Aimless Ascension

The room is softly lit with dim light, casting a soothing glow throughout the space as the mild sound of a television reverberated.

In the centre of the room, a man sat on a comfortable couch. Despite the soft cushions and blankets, he was sitting uncomfortably with his head between his knees, eyes glued to the flat-screen of the TV, playing old cartoons.

The room was adorned with vintage decor, giving it a nostalgic and timeless feel. A bookshelf sits in one corner of the room, filled with classic novels. A cosy armchair was placed nearby, which seemed to be missing a person to sit in.

The man\'s eyes somehow remained locked on the screen of the TV and vacant at the same time. Colourful lights flashed on his face, as laughter and cheers from different cartoon characters reverted throughout the room.

The man showed no reaction, not until he heard her voice.

"This is already the third time we are watching this episode," the woman said, "can\'t we watch something else, Gale?"

Gale kept his eyes locked onto the screen of the television, though he was aware someone else was sitting alongside him on the cough, albeit in a more comfortable posture than him.

"Hehe, the little mouse is so cunning," the woman commented, watching the cartoon, "the cat has no chance."

Gale kept his composure, trying to ignore her as his mind moved back to chaos.

"I don\'t think you like the show, right? Gale?"

Abruptly, the television was turned off and all the noise ceased from the room.

Gale turned his head to face the woman, his expression splitting, full of unbridled emotions.

"I watched you die," Gale said in a cracked voice. "I . . ."

The woman faced him, her expression was a cold mask, hardly resembling the woman he knew. The woman he fell in love with.

"Do you remember what I asked of you?" Saarya asked. ". . . On our second meeting?"

Gale stared at her countenance as the surroundings shifted. He was sitting on the ground now, facing Saarya, in the old quarter of the underground mine of his slave days.

The imagery was exactly like the day Saarya accepted to teach him spirit arts, the exact day a little hope was kindled in his awful life.

"Why?" Gale growled.

Gale remembered what she asked of him at that time, but Saarya reiterated now, reminding him again:

"You must not trust me."

Gale closed his face with his palms, pressing hard, bowing down onto the ground.

"Why?" he growled with the question again.

"Because I needed you," Saarya answered, "and I still need you, but you aren\'t ready."

Saarya looked at him with eyes that really seemed alien and ancient to him.

"The time is a bit earlier than I hoped to make this introduction," Saarya continued as she stood up. "But I\'m sure, you won\'t disappoint me. I have faith in you."

Gale growled at her, indignation growing as his eyes cracked into tears.

Saarya shook her head in disapproval, finding him breaking. "I always admired your intensity," she said, "your ability to recognise fact and reality, but you\'re disappointing me now.

"You are still with the notion that all this is a lie. I am dead in this pit, trying to save you. But you wanted to believe me, and I hope you still can, even though the wretched way I took. How I played you for all these years!"

"Why did you do it?" Gale asked, lifting his head to meet her gaze, tears dripping down from his eyes.

The surroundings changed yet again, and Gale found himself sitting on the open veranda of Wang\'s Inn this time. The sun was bright in the sky, flowers blossoming on the lawn, their fragrance filling his mind. But nothing brought him any joy or calmed his restlessness.

A woman appeared next to him, sitting with her long legs free on the wooden floor. Her appearance has changed since the last time, from the angelic beauty in human skin to a more earthy woman in her early years of adulthood. Sumei.

"Will you believe me if I say I have no other way?" Sumei asked.

Gale locked eyes with her, recognising the unfamiliarity, but even still he wanted to believe her, wanted to do nothing but hold her in his embrace, for all the time he missed her, remorse for her.

If only it was that easy.

"If only it is that easy," Sumei said as if reading his mind. "Oh for your information, I can figure out a little of what you\'re thinking, even more so when you\'re broken down like this."

Gale closed his eyes and calmed himself, or tried. He dived back to the night he first met her, when he was in pain and she helped her. The scene came to his mind, and only now he figured out all that was a lie, a fabrication. It never took place.

"Well, I wouldn\'t call it a complete lie," Sumei said. "That night and more, all that took place, in your dream."

