Chương 13: Battles of the Sexes

Tim and Lia lay awake all night. Both bodies were extremely horny from all the flirting, but neither could get relief. Tim found out that Lia was straight. So if he tried to masturbate as Tim, Lia's brain would recoil in disgust while he tried to visualize sex with a woman from a man's perspective, and Tim was not even close to trying to imagine sex from a woman's perspective as Lia. The end result was two sleep-deprived, sexually frustrated bodies. Tim stumbled into class with the largest coffee he had ever made.

He sat down blank-faced. Being tired in two bodies at the same time was hell. His mood got significantly better when he saw Riku walk through the classroom door, quite literally dragging her bag on the floor. She stared up at him, narrowed her eyes, then trudged forward to her seat. Riku laid her head down on the table. A moment later, Lia got a message from Varek: "What do you do if it's been hard for more than 8 hours?" Tim chuckled out loud, which caused Riku to raise her head and glare at him.

Lia's selfie had been a critical blow. Lia typed: "For normal people it would probably fall off, but being a cultivator, have a cold shower and it will eventually go down." Then Lia typed: "Ummm, how do I stop myself leaking?" Varek quickly replied: "Send us a picture so I know what you're talking about." It was Riku's turn to chuckle. The class was slowly filling and Tim had to start teaching. Lia replied: "Hey, I would appreciate it if you didn't leak that photo."

Varek replied: "No one will see my girl's body naked but me." Tim went red. What the hell was this girl talking about?

"My girl's body"? The possessiveness in that message made Lia's stomach do weird flips. Was Riku seriously claiming ownership over Lia's body through their cultivation world connection?

"Good morning, class," Tim managed to say, though his voice cracked slightly. Several students looked up with concern—their usually composed English teacher seemed frazzled. Riku smirked from her desk, clearly enjoying his discomfort. She typed another message as Varek: "Don't worry, I'll take good care of what's mine." Lia nearly dropped her communicator. The audacity! She furiously typed back: "I am NOT yours, you hormone-addled teenager!" But even as she sent the message, she felt a strange flutter in her chest.

The way Varek was being so protective and possessive was having an unexpected effect on Lia's brain. It was confusing and frustrating and... kind of exciting?

"Mr. Jones?" one of his students called out.

"Are you okay? You look like you're having some kind of internal crisis." Tim blinked, realizing he'd been standing frozen at the front of the class while having a mental breakdown over text messages from his student's other body.

"Yes, fine. Just... caffeine withdrawal. Let's begin with today's lesson on... uh..." He stared at the board, his mind completely blank. Between the sexual frustration, sleep deprivation, and Riku's increasingly bold messages, he was barely functional. Riku raised her hand with mock innocence.

"Sensei, you seem to be having trouble concentrating today. Maybe you need to focus on one thing at a time?" The class erupted in giggles at the seemingly innocent suggestion, while Tim wondered if it was possible to die from embarrassment in two bodies simultaneously. Riku's knowing smirk made it clear she was referring to his dual-body situation, but to everyone else it just sounded like helpful student advice. Cultivation World Varek emerged from the hotel he had been staying at on the journey back to his sect.

The testosterone and male instincts were intoxicating in a way Riku had never experienced before. Every fiber of Varek's being was focused on winning Lia over, and the competitive drive was unlike anything she'd felt in her female body. She flexed Varek's muscular arms and grinned at her reflection in a shop window.

The perfectly styled hair, the expensive cultivation robes, the confident swagger—she was becoming everything she'd ever found attractive in men, and using it to pursue the most unattainable woman in the sect.

"Time to up the ante," she murmured, pulling out her communication device. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Varek started running back to his sect. The Flaming Saber Sect was located in the center of the northern section of the Tempest Continent. As he ran, Riku marveled at the raw power and endurance of this body—Varek could maintain a pace that would leave Olympic athletes gasping, and he wasn't even breathing hard.

The landscape blurred past as he bounded over rocky outcroppings and leaped across ravines with cultivator-enhanced agility. Days of travel for a normal person could be covered much quicker at this pace. The wind whipped through his perfectly styled hair, and Riku couldn't help but grin at how effortlessly cool everything felt in this body. His sect brothers had been messaging him throughout his mission, asking about his sudden fashion transformation and the viral social media posts.

