《Pimps in Jiang Hu!》Chapter 1 - His hand was white?
Advertisement
When Travis woke up, his whole body ached.
“Uh… what the hell…” Travis moaned as he shifted onto his back. Jarring pains stabbed every inch of his body. Especially his chest. Whenever he inhaled, he was in agony. He ran his fingers delicately across his chest. He quickly found the point of deepest pain and tentatively fingered it. He gasped and when he found what was wrong, he pulled his hand away in a hurry.
“A broken rib… actually five broken ribs… how did this happen?” He had a body wrought with injuries - broken bones, lacerations, bruises, even a few burns. He wracked his brain in order to figure out what happened.
“Ok, so I was drinking with the guys.” Travis suddenly laughed. “I really hope Joel’s been using a condom this whole time… He really does go for anything with a pulse.” Travis remembered their banter with a grin on his face. That changed the second he remembered what had happened next.
He died.
Remembering the scent of the gunpowder, the cold metal embedded in his brain, the warm, red liquid gushing out onto the street, Travis’ face hardened. He clenched his fist and shook with pure, white-hot rage.
After a long time, he calmed down. He laughed coldly. “Man… I really died a dog’s death didn’t I.”
“Wait, shouldn’t I be dead?” His eyes widened and he went to pinch himself, but when he lifted his hand his dislocated shoulder answered the question for him. “Okay, so I’m still alive, I’m still breathing and my heart is beating…” Travis frowned. “But how can someone come back from a bullet to the head?”
Travis grinned. “Damn, I’m so badass I survived a headshot. When everyone finds out I’m alive, I dare anyone not to give me the respect I deserve.”
Imagining the cred he would have in the future he got so excited he ignored the mind-numbing pain and stood up. And immediately fell back down. He groaned. “I forgot about that. What happened anyway? No way those pigs actually beat the hell out of a dead body?” He grimaced. He ran his hand through his hair.
He immediately froze.
What he was expecting to feel under his hand was shaven hair, with a low fade. What he actually felt was straight hair. And it stretched to his shoulders! Travis’ hands trembled. His voice shook. “What the fuck?” He looked at his hand. His eyes widened. His fingers were thin, completely different from his big, strong, manly hands. These were thin and delicate, like the hands of a pianist. But that wasn’t the shocking part.
His hand was white. HIS. HAND. WAS. WHITE. Not black like it had been for twenty two years. Travis could not stay calm. Nothing could explain his race changing. He could accept surviving a bullet to the brain, but something like this was unimaginable. He panicked. “This is impossible. I can’t be white.” He rubbed his eyes and opened them as wide as he could.
Advertisement
His hand was still as white as snow. Ok, maybe not that white, but compared to his previous skin tone, which was pretty dark for a black guy, there was a world of difference.
When he looked at his hand, roaring filled his mind. A splitting pain filled his brain, like his mind was about to tear in half. He began seeing things. Memories.
A movie reel of scenes filled his head.
He saw a child, about two years old. It looked like he lived in extreme poverty. His mother was beautiful; Asian. She smiled at him, tears rolling down her eyes. “I’m sorry Wang Tao,” she said. She hugged him. Travis flinched and paled in horror. A hand had stabbed through the back of her head. Blood and gore flew everywhere.
Travis had seen really soul-numbing stuff - it was the consequence of living in the midst of inner-city poverty. He had seen crack addicts, and people stabbing their own brothers.
He knew the face of hopelessness and what the real gutter of society looked like, but admittedly, he had never seen the inside of a brain before. He puked, but nothing was in his stomach, so for about two minutes he dry retched. It was agony; a couple of blood vessels burst in his face.
It seemed as though the flow of memories conveniently paused itself while Travis had been going through hell. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry so compensated with a trusty middle finger.
When Travis returned to the film, the kid had grown up to about five years old. He had moved to a big city and had become a street urchin - robbing and stealing. It was weird - he seemed to spend almost all of his money on food but was still skin and bones. A scene of the kid eating a whole roasted pig terrified Travis.
At eleven, the child had a bit of a lucky encounter. He managed to steal a medicinal pill out of the bag of an unsuspecting cultivator and downed it immediately. He broke through to the first stage of cultivation. He went to a local sect, was found to have some talent at cultivation and entered the sect.
At thirteen, his appetite grew by tenfold. If he didn’t eat a whole cow a day, he would starve. He started stealing food from the kitchens. The hunger would be quelled by one or two medicinal pills, but as an outer disciple, he only got two a month.
