Immortal Paladin

The tavern was quiet now. Everyone had cleared out… every last NPC, every glitchy dev, even the owner who had mysteriously vanished with a muttered excuse and a sideways glance at the slipper-wielding menace. That left only the three of us: me, Joan, and the old man who apparently doubled as a nuclear weapon disguised as someone’s harmless grandfather.

“I don’t feel safe here,” I whispered to Joan, who ignored me. “Uuuh, any escape plan?”

“Shhh… don’t talk…”

The old man stood in the center of the room, one hand stroking his non-existent beard, the other loosely holding the slipper like it was a ceremonial blade. He hummed to himself with exaggerated thoughtfulness, the kind that made me think he was either solving the mysteries of the universe or just trying to remember where he last put his dentures. “Hmmm, I see, I see…”

Joan gently helped me up from the floor and onto a nearby bench. Her hands were warm, steady, and surprisingly real for someone who had just taken a divine spanking. I muttered my thanks, rubbing the side of my head and rephrasing the question I had asked before the chaos erupted. “Alright, seriously now… who is Joan’s progenitor then?”

The old man looked at me, blinking as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Of course, it’s Karen.”

That made me straighten in place. “You know Karen?” I asked, brows furrowing.

He nodded casually. “Of course. She worked for me. At least for a time.”

I tilted my head. “Small world,” I muttered. “Yeah, I know her. Online girlfriend. Even got married inside the game once… for the item bonuses.”

The old man squinted at me like I just confessed to robbing a shrine. “No way. She likes girls though.”

I blinked. Hard. “Like… seriously?”

“Dead serious,” he replied.

I rubbed my chin, trying to parse through the implications. Then, like the idiot I was, I opened my mouth. “So… Joan came from Karen’s balls, huh?”

The old man raised his slipper like a divine judgment was about to descend upon me. I instantly raised both hands in surrender. “It’s a joke! A joke! Technically, girls have eggs, so… balls. It’s a witty joke! A linguistic flourish!”

He stared me down for a long moment before finally lowering his slipper with exaggerated disappointment. “I don’t think so,” he muttered, but at least he didn’t kill me this time. Small victories.

I exhaled in relief and looked up at him again. “Okay then, real talk… just who are you?”

That was when he struck a ridiculous pose, one leg raised, slipper outstretched like a sword, chin tilted to the ceiling as if waiting for a spotlight to shine upon him. “I am the Lost Supreme! Progenitor of the Lost Gods! Most Handsome Being in the Greater Universe! And the God of Games!”

My mouth opened, but nothing came out. I stared at him. Blinked. “Most handsome…?” I repeated, flatly.

“Correct,” he confirmed proudly.

“Do you have like… an actual name? A title that doesn’t make me want to vomit? Because I am not calling you Most Handsome Being in the Greater Universe every time I want to get your attention.”

He shrugged like this was the most reasonable thing in the world. “Then call me Cutie.”

There was a long pause. A suffocating silence.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. My brain staged a rebellion and refused to form words. Meanwhile, Joan, sitting beside me and still cradling her bruised head, finally found her voice.

“I am not calling you Cutie,” she said, her voice firm.

I gave her a side glance. “Thank the heavens someone has standards.”

The old man… or Cutie, or the Lost Supreme, or whatever title he was parading today, looked unbothered by our resistance. Instead, he casually examined his slipper for dirt, then dusted it against his linen pants, like the sole of that thing hadn’t just been a weapon of mass destruction moments ago.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a realization was starting to form. If Karen was involved in the creation of this world, and Joan was a Player Character who developed a ‘spark’ of her own… then what the hell was this place? A game prototype? A memory fragment? A simulation gone rogue? Or something deeper?

“So who are you?” the old man asked.

It was only fair, I supposed. He’d given me his ridiculous, chaos-infused introduction. Though he never did say his real name, and I wasn’t about to be the only one throwing out actual personal details. Names had power in this world… both literal and metaphysical… and I wasn’t about to offer mine for free to someone who could shatter and rematerialize a soul with a piece of footwear.

So I did the only thing that made sense in a moment like this.

I stood up.

With dramatic flair, I clenched my right hand into a fist and thrust it into the air like I was calling down lightning. Then, slowly, I curled the arm back toward my chest, striking a wide-legged pose, shoulders square, chin lifted to the heavens.

