Chapter 85

Stepping inside the Creed Of Nonexistence branch proved remarkably anticlimactic.

The building looked normal.

Not normal by the standards of some suspicious organization that wanted outsiders to believe it was normal while hiding a secret labyrinth beneath the floor.

Just...

Normal.

Its exterior consisted of the same combination of metal, stone, and glass infrastructure present throughout this peripheral district.

The entrance was publicly marked, and when I neared, the doors opened automatically, leading me straight to a directory listing reception stations, meeting rooms, repositories, offices, and several facilities whose names meant nothing to me yet.

No guards challenged me.

No hidden passage swallowed me.

No one appeared from nowhere to put a dagger against my neck and demand that I prove myself.

It was a little disappointing compared to the fantasized stories I read about how the Creed did things, honestly.

At least, the interior atmosphere differed from almost every public building I had entered within the Everwell Sector.

It was quiet.

Not silent.

People still spoke, but most conversations took place in whispers or low enough voices that my hearing alone wouldn't have caught much before my [Awareness] came into existence and was developed to its current degree.

Many others simply kept to themselves.

Some wore ordinary clothing with hoods, masks, veils, or high collars covering portions of their bodies.

Others possessed equipment whose inner [Ether] signatures remained easy enough to detect even when whatever the equipment actually did was not.

And then there were the ones my newly advanced [Awareness] touched only to find...

Resistance.

Not complete absence.

Not unless I pushed.

But enough that the normal extension of my [Awareness] slid around them without revealing details I would have naturally acquired from anyone else.

No heartbeat.

No breathing pattern.

No clear internal movement.

Sometimes not even a definite outline beneath whatever visual information my eyes provided.

Individuals covered in a veil of [Secrecy], or a related Aspect.

I could probably pierce some of those veils by [Will]ing my [Awareness] to.

But I didn't.

There was a difference between being capable of observing something and having a reason to deliberately overcome another Entity's attempt to prevent me from doing so.

Especially inside a building belonging to the Creed Of Nonexistence.

Doing that sounded like a remarkably inefficient way to introduce myself.

I, in contrast, had made no effort whatsoever to hide.

My white Pulse uniform remained perfectly visible, the four-loop golden torus knot identifying me as an Aspirant to anyone familiar with the organization.

My pale opalescent hair and crystalline iridescent wings made disguising what I was impractical without dedicated effort anyway.

More importantly...

I had no reason to hide.

Not yet.

Now that I was inside, I flew toward the nearest reception station.

The attendant behind it looked broadly humanoid, though most of their body disappeared beneath a loose gray garment that concealed everything except a pair of hands and a narrow strip around the eyes.

Their face remained unremarkable.

Perhaps deliberately.

"Hello," I greeted after landing on the elevated section of the counter meant for smaller morphologies. "I would like to know how to join the Creed Of Nonexistence."

The attendant looked at me.

Then at my Pulse insignia.

Then back at me, before reaching beneath their desk.

For half a second, I expected forms.

Identification requests.

A preliminary assessment.

Maybe a list of entry requirements.

Instead, they placed a small booklet in front of me.

I stared at it.

The attendant stared back.

My [Awareness] caught the slight movement of one eyebrow.

"That's it?" I asked.

"For now."

Suspiciously familiar.

I remembered walking into a certain Pulse Tower I now worked at soon-to-be two years ago, with almost no idea how the organization functioned and receiving a similar format of introductory material before anything more complicated occurred.

Apparently, organizations whose existence spread across the Endless Realms had collectively determined that small booklets were the optimal first line of defense against ignorant visitors.

A reasonable assumption, if my experiences were anything to go off of.

"Thank you."

I picked it up.

I did not ask about [Worthy].

I did not ask about [Fate].

I certainly did not explain that if the Creed proved incapable of helping me locate prospective Chosen, I intended to visit their apparent nemesis and ask whether the Fate Conclave could do better.

There was no benefit in revealing those objectives before I knew enough to predict how the information would affect whoever received it.

Stavros would probably have approved.

I left the reception station and searched for somewhere suitable to read.

Unsurprisingly, the branch possessed several quiet areas; thus, I selected a recessed space along one wall containing seats of various sizes, then settled into one designed for entities somewhat larger than me because the fairy-sized ones were occupied by not-fairy fairy-sized individuals.

Only then did I properly examine the booklet.

Black cover.

Black pages.

White lettering.

The only decoration consisted of a faint gray symbol printed into one corner of the cover and repeated throughout the pages.

If it could even be called a symbol.

It was a line.

A thin one.

Straight for most of its length, except near the middle where it simply stopped.

A small empty interval followed.

Then the line resumed slightly displaced from where it should have continued.

That was all.

No grand crest.

No skull.

No eye.

No dagger surrounded by shadows.

