Chapter 1 A Beginning

The ruins were an unusually vast world, not a closed place as everyone had initially guessed. Looking at the endless sea of clouds and the distant sky, Nangong Wuyue's siren curiosity burned brightly: "Have you explored the boundaries of this place? Does it have an edge?"

"Not yet, but there must be a limit here," Hesperiana shook her head. "The further out you go in the sea of clouds, the denser it becomes, and a very strange thick fog rises in the clouds. Flying in the fog consumes a lot of stamina. I guess that should be the barrier of the other dimension. Also, if you go down this mountain, you will encounter a fog halfway up. If you force your way through the fog, you will see a cliff, but I didn't dare to jump down..."

It seemed that the other dimension had boundaries, but the environment near the boundaries became very strange, so much so that even powerful vampires couldn't get close enough to see what was going on. Hao Ren decided to first check out the most conspicuous cloud temple in the distance, but he first looked at Vivian worriedly: "Are you okay?"

Vivian had seemed a little strange since just now. The special energy filling this other dimension seemed to have affected her, making her, who was usually calm and collected, show signs of anxiety and impulsiveness from time to time. But she couldn't explain what was happening. Hearing Hao Ren's concerned inquiry, she could only shake her head: "I'm fine... I just need to control my emotions."

Nangong Wuyue looked at Vivian inexplicably: "What exactly is going on?"

"I don't know. I just instinctively hate the atmosphere here. It must be related to my amnesia," Vivian tapped her forehead, looking distressed. "I can't remember where I encountered a similar environment, but nothing good happened at the time..." Then she smiled at Hao Ren: "Don't worry, I've encountered similar situations before. I'm inexplicably allergic to certain things, and then it takes me half a day to remember what kind of grudges I had thousands of years ago. You know about my amnesia. I'll think about it slowly when I get back, and I'll tell you when I figure something out."

Seeing that her expression was stable, Hao Ren put his mind at ease for the time being and pointed to the cloud temple in the distance: "Then shall we go over there and take a look first? Do we have to fly?"

As soon as Vivian heard this, she reflexively spread her wings and was about to hug Hao Ren and fly together. The latter was just about to cooperate subconsciously when he suddenly shuddered. He saw that Hesperiana's eyes suddenly sharpened, and she bared her fangs and hissed threateningly in his direction. Hao Ren immediately broke out in a cold sweat: he was convinced that if he hugged Vivian in front of this girl, she would cut him into more than seven hundred pieces without saying a word, sprinkle them with cumin, soy sauce, and vinegar, marinate them for two months, and then take a hundred grams three times a day with type B blood... To be honest, he was quite amazing to be able to imagine the details so clearly in an instant. This looked like someone who had spent too much money in college and had to eat pickles for half a month.

"You can walk on the clouds, just be careful not to fall," Hesperiana stood between Vivian and Hao Ren without showing any signs, and pointed to the sea of clouds in the distance. "See those glowing roads? That should be something made by the ancient Olympus family. They are fused with the clouds, but they are actually roads. Don't step wrong. No one knows what will happen if you fall."

Only then did Hao Ren notice that there were some shimmering "roads" hidden in the sea of clouds. They were fused with the surrounding clouds and mist, emitting a faint light, and connected to the cloud temple in the distance. Moreover, there were many forks in the middle leading to other directions—they should have led to other temples in the past, but now there was only one main road to take. Vivian retracted her wings and looked at the shimmering roads for a long time before finally clapping her hands: "Oh, right, Zeus did create these cloud walkways back then. His family built their houses in the sky, and they used these cloud walkways to connect with each other. Oh my, the style was extremely high-class. People fell off every day. Zeus himself fell off five or six times. Every time he fell into a human village, he would climb out of the pit and say in a very serious tone, 'I've come down to inspect the human world'..."

Hao Ren: "...Then what were they trying to do by building this thing?! And why didn't they add a railing?"