Wang Tao had stolen food from the kitchens, so disciples had beaten him.
He succumbed to his injuries.
Witnessing the life of Wang Tao stunned Travis into silence. A stream of questions entered his head in rapid succession. But the most important one of all was: “Where am I?” Everyone looked Asian, so at first he had thought he had somehow come to China.
Advertisement
However, seeing the hand go through the woman’s brain, there was no way a human could do that.
Then, he saw what cultivation was - a method of using the energy of heaven and earth to make yourself stronger. Seeing the magical techniques being thrown out, he knew he wasn’t on Earth anymore.
The bizarre did not stop there. Somehow, he had become a thirteen year old Asian kid named Wang Tao. He realised that there were a whole lot of holes in his memories, and he only remembered some of the most important aspects of Wang Tao’s brief life.
Travis had no idea what had happened, but he didn’t care to find out. He just wanted to go back home. Travis found a extreme low quality healing pill in his robes and swallowed it. A weak burst of medicinal energy filled his body, but it was good enough to heal him somewhat.
For an entire day he walked around trying to go back to Earth. He was actually in a catacombs, ancient bones lined the walls. For some reason they were shimmering with a white light, that kept them from rotting over the years. Travis searched his memories, “Dead cultivators…”
After a day of walking he stopped and sighed with frustration.
“I can tell that there aren’t any ways to get back home right now which means I’m here for the near future. These guys can fly, I’m sure there’s some way I can teleport back or something.”
Travis imagined going back home with teleportation powers and drooled. Teleportation on Earth! Teleporting to the Bahamas, teleporting into the bank, teleporting away from the police! There were so many applications for it. If he had had teleportation, he wouldn’t have died so miserably.
“Man, why did they have to stuff me down here though?” When the disciples found he was dead, they tossed him into the catacombs so they wouldn’t be punished for murder. They took his bag of holding too. Travis was no stranger to robbery, but, “I always get my shit back. Even if it belonged to old boy, that’s mine now.”
He carried on walking through the catacombs until he reached a dead end. He prepared to turn back, but something caught his gaze. His eyes widened, and his mouth curved into a smile full of delight.
“Is that what I think it is?” He ran towards the wall. What he saw was a huge skeleton of a man, but what Travis’ gaze was fixed on wasn’t the corpse.
It was a plant. It was the plant. Travis caressed the plant, and started to weep as he fell to his knees.
“My baby, I’m so glad I found you. A world without you would be a world without love, without light. Kush! Premium fucking kush! Thank the lord!” He started blowing kisses towards the ceiling of the catacombs.
He had found marijuana. “In my memories, this is called the… Sky Divine Grass? Apparently it’s super-rare, but has no uses.” Travis roared with laughter as he slapped his knee. “Dumbasses! You smoke it, not eat it!” Imagining centuries of people eating weed and being confused when nothing happened was hilarious.
Travis ground the weed with his hands. He realised he was in a dilemma. He had nothing to smoke it with! No papers, no bongs, no nothing!
Travis thought of something. He looked around and a wolf-like glint entered his eyes. “That’s right, why didn’t I think of that earlier?”
He ran towards the skeleton on the wall and pulled out a bone on its toe, which was about the size of a normal humerus. He tried bashing it with a rock he found but it was way too tough for Travis to break down and the pebble broke.
“That shimmering white light is protecting it… how can I drill two holes into the bone?” Travis was stumped. He slapped himself in the head and went to pull another bone from the giant skeleton. He began grinding two holes: one for the weed and one for his mouth.
Admiring his handiwork, he put the weed in but soon realised the lack of a fire. He liberated two more bones from the body and rubbed them together to make a spark.
“Fuck, it’s been two hours, and still no damn fire.” His eyes bloodshot, he gritted his teeth and kept trying. After four more hours, he finally had a fire. He immediately lit the weed and inhaled. His eyes rolled back and his body slackened. He sighed as he exhaled.
“This weed is the best I have ever smoked. I don’t know if it’s because I worked for it or because it’s a spiritual plant, but I’ve never been this high in my life.” His heart full of happiness, he didn’t notice one thing. His hunger had left him. He had been starving the entire time he had been in the catacombs, but as soon as he smoked, the hunger vanished.
The other thing he didn’t notice was the energy that had rushed into his body with each puff.
“It’s time to leave.” Travis picked all the weed he could find, picked up his bong and fire-bones and stuffed it into his robes. After another hour, he saw a thread of light in the distance.
