《Origin Story》
Chapter 2: Esorem
"The sun, Lieserl. The sun..."
(Ring, Stephen Baxter)
Year 2771 Jecht Calendar.
Western End.
A man hid in the bushes, watching a trap. He had hid thus for three hours, because that was what he did. This man''s name was Esorem. He was hungry.
I am the rabbit that comes to him two hours later.
He was still watching, even then.
After another hour, as the sun set, the man began to cook my body. As I slowly spun on the spit, feeling very stupid, the bushes rustled, and a man in the fantastic and elegant robes of a great sage strode out of the bushes, and into the camp.
Esorem looked at the man, the man looked back.
"...my apologies," the sage spoke, "I was looking for spirit fire. Enjoy your meal."
The sage turned, and it was at the moment that Esorem overcame his (lack of) awe, and spoke.
"Would you like some?"
What a ridiculous question! It was like asking a celestial dragon if it would like to eat mud.
Then, the sage turned back, and offered his response. "That''s kind of you. Yes, with thanks."This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
...over there, I stood staring at the incredible scene unfolding below me. Surely my eyes were lying to me! Surely I was going mad!
"All right," Esorem said, "Then, if you don''t mind watching the rabbit, I''m going to go check my other traps."
"Of course," the sage said. Esorem ran off into the woods, and the sage sat down, and immediately began making gestures that could only have been some form of magic.
Moments later, my suspicions were confirmed as I felt a slow, inexorable tug - and with it, not a little bit of fear. This was the Samsara Breaking Method: a Transcendent Art not possible for those below the fifth level of enlightenment.
And so, clearly, the man currently making hand signs at my body was a supreme expert, and not at all a being that I could overcome.
I cursed bitterly in my heart as my body suddenly came back to life with a reflexive scream as it healed and burned and healed and burned, the sage holding it fast to life with the supreme indifference of a god.
Would that I were mortal, I would have gone mad. As it was, I withdrew from the body''s sensations and stared out of it''s sizzling eyes.
"Demon."
Rabbits can not, of course, speak.
"Serve me, or I will forge you into a treasure."
I nodded, carefully, inasmuch as a neck pierced through with wood could. The expert sneered. "Unveil your true form."
...the one over there? No, he couldn''t be aware of that. So -
Expending a little of the power I had managed to embezzle into the world, I made the rabbit grow antlers. Behold, sage, I thought you''ve caught a Rabbit Demon.
"Insufficient," the sage said, and made a crushing gesture. The rabbit''s body imploded, and my subsidiary consciousness lingered there, being eroded by the energy of heaven and earth as it had been before this particular example of powerful asshole showed up to drag it back into the body.
At least the hunter had been clean, damn it!
Without another word, the sage turned, and left - walking, incidentally, like the gobshite that he was. Five minutes later, when I was only a dull spark amidst the storm of all reality, Esorem came back. I quickly moved into his body. I was already far, far too weak to even talk to him, and my chances of influencing anything in this Kalpa were dead and gone, but I still wasn''t ready to return to the interminable boredom of my true form.
At least here, I could linger a bit longer.
Turning my attention to the outside, I watched through Esorem''s eyes as he cursed, and then...
began...
Oh. Ohohoh. A little bit longer, I had said.
Another fifteen minutes, I should''ve.
A mortal trying to hunt down and take revenge on a Key Condensation expert. Oh, this can only end well.
C2: Esorem, Continued (1)
As it turned out, I might''ve been giving the man too little credit. Barbarian woodsman he might be, but Esorem was terrifyingly good at it. He stalked through the forest like a predator born to it - in utter silence, with utter precision - every step bringing him a little closer to his goal, and his absolutely inevitable death.
Mastery of the Dao of Hunting means precisely nothing when your prey can wield the force of his very Origin against the laws of reality, you see.
