The journey to the sect Dave hoped to join without even knowing its name went by rather uneventfully, other than him once almost molesting a unicorn lady by grabbing her horn out of "scientific" curiosity. Currently he was boasting about his achievements to Fang Xiu Hua.
"And that is how I won second prize at the fifth grade science fair."
"Yaaay…"
"You could at least pretend to be interested."
"I'll be honest with you Dave, that science shit is so brutally uninteresting it makes me want to self detonate just so I don't have to hear any more of it."
"Pfft, fine. I'm used to my wisdom going over the heads of the less gifted. Suit yourself in your ignorance. Wait a minute, we're out of the wilderness, what is this place?"
"This area specifically? The big onion."
"The big onion? Sounds like a place you would go to cry."
"It's just a nickname."
"That makes sense. Back on earth we have a place people call the big apple– Oh, here comes a cute one. What beauty, what sense of fashion. Holy smokes she's hot. Hey," Dave pointed at someone in the crowd, "who's that babe over there."
"You can't expect us to know every single person here, there are hundreds of thousands of people living here."
"But she's wearing a uniform similar to yours, just much nicer."
"Oh? Who– Wait, her?" Fang Xiu Hua pointed at someone in the crowd. Dave eyeballed the angle of their respective fingers and concluded their lines intersected at the same individual. He nodded enthusiastically.
Fang Xiu Hua groaned, "Dave… that's a man. He's senior brother Ronald Shang Bong from our sect."
"W-what!? No, you're screwing with me. Seriously?"
"Yes, seriously. Have you lost your mind? You will offend heaven if you keep talking like that."
Could it be… my body yearns for a man?
"But she's–, I mean he's?– so… hot?"
"Dave shut the fuck up."
"H-huh? Ugh…"
Did I turn gay? No, it can't be… He must be using some kind of technique to dazzle me with his beauty, that's the only logical explanation.
"Stupid sexy senior brother Ronald Shang Bong," he said softly, "I will remember that name."
The warmth in his gaze sent a shiver down Liu Yan's spine. Have I brought a demon to the sect? she contemplated in silence while looking at Dave with an air of disgust .
"I'm not gay!" shouted Dave, attracting attention from passerbys.
"Hush. No one said you were gay, so stop being attracted to men and walk."
"I–" Dave began, but he was interrupted by Fang Xiu Hua covering his mouth and glaring murderously into his eyes. "I really don't care who you're attracted to. But if you bring shame to our sect I'll make sure the only thing attracted to you are flies, because you will be a corpse, if that wasn't clear." For once Liu Yan didn't come to his defense and he could only lower his head and nod solemnly.
I have to convince them I'm not gay to restore my honor. But how. How? Even science hasn't found a way to deduce whether someone is gay or not, yet anyway. Maybe if I get a boner and show off my bulge, by "accident" of course, while no men are around… You know what, I think this takes priority over my quest to complete a science experiment. System, can I get a quest for this too?
No response.
Heh, wishful thinking. I'll have to engineer some kind of situation where the three, or at least two of us, and if so, me and Liu Yan, are together, alone. Hehehe.
Meanwhile somewhere else, but still relatively nearby: A purple portal connected to another dimension (earth) manifested itself out of thin air, and a hooded figure passed through it. He coughed and cleared his throat, forcing out a single sentence filled with nothing but contempt and malice: "Dave, I'm going to kill you!"
If Dave had seen his face he would have known at once, it was Francis Hyneman, a former classmate of his. He's an eighteen year old football player, a jock, a ginger, a delinquent. Francis hates Dave with a passion, therefore he hates science with a passion. If Francis had been given access to nuclear launch codes he would have sent earth back to the stone age with the same careless attitude he shoved nerds into lockers with. He would watch cities go up in flames and society melting away with a smile on his face, knowing that he had destroyed the life's work of all those nerds who he was forced to learn about in class. If you asked him to name one of them, or what they had achieved, he would answer by punching you in the face, and he wouldn't know the answer either. Francis had also graduated alongside Dave, but he wasn't ready to let go of his bullying victims just yet. He broke through a window and snuck into Dave's basement lab that he knew of because Dave had always went around the school bragging loudly about all the science he did down there, and he also invited many girls for a tour of the lab, even if not a single one of them ever accepted the offer.
When Francis arrived, unbeknownst to him, Dave had already departed into a world of cultivation and mystery. Wrecking the lab was a foregone conclusion, but Francis was also going to rob him. He had seen a TV-show about a bald man making meth and recognized some of the equipment, leading him to believe Dave was also cooking meth as a science experiment. When he had rummaged through the room, completely oblivious to the shattered glass and soot being a sign that something had gone awfully wrong, he found a purple gem of sorts left behind, and he came to the only logical conclusion, that this must be meth of extremely high purity. Francis had promptly rolled the gem into a joint he kept in his pockets, and blazed it up, ready to unleash his newly meth fueled rage on the laboratory equipment Dave loved more than anything. He vacuumed the blunt like it owed him lunch money and it immediately exploded in his face. That explosion recreated the phenomenon from Dave's experiment that had created it in the first place, sending Francis the same way into the world of cultivation and mystery.
"Huhhhhgggggggnnnnnnn..." said Francis, breathing out a tepid black smog, and finally being able to take a deep breath of fresh air. "Arrrggghhh!" he screamed.
Dave looked up at the sky.
"Did you guys hear anything?"