“Finally, no more dead people.”
He walked towards the light, excited but also scared for what was at the end of the tunnel.
Advertisement
The Magic of Logistics
The harbour Luc has been dropped into is not a normal one. It looks like a medieval town, it's full of strange people and some of them are waving magic around. Luc will need to rely on new friends and his own determination to learn how to harness the magic of the Aether. He has to find his way back home. --- Hi everyone, This is my first story in English. Please tell me if I've used a word incorrectly. It's a slow-paced, slice of life isekai focused on Luc's goal of going home, his learning of the magic and gathering the resources he needs to grow. The chapters after the first one will be about 2-3k words long. I'll try to post at least once a week. Hope you enjoy! Cover art from here: https://www.deviantart.com/joakimolofsson/art/Harbor-354494418
8 67The Land of Many Kings
An assassin bearing the mark of a weredragon hunts down a prince. An orc deserts her army, chased by phantoms from her past. A princess has a covert affair and must navigate the marriage her father is arranging. A necromancer reaps souls and slowly grows his profane army. A king wishes to secure his legacy and prepares for war. A coven of witches must decide where they fit--or if they ever could--in a changing political landscape. These are but a few of the twisted threads that unravel in The Land of Many Kings, a high fantasy, sword-and-sorcery epic filled with romance and lyricism. Stories both sweeping and intimate develop side-by-side, some coming together, others running in parallel while a diverse cast provides a wide range of compelling perspectives. Literary in tone, it is punctuated with action, adventure, and spectacle. Updates twice weekly.
8 352Im your APLHA and you are my OMEGA (ZHANYI FF)
" Promise me Wang Yibo you will always be my Omega now and on the future" zhan said Wang yibo nod " mn"Zhan smile ."you lied to me, you broke your promise and now I hate you Wang yibo!!!" zhan said and runaway.Hi this is me again. Iwill bring you another world and another life story of Yizhan/ Zhanyi again. STARTED AT; Nov. 14 2020
8 72Leave Bad Enough Alone
Something has been amiss in the city’s theaters as of late. The local bards have long done a respectable job of keeping the audiences entertained, weaving high concepts with skillful performances. But lately, a new set of bards, and their illusionist cohorts, have captured the crowd’s attention. Compared to the theater’s usual fare, their work is hackneyed and poorly plotted, with unskilled acting, bad special effects, and unsatisfying resolutions. Worst of all, the audiences like their work more, and these upstarts are far more profitable than the city’s decent bards! Clearly, there must be some dark secret behind the success of these newcomers, and it’s up to the city’s true artists to find out what it is and expose the conspiracy! Or maybe the city’s bards have just become too hopelessly pretentious and derivative. It’s hard to tell. But investigate it they must! Failure is not an option! Victory, or...well, they’ll have to get day jobs or something. Original cover image generated by NightCafé.Master story list here.
8 126An innocent girl in a mafia camp
When you are a member of the mafia family, you need to be strong, ruthless, and cunning. But when you are one of the heirs you need to be untouchable, ruse and unbeatable. So as the head of the most strong mafia family, DON RAFAELLO needs to make sure his next successors either girls or boys will be ready when the time comes. Which leads him to start a camp to train his younger members.what will happen when you put a bunch of teenagers in a summer camp and force them to forget their vacation plans?To add more complications to the situation, the Don decides to bring an innocent girl to the chaos. Anna is shy teenager girl who has a lot of social problems, she try hard not to attract problems but she can stand for herself when needed . What does she has that the Don wanted her to be a part of this camp? what will happen when she finds herself in the middle of criminals?Will she survive and maybe find happiness? or will she suffer to the end?To know the rest of Anna's story , please read my story.Best Ranking: #8 in Romance 20/07/2020#21 in highschool 09/01/2021#3 in camp 17/01/2021
8 177Lose Myself
WAS #2 in Romance. -- He's got a secret, she's got a secret. But is it the same secret? Amara Ackerman is an interior designer who just wants to live her life, she doesn't want to get married and she doesn't need a boyfriend. To her it's just better if everyone kept their distance, pulling people in was never her style. Dominic Vitiello is just the average rich, handsome guy with tons of connections and plenty of places to be. When he takes the time out to persue her, he discovers something unexpected and it's far from disappointing. The two cross paths in the most convinient way, how does their relationship go from being strictly work to strictly personal? Neither of them can say, but I can say it's a pretty interesting story.
8 219