Apparently, half the female disciples in neighboring sects were now following his account, and several marriage proposals had already been submitted to the sect elders. As the familiar peaks of the Flaming Saber Sect came into view, Varek slowed his pace. Time to see how his sect brothers reacted to the new and improved version of their former brutish companion. Earth Tim's eyes narrowed.

Lia's emotions and hormones had him on the back foot, but he was going to show Riku who the alpha male was, he thought to himself. The irony wasn't lost on him that he was planning to assert his masculine dominance while currently inhabiting the body of a nineteen-year-old girl, but Tim was tired of being played with. As the class droned on with their reading exercises, Tim formulated his counterattack. Two could play at this game.

Lia opened her communication device and typed a message to Varek: "You know, for someone who claims to be so confident, you sure do seem desperate for attention. Real men don't need to beg for photos." It was a direct challenge to Riku's newfound masculine ego, and Tim knew exactly which buttons to push. If she wanted to play psychological warfare, he'd remind her that underneath all that borrowed testosterone, she was still an inexperienced teenager trying to act tough.

Meanwhile, in class, Tim straightened his shoulders and fixed Riku with a look that said he wasn't going to be anyone's plaything. The student-teacher dynamic was about to shift dramatically. Tim also knew the best way to undermine a man's ego was for a woman to be more powerful than him. Lia's purple eyes glowed as an intense desire to train burned within her. Varek was cocky as he was Foundation Establishment level 4 and Lia was only level 1. What Varek didn't know was the sheer amount of qi Lia could hold.

A normal level 1 would hold a cup-sized amount of liquid qi in their dantian. Lia had a bathtub's worth and growing. The original Lia had been blessed with meridians that were like superhighways compared to normal cultivators' dirt roads. Her dantian wasn't just larger—it was fundamentally different, capable of storing and processing qi at rates that defied conventional cultivation theory. As she began her training routine, Lia felt the massive reservoir of liquid qi swirling within her core.

The only reason she hadn't advanced to level 2 yet was because she'd been too cautious, too focused on building a perfect foundation rather than rushing ahead. But now? Now she had motivation.

"Let's see how impressive your level 4 is when I show you what real talent looks like," Lia murmured. She started recording as she practiced a powerful move from Lia's memory. Focusing qi into her fingers, she shot a beam of water straight through the practice dummy, and it split the hill in half behind it. The sheer destructive force left a perfectly carved trench stretching for hundreds of meters. Rocks tumbled down the mountainside as the echoing boom reverberated across the sect grounds.

Several disciples came running to see what had caused the explosion. Lia calmly ended the recording and posted it with the caption: "Just some light Foundation Establishment level 1 training. #FlowingWaterSect #JustGettingStarted" Within minutes, her communicator was buzzing with notifications. Comments flooded in from shocked cultivators who couldn't believe a level 1 could produce that kind of devastation. Meanwhile, Varek's communicator chimed as he continued running toward his sect.

When he saw the video, he stumbled mid-stride and nearly face-planted into a boulder.

"What the actual fuck," Riku whispered through Varek's mouth, staring at the impossible display of power. Her cocky confidence evaporated instantly as she realized she might have been poking a sleeping dragon this entire time. Back on Earth, Riku sat up straight in class subconsciously, her cocky smirk completely vanishing. The video of Lia casually destroying a mountainside was playing on repeat in her mind, and each viewing made it more terrifying.

"Holy shit," she whispered under her breath, then quickly glanced around to make sure no one heard her. The testosterone-fueled confidence that had been driving her all morning suddenly felt like foolish bravado. Tim noticed the sudden change in Riku's demeanor and felt a surge of satisfaction. The girl's earlier smugness had evaporated, and now she was sitting ramrod straight, actually paying attention to his lesson for the first time all week.

"As I was saying," Tim continued with newfound confidence, "sometimes appearances can be deceiving. What looks simple on the surface often contains hidden depths." Riku shot him a nervous glance, clearly realizing that the power dynamic between their cultivation world selves had just shifted dramatically. Her communicator buzzed with more notifications as comments poured in on Lia's post. Sect disciples, elders, and even rival sect members were losing their minds over the display of raw power.

Suddenly, flirting with the ice queen didn't seem like such a fun game anymore. But it didn't cool Varek down. His eyes grew bright with the challenge.

"I will tame this ice queen," he thought with renewed determination.