No complicated insignia requiring someone to consciously notice it.

The same mark could have been woven into the seam of a cloak.

Scratched along a blade.

Hidden among the grain of a shield.

Carved into furniture.

Worked into architecture.

Unless someone already knew to look for it, there was almost nothing to distinguish it from an ordinary imperfection.

Appropriate for what I already knew to be the unique symbol attached to the Creed Of Nonexistence.

I opened the booklet.

The first page immediately informed me that the question I had asked at reception had technically been wrong.

Joining the Creed Of Nonexistence was, according to the introduction, a misnomer.

Not entirely incorrect.

But misleading.

The Creed wasn't something one formally entered through an application, oath, examination, or institutional appointment, as I've always done.

One could work for organizations associated with it.

One could use their branches.

One could cooperate with other adherents.

There were obviously resources, networks, facilities, and organizational structures surrounding it.

But none of those things made someone part of the Creed Of Nonexistence.

For the Creed Of Nonexistence was defined first and foremost by...

Its Creed.

I reread that sentence and called upon [Guided] to make sure I wasn't being misled by the words I was reading, then continued.

And to become part of the Creed Of Nonexistence was to accept the Creed—as in something like a belief, or a doctrine—as part of one's Path.

If I already did, then by the booklet's definition I was already part of the Creed Of Nonexistence whether I had ever entered one of its buildings or not.

If I didn't...

No employee behind a reception desk possessed the authority to make me so.

That was surprisingly simple.

Which naturally raised the important question.

What exactly was I supposed to believe?

I turned the page.

The answer occupied considerably more of the booklet.

[Nonexistence].

Not death.

Not destruction.

Not the literal cessation of one's existence.

The booklet went out of its way to dismiss those interpretations early, presumably because an organization encouraging all its members to stop existing would encounter relatively obvious long-term sustainability problems.

Rather...

Taken from NovelPhoenix, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

[Nonexistence] was presented as a state of ultimate freedom from the ability of others to act upon one's existence.

A state in which no one could see you unless you wished to be seen.

No one could find you unless you allowed yourself to be found.

No one could know where you were.

No one could divine where you would go.

No one could define your future.

No one could bind you through knowledge, expectation, prediction, obligation, [Contract], [Fate], or any other means of turning your existence into something they possessed the capacity to [Control].

The [Ideal] adherent would henceforth aspire to exist directly beside someone without becoming part of their reality.

Could cross a kingdom without entering its records.

Could influence events without leaving enough information behind for others to reconstruct their involvement.

Could walk a Path rejected by every organization, authority, patron, enemy, friend, and Civilization at large...

And remain free to continue walking it.

Put in these words, the Creed was quite something.

Still, the booklet's language remained considerably more "philosophical" than the introductory Pulse material had been.

Not difficult.

Just... deliberately broad.

It spoke repeatedly of [Absence].

Of escaping the boundaries created by [Observation].

Of how [Knowledge] about an Entity allowed that Entity to be anticipated.

How anticipation allowed preparation.

How preparation enabled [Influence].

How [Influence] became [Control].

How [Control], when refined far enough, stopped resembling chains and instead became something much harder to recognize.

Expectation.

Probability.

Prediction.

[Fate].

When the booklet started addressing [Fate], I reread the relevant pages multiple times.

As it turned out, from a certain perspective...

The Creed Of Nonexistence was entirely about rejecting [Fate] in every form capable of constraining one's Path.

Not merely the [Fate] Aspect.

The concept itself.

Being told what one would become.

Being placed inside someone else's plans.

Being categorized so accurately that one's future choices became predictable.

Having relationships, obligations, or information about oneself transformed into mechanisms through which another Entity could shape what came next.

The booklet didn't claim all of those things were inherently [Evil].

Civilization functioned because Entities constantly predicted one another.

Organizations required expectations.

Relationships created obligations.

[Contract]s deliberately created restrictions.

The point wasn't that all constraints had to be rejected immediately.

It was that an adherent of the Creed ought to pursue a Path that eventually led toward possessing the ability to reject them.

Choice.

Not compulsory isolation.

The capacity to disappear from another Entity's grasp whenever remaining within it ceased serving one's own Path.

I contemplated this new perspective and [Comprehension] for a long moment.

Then looked at the broken gray line printed near the bottom of the page.

Odd.

Very odd.

Everything about the Creed was odd.

Even by my standards.

And yet...

I understood why Stavros had considered it relevant to me.

My [Ambition] had never tolerated the idea of something or someone deciding the limits of my Path.

Not my circumstances.

Not my age.

Not organizations.

Not an Origin Aspect framework telling me I could only align myself with [Guided] or reject it.

Not an Essence overdevelopment disorder informing me how quickly I was allowed to develop.

And certainly not another Entity deciding what my future ought to become.

