by Arthur Stone
And just as much of a mystery.
As I pondered this mystery yet again, my visual apparatus continuing its experimenting on autopilot, I noticed an odd phenomenon. Something that had never happened to me before. It was almost as if I had been pushed three feet back. Or rather, not back, but down, into and through the wagon’s floor. Into a hollow that seemed like a grave—narrow with vertical walls that let in a tiny bit of light. I could make out blurry silhouettes of some objects outside the walls, but not enough to ascertain what they were.
The visuals ahead, though somewhat clearer, still appeared hazy and almost shrouded in fog so thick you could start cutting it with a knife.
My eyes focused on a particular object that seemed somehow pronounced in the general fog. It looked like an uneven ball of yarn that had been ravaged by an overly zealous feline. Ragged pieces of thread and loops stuck out every which way, torn pieces floating overhead, like satellites rotating along circular and elliptical orbits. And moving in all directions, resulting in a ton of stress for the eyes.
As I peered into the center of the tangled ball, it suddenly dawned on me that I had done it.
All on my own, I succeeded where Treya and all of her instructors had failed. More than that, I could repeat it at will, having grasped the underlying process.
Which was easy as pie.
* * *
This world was called Rock. Technically, the sole vowel should be drawled, and indeed it was written as “Roock,” but I shortened it to “Rock” as a hat tip to my first life.
I couldn’t be sure if the name applied to the entire planet, however. Treya had been my main teacher, and I hadn’t always understood her. Nor could I have risked asking clever questions, lest I shattered the image of a mentally deficient and utterly empty creature.
Hiding behind a mask of a hopeless imbecile was all too easy for someone who had both a full memory and a burning thirst for vengeance. The challenge was having the discipline not to give myself away with even the tiniest detail. And that especially pertained to speech.
Which meant trying to beat Camai in the silent game.
The local populace had interesting sets of beliefs. Perhaps my own ancestors had believed in much of the same in times of antiquity, back when atheism was unheard of, and the gods, despite their invisibility, were as real a concept as gravity was for my contemporaries.
To be clear, the world of Rock didn’t have gods. Not anymore, at least. According to legend, in the process of creating the world, the deities had overextended themselves a bit. Desperate to push the realm away from the territory of unspeakable nightmare—or chaotic grayness—at the edge of which my own homeland was situated, they had dissolved into their creation.
And so, though the gods themselves didn’t really exist, their power persisted everywhere on Rock, in the littlest speck of dust. Some places or objects were more or less successful at accumulating it, but there could not be a place in which it could be completely absent. At least that was my understanding of the explanations that had been leveled at me.
And it was that invisible, intangible substance that I referred to as “chi.”
Various creatures, including the sentient kind, possessed an apparatus with which to harness and command this power. And I had just managed to gain access to it.
The first thing I noticed was that I was hopelessly confused, unable to make heads or tails of anything. What was I supposed to do here? What should I be calling the things I was seeing? It was like throwing a user of a simple calculator into a piece of badly designed computer modeling software, and providing the instruction manual in an obscure language. Optimized, it was not—nor user friendly.
Perhaps things were different with normal children. I, on the other hand, was a native of Earth, a grown man confined to the body of a child that was deficient in every conceivable way. So, perhaps the degenerate’s apparatus of interacting with chi was likewise deficient. Perhaps that was the reason Treya’s son had been born empty. So deformed was the body I had inherited, which included the instrument intended for working with the parameters of Order, that I hadn’t even been able to access it until after the colossal release of energy from the clan’s repository.
But now, it appeared that I had. So what’s next? I felt like a caveman staring at a Windows logo on a computer screen.
For the first few minutes, I didn’t understand anything at all. Then, after a bit of trial and error, I learned that the tangle, which comprised a substantial part of my field of vision, could be controlled. Specifically, I could modify its position and configuration, remove pieces and put them back together, and, if I willed it, I could even make manifest lines of text that appeared to serve as descriptions or explanations. At first, these were but hazy images, but I quickly learned to translate them to letters and words.
None of that helped to make any sense—until a thought came to me that I should try looking at this thing not as something entirely alien, but as the interface of some familiar computer program. The closest association that came to mind when looking at this visual mess was that of a talent tree from a role-playing game. One of the main features of such games was the ability to modify different parameters that impacted the effectiveness of your character’s skills or certain items.
That changed everything for the better. To be sure, it took me a while, but in the end I managed to reshape the mess into a coherent structure, the kind all the normal natives probably started with by default.
I was a unique degenerate, indeed. And would require unique solutions.
