Demon of Lust in the Land of Water 7

Commissioned by Kejmur

-VB-

Demon of Lust in the Land of Water
Chapter 7

-VB-

After what felt like an hour of explanation, Terumi Mei could not help but stare at the … the … the crazy man.

“I don’t believe you,” she flat out replied.

She couldn’t believe that she slept with this man! In the Jail!

“It’s not that hard to believe,” he grumbled indignantly. “It’s not like I’m asking you to anyone else would not have done. It’s just a part of life.”

“There is no such thing as a goddess of love,” she scoffed at the idea.

The Elemental Nations was a place of war, intrigue, politics, and castes. Goddess of love? This was the first time she’s heard of something like that. Even fantasy books beloved by the nobility didn’t even consider such a thing.

“You mean that’s how your people grew up,” the swamp man - she needed a better name for him - replied.

“Well, where are you from?”

“From another world.”

She groaned. “You keep saying that, but you expect me to just take your word for it?”

“Well, I can describe to you the entire cultural, societal, political, and military structures that I remember. It’ll be impossible for me to just think of a whole fictional world with its own history, right?”

Mei thought about it. It was true that even ninjas with phenomenal memories had a hard time memorizing everything. Only things anyone was naturally used to came to them easily.

“How do I know that you’re not bullshitting me?” she asked bluntly.

“Do you have a inquisitive, loyal, and talented friend who could do some basic and advanced lie detection?”

… Ao was someone like that, yes.

“I do.”

“Well, bring them over! It’s story time!”

“You’re crazy.”

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

She paused. “Okay, so you can spit out some wise words, but it doesn’t prove anything.”

-VB-

“You slept with him in the Jail?” Ao asked hoarsely. “I… didn’t know our security was that lax.”

“It’s not,” Mei grumbled.

It’s been a day since she and Alan, the swamp man, talked and Alan urged her to bring a lie detection expert. Ao, with his stolen Hyuga eye and espionage training, was her only loyal friend capable of determining the truth about the swamp man.

“And he’s not a risk to the village?”

“The only danger the village is in because of him is the rise of an orgy cult.”

“An… orgy… cult?”

“That’s what I said,” she grumbled as she led him deeper into her apartment.

And lo and behold, the maddening man was there with another feast.

“Oh,” Ao, the loyal Kiri-nin, stared at the feast presented before him with sparkling eyes. “Is anything poisoned?”

“I could do so much worse than kill you, Ao!” Alan laughed while saying things that reassured no one. “Come, I know you’re all starving!”

Ao’s stomach decided to growl right at this moment.

Mei couldn’t stop him or herself from enjoying the feast.

-VB-

“Well, he really does want to … make an … orgy cult…” Ao muttered an hour after dinner, taking his hands off of Alan’s wrists, hands, and temple. “But why?”

“Because that is what my goddess, whom I am champion of and gave me this second chance at life, expects of me.”

Mei facepalmed at the ridiculous declaration, and she saw Ao just stare incomprehensibly with a gape of his jaw at the weird man she slept with.

“.... Huh?” Ao uttered.

-VB-

Then …

Well, the floodgates opened.

“So human history on Earth began roughly … twelve thousand years before I died, because this is the date of the oldest known human settlement was found by people who specialize in …”

“They called it the Seven Wonders. Imagine, for instance, of a man made structure as big as a small mountain sitting out there in the middle of the desert, and for the next four thousand years, it would remain the tallest structure man made, and this is a world without chakra, so you can imagine just the sheer size of this structure and the awe it made people feel, and this was just one of the seven…”

“And then everything collapsed. There are so few records of that time, and what records that do exist are propaganda that tells of false victories. All of the ancient world but the far east fell, and no one knows exactly what happened anymore…”

“The Persians, well, they were the vanguard of democracy at this time. They freed slaves and incorporated so many different peoples together. They were truly an empire…”

“Now Alexander the Great was a man with a drive like no other. At a time when horseback riding and sailing was the fastest methods of travel, he conquered an empire that would take an experienced horse rider a full year to simply cross from one end of the empire to the other end, and he did this in the span of a decade…”

