's merely a weapon. I am another being, inside the sword." The treasure explained.
"My name is Shen Zhihao. You hold in your hand the sorry remains of the legendary blade, Weeping Conqueror. Continue to nurture me through our connection and I will make it worth your while."
"Wait wait wait hold on! Slow down! I've gotta ask you some things before we go talking about stuff like that." Alexander replied, picking up the piece of spirit steel and sitting back down on his bed. He had carefully cleaned almost all of the rust off on the first day, but now the young man noticed that the remaining rust had all fallen off, and the patterns carved into the hilt seemed a little bit less faded. "You know, stuff like 'what actually are you' and 'what does this Weeping Conqueror do', you know? That name is very sketchy, I don't wanna use some evil sword that eats babies or something!"
"No, the Weeping Conqueror does not eat anyone. What I am is a ghost, or rather, I would be a ghost if not for this vessel to which I am bound. I attempted to transmigrate at the moment of my death, but only made it five feet, into my own sword." Shen Zhihao patiently explained, as if he'd done this a hundred times before(maybe he had!).
"Feed qi to me and I'll use it to restore the sword myself, don't worry about the details. In exchange, I shall draw upon my three thousand years of knowledge and teach you whatever your heart desires."
Alexander made an almost comically enthusiastic facce, before reigning himself in for a moment. "Okay, that's amazing, but what does the sword do? I've heard stories of swords that make you do evil stuff, by puppeting you, or by not going back in the scabbard until they've killed someone."
"You are very hung up on this. Am I really to give away such secrets to such a lowly Junior?" the treasure sighed, a little overdramatically.
"To keep things simple, it produces a thick mist, as hard as the blade itself, which the wielder can command. A very useful tool to befuddle the enemy and defend yourself, though cutting them down relies on the wielder's own skill."
"Holy shit, that's amazing!" Alexander laughed boyishly. "And I picked a treasure like that out of the trash? You've got yourself a deal, you old monster!"
"I already wish I hadn't told you. Now you'll be thinking about the sword all wrong because you still have Junior Brain." Shen Zhihao rambled, his voice began to flicker and fade away.
"Shit! It's happening already? I've barely introduced myself!"
Already, after a mere quarter-hour of discussion, the connection was getting hazy and weak again.
"Damn, drained already?" Shen Zhihao lamented.
"Boy! Keep infusing what little qi you can into my vessel every morning, but not so much that it will get in the way of cultivation! I shall speak to you when I have enough energy. Think you can save me? Prove it by getting strong enough to-
From around there, the voice echoing in Alexander's mind became too indistinct to make out. He could just about guess what the old ghost meant, at least; reach a high enough cultivation that a mental connection could be maintained at all times. That meant ninety-six times more qi at the bare minimum - in other words, Foundation Establishment.
Alexander sighed. "You're a greedy little guy, aren't you?"
----
And so a routine of sorts was established, where Alexander would donate a substantial(to him) amount of qi to the treasure when he woke up in the morning, work and train in the day, cultivate from the early evening until most of the way through the night, then sleep until morning. Every ten days, Shen Zhihao was able to speak to him for another quarter-hour, gradually explaining his own situation as well as handing out simple tips on cultivation, as well as other pressing topics he was asked about.
And so, over the course of months, the old ghost began to weave a tall tale, if a relatively brief one. For such an ancient being with such an eventful life, many things had to be skipped over to get to the broader point. Alexander also suspected the ghost might be omitting some of his defeats, but he didn't dare say that.
Shen Zhihao was born in the Grand Cloud Empire, specifically in the Southeastern area known as the Meteor Valley, named for the fallen star which carved it into the ground. Cunning and intelligent, he found himself brought into the Heavenly Magnate Sect as a boy and rose through the ranks at a meteoric pace. After a long and successful career as a Core Formation Elder in the countless wars the Empire waged to keep invaders out and rebellious territories quashed, he became infamous for his brutally effective sword arts and billiant strategic mind. For these qualities, he was chosen over all other candidates to rise into the realm of Nascent Soul, becoming the right hand man of the Heavenly Magnate Sect's leader.
A couple of centuries then passed in relative(
very relative) mundanity, as Shen Zhihao became further embroiled in the endless beraucracy and politicking of helping to run a large sect. Bored to tears, he would often sneak off to have adventures, wishing for nothing more than to return to the days of his youth where he risked his life for thrills.
Then, one day, Shen Zhihao stumbled upon what was once a small nation, the evidence of the cost of the Cloud Emperor's dominance. In order to further enrich the core, as well as the favored parts of the periphery, this put-upon place and many others like it had paid the price. Stripped of their natural resources and with their culture tightly policed in order to make them more "civilized", these people's way of life was methodically choked out.
Shen Zhihao knew of this practice, of course; he'd known for a very long time. But seeing this in person was the straw that broke the camel's back. He had no loyalty to the Cloud Empire, and wished to go back to his old days of freedom and adventure. He also felt himself gripped by a desire to fight for liberation and freedom, to devote himself to a cause that he could actually believe in.
The legendary general had finally had enough. Formally seceeding from the Heavenly Magnate Sect, he and over a third of its Cultivators broke off and established themselves in the mountains, becoming the Unconquered Tiget Sect and funding acts of rebellion against the Empire across the mountains and the plains. Secure in their nearly unassailable defensive position, they proved a consistent thorn in the Empire's side, especially once they recruited a second Nascent, the mysterious and indomitable Green Sage, who never revealed his face or name to anyone. Time and again Shen Zhihao clashed against and defeated enemy Nascent Souls from various sects who would attempt to reconquer his territory, and soon he became known as the Vermillion Cloud Hunter.
