It was a common sparrow that did it. It's shrill chirping finally piercing through the blanket of unconsciousness. Sleep, while rare, was not altogether unanticipated, but the discordance between my awakening senses and what should have been my villa raised alarm bells and sent my adrenaline pumping. I bolted awake and took in the room around me.

  It was a large room in an unusual style. The wall had a fetishistic relationship with carved hardwoods and overwrought brass. While the large windows allowing indirect morning light was oddly framed in glass of all things. I myself appeared to be on top of a large piece of furniture which, on double-take, appeared to be the largest and most impractical bed I had ever seen. My attention slowly drifting inwards towards myself made me suddenly realize I was no longer wearing my own clothes, instead, in some sort--

  "Ah good, you're awake, hero," a baritone male voice suddenly spoke up from a chair next to the bed. "Given the difficulties involved in summoning you, I would have been rather disappointed if there was any perman--"

  My bare heel connected with the man's face, splattering skull, brain and blood across half the room in a surprisingly, muffled eggcrack. I belated realized that the man was a mortal and that was the reason I did not immediately sensed him and was startled to action against an unknown foe when waking up in an unknown bedroom in clothes not my own.

  Even more belatedly, while his style of dress was as queer as the room itself, it was clearly fairly fine and well-wrought materials (for a mortal at least). Piecing together the few words he had spoken before his unfortunate demise, I had a terrible premonition that he was or represented a local--wherever that was--power. And I was not keen to awaken a tiger without even knowing what sort of tiger it was. I tried to reach into my storage ring for resurrection artifact appropriate for a mortal, but the ring was gone too with my clothes and his soul was already beginning to dissipate.

  Throughout this process, I had remained standing on one leg, with the other, bloodied leg hanging in the air. A quick application of qi at least let me clean that foot off and I recentered myself as I stood again on two feet and calmed my panicked decisionmaking into something more coherent.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  My name is Azure Emerald, the Lady of the Seven Waters. I've found myself in an unknown land with nothing but--I used my qi to metaphorically tap my personal spatial space, confirming it was there--what I have in my spatial space. I do not know how I got here, who was responsible, who I killed or who the local powers are. Is this a mortal city? Or was he merely an agent for an my immortal executioner? ... There is only one path forward.

  I quickly made my way to the door, slipping my divine sense through and into the hallway outside. There were two mortal guards in strange, metal plated armor and armed with spears and shortswords. My divine sense stretched farther throughout what I increasingly realized was a tremendously large mansion, mapping out it's many pathways. The servants were numerous, but the building was so large that there were many blind spots throughout. More pertinently, there were very few who seemed to fall into any sort of categorization as superior, and even fewer who had an unit of internal power, any even those were only in the first few levels of power.

  I shook my head at this great mystery at how such weak people could have gotten my here, unless of course this was a feint. But as my divine sense left the mansion, across the strangely manicured gardens and lawns to the walls surrounding the estate, I continued to doubt whether any immortal was involved at all.

  I could have slaughtered them all in less time that it took to brew tea. And likely without consequences. But again, I was operating now in the dark, and my divine sense could barely reach past the estate itself.

  With a quick step, I kicked the dead man's chair, sending it on a ballistic arc towards and through the large glass window. As the mundane glass tinkled, I jumped behind the door as it slammed open, the two guards rushing in. One knelt beside the dead body and started cursing, while the other ran to look outside the window. I slipped out the door, and took off down the hallway deeper into the estate. The alarm raised was slow to my tastes, but like an anthill, it would slowly spread throughout the estate as more became aware of the death of this seemingly important man or the apparent escape of my person through the window.

  With a few quick turns and judicious use of hiding behind columns and, of all things, statuary in the hallways, I found myself in the servant's quarters. A quick ransack of a chest found a practical maid's outfit that would fit me, but before I put it on, I turned towards and rushed through a cruder wood door, finding myself before an unfamiliar porcelain apparatus with a familiar function.

  Because if there was one thing that crossing the veil apparently caused was a huge build up of impurities in the colon!