4 Chapter 4: Why.

I thought that I was outside of the city entirely, but it turns out that I was just outside of the Xia family's compound.

That made my entire charade useless since I now still had to find a way out of the city without being found out.

Suddenly, I felt a tingle to my palm, my left palm to be precise. I saw glimmers, small flashing lights, coming from the magical circle tattoo on my palm.

It seemed to be pointing in a direction.

Maybe, but what could go wrong?

So I just followed the direction in which Mark wanted me to go.

Eventually, about an hour later, I finally reached a mountain. This place was incredibly near where the Xiao facility's compound was, and I had just returned to the starting point of this whole adventure!

But it didn't matter, as I kept walking, following the tattoo's direction. I had never thought I would pick up hiking in a different world, but here I was.

I reached the foot of the mountain when the tattoo started flickering faster and faster, until I finally reached where it wanted me to go.

I saw it then—two blades of grass flickering in and out of existence as if hiding themselves from my sight. I had no idea what I thought I would find, but I had to say, this was not it.

But my magical tattoo seemed to like these blades of grass, so I just gently uprooted them, not wanting to destroy whatever magical properties they had in them.

And once again, the green circle tattoo reacted in ways that I couldn't predict; it wrapped a weird green aura around the blades of grass, then they disappeared.

"What?" I asked, dumbfounded.

Today was a weird day.

Where did the disappearing grass go?

Then it reappeared, right in my hand.

"Huh."

Then I willed it to disappear, and it disappeared. Then I brought it out, and then I put it back in.

"Ok, this is useful; is this an inventory like in those mangas my girlfriend liked?" I mumbled to myself.

I didn't know what it was, but I just upgraded my weird magical circle tattoo to a higher level of importance in my mind.

The flickering in the tattoo disappeared then and there, just as the grass disappeared inside of it.

"Does it require sacrifices?" I thought, but then discarded the option; I could still take out the grass after all.

I then started looking around in search of where I had come from, but fortunately, or unfortunately, what I found was far more interesting.

I saw a figure lying on the ground; was it a person?

I ran in its direction, thinking that it was someone in need of medical attention, and I had taken a vow to help those in need. Whether it was in another world or not, it didn't matter to me.

I instantly got to the person's side, put my index and middle fingers on the side of their neck, right on the neck artery, and felt a regular but slower than usual heartbeat. The skin felt cold to the touch, so it might have been hypothermia, so I took off my shirt and laid it on her to try to warm her.

I opened their mouth to see if they had anything stuck in their throat; it was free.

She was alive and regular, probably passed out for whatever reason. I propped up the person's legs enough to promote blood circulation to the brain, noted that it was a young girl, and then continued my job.

I then immediately checked her breathing; two hands below her nose were enough for me to feel a slightly weak but steady breath; she probably wasn't in any danger.

I checked if she used any belts or other things that could stop the blood flow but found nothing, so I sighed in relief.

The only thing I could do was try to ventilate her as much as I could and pray for her to wake up.

Thankfully, there weren't any visible wounds, so she might probably wake up soon enough.

Only when I had made certain that her condition was stable did I realize that the grass around her seemed charred—not dark, even if the lack of daylight might make me think so, but completely burnt black.

I couldn't move the girl, as that could create further problems in her condition, but I still touched the grass, trying to find out what had happened to it and if it could in any way cause problems for the girl, but as soon as I touched it, the green tattoo on my hand started shining once again.

With a brilliance far greater than when it was guiding me to that disappearing grass, the grass near the girl soon turned back to its natural color, and the girl's breath started growing more vigorous each moment the brilliance from my magical tattoo touched her body.

I had no idea what this magical mumbo-jumbo was, but it worked.

Soon enough, the girl opened her eyes, showing a dark sclera with a menacing brilliance emitting from them.

I saw her hand moving slowly, so I firmly took it in mine and said, "It's okay, don't worry, I will make sure you can get back to your feet, so don't give up either." Trying to reassure her that she'd be fine.

But she didn't respond; instead, she moved her lips and said, "Sky... poison... pearl..."

'Sky Poison Pearl," So she had been poisoned?

Maybe this weird green magical aura worked to detoxify poisons in people's bodies. How did this work?

Did this help the body's natural detoxifying ability, or did it itself destroy the toxins?

In the second case, how did it distinguish between toxins and the rest of the body's essential molecules?

The nerd in me squealed in delight at the new and incredibly promising potential field of study; maybe I could make some discoveries from it that would warrant a Nobel prize, but the human in me had just realized that the girl had bit my finger and was sucking blood out of it.

I knew this was a different, weird, and magic-filled world, but weren't vampires a little too cliche?

I didn't panic, as that wouldn't help anything, and soon enough the girl stopped taking blood and let go of me, just as I hoped; bloodletting wasn't something I was keen on trying.