“Great Guard!” I declared, letting the words echo. “The Slayer of Abyss! He Who Defeated the Hell’s Gate! Lord of Riverfall! Honored Friend of the Final Emperor!”

Joan had stopped breathing. The old man tilted his head.

I wasn’t done.

“This Champion,” I said, sweeping my arm out in a grand arc, “is Da Wei! More handsome than the Most Handsome Man in the Greater Universe… Da Wei!”

Silence.

Absolute silence.

The kind of silence that made your spine stiffen and your stomach perform acrobatics. The kind of silence that followed people who’d just insulted a god, a government official, or someone’s cooking in public.

The old man stared at me with an unreadable expression. His slipper didn’t rise. His mouth didn’t twitch. He simply blinked, once, then again, like his brain was buffering the input.

Beside me, Joan tugged at my sleeve like a frightened intern watching her boss throw hands with a dragon. “What have you done?” she whispered, her voice pale and papery, barely audible.

To be honest, I had no idea. I’d gotten swept up in the moment. The grandeur of it. The theatrical rhythm. Maybe it was my old teaching instincts… trying to command a class full of screaming children had given me a taste for performance.

Still… maybe I had gone too far. Maybe this would be the moment the slipper would erase me from existence and render my legend nothing more than a stain on the tavern wall.

Then the old man’s shoulders started shaking.

He dropped the slipper.

And laughed.

“Ha~!” he bellowed, loud enough to rattle the empty mugs on the tables. “Someone gets it!”

His laughter rang like thunder, equal parts joyful and unhinged, and he slapped his knee with such force I worried it might splinter. “Finally! A proper introduction! Full of nonsense and bravado and zero grounding in reality! Beautiful! Inspiring! Absolutely pointless!”

I blinked, half in awe, half in terror. “Wait, so you’re not going to kill me?”

“Kill you?” he said, wiping a tear from his eye. “I’d promote you if I could. That was top-tier delusional confidence. If you were any more shameless, I’d make you one of the Lost Gods on the spot.”

Joan looked like she wanted to dissolve into the floorboards.

“Da Wei…” she said, not quite accusing me, but not congratulating me either.

“What?” I muttered. “You heard him. He liked it.”

“That’s not the point,” she whispered. “You just declared yourself handsomer than a god.”

“Well, he started it.”

The old man clapped his hands together and suddenly the room’s tension cracked like a bubble. “I like you, Da Wei. You’ve got that spark, that nonsense-magic-chaos-stuff that makes worlds tremble and systems cry. A real unpolished disaster.”

“Thanks,” I said cautiously, “I think?”

He gave me a thumbs-up. “You’ll go far. Or die horrifically. But either way, it’ll be fun to watch.”

With that, he walked past me, slippers softly pattering against the wooden floor, and sat himself down at one of the larger round tables. He poured himself a drink from a keg that hadn’t been there moments ago and took a long, slow sip, his eyes gleaming with mischief and old, old memories.

As the silence settled again, I sat down next to Joan, who still looked like she was debating the merits of transferring herself to another simulation.

“Well,” I said, voice quiet now, “at least he laughed.”

“That’s not reassuring,” Joan muttered.

“Okay, let’s talk,” the old man said, shaking off the last of his laughter and settling back into his seat like a king returning to his throne. “Why are you here?”

He didn’t say it with malice, nor with suspicion. It was the sort of question someone asked when they already knew the answer or thought they did, but wanted to hear your version anyway. Maybe it was just small talk for him. For me, it felt like a confession.

So I told him. Honestly. All of it.

“I was playing a game,” I began, my fingers laced together on the table. “LLO. Lost Legends Online. An MMO. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Who am I kidding? Of course, you’ve heard of it.”

The old man raised an eyebrow and tilted his head like he was listening to a bard recite a particularly questionable ballad. I went on.

“There was an accident… something went wrong. I still don’t know what. One second I was playing, the next I was falling into this place called the Hollowed World. I think it was some kind of eldritch being that pulled me here… tentacles, unknowable whispers, the usual cosmic horror vibes. Whatever it was, it dumped me in a completely different reality.”

I paused for breath, then continued, “Since then, I’ve fought demons. Cultists. A forest that turned out to be a dimensional horror-slash-kaiju. Got in over my head more than once. I’ve met amazing people, terrifying monsters, and even power-hungry cultivators with edgy shadow abilities and too many titles to fit on a business card.”