It''s pretty pointless. Imagine you are a bacteria metabolizing sugar into lactic acid. It''s what you do, bitch! Then one day, a silent green ocean comes forward with inexorable might, and kills you and all your relatives down to the last speck. Unstoppable force, you cannot resist - the idiot whose mouth you were living in just used mouthwash.
Can not oppose.
It''s like that.
So, I waited for Esorem to die.
Ten minutes later, when he found the sage, he failed to. Somehow, he managed to remain hidden, even from the transnatural senses of the Transcendent who was now only ten meters away.
Things proceeded like that for awhile, as my incredulity slowly grew, until, finally, the bastard stood in a clearing, as Esorem watched.
Then... things got a bit odd.
For a moment, the night was utterly normal. Then, a point of light appeared about three meters up in the air, and fluidly sliced down, drawing a crack of anbaric Worldlight in the air, shining like the heart of lightning.
Would that I had lungs, I would have drawn in an involuntary breath.
Worldslicer Sword.
I froze, in shock. Surely not - how could one of them be here? Had they come to kill the man who had tried to kill me? Why?
The sword completed its cut, and withdrew. Then, from the crack in the air that it had left behind, a man in shining plate armour that would not have been inappropriate during the Crusades1 stepped through.
"Philosopher," he greeted. Oh, the gobshite didn''t come from Alchemy? Since when did Philosophy allow sociopaths to skip learning empathy?The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
"Sir Knight," the philosopher replied. The Philosopher knew what he was!?
I waited watching as they regarded each other, waiting for the killing to start - but it did not.
Instead, the philosopher said, "It''s done. I''ve killed it''s incarnate form."
Motherfucker!
"Good. Then, here is the payment we''ve agreed on."
The Knight took his sword, sheathed it, and presented it to the philsopher, who took it...
...and promptly fell into a seizure.
"By the way," the Knight said, "that particular sword is a bit indiscriminate. If you''re not careful, it can... well, you weren''t anyway, were you?"
The Knight watched with utter dispassion as the sage continued to twitch, until suddenly, without warning, his body began to collapase. I had seen this before but, still, even if he had killed me, it was painful to watch.
The bodies of mortals support a mortal''s soul. The souls of immortals support their body. The nature of a Transcendent, though, was for both to be [the same thing]. For a Sage''s body to die... it could only mean that their soul had been destroyed.
...well, that was the nature of defiance. The greater your immortality, the more vicious the consequences of death.
Still - it was painful to watch.
Eventually, there was nothing left of the cultivator but some black dust and robes. The knight snorted coldly and bent down, retrieving the sword.
Without another word, he turned, and walked back into the crack in reality, his sword cutting it once more to seal it behind him.
Silence reigned for a long moment.
Then, Esorem came out of the thicket he had hidden in, slowly approaching the sage''s robes with an overabundance of caution.
"Don''t bother," I muttered. "That guy is beyond dead."
Naturally, he couldn''t hear me.
After about five minutes of stalking closer, he finally closed the distance. There, he stood, staring down at the clothes, and at last muttered, "What the sundammned mere was that?"
I couldn''t help it - I burst out laughing.
Only now?
Only now he was asking this?
As I chuckled, Esorem knelt down, and riffled through the robes, coming up with a small black pouch that looked like the night sky, and a few other trinkets of note. All of it was stuff that was way too profound for him to understand, but naturally, that didn''t mean it was too profound for him to loot. No - not at all. Even birds know how to steal shiny things.
Curiously enough, though, he seemed only to take the profound things. The philosopher''s clothes, the mundane jewels, the usual wuji talisman that marked one as a disciple of Philosophy - all of those, he left.
Only the things that were treasures to cultivators, he took. From this, I gathered that his spiritual sense must be remarkable.
So I opened myself up to it, in the same way as I had opened myself to his sight and hearing.
For a long moment, I just stared.
How could a mortal understand the world as he did, and remain sane!?
