Free Web NovelChapter 5: Chapter 5: Karma-vore
They merged.
As soon as the two points of existence touched, the concept of "two" simply stopped making sense. There was no more night and no more twenty-four year old man sitting under a tree in India.
Night finally got to experience why that specific memory was so heavy, so impossibly thick despite it belonging to a mere mortal without a single point in Strength or a fancy black fog power.
It was because of what the older version of himself was doing in that exact moment. In the forbidden books the cracked porcelain man probably read, this was called "becoming one with the world."
But to Night, it just felt like he was accidentally deleting his own edges.
It was like being a drop of blue ink falling into a giant bucket of clear water; he was spreading out so far that he couldn’t find where "he" started and where the "bucket" ended.
The middle-aged man could only watch, his jaw hanging open so wide it looked like it might actually fall off his cracked face. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
He stood in the dark soul space, his hands trembling as the ritual he had spent a fortune on began to tilt sideways.
He had expected to walk into an empty house and take the keys; instead, the house had suddenly turned into the entire planet.
Nightmare felt the older version’s breath become non-existent. It wasn’t that he was suffocating; it was just that the concept of "pulling air into lungs" felt a bit silly when the air itself was part of him.
He felt his consciousness spread out like spilled milk across a table, only the table was the woven mat, and the tree behind his back, and the humid air, and the vast, endless sky.
There was no distinction anymore. There was no "Nightmare" and no "tree." There was no "boy" and no "ground." More accurately, right now, he was the world.
There was no concept of him being a human in that moment, but he didn’t cease to exist. He was aware, so he definitely existed. He was just... everywhere at once.
Because Nightmare was merged into a memory that seemed to ignore all mundane rules, like time being a straight line or space having walls, he was experiencing the same thing the meditator felt.
They were the same person, after all, just existing at two different points on a map that had been folded in half.
This wouldn’t have been such a big deal if it had happened while he was just napping in his white room. But because of the nature of the experience, the grey rune suddenly had a very big, very magical problem.
The rune was a hunter. It needed a discrete "target" to eat. It was designed to swallow a soul: a specific, contained shape of Karma.
But how do you swallow a target that has currently turned into the entire horizon? You can’t put a leash on the wind, and you can’t absorb the Karma of the ground you’re standing on.
The seemingly overpowered rune, which had been crunching through millions of years of life like they were popcorn, suddenly ground to a halt. It flickered and hummed, vibrating with a confused, high-pitched whine.
The rune had lost its target.
Now, it was the middle-aged man’s turn to be absolutely freaked out.
"Where is he?!" the man shrieked, his voice cracking just like his porcelain skin.
His eyes darted around the soul space, wide and leaking dark energy. "The soul was right here! It was a blank slate! You can’t just... you can’t just turn into the void!"
He lunged forward, his hands clawing at the empty air where Nightmare’s jade-white shape had been. He looked like a guy who had tried to grab a shadow, only to realize the shadow had become the darkness itself.
He was panicking, but in a scary, ’I’m-going-to-kill-you’ kind of way. He had spent his life chasing this "Perfect Rebirth," paying ridiculous prices to witches and blowing up a facility, and now his prize was currently busy being a tree and a sky in India at the same time.
But the rune didn’t care about the man’s feelings. The rune was activated, and a forbidden skill doesn’t just "quit" because the target got complicated.
It had a purpose to fulfill: it had to facilitate a rebirth, and it had to absorb the complete Karma of a being. ƒгeewebnovёl.com
It was like a hungry dog that had been promised a steak; if the steak turned into the air, the dog would just look for the next closest thing to bite.
The rune sure didn’t care who was absorbed and who was reborn. It wasn’t picky. It was a "Karma-vore," and it was hungry.
It turned its dull, grey gaze toward the only thing left in the soul space that still had a shape. The only thing with a discrete ego and a solid, cracked body.
The middle-aged man.
"No," the man whispered, the arrogance draining from his face as the grey rune in his palm began to glow with a dark, predatory light. "Wait. I am the master! I am the one who—"
Before the middle-aged man could do a single thing, before he could try to shut down his energy or throw the rune away, the grey pebble activated again. It didn’t fly out; it sank inward. It leaped from his own palm and buried itself in his chest.
Since the rune was in his hands and it was him who had been pumping his own energies into it to fuel the theft, the Karma absorption process was incredibly smooth.
His defenses were non-existent. His soul was wide open. It finished in a heartbeat. He didn’t even get to scream. One second he was a scary villain who bent metal bars with his hands, and the next, he was just...snacks. He was sucked into the rune.
Then, the rune activated one last time. In a flash of light that felt like a thousand suns exploding inside a shoebox, it expanded.
In the dark soul space, it shifted its shape. It didn’t look like a pebble anymore. It stretched and twisted until it looked like a white snake eating its own tail, a white Ouroboros in the shape of an infinity symbol.
Then it turned into a blinding white flash, covering everything.
The Night, opened his eyes.