When not defending their position, his forces would perform raids en masse, stealing massive hauls of materials and treasures in their daring, brazen sacking of their neighbors, allowing them to grow quickly, pulling in more and more towns and cities on the Empire's southeast periphery. Five hundred years after he left the Heavenly Magnate Sect, the Vermillion Cloud Hunter returned to conquer it in a bloody and furious conflict, eventually slaying its leader and bringing the Sect(and its new second-in-command) to its knees as a vassal of the Unconquered Tiger Sect. Shen Zhihao had become a feared old monster with two Nascent Subordinates, and it seemed like his reign of terror would continue forever.
But as with most dreams, reality one day came knocking. Jin Zexian, an old rival from his Core Formation days, returned to menace Shen Zhihao once again. Again and again the two clashed, as this infuriatingly persistent man somehow always managed to find and attack Shen Zhihao when he left the sect. The two genuinely liked each other, and both would have rather not fought to the death like this, but Jin Zexian didn't care for his rival's objections to the Empire, desiring only to punish him for all the damage and suffering his rebellion had caused. After many years of fierce duels, Shen Zhihao was finally cut down for good, but he had one trump card left.
The old monster attempted the extremely difficult Ninefold Path-Paving Transmigration technique, which would have, if it succeeded, stealthily sent his soul right into the nearest newborn baby, consuming all of his original body's cultivation base to bless this new one with a massive boost in cultivation aptitude, to get him back up to Nascent Soul faster.
The problem, however, was that Shen Zhihao did not possess the full technique. He had gathered fragments of data and knowledge from old ruins and snatched shards of memory right out of the minds of old masters, but while he broadly understood the mechanics of Ninefold Path-Paving, the precise method of controlling it was not known to him. In his arrogance, Shen Zhihao thought he could reverse-engineer the remainder of the technique by himself based off theory. The result was disaster; Shen Zhihao's soul was ripped away and instead placed into a nearby object - his sword. His cultivation base was burned away, but while some entered the weapon to empower it beyond the strength it already possessed, most of it simply evaporated into the air, returning to the heavens once more.
From there, the Weeping Conqueror found its way into the hands of many warriors, as the ghost bound himself to promising Cultivatiors in the hopes they might someday find a way to resurrect him. The blade had been wielded by all sorts of masters for all sorts of purposes, and Shen Zhihao was not very picky, only refusing his services to truly heinous villains. So long as he got another shot at returning to life, he'd put up with a lot, but thus far none of his projects had paid off.
After changing hands dozens of times, the blade eventually moved to the west, and at some point went south into the desert. The details of how Weeping Conqueror had traveled often eluded its resident, his constant forging and breaking of qi bonds rendering his memory of this past millenium hazy.
----
"And then at some point I suppose the Weeping Conqueror broke. Perhaps some idiot cannibal attempted to use the weapon after I refused to bond with him, only to find it no stronger than an ordinary blade without my permission." Shen Zhihao somberly lamented, finally concluding his life story.
"And then you got found and put in a pile of salvage..." Alexander sighed, now looking thoroughly depressed. "Talk about downhill. That chunk just looked like generic garbage, I couldn't even tell it was part of a hilt at first."
"If I was in such a sorry state, and you knew nothing about the Weeping Conqueror, then why did you pick it out of that rubbish heap?" Shen Zhihao asked after a moment of contemplation.
Alexander laughed and scratched his head. "That's the thing, I'm still not sure why myself. I think... I think it felt like someone needed to be saved."
The ghost made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a choked bark of laughter.
"Saved? Me, asking a First Heavenstage to save me?" The ghost sputtered.
"No, it didn't feel like you asked. Just that... Ah, I don't have the words for it!" Alexander threw up his hands, giving up on being articulate. "The point is, we're gonna work together and I'm gonna rescue you!"
"You only say such things because you don't understand how absurd they are. In the Third Sea, one percent of Qi Condensation Cultivators reach Foundation Establishment. One percent of Foundation Establishment Cultivators reach Core Formation. You'd need to be at least that powerful to even restore this vessel to its full strength. To free me and resurrect me in a living body would be unthinkable to anyone below Nascent Soul, and even for those it would be difficult. I have been attempting to resurrect myself for over one thousand years. For you to claim you shall be the one to do is folly so ridiculous that I can't even feel offended!" Shen Zhihao mocked. The ghost began to chuckle, which then broke into full-throated laughter.
"Ambition is good, but be reasonable; first you should promise to restore my hilt; you could do that at Foundation Establishment."
Alexander rolled his eyes in response to the jeering. "Yeah, yeah, laugh it up! Laugh at me as much as you want, It'll make me even more proud when I do it!" He shot back with a cocky grin, shaking the treasure as if he were throttling a man's neck.
"Yes, that's it! Get mad at me and get even bolder!" the old monster continued to laugh.
"You're a very endearing kid, I'll give you that. I like seeing impetuous fuckers like you succeed - makes me feel nostalgic."
And so, from then on, the old ghost and the young fool pledged to work together. A life-defining moment for Alexander and a deeply familiar one for Shen Zhihao, it would go on to affect both in ways they never thought possible.
Glad I could finally get this one done. This is basically the introduction for what my Good Seed would have been if I hadn't gone with Gaius. Well, realistically if I'd written it back then it would have been shorter and just kind of worse overall.
Ah man, I'm starting to feel nostalgic for something that never existed. Maybe in a sequel quest I'll create a character like this.
The wordcount tracker doesn't include quotes, but if you include the fake quotes this omake is 5,473 words.