He could sense the currency - the primal substance of the world - in detail that normally only belonged to Totality Grasping experts! What a prodigy!
What a waste.
After he looted the remains, Esorem retreated back to his camp, and without another word, went to sleep.
1: You know. Knights? Holy land? Saladin? Any of this ringing a bell, dear reader?
C2: Esorem, Continued (2) - After the incident
Across the space of the night, I tried to understand what I had just seen. Philosophy and the Knights were natural enemies. That the Philosopher had died was one of the outcomes I expected. That the Knight killed him with treachery...
That was wrong. Wrong.
In the first place, a Philosopher shouldn''t ever be amicable with a Knight. They worked at cross purposes - especially for those Philosophers that had transcended the mundane world. Crossing the rubicon of Heaven Severing would inevitably make the Knights one''s enemy. It placed one firmly within their world - and that was merely the third step! The Philosopher I had seen last night had been of the fifth. Key Condensation. At that level, it wasn''t just inside the knight''s concern. The Realm of Key Condensation was as close to their natural enemy as existed anywhere.
I wanted to know what the hell had happened to make that bastard of a Sage think that he was anything other than a danger to be annhilated, but I just didn''t know enough! Damn it, why couldn''t I ever reincarante as a mortal cultivator!? The closest I had ever been able to come was the sundamned Dragon thirty lifetimes back, and it had died in the first ten seconds!
...truly, the world is cruel. Oh, woe!This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I snorted internally. Woe indeed. That the Knights would one day find out that I had learned how to project a self beyond my imprisoned body, that, I knew. But everything else...
Morning came without answers, and as the subtle enervation of the Sun roused Esorem, making his sleep restless, I felt a small change, and seemed to be pushed down, deeper into Esorem''s soul.
Not good. I could float on the surface indefinitely, but the deeper I fell, the more I''d have to pay to remain intact.
--the sooner my incarnation''s death would be.
Esorem stretched, and patted himself down, before cleaning his camp and getting up to go look for food.
The next nine months went more or less the same way. Only, every now and then, he would return to the clearing, walking a slow circle around the spot that the Worldslicer Sword had cut, occasionally probing at it, and once or twice, even muttering magical incantations that - while not especially lucid or coherent - were a step above what most hedge wizards knew of.
They also had pretty much no relation to any of the so called "schools" of mortal magic in existence. He had probably worked them out himself, relying on his cheat-code like spiritual sense to figure out which formulas were more likely to produce results.
Naturally, though, his efforts met with no success. In the first place, how could someone without even an awakened awareness cut through the world and find the path the Knight had traveled?
Eventually, one day, in the midst of winter, he sighed.
"I have to know," he said out loud. It was the first thing he had said since he last spoke, nine months ago.
Those words... They began a long journey.
C2: Esorem, Continued (3) - Setting out; backstory
Tenosyat, the Map. Seventh of the Worlds; home of my heart, home of my sorrows. That is where this takes place.
It is a world of Plates and Domains. Each Plate has two sides. Each side is a Domain. Each domain utterly dwarfs the earth, and though it seems vast, this is only on the mortal scale. To an immortal, it seems knowable.
To a Transcendent, it is a crippling cage.
In my myriad lives, I had know the entirety of the world - but at the moment?
I had no idea where we were. Because. You know.
We were in the middle of utterly trackless wilderness. Not that that was my fault.
I had incarnated myself with the turning of the Kalpa, but one of the flaws of the technique was that I had no choice of where I or who I appeared as.
As for Esorem, I wasn''t sure he knew where we were either - oh, he moved with purpose - east, east, and always east - but that purpose was just too simple. Yes, Esorem went east. But no matter how many valleys we crossed, he seemed to only be heading east. It was as if he had decided to travel in one direction until he found a road.
Two months later - with some amazement, I found out that that was exactly what had happened.
The story came out in a tavern, where Esorem had traded some furs for a night''s stay, food and ale inclusive. Honestly, I think it was more for the ale than anything else. There was a certain novelty in it for him that I...