That was why nobody knew of her presence. Saarya or Sumei, nobody but him knew of her existence. And Gale simply thought she was hiding from powerful enemies. Well, she hinted some of it, and the rest was a piece of cake for his imagination.

"Love, adoration, belief, trust," Sumei said, her voice melancholic, "even the best of us grew blind for them, and overlooked the common clues. Your weakness is being more compassionate towards mankind, especially towards the opposite sex."

Since the beginning, she had been manipulating him, since the day he was summoned to the wretched place. Gale wasn\'t even sure how much she was responsible for the summoning, for his misery.

"That is where you\'re wrong, Gale," Sumei\'s voice came to his mind as the surroundings shifted back to the underground mine again. However, it wasn\'t the merciless hotness that hit him this time, but an alien coldness.

Gale appeared on the cold stone floor where the summoning took place. Sumei reverted her look back to Saarya and stood beside him. She recreated past events, as a few black-cloaked figures appeared before him, screwing around with something that seemed to resemble a smaller version of an arc reactor while thousands upon thousands of scripts were carved in the surroundings.

In the midst of the reactor was a complete jet-black matter that didn\'t seem to have any physical shape, and was more like a form of energy rising and collapsing, much like heartbeats.

"Humans," Saarya said in a condescending tone, peering at the lots who were screwing around with that thing. "They never learn. Even when they don\'t understand a thing about what they were experimenting on, they never stopped tinkering with it. And others pay for their recklessness."

The next moment, the reactor activated as a suction force appeared in the middle of the room, along with a wide portal opening there.

A mangled corpse dropped onto the ground the next moment as the portal hole collapsed right after. The black-cloaked practitioner sent men to clean up, as the experiment continued.

One after another, mangled corpses dropped onto the floor, none of them even twitching a little, their lives ceasing even before they could be summoned.

"They are smart enough to understand the law of equivalent exchange," Saarya continued, her voice full of scorn. "But their thick skull never stopped and thought most practitioners couldn\'t injure a spatial tear of that calibre, much less common people."

"What are they trying to do?" Gale found himself asking.

"What a monkey does when you leave it with a revolver," Saarya said as a thoughtful look appeared on her face. "But I guess a couple of them had some ideas of what they were doing and what all this could entail."

"What?"

"They were trying to summon and imprison a higher being, unaware the higher being has been looking right back at them all that time. Mortal and their failings."

Saarya was talking with such a condescending tone as if she stood about all mortals and humans. As if she wasn\'t human at all.

"That\'s because I am not," she answered, reading his mind. She gestured at her figure. "This appearance? It\'s merely an illusion, see. . ."

As her voice trailed off, her appearance changed multiple times, from Saarya to Sumei, to some unfamiliar Elf, some dwarven woman, some other race he hardly recognised to revert to Saarya again.

"I guess this appearance you\'re most familiar with me," Saarya said, "and it also resembled my original appearance. Hmm, I don\'t know. . ." Saarya paused. "It has been so many years since I looked upon my face, I fear I won\'t recognise my own appearance.

"If you\'re curious, it was much like the child holding you on the mountain now, pure and angelic."

Her voice seemed to hold hidden derision, but she changed the topic back to summoning before Gale could recognise anything.

"Recognise the truth," Saarya said. "I\'m not the one who summoned you and plunged you into years-long misery. It was them."

She pointed towards the masked and cloaked figures, accusingly.

"They brought all this upon you and thousand others for their greed of power," she said. "While I merely tried to minimize the consequences of spatial tear onto your body."

Time flowed quickly as corpse after corpse dropped on the floor and was cleaned until Gale found himself squirming on the ground.

At that time, Gale was completely overwhelmed by the pain, so he didn\'t notice the black matter glistening in his left palm. But now he noticed. The Fate mark.

"I merely managed to save a few," Saarya\'s voice rang back and forth in the hall. "And chose one to guide. One who\'d end all this suffering. All my suffering. . .

"That one is you."

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I guess this is still confusing for you to understand, don\'t worry, more explanation coming in the following chapters.