Sounds of water splashing close by rang all around.
"Urgh…" Alex cried out as he slowly came to consciousness. He struggled to push himself against the crusty, hot ground to stand up. His left arm never touched the ground.
'Right, I don't have it anymore,' he thought. He slowly stood up to feel the cold wind blow past him. He saw vague light in front of him, but nothing else.
He used his spiritual sense to look around him. He was on top of hard ground, close to where the water entered his spiritual range.
He saw his own body. Fully black from burning from whatever the source was. Fortunately, it hadn't gone past his skin.
He had a memory of being poisoned, but the red veins he remembered were not on him anymore.
He stood there for a moment before he realized, he wasn't cultivating at all. "Huh?" he wondered.
He checked with his spiritual sense and he really wasn't cultivating at all.
"How… am I here when he's not cultivating?" Alex thought for a moment before he thought of an answer.
He wanted to believe it was true, but… the hope it gave was too much for him if it were not.
He took a single step forward. He moved… and nothing happened. He stepped again. Nothing happened once more.
"Is this true?" he wanted to cry, but no tears came out of his eyes. Even his eyelids were fully burnt from the heat of the source.
He slowly reached to his crusty eyelids and peeled them open to see in front of him.
There is was, with all of its greatness, and all of its terror. The ocean.
He remembered seeing this scenery with a lot of light around it, however, this was the first time he actually experienced it himself.
He felt the Qi in the air. There was not a single hint of Yang energy in it.
He looked around. He moved around. It was true. Somehow… it was true.
Finally, tears started flooding down his face.
"I'm Free! I'm finally free!" he cried out. It had been ages since he could control his own body.
He wiped the tears off, ignoring the pain he felt when he did so. In fact, the pain made him feel happy. Finally, he could do something on his own after so many months.
The winter air was cold, but the sun in the sky helped him feel the warmth.
Alex loved it all.
He took a deep breath. The smell of salt was in the air all around him. He slowly walked ahead and jumped into the ocean.
"Hahaha-hahaha!" he started laughing while tears streamed down his face again. The cold ocean water made him feel alive. Finally, after so many months.
"So he's really gone? Forever?" he wondered.
After a few minutes, he stood up and walked away from the ocean. Just as he was leaving, he saw something out of the corner of his eyes.
To the side, he had missed something by being too tunnel-visioned on his freedom. He had missed a giant tree about 10 meters tall, with a yellow trunk, yellow branches, and yellow leaves.
He slowly walked up to it, he felt like it belonged to him for some reason. He placed his hands on the trunk and closed his eyes.
He could tell, the tree had lost all of its yang energy and it had died.
"So, was this… the treasure?" he wondered. A memory came to him, something he hadn't experienced himself, but the other guy did.
It was the memory of reading a book, a record of the Tiger sect.
The words flowed through his mouth as he looked around him. "Where the fiery earth embraces the yin like water," he looked at the tree next to him and continued, "A golden wood of Yang emerges."
He looked at the rock-hard ground that was likely molten before from the heat. The Fiery Earth.
He looked at the ocean whose coldness knew no bounds. The Yin-like Water.
Finally, he turned back to the tree once more. Golden Wood of Yang.
"So this is the place that record was talking about, huh?" he wondered.
This was the birthplace of the Tiger sect. Their Sacred land.
He looked up at the tree and saw something missing on one of the branches. "I see," Alex said. "So the source… it was your fruit, wasn't it? No wonder that old man was so scared about you losing your maturity."
Alex felt like the tree had a soul, so he kept talking to it. "You're dying, aren't you? I can't save you."
The tree suddenly moved. The branches dropped to the ground, tearing up the land beneath them before the branches brought out something.
"A seed?" Alex asked in surprise. "Is this your seed?" he asked.
The tree moved in acknowledgment.
"Do you want me to sow it somewhere?" he asked.
The tree moved once again.
Alex looked at the yellow seed about the size of his thumb and said, "You were the reason I got my life back. I will do everything in my power, to get one for your child as well."