The old man nodded along, occasionally sipping his drink, though it was more like gulp, refill, gulp, repeat. Joan, still quiet beside me, looked on like she was reliving every insane moment I mentioned. I could feel her fingers twitch slightly... muscle memory from fights, maybe, or tension.

“Most recently,” I said, voice lowering, “I’ve been dealing with a… ‘God’ called Aixin. She’s from the Greater Universe. She took over Joan’s body. Tried to take mine. Would’ve succeeded if I hadn’t… er… gone nuclear.”

The old man finally set his cup down and stared at me. His eyes weren’t glazed or drunk. They were heavy. Old in a way that didn’t refer to years. He spoke plainly, “I don’t know anything about the Hollowed World.”

That stunned me. I’d half-expected him to wave his hand and deus ex machina everything away… some cosmic developer’s cheat code to reset the board. But instead, he leaned back and said, “Before I go on, you need to understand something. I’m a memory. Not the original. Just an echo of someone who once was. What I can tell you is bound to what I remember.”

I nodded slowly. “I understand.”

He adjusted his posture, folded his hands, and continued with a seriousness I hadn’t yet seen from him. “I know Aixin. She serves a Supreme Being. One who rules over ‘Hearts.’ Be very careful, especially with the relationships you form. In their eyes, love, loyalty, and desire are things that can be weaponized… and converted into fuel.”

That gave me pause. The weight of it made my chest feel heavier. I glanced at Joan. Her expression was blank, but her hand had tightened into a small fist on her knee.

“And the terrible entity that brought you there? Eldritch, you called it?” he went on. “I don’t know why it did that. Even beings like me can’t comprehend the motives of such things. Maybe it was chance. Maybe design. But whatever the reason, you’re here now. And you’re entangled in a lot of things that an explanation or two won’t fix.”

“Great,” I muttered, rubbing my temple. “But, uh, back to Aixin. Can you help with that? Maybe slam her with a slipper or something? I mean, I used Divine Possession on Joan’s body to try and kick Aixin out. It’s our best shot.”

He exhaled and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t. Even if you managed to corner her within Joan’s mental world…and even if I managed to land a hit… she’d still overpower me. Worse… if she learned Earth’s location through me, that would be a catastrophe.”

That sent a chill through me. “Wait. What do you mean?”

“Da Wei,” he said carefully, “none of the Gods or Supreme Beings of the Greater Universe would ignore a chance to claim Earth. Its existence is a myth to most, and a divine secret to others. The one who seizes Earth,” he said slowly, voice dropping like thunder through molasses, “seizes the World, as one seizes the Heavens… and the Void.”

I didn’t speak for a while. I couldn’t. The tavern around us felt colder. Still empty, but now somehow hollowed out by the weight of what he’d said. Joan was staring down at her lap, her mouth tight with unspoken thoughts.

So Earth wasn’t just a home. It was a prize. A key! Maybe even a final piece in some god-tier game of cosmic chess.

“And nobody on the Hollowed World knows about it,” I murmured.

He nodded. “They don’t have to. The Hollowed World is most likely... peripheral in nature. A fragment. Its role in all this may be incidental. Or it may be crucial. It depends on how you play your part.” 

I slumped back in my chair. “No pressure, huh?” 

“Only the fate of worlds,” he said, raising his cup. “But you’re a gamer. You live for final bosses and underdog runs, don’t you?”

That almost made me smile.

“I… I have questions too,” Joan said suddenly, her voice quiet, but not hesitant.

The old man didn’t blink. He simply nodded, as if he’d been waiting for her to speak. “Go on.”

Joan glanced at me first, maybe for reassurance, then turned her gaze back to the old man. “Am I real?”

That question hit harder than I expected. My breath caught for a moment. I wanted to know that answer too. I wanted someone to just say it, plainly, because deep down, I’d been afraid to ask.

The old man didn’t hesitate. His expression softened, his voice steady. “Of course, you are real. We feel. We hurt. We think. We die. That makes us real.”

He looked at both of us then: me with my game memories and human heart, and Joan with her half-possessed body and wounded soul.

“We are real,” he repeated, gently.

Something in Joan’s posture loosened. Just a little. Her hands unclenched in her lap. I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I exhaled too.

I leaned forward. “Then… what is this world? Isn’t this a game? Isn’t this Lost Legends Online? The same game I came from?”