Every child born on Rock came with their own kind of reservoir of chi. The process of traversing the birth canal became their first trial, and by completing it successfully, the gods that permeated the world rewarded the newborn by filling this starting receptacle.
This was how natives earned their first degree of enlightenment. A great achievement in the bag before they would even cry about being removed from their warm and cozy home.
An achievement that had taken me twelve long years.
Because I hadn’t had a chi reservoir to begin with. Such was my fate as a degenerate cripple. Despite mother’s and her instructors’ best efforts to locate it, their failures would have them admit that nature must have been asleep on the job when my turn had come. Yet, the paradox defied belief: in a world so thoroughly permeated with divine emanations, it was hard to imagine the existence of a child so thoroughly lacking in even the smallest particles of the primordial force. A fully empty vessel was simply nonviable. Such cases were common with C-sections. The higher powers considered this type of birth too easy for the child, oftentimes resulting in the receptacle not being filled to the top. An amount of chi insufficient to attain the first degree meant a quick and certain death for the newborn.
One of the instructors had theorized that my vessel hadn’t been partially filled. It simply didn’t exist at all, and that somehow allowed me to keep up my miserable existence. Mother hadn’t agreed with him, maintaining that the vessel was there, but that it was perfectly empty, without a drop of the primordial essence, and that also somehow prevented me from dying. That was why she had flushed all her wealth down the drain in an effort to fill me up manually, hoping that this unconventional method would ultimately bring me to the first degree.
And down the drain it had gone. The chi just wouldn’t stay in me, like water running through a sieve. No one knew where it went, only that nothing had remained.
Until today.
Today, for the first time, I saw my reservoir. To be sure, it was either immaterial or comprised of matter so rarefied that it didn’t really matter. I could use my will to manipulate it into any shape. After a bit of experimenting, I decided on a ring, and placed it right at the center.
This was the essential core. The foundation of my other self. A superstructure so critical, no denizen of Rock could survive without it.
And, in my case, only partially filled. My inner eye saw it as a ring made of cheap and
dirty silver, having been carefully sawed open, and the resulting hollow filled with the purest gold. If I could paint the remaining parts the same bright-yellow color, I would move on to the first degree. That is to say, I would achieve what the local infants received at the very start.
A tsunami of chi had passed through my body, devastating everyone around who hadn’t the blood of the Crow. And all that power had been barely enough to fill a tiny hollow in the emptiness of my ring.
Where would I get the rest? I’d had only the abunai, and that had been blown to the smithereens. I couldn’t begin to fathom where to look for any additional chi.
And yet, this wasn’t my only handicap.
At birth, the locals typically received three attributes out of a possible five. Ignoring the highfalutin language used to describe these, I would call them simply: Strength, Agility, and Stamina. The words were expected to be capitalized when written—and affected with a reverential tone when spoken.
Each attribute came with its own degree and milestones—or levels. From zero, when it made no impact at all, to a certain max. Take, for instance, two young people of a similar age. The first gets poor nutrition and doesn’t do any manual labor, so he grows up soft, yet manages to develop within himself the Strength attribute. The second is the opposite: eats like a horse, works like an ox, and pumps iron in his spare time, but pays no mind to his attributes.
Suppose the two decided to hold a weight-lifting competition. In such an event, the athlete may well lose to the weakling due to the difference in their attributes. No doubt, the latter would have a tall hill to climb to compensate for his physical inferiority; and yet, in this world, the prospect of such a pipsqueak beating out a bodybuilder was not out of the realm of possibilities.
For the overwhelming majority of the populace, these three attributes were quite enough. There just weren’t that many professions in this world that required more.
Those who managed to manifest and level all three attributes were called omegas. So, any local reference to omega-threes had nothing to do with fish oil food supplements. Rather, it meant a person who had achieved the third degree of enlightenment, having developed nothing but the three attributes acquired at birth.
So, the matter of the chi reservoir was more or less settled. First, I actually had one. And second, it was at degree zero, and barely filled with anything. Practically empty.
The matter of the attributes was worse. I had none.
They weren’t empty or partially developed.
There weren’t any at all.
I was a zero on both fronts: degrees of enlightenment, as well as attributes.
I was a creature that had no business existing in this world.
Not an omega-zero, but a zero-zero.
Not even at square one. Square zero. The very bottom.
Chapter 7
Good People
Degrees of Enlightenment: Unknown
Attributes: none
Skills: none
States: none
I was trying everything possible to find that with which the nature of this strange world should have presumably endowed Gedar’s body. And getting nowhere. Not Agility, not Strength, not Stamina. Nothing. I wouldn’t even make it here as an indigent serf, as the physical body alone meant very little. Even if I somehow managed to train my body into amazing shape, like that of a pro athlete, the best I could hope for was matching the level of a pitiful omega-one. On a good day.