“Ashoka the Great is different from Alexander in that he left a legacy that more than one and a half billion people look up to…”

“Romans. I don’t think in history you will encounter a people who left a legacy that lasted for thousands of years. Not even the ancient Egyptians did, and they were around for much longer than the Romans. Idioms like ‘In Rome, do as Romans do’ and ‘all roads lead to Rome’ don’t exist in a language like English, which was not even closely related to the Roman’s Latin, that as a historian, I just can’t help but admire…”

“The Warring States Era. That was an era of bloody warfare that not even your Elemental Nations could match up to. There are generals involved in this era whose death toll numbers in the hundreds of thousands, some even reaching nearly a million. Can you imagine a war in which a battlefield was measured in hundreds of thousands of deaths each? I mean, I’m from an era where there are nearly eight billion people in the world, and I have a hard time comprehending that kind of death tolls. A thousand death battlefield is already bloody enough. What kind of horror does a hundred thousand death battlefield depict…?”

“The Han Dynasty-.”

“The Third Century Crisis-.”

“Rise of Christianity-.”

“The Fall of the Roman Empire-.”

“A continent in war-.”

“Islam-”

“Jihad-”

“Crusade-”

“... Black Death.”

Mei, whose head was spinning from a lecture in world history of another world she would never see, found herself focusing on Alan when he spoke the two worlds with such somber tone.

He didn’t speak for a while. “I came from a time when a new pandemic had broken out. It killed half a million people in my country-”

Half a million?

Half a million?

“-But the Black Death makes it seem tame in comparison. At least with COVID, the disease my country and the world was fighting, didn’t make people die so horribly as the Black Plague. It wasn’t called Black Death because it killed people. It literally turned them black as the disease progressed. On the continent of Europe, it killed a third of the population…”

Mei listened as his retelling of his world’s history became more detailed, dense, and understood.

And she began to believe that he truly was from another world, because the sheer volume of things he implied, the way he even drew a map of each countries’ borders, geography, and more told her that this wasn’t some bullshit he was feeding them.

This was real.

“And yeah, COVID is where my story ends in that world.”

Mei and Ao sat there, ignoring the sun that rose from the east whose sunlights peered through the curtains of Mei’s living room.

“And you? What about you?”

It felt bigger than a simple village matter. No, it was.

She’s seen some of the minor things he could do - things he did on a whim. What if he got serious? If his words were true, then he was a champion of an outsider, a goddess who saw their world and wanted it for herself.

“Well, Aphrodite - the name she used to converse with me because it was the one I recognized the most - is the Goddess of Love, Beauty, Pleasure, Passion, and Sex. As her champion, it is not only my job but my honor to construct temples in her name and perform acts that please her.”

“Like sex.”

“Lots and lots of sex.”

“I’m…” Ao muttered. “Mei, can I sleep in your guestroom?”

“Go ahead.”

He stood up and stumbled away.

“What did I get myself into?” Ao muttered, which Mei heard, and felt sympathy.

Indeed, what the hell did she get herself involved into?

She turned back to Alan, a strange man for the swamp man but maybe it wasn’t so strange for a foreigner from another world. “What do you intend to do specifically?”

“Hmm, well, I came to this Land of Water because it was the place that my goddess saw as lacking all of her domains, even pleasure.”

Mei winced. If a goddess said her home country sucked, then could she say much about that?

“So I am here to make it all better.”

“How?”

“Hmm? Oh, I’m going to invite people to join me - and you - whenever we have fun.”

“... Don’t drag me into this.”

“Aw, why not? You certainly enjoyed it when I used my tongue-”

“Stop talking about it.”

“Don’t worry! It’ll be fun! There’ll be pamphlets, carnal rituals, booze, sex, adrenaline, and more! Why risk your life doing dirty business when you can have fun instead and make your country better for it?”

“Sex doesn’t make life better!”

She hated the look of pity he leveled on her.

“Oh, you poor soul. Don’t worry, I’ll teach you, thoroughly,” he said slowly towards the end with a lick of his lips.

Her entire body shivered at the insinuation.