Chapter 408: The True Weight of Existence

The touch of the system was familiar; it was the same presence that had been with me since the first day I had opened my status screen as a child, when I knew how to reach with my will and called for my status screen.

It was a rite of passage for every child, and there was always that faint hope in our small hearts that when we called for our status screen, we would see something special... a quest, or a hidden talent that only the System could find.

For me, I had always known I was going to be a mage, from the fact that my soul was constantly growing beyond the limits of everyone around me, and I could see that while the Anima Depth of my parents was stuck at 10, the maximum for a fully grown mortal, mine was closer to 15.

The touch of the System was known to me, familiar like one of my limbs, and I felt it reach into my perception and began to translate the script, turning the ancient lines into something I could understand, fitting them into the framework that I had grown up with.

I paused and observed the System’s presence trying to shape what I was seeing, and what made me want to laugh in frustration was that in all my life, I had never once questioned why the System was so closely melded to my soul and had never tried to hold it back.

And for the first time, I pushed back against its influence... I did not even know that I could until this moment, and I was not able to hold it back. The System, whether I liked it or not, was part of my soul, but I just refused to allow whatever was going to happen to complete itself... it was as if I was blinding my eyes to whatever the System was going to show me.

I closed my eyes and focused on the tablet. On the script that was not a language I knew, on the shapes that were not words I could read. I ignored the System’s translation, its attempt to interpret what I was seeing. I wanted to see the truth, not the System’s version of it.

[System Interference Detected]

[Translation bypassed. Warning: Unfiltered perception may be unstable.]

I nearly flinched as the words flickered across my vision, and the color of it was red like blood, and not the clean blue and white that I was used to seeing on my status, and there was this instinctive panic inside me to stop what I was doing that just pissed me off.

I felt the System’s attention sharpen, and it was one of the strangest sensations I had ever felt, and the thing was, I did not think I would have been aware of what the System even felt like if it did not partly remind me of one of the Passengers in my soul... the Hollow Avatar.

Ignoring the sensation of rejection from the System, I kept refusing its attention.

[Interpretive assistance is active. Disengagement is not advised.]

Oh, this is new; for all the sixteen years of my life, the System had never advised me before. Well, it was a shame that the first time it did, I was going to ignore it... not because I did not think it might be really trying to keep me from harm, but that should be my choice to make.

It said it was advising me, but why was I feeling as if it was pushing against my mind for me to just see what it wanted me to see, and I hated it, so I just kept my hand where it was.

[Unmediated perception of unfiltered record may result in cognitive degradation, soul strain, or permanent interpretive damage.]

Well, as it turns out, System, my freaking soul was the last thing that I was afraid of being strained. I had done it so many times that there had to be a reason I was not dead or just plain bat-shit crazy.

[Warning. Bearer’s Soul Condition is Sealed. Protective mediation is a function of the seal.]

Protective. That was the word that decided it. I was not going to listen to the damned System. It was as though the thing in the middle of my soul had been keeping something off me all my life out of concern.

When I needed protection, I had not seen it; when I had cried and begged, bled and died... there was no protection but the relentless grind towards power and madness.

The boy that would listen to the system was gone. I put my other hand on the stone tablet.

I pushed harder, and the script on the tablet shifted. The lines that had been unfamiliar began to resolve into shapes that I could almost understand, but not through the System’s translation. I was seeing them directly, feeling their meaning in my mind the way you feel the meaning of a dream.

[Warning: System translation disabled. Perception unfiltered. Cognitive strain increasing.]

I felt a pressure building behind my eyes, a familiar ache that I had not felt since I was an Acolyte pushing too hard against the limits of my soul. But I did not stop. I could not stop. I was seeing something that I had never seen before, something that the System had been hiding from me my entire life, and no matter how dangerous it was, I wanted the truth more than I feared danger.

The script resolved into shapes that were like weird symbols. Symbols that carried meaning the way you can look at a flame and know it carries heat. I felt their meaning in the hollow place where my soul had been welded to something that was not quite me.

And then the world tore.

∞

I was no longer in the hall. I was no longer in the mountain. I was suspended in a vast, endless space that was not dark and not light, a space that stretched in directions that did not exist, and I could see things moving in the distance, shapes that were not shapes, patterns that were not patterns, a geometry that my mind screamed at me to look away from even as it pulled me deeper.

I heard a sound. It was not a sound I could describe, because it was not a sound that was meant to be heard. It was the sound of something vast and ancient and indifferent, a sound that bypassed my ears and arrived directly in my soul, and it was asking a question that I could not understand, that I was not meant to understand.

The shapes in the distance turned toward me. I felt their attention, their weight, the pressure of their existence pressing against my consciousness like the weight of a dying star. I was nothing to them. Less than nothing. A flicker of awareness in a place where awareness was not meant to exist.

But they saw me. And they found me. Interesting.

The sound came again, and I felt something inside me crack, a fragment of my soul that I had not known existed, a piece of me that had been protected by the System’s careful translation. The System had been hiding this from me, I realized. It had been hiding the true shape of reality, the true weight of existence, because seeing it would break me.