And I wouldn’t have too many good days. Here, the parameters of Order were paramount—the foundation upon which stood absolutely everything. Without them, there wouldn’t be anything to develop.
But I did discover something interesting as a result of my “introspection.” It turned out that my body had not one superstructure, but two. The first was the primary one—the ring scarcely filled with chi. The second contained an odd-looking vessel filled to the second degree of enlightenment, and containing all three attributes at decently raised levels: Stamina at nine, Agility at six, and Strength at three.
Decent, because one degree of enlightenment only added six points to the attributes of a standard omega. Whether by blind luck or careful selection, one attribute would be raised to three, another to two, and the third to one. And that was it. If you wanted a different set, that would require unlocking other attributes, which was far from simple. Or getting a new degree, which would net six more points to distribute among the same three attributes.
In other words, my second superstructure displayed the attribute levels of a full omega of the third degree. Yet, according to the same superstructure, I had only achieved the second degree of enlightenment.
At first, I couldn’t make heads or tails of this mystery. The natives simply didn’t have multiple superstructures, so what could it mean that I did?
And then it hit me.
Careful not to draw any attention, slipped my hand into the cut of my tunic, found the amulet, then took it out and brought it up to my face, trying not to fall back into my regular state. That is, I tried looking at it with my inner vision, and then tried to make order of the chaos it presented. I followed the same path as before, viewing the picture through the lens of raw computer software.
Experience was a grand thing. Not five minutes had passed before I organized all the information into a neat icon free of anything extra.
Black Claw on a String. Amulet. A vessel for chi that has absorbed a portion of the great might of the Crow Clan.
Active Effects:
Unknown Spellcaster
Conditional Degree of Enlightenment: 2
Stamina: 9 (56 days remaining)
Agility: 6 (56 days remaining)
Strength: 3 (56 days remaining)
Treya the Enlightened from the Crow Clan
Invisibility (44 days remaining)
You’ve bonded with this item as a result of a devastating stream of primordial power passing through you.
Did I understand everything that was written? Hardly. I had more questions than I could count.
I had already known that the amulet boosted attributes when worn. That had been the general consensus as to how Gedar had managed to make it to thirteen years of age when most empties died either immediately upon delivery or a few torturous days after.
Except that Gedar had possessed this body for only its first year. For the subsequent twelve, it was occupied by a new owner. And I hadn’t been merely counting flies on the ceiling all of those years, but also studying the world in which I’d ended up against my will. Some things were clear, other things less so or not at all. Either way, I had been dutifully storing all the observed information in my memory bank in hopes that it would come in handy later in life.
My amulet had always added six attribute points. And deficient attributes at that. Three points to Stamina, two to Agility and one to Strength would bring me to the level of a full omega of the first degree. But whereas children at this stage behaved like you would expect—running and jumping and generally horsing around—I had been barely capable of moving my feet. Most of my time I had spent either lying down or lounging in a low armchair. A walk of twenty steps was a record-setting affair that took no less than a minute and required at least one spotter to ensure I didn’t stumble and fall, as such an injury could have easily resulted in my death.
So, any way you sliced it, I was a fragile creature with broken parameters. And those weren’t even mine, but borrowed from a recharged amulet that I had always struggled to adjust to in its brief periods of activity.
And now, I had not six attributes, but eighteen. Even if they were deficient as before, that still meant I was now three times more capable. The practical application of this discovery was not yet clear. I wasn’t feeling any special vigor, but only the familiar pain in every joint, muscle and bone.
Just as the pain was familiar, so was the state. I had experienced it on numerous occasions, albeit not so acutely.
It would happen whenever Camai was a few day
s late returning from his trips. The reasons for the delay had varied, but the result had been the same—I would experience negative sensations upon reuniting with the amulet’s life-giving power.
After taking the amulet, Camai would put me on forced bed rest, then set out south with maximum speed in search of the nearest master of enchanting offering the required recharging services. Alas, the claw wasn’t of the legendary tier of artifacts, so the attribute boost wasn’t permanent. Magical items that held charges for at least a year carried considerable costs that even top clans were often reticent to pay, never mind those down on their luck. As for the destitute Crow, such luxuries had been well out of reach.
Even my amulet had been far beyond our financial means—nobody knew the lengths to which mother had gone to keep hold of such a powerful item. She had been squeezing every last drop from her pitiful remnants of shudras, and selling every last crumb of clan property. Denying herself all but the very essentials and driving the clan further and further into penury.