...that I hadn''t expected.
This is Esorem''s story.
Whenever, wherever, a twelve year old nobody decided that farming wasn''t too hard, just too boring. So he left his farm, wandering into the mountains. Twenty five years later, a transcendent two steps away from true amortality stole his rabbit, and a robot teleportaled away after killing said sage. Now, this boy was in his late thirties, getting drunk.
I didn''t know whether to laugh or to cry. Over the kalpa of kalpas that I had lived, I had met all sorts of people, but Esorem... Esorem was the only person like Esorem I had ever met.
I mean, who ever heard of a farmer peasant walking into the demon-haunted world and surviving for more than a month without guidance? And for twenty five years!? Truly, my host was a singular individual. He could have gone far if he had been noticed by Philosophy or Alchemy. Even as a mere Immortal, he could have been some...The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Something more than this.
Esorem might have left his life for boredom, but the man he had become cared about almost nothing. He wasn''t depressed, oh no. The world really was just that empty to him. He was either a mortal genius capable of ascertaining everything to be known without guidance, or an idiot so completely incapable of thought that nothing could captivate him.
I was leaning on the former. An idiot should have died.
The next day, after he asked for some directions, we set off down the road for River Mantis City, a minor outpost of the Green Sun Empire. Said empire, I gathered, was nothing special in the grand scheme of things. Just a typical solar theocracy.
There was one interesting tidbit, though. This World was now made of seven plates and fourteen domains. No longer thirteen and twenty-six.
To wit: Somewhere, out there, a World had been born, and the map had updated to better represent its territories. I wondered what it was like, that world.
Was it Dunamis? Askorra, maybe? Either was common enough in the cycle of the Worlds. Depending on the identity of the new World, and when it emerged, I could plot the most likely courses of the remainder of this iteration of existence.
...no clues forthecame, though. Mortals, ever mortal did not eve have the necessary senses to realise that the seven and fourteen was other than how it had always and ever selfsame been. Not even Esorem could sense the difference, though if he had been born after it, even if he could have, it would not have been new to him.
At any rate, without it being obviously remarkable to anyone, there was no patter about the recent singularity of mundane reproduction. Or even a clear discussion of what, where. All I could do was leave it for the future, assuming that I had the survivability for such a thing.
The remaining journey was uneventful. Halfway to River Mantis City, Esorem was robbed, and his furs got stolen. Subsequently, he walked into the forest and procured more with the help of that absurdly powerful spiritual sense of his.
Looking back on it, that same sense was probably a third of the reason that he did survive his choice.
Still didn''t explain where he learned the rest of his skills.
Anyway, three months later, most of which was spent re-finding the road after Esorem left it to get more furs, and thoroughly lost it in preference to tracking animals, we arrived.
The city? Ah. This culture followed patterns of architecture and design suitably close to Denmark''s for the purpose of your your imagination. Eighteenth century. One minor deviation - local artistic taste and styles verged Vedic with a hint of Mayan influence. There was also a natural and conspicuous lack of abrahamic symbols; which made sense given that we were in the wrong World for it. You want Yahweh, go to Earth. People do sun-worship here.
Ignorant fools, the lot of them. The Dao was not made throught worship.
Nor was it broken by it.
All of that''s irrelevant though. This world is cast from the shadow of paradise.
They had almost no choice, barely culpable in their ignornance and foolishness.
...
Esorem circulated himself through the city in a desultory sort of fashion that led me to conclude that he had no idea what on earth he was doing. Eventually, he proceeded to sell and get ripped off for his furs, got drunk, went out hunting, and continued this cycle while asking people about metal men who could cut the air with such regular ineptitude that I concluded that his brilliance in the forest just may have come at the cost of his social intelligence.
The entirety of it.
He was fortunate that this was a society that just didn''t care about madmen, as long as they were nonviolent.
