Chapter 46: Spirit Temple

This dimension was actually called Spirit Temple and it existed in a person’s spirit.

I entered a state of cogitation and let my spirit get forced inward. This process was called Spirit Conciousness, and it was used to get inside the Spirit Temple.

Inside the Spirit Temple were Summons and the Core.

Standing on the holy symbol, I let my consciousness settle, allowing the stillness of Spirit Consciousness to sink through me and open the door into my own Spirit Temple.

I had originally assumed this place would be simple, a core, maybe a stretch of scenery borrowed from some memory of home. That was what the books described, what every other Awakened I’d read about seemed to have.

But after a week buried in mysticism and astrology, I got to know that such a situation like my Spirit Temple’s was described for a person standing between eternity and nothingness.

Looking at the stars scattered above me, I let my awareness drift toward the bronze sphere hovering a few paces ahead.

Just as I had expected, the moment my consciousness brushed its surface, the sphere responded, threads of spiritual power sliding toward it from every direction and disappearing into the metal without a ripple.

Following that same pull, I let myself sink deeper.

All at once, I saw three shapes suspended inside.

The Breathing Fire Glove, Starlight Hurricane and some Substitution Charms along with the Voice of Death. Each one wrapped in its own current of power, each one being fed, slow and patient, by whatever quiet process turned raw spirit into something a soul could use.

Noticing that this was an ongoing process, I let my consciousness stay a moment longer.

The threads kept moving, kept feeding, kept vanishing into the fires without ever running dry.

I withdrew and let myself drift back into the fog.

That was when I noticed the stars weren’t just scenery.

Above me, cold and patient. Endless.

Following some instinct I didn’t examine too closely, I reached for the nearest one.

It came without resistance, settling into my palm as though it had been waiting.

I let my consciousness sink into it the way I had with the core.

All of a sudden, I saw a stone bridge and heard the low restless churn of a river beneath it.

A boy stood on the railing, seventeen by the feel of the memory, his silhouette swaying against a sky gone the color of an old bruise.

Above the water, he was muttering to it, as though it might answer him back.

Noticing that this was a real memory and not some invention of the dimension itself, I let the scene pull me closer.

Through his descriptions, I seemed to have witnessed his short life.

His name was Percy. Born into a lawless scrap of land tucked inside the Kingdom of Zaelshak, one of the five kingdoms alongside Valemont, Euiscope, Rumen, and Neusak. His father was a soldier and had died in a war between Zaelshak and Neusak that happened a decade ago.

His mother took work as a housemaid for a wealthy lord, just to keep the two of them fed. For a while, that was enough. They weren’t rich, but they weren’t starving either, and Percy remembered those years the way most people remember the last good stretch before everything turns.

An abrupt change occurred not long after. The lord began forcing himself upon her, quietly at first, then without any pretense of hiding it. When he was finally caught in the act by his own wife, he didn’t hesitate. He turned the story on its head, blamed the housemaid instead, called her a seductress in front of the household staff, and had her thrown out with her reputation in ruins before the sun had even set.

Subsequently, with nothing left and no one willing to hire a woman with that reputation attached to her name, she became a street worker, selling what little she had left so her son wouldn’t go hungry.

Percy hadn’t learned the truth of it until much later. When he did, he didn’t cry, didn’t scream, didn’t do any of the things a normal child might do. He simply started planning. He tried to poison the lord, patient and careful about it, the way only a child who has already lost everything can be patient. It didn’t work. The man was an Awakened, and poison meant nothing to a body that had already outgrown such things.

The lord caught him instead.

I didn’t need the memory to spell out what happened next in detail. The shape of Percy’s silence told me enough: the way the scene itself seemed to hesitate, the way the light dimmed at the edges as though even his own memory didn’t want to look directly at it.

He had run, finally, yesterday by the scene’s own reckoning. And when he made his way home, he found his mother already dead, cold in a room that still smelled faintly of her.

"Why can’t I live a normal life?" he asked the wind, and the wind, being wind, said nothing.

"Why must I carry pain in my heart while everyone else carries happiness!?"

He dragged a hand across his cheek, smearing a tear he probably hadn’t meant to let fall.

"Oh God...

"Oh, whatever mighty thing is out there listening."

His voice rose, cracked further, until it was less a prayer than a scream aimed at the sky.

"What sin did I commit in my mother’s womb, that you’d give me this? Can you hear me? Huh!? Why won’t you say anything!?"

The scream broke apart into sobbing, ragged and useless against the sound of the river.

"Why does it have to be me..."

He let go of the railing.

Plop!

The water took him without ceremony, without even the decency of a splash that mattered to anyone.

Above the fog, I felt something in my chest go quiet.

I wanted to help him. But how could I? This wasn’t something happening now. It was a memory, already finished, already buried in whatever ground held it, years old by the time it ever reached me.

I fell silent for a moment, then let out something that wasn’t quite a laugh.

’This is something I have to take note of. To witness pain like this and do nothing about it, but also to never let it stop meaning something... That’s difficult to accomplish. Failure to pay attention to it can harden a person in the wrong places, turn a person into someone who stops flinching at things that should never stop hurting to see.’

After thinking for a while, I let out a sigh and let the star drift from my palm, back into the endless dark above me.

Wrapping up my thoughts, I turned my attention to the fog around me, searching for something else to look at.

Most of the stars stayed distant, indifferent, the way stars are supposed to be. But a handful pulsed faintly brighter than the rest, as though they knew I was looking.

’Later,’ I thought. ’There will be time enough to open every one of you eventually. Not tonight.’

I retracted my consciousness, let the holy symbol beneath me dim, and swiftly returned to the real world.

Yawning, I finally went to sleep half an hour after returning to the real world.