Only myself.

The comparison wasn't perfect, though.

I didn't possess some deeply held philosophical opposition toward being influenced by others.

[Guided] was all about influencing my decision, after all.

And I followed advice constantly.

Stavros had stirred my Path.

Xafsa had shaped it through [Knowledge].

Lavanya had just spent two months influencing my outlook on my [Faith] [Foundation].

If someone, or even just a book, offered a better direction than the one I presently intended to take...

I would follow it.

That wasn't submission or dependence.

It was optimization.

The problem only emerged when I lost the ability to choose otherwise.

That distinction made the Creed significantly more comprehensible.

And inevitably...

My thoughts turned toward my [Secrecy] Aspect.

The Aspect had sat at Tier 0 for close to three years now.

Not because it was useless.

Quite the opposite.

I had used it constantly one way or another.

During my journey from the Red Sand Sector to the Everwell Sector...

I controlled information around myself.

Suppressed unnecessary traces.

Obscured my actions during the many combats and escapes I lived through.

Limited what others could perceive.

Made myself harder to track.

And since making it to the Everwell Sector, I had always relied on it to allow people to observe exactly what served my interests and denied them what didn't.

Those habits had become so natural that I rarely thought about them as deliberate [Secrecy] [Cultivation] anymore.

Still, at its present level, much of my [Comprehension] of its intrinsic coconut remained rooted in what came before it.

[Darkness].

Hiding.

Concealing.

Making something harder to perceive.

Controlling the boundary between known and unknown.

Ultimately useful.

But...

Ultimately shallow relative to the grander designs of my Path.

Or maybe...

Shallow was the wrong word.

Or at least an incomplete one.

I returned to the booklet.

The Creed was famous for intelligence gathering.

Infiltration.

Counterintelligence.

Hidden observation.

Operating where others didn't want them.

Finding information people attempted to conceal.

Preventing others from acquiring information in return.

At first glance, all of that seemed perfectly aligned with what I already understood [Secrecy] to be.

But after reading the Creed's actual philosophy...

Those activities looked different.

Information gathering wasn't necessarily the destination.

Neither was infiltration.

Neither was becoming impossible to see.

They were prerequisites.

Training.

If one wanted to reach a state where another Essence Entity couldn't hope to manipulate them through [Fate], [Divination], prophecy, prediction, or any similarly "invasive" concept...

Then one first needed to learn how to deny simpler forms of information.

A hidden footstep before a hidden destination.

A concealed action before an unknowable intention.

An unreadable record before an unreadable future.

A secret before [Nonexistence].

I flipped backward several pages.

Then forward again.

The booklet never said that directly.

Not in those words.

But still...

If I read between the lines correctly, that was what the Creed truly seemed to be about.

Before someone learned to disappear from [Fate], they first learned to disappear from sight.

Before escaping [Divination], they learned to prevent ordinary investigation.

Before becoming unknowable to some impossibly developed Aspect capable of reaching across distance, time, causality, or whatever else...

They learned how not to leave their plans sitting in a notebook where someone could steal them.

Basic [Secrecy] I didn't really bother to apply as I didn't really have anything I wanted to genuinely hide yet.

Pushing that line of [Comprehension], the Creed ceased being about hiding information and started becoming something much closer to denying other Entities the right to access one's existence at all.

[Nonexistence].

I leaned back, considering that concept.

[Nonexistence].

I wondered what Order it belonged to.

Fourth?

Fifth?

In any case, the booklet truly allowed me to glimpse something novel and fascinating.

And incidentally, it was also a potential direction I found objectively attractive.

Not enough for me to suddenly redirect my Essence development toward it.

But enough to reconsider where my [Secrecy] Aspect might eventually belong within the future of my Path.

Until now, I had mostly treated it as a highly useful supporting Aspect whose immediate applications justified its existence.

Combat was easier when enemies couldn't predict my attacks.

Exploration was safer when dangerous people didn't know I was nearby.

Information gathering worked better when no one knew I was gathering it.

Negotiations benefited from [Control]ling what others knew about my objectives.

Social interactions benefited from keeping private thoughts private.

Even ordinary travel became easier when I could decide how much attention I attracted.

All useful applications.

But none that sat particularly close to the core of my Path.

I wasn't an assassin anymore.

Assuming I had ever truly been one.

I had no desire to spend centuries hiding in [Darkness] simply because lurking in [Darkness] unseen felt spiritually fulfilling.

I didn't dream of becoming the most concealed Entity in existence.

[Stealth] was a means.

[Concealment] was a means.

Information [Control] was a means.

If flying openly through a city while wearing a bright white Pulse uniform accomplished my objective more efficiently than hiding...

I would fly openly.

If announcing exactly what I intended to do made cooperation easier...

I would announce it.