Eventually, Esorem gave up, and obtained directions to the capitol. There, finally, things changed.
C2: Esorem, Continued (4) - Capitol
Destiny is heralded by, like, nothing really. One day, you wake up, and before you know it, you''re fighting beings with one foot in the realm of godhead.
And you''re one of them!
Likewise, when Esorem found himself in the capital, everything was recapitulated. Esorem''s life was more or less the same life he led in River Mantis - sell furs, get drunk, ask about metal men - with the minor exception that it took awhile to get to a place that had enough furs.
This place was the royal family''s private hunting grounds.
Poaching? Hahahahahaha! Esorem didn''t give two shites. Or one. All of his furs were poached. Miraculously, in three years, this caused trouble only once, and that was settled with a timely bribe executed so clumsily that I''m not even going to describe it. When the affair was over, I almost wanted to hug the guards who accepted the money for being so kind-heartedly corrupt.
The only thing that was odd in all of this is that Esorem never did bed anyone, woman or man. It wasn''t that he was ugly - by human standards, he was acceptable. It wasn''t for a lack of money - by the third year, Esorem had enough gold coins hidden away to do whatever a man could want to do. (This, mostly due to the fact that he wanted almost nothing.)
It just... wasn''t something he did. And honestly, it was odd, in the same way that the spiritual sense was odd.
I was inside Esorem. I was living in his body. I could see the totality of his soul. And it was not cultivated. It was completely mundane, ordinary, unrefined.
Worthless.
And yet he acted like a Heaven Severing ascetic at times.
It made no sense - I was aware of his body. The proper chemicals and hormones were there, but the signals that they engendered seemed to be adressed to nowhere. Could growing up and living in total isolation have been the cause?
I puzzled over this, as Esorem turned forty, and group of philosophers came into the city.
The Many-Worlds Sect.
As Sects went their delegation was... manifestly unimpressive. I sensed perhaps two disciples who had even reached the Great Circle of Awareness - which was at best the first step in Transcendence - if even that.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
The rest - all twenty seven of them - were just mortals. Oh, a good few were cultivators, too, but the sort of parochial garbage counted for very, very little. I thought at the time that perhaps they were just a minor detachment, but still... A detachment of dregs?
Still; if there was ever a stimulus tailor-made to elicit a response from Esorem, the Many-Worlds Sect was it.
Allow me to explain.
In this World, three types of Transcendents exist. Alchemists, Rogues, and Philosophers. Alchemists who cultivate transcendence - there are also alchemists who remain mortal - want truth at any cost. Any. Rogues lack a coherent ideology, are almost all insignificant, and constantly suppressed. Philosophers focus on developing knowledge from certain perspectives; holistic truth is generally not wished for except at the very highest level - and even then, they have limits.
To facilitate the condensation of individual perspectives into greater truths, Philosophers who share similar theses form sects. And so in extremely ancient times, you had things like the Formal Realm Sect and True Equanimity Sect develop equivalent concepts of heavenly motion, each from their own perspective - a martial language in the case of Formal Realm, and a (now long dead) system of notation in the case of True Equanimity.
Dry, no?
The point is, each sect has a central concept, and the Many-Worlds Sect had this one: That there were other worlds. And they didn''t mean the type Immortals and Transcendents could create - oh no. Though we would only find out later, their leader knew the Scheme of Totality, and comprehended it, and had walked upon it, peer to the ancient masters of old. And these were not the worlds that any had the strength to create. They were the Worlds; and the Many-Worlds Sect knew them.
This was actually so unspeakably profound that I wondered which Tenma was currently using us as the punchline in its cosmic joke, because that wasn''t something a trash sect like Many-Worlds had any business knowing without the Knights annihilating them.
And certainly, one day, they would be annihilated.
Actually, that last bit was the only important one. By joining them, Esorem got to take a suicidal risk.
How could he not?