"It's for looks, railings don't look good. And anyway, you can fly back up after falling, so why would they care? In fact, most of the people who fell realized it halfway down and flew back. Only Zeus was slow to react. He was too old and had a habit of being absent-minded while walking," Vivian shamelessly revealed the unknown secrets of the Olympus family back then. "Not only the Olympus family, but also those guys in the Nordic and Egyptian regions who lived with humans and pretended to be gods had the same problem. They liked to build their houses in a strange way, just for the sake of looking good, being cool, and making humans feel awestruck—in short, they were just showing off, making humans revere them for hundreds or thousands of years until their mentality became unbalanced, and they felt that they would be letting down their titles if they didn't live in the sky. It's a pity that they all died out later. Actually, they were a bunch of very interesting jokers."

Hao Ren: "..."

The group wiped their cold sweat and stepped onto the cloud walkway, heading towards the aerial temple in the distance. When he stepped on the glowing clouds, Hao Ren breathed a sigh of relief: this thing could indeed be stood on. Although it was only a layer of light, the feeling of stepping on it was no different from standing on flat ground. He walked forward for a while and couldn't help but turn his head to look at Lily: "Can you please stop pulling? It's troublesome to walk like this..."

Lily followed closely behind Hao Ren, clutching the corner of the latter's clothes and refusing to let go. And in order to maintain balance, she even revealed her tail—anyway, her werewolf identity was already well known, so she didn't worry about Gene or Hesperiana rushing up to bite her a few times. Hao Ren couldn't help but be a little curious when he saw the girl's tail shaking so much that it became a blur: "Are you afraid of heights? That shouldn't be the case. You even dared to cling to the outside of a plane to evade the fare back in the Republic of China era..."

The fur on Lily's tail stood on end: "I'm not afraid of heights... I just don't feel safe stepping on this thing! Back then, there was a glass scenic bridge built somewhere, and someone fell off the bridge—that was me! They didn't lay a piece of glass, and I didn't notice..."

Nangong Wuyue was quite surprised: "What kind of place could have such a low-level accident? I've never heard of it."

Lily said with a sad face: "...The bridge wasn't finished yet, and I secretly sneaked in to watch the excitement. As a result, I stepped on the air and fell down. This bridge was also a dry bridge, and below it was the main road that had just been half-paved. I fell directly into the mixer and was almost poured with cement and paved into the road. Fortunately, I reacted quickly and jumped out in time without being noticed, otherwise you would have seen me in the news a few years ago. Since that day, I've had a very heavy psychological shadow. I really don't feel safe walking on this kind of transparent thing."

Hao Ren sighed: "Then continue to pull me."

This husky's past life was rich and colorful enough.

Vivian walked next to Hao Ren, carefully observing the scenery in this space and searching for related information from her unreliable memories. She had already seen that the aerial temple in the distance looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn't remember whose thing it was for a while. The mountain behind her reminded her of the scenery somewhere on Mount Olympus—this referred to "another" Mount Olympus.

Not the same as the real Mount Olympus mountain range on Earth.

"There were many spectacles created with magic in the age of mythology, and most of them were related to spatial anomalies," Vivian explained some ancient knowledge. "Some were for safety, to prevent being breached, some were to find a quiet place, and some were addicted to playing God games and felt that they should establish a God Realm. In short, for whatever reason, the aliens of that time built a lot of residences that floated on the edge of the real world. Their nature is a bit like the Shadow Interlayer, but the protection is not that strict. The 'Mount Olympus' where Zeus lived back then was such a place. Part of it floated in the sky above the Mount Olympus area in the real world, and the other part was in another dimension. After the collapse of the mythological era, most of those other-dimensional residences shattered, but now it seems that some have survived. This place seems to be a piece of land near the main peak of Olympus back then... but the scenery is a bit distorted and changed, probably because some kind of mutation occurred after the other dimension collapsed. Of course, it is also possible that there is a problem with my memory."

With Vivian's constant explanations along the way, the group finally arrived at the foot of the cloud temple.