Chapter 2107: New Shell for New Calling

The journey to Avelis was a long one.

Even with the teleportation matrices, the distance between Kessrin Command and the heart of human civilization was vast enough that the transport needed nearly a week to make the crossing.

It stopped at hub after hub along the way, passing from one system to the next, and between the jumps, there were long stretches of ordinary travel as the transport crossed each system to reach the next matrix in line.

Ning had a small private cabin aboard, a courtesy arranged by General Choo, and he spent most of the journey there. He lay on the narrow bunk, watching the stars drift past the small window, and thought about very little at all.

It was on the third day of the journey that he realized there was a problem.

He had been thinking idly about the Calling ceremony, wondering what it would be like to experience it again after so long. He had been remembering the mountain where Crownus had first shown him the Heavenly Records, the transparent words appearing in front of his eyes, and the three options he had been given.

Priest. Boxer. Winemaker.

He had chosen Winemaker, mostly as a joke, and the knowledge of fermentation and fruit selection and flavor balance had settled into his mind as though he had spent years learning it.

Ning sat up slowly on the bunk.

He had already received a Calling.

A hundred and thirty thousand years ago, on that mountain above Avelis, the Heavenly Records had evaluated him, offered him a choice, and recorded the result.

As far as the Records were concerned, he was already an awakened person who had already chosen his Calling. If he walked into a Calling ceremony now and the Records recognized him, it would not offer him a choice at all.

At best, it would simply show him the Calling he already had.

At worst, it would show the officials overseeing the ceremony that a young pilot from Truimal, whose records said he had never left his home system before joining the academy, had somehow received a Calling more than a hundred thousand years before he was born.

Ning rubbed his face with one hand.

"That would be awkward," he muttered.

He considered his options.

He could ask Crownus to alter the Records directly, but that would mean drawing the Galactic Will into something he would rather handle himself.

He could try to avoid the ceremony entirely and come up with some excuse for General Choo, but Choo had been so delighted by the idea of sending him to Avelis that refusing would raise more questions than it answered.

He could let the Records show whatever they would show and deal with the consequences, but that was the worst option of all.

In the end, he decided the cleanest solution was the most direct one.

He would remove the old Calling from himself entirely.

It was not as simple as forgetting what he had learned. The knowledge of winemaking was still there in his mind, and he did not particularly care whether it stayed or went.

What mattered was the connection, the faint thread that linked him to the Heavenly Records and marked him as someone who had already been awakened and had already chosen.

It had been there since that day on the mountain, so faint that he had nearly forgotten it existed. But if he looked for it, he could still find it.

He found it.

It was a thin, delicate strand of energy, woven into him at the moment he had pressed on the word Winemaker. It ran outward from him toward something vast and distant, the Heavenly Records themselves. It carried his record of awakening and his choice.

Ning reached out and severed it.

There was no pain and no dramatic flash of light. The thread simply came apart, its two ends drifting away from one another, and a moment later, the faint presence of the Heavenly Records at the edge of his awareness was gone. The knowledge of winemaking remained in his mind, but it was no longer attached to anything. It was simply something he happened to know.

But removing the old Calling was only half the problem.

The Heavenly Records connected every human born on Avelis or descended from its people to itself at the moment of their birth. If Ning walked into a Calling ceremony with no connection to the Records at all, it would be just as strange as walking in with a Calling a hundred thousand years old. The Records would not recognize him as human. It might not recognize him as anything.

Ning thought about the Mekharans, and how the Records’ failure to recognize them had started a war.

He did not want to find out what would happen if it failed to recognize him.

"System," he said quietly. "I need your help."

<What do you require?>

"I need a version of myself that matches my records," Ning said. "A human named Ning, born where my records say I was born, to the parents my records say I had. He needs to be connected to the Heavenly Records at birth, the way every human in the Federation is. He’s never been awakened, and he’s never received a Calling. When the Records look at me during the ceremony, I want them to see exactly what my paperwork says, and nothing more."

<Understood. Constructing.>

The System went to work.

Ning felt it happening, a slow, careful reshaping of the outermost layers of his presence. It was not a change to who he truly was. Beneath it all, he remained exactly as he had always been, energy and System and nothing else.

But around that core, the System built a thin, convincing shell, a version of Ning that matched every detail of his fabricated life. It was a human, born on Rossin to two ordinary parents, connected to the Heavenly Records at the moment of his birth, and never awakened.

When the System established the connection to the Records, Ning felt it at once.