I sighed in relief, but the relief wasn't long-lived, as the girl disappeared in mist soon after, the mist which gathered and entered into the green tattoo in my hand.

I just stood there, still kneeling on what was now normal grass, empty of the vampire girl, confused out of my mind.

Did she go inside the tattoo?

That wouldn't be the weirdest thing I had experienced today; it was a close second, I could admit, but still not the weirdest.

The weirdest was obviously transmigrating to another world, but the disappearing, bloodsucking vampire girl had outclassed running away from an arranged marriage by more than a bit.

I tried to concentrate on the tattoo in the hopes of gleaning something from it, and miraculously, I succeeded.

I found myself once again in the world of green, and in front of me was the vampire girl.

Naked.

Why she was naked, I had no idea; why she was inside my body, I also had no idea.

What I did know was that peeking at a sleeping girl was wrong, especially since said girl seemed underage and was naked, so as soon as I realized the situation, I instinctively turned around, and only then did I remember I could just leave the green world altogether.

This was getting weirder than I could bear, so I once again took out the map I got from the Xia girl, whose name I had long forgotten for being too Chinese for my tastes, and decided that I would finally and definitively leave this incredibly weird city. Something told me that nothing good would remain of me if I stayed here.

Now that I thought about it, I needed to choose a name, or a nickname, to go by. Xiao Che wasn't good; I didn't want to get found out in the small possibility that someone knew of me outside this city, but I had no idea about the naming sense of these people.

I could use my old name, but that didn't seem good enough.

I chuckled. I might even choose Paracelsus if these people's medicine sucked enough; I might do as he did and burn these people's works publicly.

That would certainly bring me infamy, as it did to the Alchemist, and it might be fun.

So I walked in a random direction while consulting my map, but I had to admit that while it seemed really detailed and well done, it was unlike any other map I had seen.

Which wasn't good news because, for some reason, there was a big tortoise in the middle of the map. What that tortoise represented, I had no clue; it was just there.

And that wasn't the only thing weird; for some reason it was lacking the most vital part of a map, the metric scale. How would I know if it was oriented with the north up instead of the east, south, or west?

It took me a lot of trial and error, bumping into a lake when what I was expecting was a river, and the like, to finally figure out that it was a very weird map, with the east on top for some reason.

Having finally figured out which direction I should take, I figured I might as well go to the biggest city in the region, some place called New Moon City or something. Now I finally had all the time in the world to figure out what I was supposed to do from that moment forward.

This situation seemed too weird for it to be a dream, if it were one. As soon as I woke up, I decided that I would take up therapy.

So I devised a couple of plans in the increasingly likely possibility that this whole thing was real and not a fever dream.

Plan A was pretty simple: find the biggest city, figure out what the green circle on my hand was, wait for the vampire girl inside it to wake up, hoping that she did, and take up my profession as a medic to get found while I spent the money I got for research.

Just the green light was too big a research field to just ignore it; if I understood it and devised a way to replicate its poison-degrading effect outside of my body, it could be a gigantic boon to the people of this world.

Plan B was an add-on to Plan A; I could use the money I get from helping people to open a school to teach people the wonders of modern medicine, seeing as whatever that doctor the old man had brought to see me thought that he did was completely worthless.

But I would also have to teach people about physics and chemistry who would specialize in those fields. I would also need engineers to create the machines that we would need.

That would be a long endeavor, but a fruitful one nonetheless.

Plan C was a bit less of a surefire method, but I could try to bring stories and books from my old world into this new one; I might even go with the songs since this body has very flexible vocal cords and the Xia girl seemed to like Lost.

But, as I knew, plans never survive impact with the enemy, so I just made rough outlines and decided to adapt to whatever situation I would find myself in.

The way was long and torturous; who would have guessed that the nearest city was roughly two hundred kilometers away?

The good news was that this body was pretty fit, being able to jog for hours relatively fast without tiring too much. It took me just a week to reach a place called Cyan Forest City, as if the other places weren't named weirdly enough.

I was just about to finish the food and water that my wife-not-to-be gave me, but the money was more than enough to get more provisions for the rest of my journey. Not that I had any idea how much that money was worth, but it seemed enough.

But before going ahead with the rest of the journey, I decided to take it easy for a little while and rent a room at some random inn.

It was a pretty good place; they even had private baths, which I sorely needed since it had been over a week since my last bath, but unfortunately, I soon enough found my way back on the road.

I had to admit, this world was really beautiful, and I wasn't only talking about the landscape; everywhere I went, there were girls beautiful enough to turn heads, but I was a faithful man, and I would not be tempted.

Soon enough, I reached the final step of this journey, a city bigger than any I had seen in this world but still smaller than the big cities on Earth, New Moon City.