Free Web NovelChapter 4: Chapter 4: A simple mortal
"This rune here contains the forbidden divine skill," the man whispered reverently. "Unfortunately it can only be used one single time as a one-way ticket to a new life. It also requires a heavy price which is all the Karma of the target."
"It will allow me to not just possess you but to be truly reborn inside your pristine little vessel. The only major drawback... the part that made me want to burn down an entire city in sheer frustration...is that it strictly requires the target to not be integrated into the System."
The man let out a barking jagged laugh that echoed through the soul space. "Haha! I was so pissed off when I heard that ridiculous requirement! Everyone is integrated in this world and everyone has a blue box in their eyes from the very moment they take their first breath. But then I found you."
"A secret Project kept in hiding for seven years with a soul entirely untouched by the System’s brand. I guess the requirement wasn’t that ridiculous after all. It was just waiting for a Nightmare."
He didn’t wait for Night to understand the grand evil plan or beg for his life before he simply tapped the ancient grey rune.
Karma at its root is basically memory but it implies something much deeper than scattered thoughts or DNA.
It is the total account of everything a being ever was and acts as the hard drive of a person’s existence stored in the very marrow of the soul.
Every breath and every bug he had ever stepped on was all there.
Night froze as images and sensations began appearing in the soul space. The rune activated to bring all that Karmic memory to the surface before it began devouring them like a starved beast in a slaughterhouse.
He watched in horror as he saw memories that didn’t make sense. He saw himself as a tiny single-celled thing in a warm ancient puddle before becoming a basking lizard and then a beast with long teeth dripping with blood. Then came the humans and millions of years of being people. ƒreewebɳovel.com
He saw himself as a slave in a dusty field and a lonely king sitting on a throne of cold gold. He was a merchant and a fighter and a child who died of a cough while the rune mercilessly ate it all.
The memories played like a movie on fast-forward as a kaleidoscope of a million lives while the rune sucked them all in. It was eating the Record of Nightmare and devouring millions of years of karmic memory to destroy the very thing that makes a being what it truly is.
Night watched this happen and felt himself becoming less as a profound hollow fear washed over him. Lifetimes of learning and suffering and loving were being erased like chalk on a blackboard.
Despair began to set in since he couldn’t move or speak so he just looked at the man with pleading crystal-blue eyes hoping to find some kind of kindness in his heart.
But the man ruthlessly crushed the boy’s hope with a cold sneer.
"Don’t look at me like that," the man hissed. "Your death will allow for a perfect rebirth. I will take all that weight you’ve carried for eons and use it to fuel my climb."
"I will use this chance to become the strongest being to ever walk the sand. You’re just the fuel, little Nightmare."
The absorption reached its final stages as the ancient memories and beast forms vanished. The rune reached for the very last few reincarnations but then something interesting happened.
The movie didn’t just play when the rune reached the penultimate reincarnation but instead it slowed down and ground to a complete halt. It was as if the Karma of this specific life was made of lead and was impossibly heavy.
Both Night and the man stopped to look.
This is the same as my dreams, Night thought.
This Karmic memory was the most lifelike thing they had seen yet because all the previous kings and warriors seemed blurry and thin like ghosts. This life was completely solid and vivid but also entirely normal.
It started with the birth of a boy in the year 1999 who wasn’t born in a white room with robots but rather in a small town called Nevada City in California.
The middle-aged man was surprised by the weirdness and squinted at the memory with a furrowed brow before deciding to share his confusion since the process was almost finished.
"This place..." the man muttered with his voice shaking just a little bit. "This place is very close to the Nevada Desert we are at right now. I was also around during this time... I was a young man when the world looked like this. Before the System... before the bombs..."
The scenes changed as the boy in the memory grew up with a caring father and a mother who smelled like lavender and rain alongside a little sister who used to hide his shoes just to annoy him.
It was a life of simple quiet things until something happened when the boy was around ten years old. His father went into a deep dark depression because of work and the house became quiet when no medication or therapy seemed to work. It was like a hole had opened up in the middle of the family.
The family moved to India upon a recommendation from a friend to try something called Classical Yoga and Meditation and it miraculously worked.
The hole in the father started to fill with light so they decided to move there permanently.
The boy also started doing the same sitting and breathing exercises to look for the silence upon his father’s suggestions when he turned twelve.
The memories became slower and slower from here until they weren’t just pictures anymore.
Night and the middle-aged man could practically feel like they were living through it by experiencing the humidity of the Indian morning and the specific itch of the yoga mat.
They could feel the absolute unshakeable stillness in the boy’s chest even though a memory shouldn’t have been able to carry this much weight.
The middle-aged man grew nervous for a second as he looked at the grey rune vibrating and groaning like it was trying to swallow a mountain but he chalked it up to the process being close to the end.
"Just a little more!" the man snarled.
It finally reached the point where the boy turned twenty-four which was exactly twelve years after he had started his meditation and yoga.
The incredibly vivid scene felt more real than the dark space as the boy in the memory sat under a massive ancient tree on his mat. He wasn’t just sitting but was so entirely present that birds landed on his shoulders and the world seemed to revolve around him.
That was when Night suddenly moved without using his legs because he was being dragged forward by an invisible force.
A massive silent force erupted from the twenty-four year old in the memory before the middle-aged man could even reach out his cracked fingers to stop the process. It was like a black hole of pure existence had opened up to pull Night toward the tree and drag him straight into the man on the mat until he was completely sucked into the memory.
