...Is this a nightmare?
I can enter a nightmare just by walking?
In the instant I saw those words.
The child suddenly felt his right hand become empty—Xitan Pulan had disappeared.
And the child was merely bewildered...
When he awoke again, he found himself standing in front of a gigantic tree.
The gentle rays of the setting sun shone on his face, making him feel incredibly warm.
It was then the child belatedly realized... his body had actually shrunk—
Or rather, his consciousness had entered the body of another elf boy.
This experience was completely different from any nightmare he had before.
Not only had he not received any main quest...
But the child could also feel distinctly the natural powers bestowed by the "Jungle Walker" class, still boiling within him... His body’s attributes were almost entirely consistent with his own.
Only, the weapon in his right hand was not his own slender rapier.
But rather it resembled the Song of Shadows from Mavi... or to say, a delicate and light chakram like the one Qiana had.
A crisp and pleasant voice sounded from behind him.
He turned his head toward the sound and saw an elf girl in her teens with silver hair, wearing a white dress that only revealed her left shoulder and arm, with a hemline ten centimeters above her knees, standing behind him looking pretty as a picture.
Her hands were clasped behind her back as she surveyed him curiously, "What are you thinking about, Julian?
"Mom will be back soon, won’t she? Or... have you already mastered the Vine Strike Technique?"
The appearance of the elf girl gave the child pause.
She was not the "soul of an elf" he had previously known.
But instead, she was incredibly real... just like the girl next door!
He could even smell the purity of her fragrance distinctly.
And the place he was in was not a ruin—
His pupils constricted slightly.
Just behind the girl, not far away...
There stood a massive edifice over a hundred meters tall, composed of sparkling blue rocks, shining with the colorful radiance of rainbows and emitting a strange humming sound. It was somewhat like a windmill, yet resembled a snail’s shell, continuously extracting something from the ground.
The interface with the earth alone was over a hundred meters in diameter. The surrounding earth, however, was collapsing and cracking... as if water had been drained away.
Near that extraction site, all the way to where the child stood was incredibly open. The trees in this area had obviously been cut down, leaving a vast open space.
Not far away was an extremely prosperous city—
Huge treants moved slowly along the streets.
Unseen before, a luminous white stag roamed through the void.
There weren’t many people on the streets, but every building and bridge was entwined with exquisite vines. The patterns on those vines were nothing short of artistic...
And those "elves" were not as the child had imagined them to be, dressed in leaves or wearing minimal animal skins and carrying bows and arrows like slender primitives.
Their clothing, however, seemed more like the modern... as in, modern Earth.
It even seemed somewhat advanced...
It wasn’t like the clothes they wore on the streets but more like the fashion from Paris Fashion Week.
The most terrifying part was—the child even saw a floating airship in the distance, and some massive buildings in the city had walls with decorations resembling billboards, giving off a very cyberpunk vibe.
What the fuck, what is all this?
What the hell is going on with this world?
How can the tech tree grow in reverse?
Full of reservations, the child found them stuck in his throat, unable to cough them out or swallow them down.
It took the child a while to recover from the startled feeling of "Did I enter the wrong game?"
He glanced at the girl beside him, who seemed to have "innocence" written all over her face, and decided to try to bluff her first.
"Ah, I mean... hey, you."
He put on a somewhat haughty air and lifted his head, his youthful voice ringing out, "When will your mother be back?"
The girl swung her head in displeasure, responding earnestly, "I’m not ’hey, you,’ my name is Bofis!"
Her hair struck the child’s face, making him feel as if someone had whipped him with a lash...
...but it was actually pretty fragrant.
Good, he managed to snag her name after all...
The child quietly celebrated in his heart.
Because the elf girl’s clothing was somewhat revealing... both the upper and lower halves. The child, not being very skilled in communicating with females, dared not scrutinize her too much.
He touched his nose nervously, silently pondering his next topic of conversation.
What to say, what to say...
"...Ah, the weather is really nice today, isn’t it?"
After a lengthy silence, the child remarked casually.
After stepping through the Fog Gate, Xitan Pulan felt a moment of dizziness before her familiar sense of ground beneath her returned.
She also realized that her livestream had not been cut off.
The only problem was...
"... it seems I’ve lost our team leader."
She almost immediately accepted this reality, calmly stating through the livestream to the two waiting outside, "Don’t panic. Just as the leader said... I am now your new leader.
"No, I’m not plotting a coup... He lost himself fair and square, I’m just respecting the results of his loss."
Xitan Pulan casually bantered with the chat while looking around her.
Without a doubt... this was a ruin.
To call it a ruin was almost to put it nicely...
The buildings here were more broken than Ishgard after a dragon’s dance party.
Even Xitan Pulan couldn’t understand at all what they had originally looked like, or what they might’ve been used for... The ground was also inexplicably dotted with very smooth-surfaced holes.
It didn’t look like they were blown open by something; rather, it seemed as if something had dug them out...
But her steps soon faltered.
Because Xitan Pulan saw a silver-white, semi-transparent young ghost girl wandering the streets—presumably, probably, possibly streets.
The ghost wore a white dress that only showed her left shoulder and arm, with a skirt hem about ten centimeters above the knee.
Xitan Pulan was captivated by that exquisite, adorable smile for a moment, then couldn’t help staring closely:
Those slender, straight legs, neat knees, the delicate white boots... and the cute sleeve that covered half her palm on her right arm, as well as the partially exposed side of her body on her left due to the completely exposed shoulder, made Xitan Pulan somewhat involuntarily crave her body...
Her breathing became a bit faster, and her gaze toward the ghost girl grew more predatory—
With a slight hint of wanting to take her home...
—She was a sad case of a non-human enthusiast.