And as my Path continued growing, many of the crude benefits [Secrecy] presently provided would inevitably become less relevant unless I continued investing in the Aspect.

A stronger enemy could eventually perceive through my concealment.

A better investigator could reconstruct my actions.

A specialized observer could see through my superficial veil of [Secrecy] more easily than I could see through walls after my recent [Awareness] Aspect advancement.

A sufficiently developed organization could probably follow me through methods I didn't even know existed.

Without further [Cultivation], the things I currently considered impressive applications of [Secrecy] would eventually become...

Pointless.

That was the nature of Essence development.

An Aspect didn't remain useful merely because it had once been useful.

In the grand scheme of things, I wasn't competing with others my age.

I wasn't even truly competing with anyone other than myself.

But the [Truth] was that no matter how many steps I took on my Path, for centuries to come, I would always find peers who had taken twice or ten times the time it took me to arrive at their level.

Which left me with a question I had previously lacked a compelling reason to answer.

What did [Secrecy] become when hiding in [Darkness] was no longer enough?

The booklet offered one possibility.

[Nonexistence].

Not merely becoming harder to perceive.

Becoming harder to bind.

Harder to predict.

Harder to manipulate.

Harder to weave into someone else's [Fate].

It was a course leading toward retaining the ability to rely solely on my own Path even when dealing with Entities capable of influencing reality on levels I presently understood only through books.

That...

Was relevant.

Very relevant.

My [Purity] seemed almost annoyingly interested in the implications of opting for that course.

I didn't immediately give in.

Instead, I opened my notebook and began writing.

Potential high-order direction for my [Secrecy] Aspect: [Nonexistence].

After writing that small snippet of thought, I paused for a bit, then added:

Primary value: preserving [Freedom] and agency against increasingly sophisticated external constraints.

That captured the part that mattered.

Not infiltration.

Not assassination.

Not hiding.

Those could remain useful consequences.

But if [Nonexistence] truly represented what this booklet suggested...

Then pursuing it could keep my Aspect formed around the concept of [Secrecy] relevant even after every one of its present applications became obsolete.

After that, I continued writing about all this direction served to oppose.

[Fate].

[Divination].

Remote observation.

Prediction.

Binding.

Information-based influence.

Unknown higher-order equivalents.

Then, after some consideration, jotted down some initial thoughts on its hypothetical compatibility with my [Ambition], [Purity], and [Will] Aspect along with my Origin Aspect.

That question would require considerably more research, however.

[Guided] especially.

The interaction between an Origin Aspect that continuously provided me with direction and a hypothetical future state centered around becoming inaccessible to external determination could either be beautifully complementary or catastrophically contradictory depending on details I didn't possess.

Then there was [Faith].

If I eventually wanted countless Entities directing [Faith] toward me, pursuing a state defined by becoming impossible for others to reach might contain extremely obvious complications.

Or perhaps [Faith] represented an exception.

Or a controlled channel.

Or something [Nonexistence] could selectively permit.

I didn't know.

Which was exactly why I wasn't making any decisions.

I closed my notebook.

The booklet remained open beside it.

For something I had received after asking the simplest possible question at a reception desk, it had done remarkably well at generating an entirely new branch of long-term Path research.

Stavros would probably consider that amusing.

He had told me to begin synthesizing [Darkness] into [Secrecy] years ago if I wanted to understand what he had spent centuries developing his Essence toward.

At the time, I had interpreted that as him being annoyingly dramatic about his preferred Aspect.

Now...

Maybe not.

Perhaps [Secrecy] had never been the point.

Perhaps it was simply where someone like me had to begin.

I looked once more at the broken gray line running across the booklet's cover.

A line.

An absence.

Then continuation beyond it.

I wondered whether that symbolism was intentional.

Probably.

Or perhaps expecting an organization dedicated to [Nonexistence] to explain its symbol clearly was optimistic.

Either way...

My conclusion stood.

Pursuing [Nonexistence] deserved a place among the countless things I intended to investigate over the course of my Path.

Not as a priority.

Not while the formation and advancement of my [Flow] and [Foundation] Aspects remained directly tied to solving my Essence overdevelopment disorder.

Not while my [Faith] possessed unresolved [Foundation]al questions.

Not when I had barely begun exploiting what [Vitality], [Mastery], [Comprehension], and my now Tier 3 [Awareness] Aspect could eventually become.

But later?

If no higher Order Aspect presented itself as a clearly superior destination for the portion of my Path presently occupied by [Secrecy]...

I could see myself pursuing it.

Centuries of [Stealth] and [Concealment] for their own sake held little appeal.

Centuries spent developing the ability to deny even [Fate] the authority to decide where my Path went?

That was different.

Eventually, with this new [Comprehension] of the Creed, I closed the black booklet.

In any event, this was not a decision I needed to make anytime soon.