Free Web NovelChapter 12: Three Choices
Three choices had now appeared before Trevor Ashford.
First, he could sit back and do nothing, in which case both he and the little boy would simply fade from existence.
Second, he could continue absorbing the boy’s Soul fragments in an attempt to save himself, then look for a way to take over this new body he coincidentally found himself inhabiting.
Or third, he could attempt to piece back together the broken bits of the young boy’s Soul while allowing his own to continue collapsing. This would undoubtedly result in his own death, but may give the boy a chance to survive.
Given the cold, indifferent state Trevor now found himself in, one might assume that the first option would be his obvious choice. His life or death now meant next to nothing to him, much less the life or death of a stranger he had never met.
However, he quickly discarded the idea of standing idly by and letting fate run its course. That would be the same as giving up, and while he didn’t feel any emotional impetuses anymore, Trevor Ashford still retained most of his memories, and at no point in his life did he ever recall being a quitter.
Even when faced with great adversity or tragedy, the very notion of surrendering went against who he was.
Perhaps he was simply just following his previous behaviour like a pre-programed machine, but Trevor wouldn’t be giving up today, which left him with two choices.
Devour the remnants of a child’s Soul he had never met before and knew nothing about to save himself.
Or sacrifice himself in an attempt to save that same child.
From a logical perspective, if he could save himself, that was what Trevor should do. He had died with regrets, many of them, and even if the chances were remote, perhaps if he could assume control of this young boy’s body, he could be reborn and return to the other universe to see his loved ones again.
Trevor seriously considered this possibility, not so much because he was desperate to live, but simply because he felt it had a higher chance of success than trying to repair the child’s broken Soul.
There was just one problem. He estimated that by consuming the boy’s Soul, he would be able to survive, but what then?
Unlike the little boy’s Soul, which appeared to simply be broken, his Soul had already been worn down and ground away by is journey through the void, leaving barely anything of his former self behind. Even if he did manage to stop the collapse of his Soul and assume control of this body, Trevor Ashford was almost certain he would no longer be himself.
Every reason he had to live on was based on emotions he could no longer feel, so what the point even be?
If he never recovered his emotions, and simply remained a broken husk unable to feel love, joy, happiness, or anything else ever again, would he really be alive?
Say he succeeded, overcame all the odds, and managed to return back home one day; in his current state, would he be happy to see Jessica again?
Would he be able to tell Lilly he loved her?
Would he shed tears for them if he discovered they had died?
If the answer to all those questions was ’no’, then how would that be better than simply dying here and now?
On the other hand, perhaps in time he could regain his ability to feel those emotions, but if he did, would he be able to live with himself knowing what he had done?
From a strictly technical perspective, the answer to this question was yes, but judging from his past self’s actions and thought-patterns, Trevor knew the answer was no.
Killing a child to save his own life was definitely a sin the former Trevor would deem absolutely unforgivable.
As he contemplated all these possibilities, any appeal trying to save himself rapidly faded away.
It seems there was only one option from the start, Trevor concluded.
Whether this was truly the most logical course of action to take, or it was the last vestiges of his original personality tipping the scales towards the outcome it wanted to see, Trevor would never know, but he had now made his decision.
Besides, he had ’died’ once before to save hundreds of lives, including that of the woman he loved, so what did it matter if he made one more sacrifice now?
This final act of his might not be as meaningful as his previous sacrifice, it may not lead to the salvation of the human race, it may not even succeed, but that didn’t matter to Trevor.
He had considered his options and made a decision; he wasn’t going to back down now.
All that said, Trevor still had a serious problem: he had no idea how to do this.
With time running out, Trevor took the simplest and most straightforward action he could, he began reaching out and collecting as many of the floating wisps of light as he could.
This was troublesome at first, as he quite a few of the fragments he touched he would unconsciously absorb, but after experimenting for a short while, Trevor discovered that as long as he clearly pictured there being a barrier between him and the boy’s Soul, he could stop the wisps from merging with him.
This method required quite a bit of focus and concentration, but that didn’t bother Trevor.
There were, of course, some accidents still, with Trevor unconsciously absorbing small bits and pieces of the boy’s life as he worked, but there was nothing he could do about it.
How this would negatively affect the boy should Trevor ultimately succeed in saving him, he had no idea, but it couldn’t be worse than dying, so he carried on unabated.
Having gathered nearly a thousand Soul fragments, and again, with no better ideas about how to mold them into a single whole, Trevor smooshed them all together, hoping they would stick.
If this didn’t work, he really didn’t know what else to try, but fortunately, it seemed luck was on his side today.
While initially the wisps he gathered didn’t hold together, causing him to doubt whether this method would be effective, after taking a closer look, Trevor noticed that a few of the fragments had merged into large, more solid pieces. fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
Pausing for a moment, Trevor Ashford tried to analyze this newly joined fragment and soon came up with a theory.
The individual pieces of the boy’s Soul couldn’t just be jammed together at random, it was more like a puzzle that had to be re-assembled in a specific pattern to form a complete picture.
Now, normally this would be impossible because the individual wisps all looked similar. Some where bigger and some where smaller, but, essentially, they were just shimmering points of light.
Thankfully, it seemed as though the pieces of the boy’s Soul had a certain attraction to one another, so if Trevor could gather them all in one place and shuffle them around, they would probably continue merging together all on their own.
Encouraged by this discovery, Trevor began collecting the wisps even quicker than before, no longer just using his ’hands’ to grab at them, but taking advantage of his seemingly amorphous form to stretch his Soul in various directions, sweeping up large swaths of the light all at once.
However, it wasn’t long before he noticed a new problem.
While it wasn’t obvious at first, Trevor quickly realized that exerting himself to collect the pieces of the boy’s Soul, and even holding the pieces together in one place, were causing his own Soul to break down faster.
In other words, he was in a race not only against time to collect all of the boy’s Soul fragments before they blinked out of existence, but was also racing against the dying of his own Soul.
Trevor knew from the start he was running out of strength to complete this final task, but now it seemed he had even less time than he originally estimated.
If he could still feel frustrated, Trevor Ashford would certainly be grinding his teeth and pulling his hair out after noticing this harsh reality, but in his current state, he simply carried on, as if he was oblivious to the chances of failure before him.
At this point, all he could do was carry on and hope for the best.
