Immortal Kingdoms

A clear lake reflected a night sky dotted with stars and three luminous moons. Music like rhymes of trickling water, chirping birds, and floating fireflies weaving about in an isolated dark forest.

The main theme on planet Arcadia was the beauty of nature.

In this breathtaking scene of the wild, a three-metre tall, elliptical portal opened, from which stepped out a party of three; two young men and a woman.

Mordred took a deep breath from the clean air and began to enthusiastically survey his immediate surroundings. "Damn beautiful!" He blurted out the moment his eyes landed on the clear lake and the tall waterfall cascading from a mountain peak in the distance.

Pandora was as silent as ever, and Leonardo's eyes sparkled with curiosity as he inspected the area. The flora and vegetation in this forest were both familiar and unfamiliar to life on his home planet, but he had to admit that the quality of the atmosphere was miles ahead.

"We need to get moving," Leonardo and Mordred snapped their necks to look at Pandora who parted her lips to speak, feeling somewhat weird. Both of them subconsciously attributed Pandora to be the silent type, who knew she would talk out of the blue?

Still, Leonardo knew she was right and hence he nodded, "This place is too well preserved, it wouldn't be a far-fetched possibility that we stumbled into someone's backyard, private property, or a forbidden area."

Mordred got his act together and joined in on the discussion with a serious face. He asked, "Where should we go from here? If this is truly someone's private property, then we're almost certain to bump into someone as we make our way out…"

Splash!

Mordred was yet to finish his sentence before the lake's surface parted, and a blonde mature woman flung her wet hair in an arc, splashing the crystalline waters all around.

Both Pandora and Leonardo glared hard at Mordred, but he merely shrugged with a helpless smile. Luckily, both men had their backs to the lake, and only Pandora was in a direction where she saw the spring scenery at full display.

The mature woman froze stiff for a moment before plunging deep into the lake's water once more. Only her head poked through the restless surface, her long blonde hair afloat behind her head.

She didn't look like the type to panic, and she levelled a calm gaze toward the party of three. She also noticed their awkward situation, but she was also clear-headed enough to realise that her body wasn't profaned by the males, only the female got a glimpse of her generous assets.

"Elf?" Pandora asked in a flat tone, not shying away from eye contact with the woman.

The woman kept silent for a moment before asking with a faint smile, "Won't you give me some privacy to dress up? Or do we keep this conversation like this?"

Pandora looked at Leonardo, and the latter nodded before walking deep into the thickets nearby, followed by a nervous Mordred.

Pandora stayed behind for obvious reasons, but the mature woman didn't mind. She simply began to levitate until her wet, sultry mature body floated above the water.

As though it had a spirit of its own, the lake spat tongues of viscous water that coiled around the woman's figure, donning an elegant long blue dress over her hourglass figure. One step at a time, the woman approached the banks of the lake, her green eyes glittering in the light of three moons.

She boarded the soft ground with a chuckle as she called out, "Alright, you two can come back now. I'm fully clothed."

Mordred and Leonardo soon walked out from the forest into the clearing, the former having a weird expression, but the latter was rather calm.

The woman scanned the party of three, then her gaze seemed to linger on Leonardo for a moment before she covered her little mouth with a gasp, "No way! You only have five years of lifespan left! Why would they send someone like you here?"

The woman's words shocked both Mordred and Pandora, who turned to look at Leonardo in disbelief. A moment later, as though realising something, the woman tapped her forehead and said, "I see! You want to enter sainthood in Arcadia, is that it? Can you do it in five years though?"

Leonardo frowned, not knowing how she could read his situation like an open book. He shook his head and calmly asked, "So what?"

The woman shook her head as well, giggling to herself as she responded, "Don't question my strength. Really, I'm not that powerful. I'm an Elf, I am innately sensitive to nature and life force, and yours is incredibly weak; much like a candle in the wind on the brink of fading away. I don't know if you're fortunate or unfortunate to end up in this secluded garden of mine."

"This forest… Is it your garden?" Mordred asked, not knowing how best to describe his bad luck. They didn't just run into any ordinary person, but the landlord herself.

Was he really such a jinx?

"Right!" The woman nodded, "But you haven't seen my naked body, so I guess your crimes aren't warranting a death sentence yet."

"Yet?" Leonardo asked, his brows raised lightly as he responded, "You're too smart for your own good. You've probably already guessed our identities and why we came here, do you still dare kill us?"

Leonardo could tell at a glance that this Elf wasn't so ignorant of the existence of higher realms. In fact, he began brewing some thoughts about her deliberately showing herself when she could have simply acted as though they didn't exist.

"Maybe not," She narrowed her eyes and spoke lazily while inspecting her nails, "But what if I detained you for four years? Four and a half? or maybe one month shy of five years before letting you go…? Who can say I killed you?"

Although the woman seemed laid back and relaxed, her body began to ooze out a dangerous aura. The aura clearly belonged to a mortal tier cultivator, but something about it felt different. Quickly, this aura of nature enveloped the party of three, almost incapacitating their movements altogether.

Apparently, the woman was on the cusp of entering level 41, her aura was short of a unique martial intent to catalyze her sainthood. For someone of her young age, considering that this is a planet in the middle realms, her talents speak for themselves.

"Is this a threat?" Leonardo chuckled coldly, seemingly as composed as a moment ago, unlike Pandora and Mordred who were barely able to breathe under the pressure with their level 30 auras respectively.

"Ever since I got involved in this immortality-seeking bullshit…" Leonardo didn't even allow the woman to answer as he casually walked over toward the immobile Pandora, unsheathing her daggers from her thighs. Of course, the posture was somewhat ambiguous as Leonardo stood right behind the female ranger.

Leonardo's voice was as low as a whisper at this point, but it seemed to ripple through the air, mounting into the woman's aura field as a medium, "Everyone I came across is an arrogant prick who thinks they're all this and that…"

Memories of his experience in the slave market and the Exiled Paradise began to reel in from the depths of his mind. Nier was right, he was supposed to have about twenty years of life force after the reconstruction of his constitution, but he actually netted thirty years.

He was supposed to leave the Exiled Paradise after the mending of his new constitution as it signalled the end of his special training. However, he knew a constitution wasn't enough to stand against people who sought to humiliate him in the future.

At least, he hoped to not be humiliated within the same cultivation tier. Thus, for 25 years, training was all Leonardo did. Eventually, he comprehended a unique martial intent that represented the dullness in his life, inspired by the atmosphere of the Exiled Paradise.

"Do you have a death wish? Kneel for this princess!" Feeling that something was amiss, the woman increased her pressure twofold by stomping the ground, forcing the muted guardians into a half-kneeling position as their bones quacked and bodies trembled. For some reason, though, her nature-attributed aura seemed to wither away like the fleeting seasons when it approached anywhere near Leonardo's immediate vicinity.

Her shimmering yet restless emerald eyes settled on Leonardo, who merely reciprocated to her with a flat smile, his lifeless eyes trained on that body that screamed at his instincts to wholly devour.