The tree moved again, and as a gesture of thank, 3 leaves fell from the very top of the tree.
Alex grabbed the leaves and looked at the shiny, golden leaves. "You don't have to thank m—"
Before he could even finish speaking, the tree lit up all over, and as if winds could carry light, the motes of light slowly flew away, before the entire tree vanished from his sight.
"Thank you," Alex said and bowed towards the tree. He looked towards the ocean again and smiled. He smiled because he was happy he lived. He smiled because he was free.
Then, he turned around and left. He flew up the massive dune of sand and slowly floated down on the other side.
He saw a sand-covered boat just sitting there. He walked up to it and looked at his items.
Were they even his items? He never did anything to get them. It was the other guy who got them after all.
He took… his... storage bag and pulled out a few pills. He needed quite a few healing pills to bring him back to looking like normal.
That meant healing the innards, healing the skin, and even growing out the hair all over his body.
When his body did heal, Alex used his spiritual sense to check if there was something wrong with it still.
He checked his whole body, and finally moved on to his face. At first, he saw nothing wrong, but when he realized what he was looking at, his eyes went wide.
"My… My face! It's back?" he shouted out loud. Alex's face looked exactly the same as his real face back in his homeworld.
His… Alex wasn't sure if he could call that world his at the moment. From what he understood, he was just a clone, trapped in his own body, while the real soul drove it.
Now that the real soul had gone, he could finally surface and use it as his own.
'Am I really a clone?' he wondered. The last thing he remembered doing by himself was putting on that helmet for the first time, getting ready to log in.
That was the last time he ever did anything by himself. Ever since then… he was suppressed in his own body.
"No," Alex thought. That was not the only time he did something on his own.
He remembered the other time, when his real soul fought with Zexi, while he watched from beneath the water in his spiritual sea.
He was in a stasis, unable to do anything. However, when his other soul had lost all control, at the last moment, he had gotten his control back and had then killed Zexi.
Alex looked down at the boat and with a wave of a hand cleared the sand. There were his dirty clothes and his other storage bags.
He recalled another memory, not his but the other soul's memory.
The other soul had left all of his possessions here, wishing luck to the next person who found it. He had hoped this would help them on their cultivation journey.
Alex looked at them and said in a soft voice, "Thank you for giving me all of this. I promise I will put them to good use."
Alex quickly put on a new set of robes. The robe was neither green nor yellow, but rather a neutral gray color.
He then stored the golden leaves and seed into a storage bag, before putting all of the storage bags into his robes and got on the boat to fly back towards the Hong Wu sect.
'How many days has it been since the attack? How many days was I out?' he wondered.
The sun was in the sky, but that gave no information of how many days had passed.
"Will I ever be able to go back home?" he wondered. He also wondered if that other world was his home.
The speed at which he had flown was very fast now that the suppression in the desert no longer existed.
Within a matter of hours, Alex could see the giant cliffs of the Hong Wu sect.
He didn't know how to feel about the sect yet, as it was never his sect, but the other guys. However, the memory of the other Alex told him just how much he cared about it.
Just before he reached the sect, however, he saw something shine next to the river.
He slowed down to check what it was. When he did finally see it, his eyes went wide.
He immediately took back the boat and jumped down to the object. It was half-buried in the sand around the grasses, but the half that did stand up made it very clear what it was.
The short blue handle, the light blue cross guard, the thin blade with the blue hue.
That was his master's sword. He slowly pulled it out and looked at it, half of it bloody from the old man's stab wound.
The memories this sword evoked, they weren't something he wanted to feel at the moment, but he couldn't help it.
Tears streamed down his face as he remembered Ma Rong, his master, and her promise.
He walked up to the river and washed away the blood from her sword. He couldn't let the filth's wound desecrate it like that.
He looked at the sword again. His master's sword. Not the other guy's master. HIS master.
This evoked another memory of his. This one, however, didn't belong to the other guy. This was a memory of his own.
The memory he had from the time he talked to Ma Rong.
