The sky over the Green Leaf Mountains was turning a bruised purple.
Alex wiped a mixture of sweat and rain from his forehead, gripping the strap of his worn-out canvas bag tighter.
He was nineteen, lean, short with messy black hair that stuck to his face.
"Just my luck," Alex muttered, his breathing heavy. "Uncle John said it would rain, but I didn't think the sky would open up like this."
He wasn't a powerful Gene warrior, just an average awakener with a F rank gene, living in Iron Creek City with his middle-aged Uncle John, a gruff but kind blacksmith.
In fact, just two years ago, Alex was an ordinary office worker on Earth.
However for some unknown reason, he suddenly woke up in the body of Alex two years back.
Even with the memories of a life on earth, life was not easy for him in a world that was affected by "Spiritual Power Recovery".
He waited for two years for some system to help him reach the top of the world or awaken some powerful gene, but nothing happened so far.
From the memories he inherited, uncle John had taken him when he was still ten years old, raising him alongside his own two kids.
Alex easily adjusted to the new world, it's just that he had a brawny, loudmouthed older male cousin named Marcus, and a sharp-tongued, older female cousin named Elena.
They were a noisy, chaotic, and loving family, but money was always tight.
That was why Alex was out here in the dangerous outskirts, miles from the city, hunting for 'Spirit Grass.'
A single stalk could sell for 500 credits, enough to buy high-quality iron ore for the shop.
Boom!
Thunder cracked directly overhead, shaking the ground beneath his muddy boots. The drizzle instantly turned into a torrential downpour.
"I can't make it back to the city outpost," Alex realized, scanning the dark treeline. "I need to take shelter for now."
Through the curtain of rain, he saw a jagged silhouette on a nearby ridge. It looked like an old building, its roof sagging and covered in moss.
A shrine.
Without hesitating, Alex scrambled up the slippery slope, his hands clawing into the mud.
He threw himself through the rotting wooden doors of the structure just as a bolt of lightning struck a nearby pine tree, turning the world white for a split second.
He collapsed on the dry, dusty floor, gasping for air.
"Fuck just missed that," he cursed, brushing the dirt off his clothes.
He looked around. It was a dilapidated shrine, clearly abandoned for decades.
The air smelled of dry rot and old incense.
In the center of the room sat a stone statue, but it was too damaged to make out what it represented.
The head was missing, and vines had strangled the torso.
Behind the snake statue, there was a faded painting on the wall. It depicted a woman with the lower body of a serpent.
"A Naagin?" Ren whispered. "A snake demon?"
Crack-BOOM!
Lightning struck right outside, lighting up the room in a flash of stark white.
The cold inside the shrine wasn't just the damp chill of rain; it felt like the air itself had been stripped of heat.
Alex shivered violently, his teeth starting to chatter as he reached for the hem of his soaked t-shirt to wring it out.
He squeezed the fabric, water dripping onto the dusty floorboards, when a flicker of white caught his peripheral vision.
He froze.
His heart hammered against his ribs, not from the exertion of the climb, but from a sudden, primal spike of adrenaline.
Slowly, he turned his head toward the broken stone deity.
There, huddled behind the moss-covered base of the statue, was a woman.
Alex's breath hitched in his throat, and he subconsciously swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly dry despite the humidity.
She was stunning in a way that felt dangerous.
Her hair was a cascade of silvery-black silk, plastered against her neck and shoulders by the rain, framing a pale face with wide, fearful blue eyes that seemed to glow in the gloom.
But it was her state of dress… or lack thereof… that locked Alex's gaze in place.
She was wearing what looked like a thin, white ceremonial robe, but the torrential rain had rendered the fabric almost entirely transparent.
It was soaked through, clinging to her body with the tenacity of a second skin, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination.
Alex couldn't help himself; his eyes traveled down.
The wet silk was pasted tight against a pair of heavy, full breasts that rose and fell rapidly with her shivering breaths.
The cold had hardened her nipples, which pushed visibly against the sheer cloth, demanding attention.
The fabric dipped in at an impossibly narrow waist before flaring out over wide, soft hips and thick, shapely thighs that were curled up against her chest.
Every curve of her hourglass figure was highlighted by the damp material, outlining the deep valley of her cleavage and the soft swell of her stomach.
She looked incredibly soft, plump in all the right places, radiating a raw, intense femininity that made the dark, rotting shrine feel suddenly suffocatingly hot.
She looked up at him with a pitiful, trembling expression, wrapping her arms around her knees as if trying to hide her exposed body, which only served to squeeze her chest together, pushing her cleavage up further.
"I..." Alex started, his voice cracking. He blinked, trying to clear his head.
'I checked this room. I scanned every corner when I walked in.' The logic part of his brain was screaming an alarm. 'She wasn't there five seconds ago.'
The shrine was barely twenty feet wide. There was no back door, no hidden cave.
Yet, the biological part of his brain, the part of him that was a nineteen-year-old virgin who hadn't seen a woman this beautiful, let alone this exposed, in two lifetimes, was drowning out the logic.
The scent of rain and rot was suddenly overpowered by a faint, sweet smell coming from her, something like blooming night flowers.
"Who are you?" Alex managed to whisper, stepping back slightly, though his eyes remained glued to the way the water dripped from her silver-black hair down onto her collarbone.
The woman didn't speak. She just shivered, her blue eyes locked onto his, pleading for warmth.