The old man shook his head. Not dismissively, but with a quiet sort of gravity.

“This is not a game to me, not exactly in the way that mattered,” he said. “And it’s not a game to the denizens of this world either.”

He let that sit for a moment before continuing, “I created this world with one goal: to protect Earth. To prepare it. To keep it out of reach from the greedy hands of the Greater Universe. I analyzed countless paths, sacrificed my Dao, and poured everything I had into building this system… this reality you call a game. What you think of as ‘Classes’ or ‘Legacies’ are the remnants of that sacrifice.”

He glanced at me, and then at Joan, his gaze deep and full of weight. “I chose mana as the foundation for these legacies. Not Qi. Mana is closer to Quintessence. It’s more flexible and easier to replicate across realms. Qi is rooted in Heaven and Earth, but mana is rooted in intention. And more importantly, mana makes it easier to construct Spell Slots… conduits that allow you to borrow the Universe’s Quintessence. That’s what gives your abilities their edge.”

I stared at him, mouth slightly open, my mind catching up to the implications. “So… all the spells, the balance patches, the cool-downs…”

“Were artifacts of an incomplete system,” he finished for me, understanding what even a balance patch meant. “Yes. But it was all to give Earth a fighting chance. If you ask me where this place is, I’ll tell you: it’s a world I built, a seed of resistance in a universe where all that was left was oppression.”

Somehow, the words made sense. They rang true in that strange way dreams and death sometimes do. I felt my thoughts stretch toward some unknowable edge.

He continued, “The reason this world was made to be skill-intensive, harsh even, is because it was never meant to be a leisure space. It was meant to train you. To test your creativity, your resolve. To elevate humanity’s potential. I don’t even know if I finished it. Toward the end, it became too resource-intensive. Too unstable.”

He looked at me with something close to pride. “But seeing you here… I think I might have succeeded.”

Joan snorted lightly. “Don’t be too sure just yet. Last time I left this place, it wasn’t doing any better.”

I laughed under my breath. “Same here. This place was a mess when I first landed on the Hollowed World. The difficulty scaled like crazy each season, the devs were silent, and bugs kept turning into enemy mobs. I nearly died because a rock formation spawned in the wrong place and aggroed an elite I hadn’t even seen.”

The old man chuckled, but there was a sadness behind it. “Still… I have you. And Earth is your home. I trust that you’ll defend it with everything you have.”

I looked at Joan, then back at him. I wanted to say something inspiring. Something heroic. But the truth came out instead.

I sighed. “Yeah, but first… I’ve gotta save Joan and maybe survive Aixin.”

“I have an idea,” Joan said, her eyes narrowing as she glanced between me and the old man.

That tone… confident, dangerous, and far too motivated… immediately set off alarms in my head. She wasn’t scheming against me per se, but whenever Joan got that look, at least according to Dave’s memories, it usually meant pain was coming. My pain. Somehow.

The old man raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Joan pointed at him, then at me, like she was connecting dots in the air. “How many cultivation techniques do you have?”

The old man blinked at her, then turned his gaze slowly toward me.

A cold shiver ran down my spine. That look he was giving me… It was like a blacksmith inspecting a slab of ore. Like a tailor sizing up fabric before cutting. It wasn’t malicious. It was worse. It was discerning.

I raised both hands, instinctively taking a step back. “Hang on… why are you looking at me like that?”

“I believe she’s volunteering you,” the old man said with a smirk.

Joan nodded, arms crossed now. “Yes. I am.”

I groaned, rubbing my forehead. “Joan, no. Come on. I just barely survived a fight with a goddess who bodyjacked you. Do you know how exhausting that was?”

“Do you want to survive the next one?” she asked flatly.

That shut me up.

The old man folded his arms, considering. “To answer your question,” he said, “I have a few thousand techniques. From basic body tempering to incomplete Divine Laws. Most of them were derived from collapsed sects, forgotten realms, or experimental paths I needed to test during world construction.”

My stomach twisted. “A few thousand?”

“I discarded many,” he added helpfully. “Most techniques are inefficient. Rely too much on rare materials or only function within a specific realm’s laws. But if you’re looking for power? I can show you something… like say, the whole list of Paladin Skills you were yet to learn…”

“...”

That was honestly making my blood boil… What kind of gamer wouldn’t feel such things?