1 The Forest

In a night that was darker than black, a young girl ran through a forest.

She seemed to be frightened as she ran, weaving through trees left and right as she jumped over a few rotten logs on the way.

She was running from something.

Something... intangible.

A light.

As she ran through the forest, it seemed to have an eery and oppressive atmosphere. The silence of it all gave her the creeps and made her fear stack up to a new level along with her chase.

The forest... didn't seem normal. It didn't have the usual howls of wolves, the usual scurrying in the bushes, the crickets of grasshoppers, the crawling of insects.

The forest was silent.

As if frozen in time.

Hell, even the leaves weren't moving!

There was no wind shaking the leaves, no bark breaking under the girl's feet.

Everything seemed trapped in lifelike statues. But instead of the stone grey colour of stone, there was actual colour to them! It was all so bizarre.

But even then, the girl never stopped running.

She didn't want to accept her fate, so she continued running.

But no matter how long she ran, there was only the ever oppressive silence emitting from the forest.

A silence that was louder than any sound could ever be.

The girl was scared. Oh so scared!

The girl had never seen lights jump out of nowhere and start following her around.

It didn't seem to go away no matter what she did! It had an eery blue light to it, and it didn't seem to go away from her vision no matter how much she swiped her arms around in the air.

It just wouldn't go away. It even had weird symbols on it, that she wasn't willing to see properly.

The girl continued running as she imagined how she should've reached her town by now.

She was sure she was running around the forest of her town. Or where else could she be right now?

But this forest was too long. Much longer than the forest she was used to.

She would know. Since she had her night-time escapades relatively often in this forest.

But soon, the girl started noticing how the clouds didn't move either. There was barely any moon shining in the sky. But the light it did shine, somehow made the already dark forest even darker than it should've been if there was no light.

But, the blue light never stopped glowing in the dark regardless, as it floated in front of her vision.

The light seemed to be her guide.

A torch in this oppressive darkness of mediocrity.

The girl ran and ran. She didn't know why she was still running, but she didn't dare to think about it at this point.

She was all alone in a forest as she was chased by a silent mystical being.

A silent mystical being.

Silent being.

Silence...

'Wait...' She thought to herself as she stopped running, realising a horrifying possibility.

Soon, the girl looked at her feet.

She lifted it up and stomped it on the ground as she crushed the leaves under her foot.

Silence.

She saw a twig and stepped on it as well, as it snapped in two.

Still, there was only silence.

She started panicking slightly as she grabbed a nearby branch and slammed it against a tree, breaking violently against its trunk.

Silence...

The girl started taking shallow and quick breaths.

She looked up and screamed.

...

But there was still no sound.

She was finally terrified.

She was afraid before, but what she was feeling now was pure abject horror.

A type of fear far deeper than just fright.

Horror...

The girl finally crumbled on the spot. Tears welling up in her eyes.

She looked to the floor crestfallen crying her thoughts out to the forest floor.

"How did I even come here!?"

Was she trapped by some sick magician as some sort of sadistic game? But which powerful magician would even care about her? She was only a commoner! No, even worse. A slum dweller!

This wasn't fun anymore.

This was horrifying.

This was not an illusion.

In the end, the young girl lifted her head, as she gazed up into the blue light that had been following her this entire time.

She wiped her tears as she squinted her blurry vision to try and see what the blue light was supposed to be.

She couldn't understand what she was seeing.

The blue light seemed to have strange symbols on it that she thought could be words.

At least she reckoned they were! She didn't have any clue about literature since she couldn't read, so this was her best guess.

The girl stared at the words for a long time, until she saw two more strange symbols underneath those words from before.

They seemed to be choices. Why were there choices?

The two options were colour coded with green and red. Even though she couldn't read the words, she could somehow still have a basic understanding of what those symbols meant.

Maybe it was the blue light helping her?

Who knows. Because she definitely didn't.

Either way, the blue light was giving her a choice.

A choice to change her life.

[Welcome to the Cultivating Seductress System host!]

[Do you accept the system and allow it to integrate basic systems, functions and knowledge of functions into the host's mind?]

[Yes]

[No]

[Warning! If the Host rejects the Cultivating Seductress System, her beauty will be taken as compensation and most possibly be left severely crippled after the rejection!]

[Please choose wisely...]

What the fuck?

Now she was ridiculing her fate.

This system was a monster!

Her beauty was all she had in this god-forsaken world of hers!

Sure, she didn't understand the concepts of system integration but she knew the concepts of punishment and penalty very well!

She had plenty of punishment in her life after all, ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

But this was a different type of punishment than she was used to.

This wasn't even a choice for her!

But regardless, she still wanted to know more about this 'Cultivating Seductress System'. And, she also didn't want the overbearing penalty from her rejection of it.

Her fear with a mixture of curiosity was making the green especially appealing.