I was just as surprised as she was. The man had a slender figure covered by his black shirt and dark pants.
"Welcome!" he pronounced with a slight smile, joining his hands to greet us. "I am Issei, your spiritual guide."
His eyes lingered a little longer on me, but I didn't give it much importance. Asarys' sigh forced me to give her a discreet nudge to remind her to keep her thoughts to herself. Indeed, I felt that they threatened to cross the edge of her lips. She glared at me in response. The elegant physique of this fifty-year-old with short, copper-colored hair made me almost forget that we had before us a shaman whose mission was to explain the laws of the universe to us. His strong forehead gave his face an oval shape, with smooth features and a round chin. His ears, although short, had strangely elongated lobes.
"If you would like to follow me?" our guide invited us after short presentations.
He turned to head inside the temple.
"We're a little late," apologized William in his footsteps. "Crossing the mountain and the glass bridge wasn't an easy task for everyone."
My friend's tone, tinged with irony, seemed to accuse us directly. The shaman's little crystal laugh echoed within the walls.
"As for the mountains, I apologize. I know how hard this walk can be. But believe me, it is necessary in order to assess your sensory level and…many other things besides. As for the glass bridge, I plead guilty. I allowed myself this little fantasy which, I admit, is in no way necessary in itself."
Asarys was about to open her mouth, but I grabbed her arm in time to stop her in her tracks, narrowly preventing her from unloading everything she had on her heart.
Issei entered one of the many rooms in the building. This one, like all the others, had no door. The place, lit by several hundred thousand candles hanging from the ceiling, gave an impression of depth with a play of light that made our shadows dance on the walls. The ground, representing the universe and its solar system, seemed to move slowly under our feet. This cosmic visualization was so realistic that it almost became hypnotic.
"I feel like an astronaut lost in space!" Ray exclaimed, stunned as he walked around the room. "How did you manage to create all of this?"
The shaman watched our reactions silently, hands in his pockets, then finally said, still in a quiet tone,
"It is an artistic work made from logarithmic maps."
"But where is the mechanism hidden?" asked Asarys, pointing to the floor. "All of this seems to be shifting."
"It is not so. It's just an optical effect," replied Issei. "Your brain voluntarily gives you a misconception of information."
"Why would it do that?" I asked, taken aback.
"Simply because you ask it. It has the power to transform the environment. You're far from imagining what it's capable of. The human body has immense energy directly connected to our thoughts. Our brain analyzes and processes a lot of data automatically without you even being aware of it."
Issei approached me. William immediately did the same. His need to protect me instinctively took over, which was not lost on the shaman, who gave a small amused grin. Then he slowly walked around me to finish placing himself right in front of me.
"A non-egregore. The embodiment of your divine soul is quite simply perfect," he whispered, seemingly subjugated by a spectacle that I didn't see.
"I'm sorry, I don't understand," I said, lost trying to catch his words.
William stood before me, snatching Issei from his contemplation and asking him,
"Do you know who we are? And why we are here?"
The shaman put his fingers to his forehead and began to pace the room, his face closed. He sighed deeply before answering.
"Yes, I know! It is I who have the heavy task of transmitting to you the principles of the universal laws."
Issei paused, his eyes heavy with meaning, then added in a whisper,
"How to show the light to blind people? You're just empty shells."
"I'm a Sylph!" William got annoyed at the guide's words. "It's no secret here. I think you are dealing with people who can believe and understand the irrational and the mysteries of this world."
"Here is the problem! Too much!" Issei retorted, raising his voice. "You believe until you become naive and forget your spirituality. You focus on details that are, in fact, only diversions in order to make you fail in the mission for which each of you has been chosen."
The man walked quickly and threateningly towards William.
"Did you listen to what I just told you? No, because you only select the information that you think is appropriate!"
The noise of the radio disturbed this meeting and reminded us that we were still being listened to. The shaman then raised his hands to heaven and exclaimed in a furious voice, pointing to the box hanging from Ray's waist,
"When I talk about diversions of the mind, I mean that thing! You are again disconnected from your energies. Turn that thing off immediately!" the man ordered, his voice full of anger.
"Impossible!" said William, glancing at the device. "We can't take any risks."
"Then we are done here!" replied Issei, moving towards the exit. "It's lost in advance."
Leaping in his pursuit, Ray called him to convince him to stay.
"Teach us, please. Here, on Eros, there is a stone, more precisely a ruby. It once belonged to a woman named Kushisake. We have to find her."
Issei turned around immediately and seemed to hesitate for a moment. In order to prove his good will, our friend grabbed the radio and brought it to his face.
"Team one, over," Ray said before breaking off contact with the outside world.
We were all gathered in the center of the room to listen carefully to each word spoken by Issei.
"Our actions, our words, emit vibrations which are instantly transformed into energy. In return, the universe returns similar energies to us. It's the famous law of attraction. If you focus on your thoughts, they will eventually materialize, and the universe will give you what you asked for."
"Is it prayer?" I interrupted the shaman.
"Leave prayer, the gods, and religions aside. All of this was created by man, written by man's hand, for the purpose of serving man. I speak to you of immutable and precise laws. Let's start with a little science, because everything is demonstrable. Our body is a collection of atoms. But what is the atom?"
Issei interrogated us one by one with his eyes.
"Energy," I whispered hesitantly.
"Bingo! The energy in which the atom is found is called a 'field,' and a field is what?"
"A vibration," replied William in turn, arms crossed, focused on trying to understand what our interlocutor was trying to say.
"Albert Einstein was a genius," continued Issei. "You have to rely on his theory of relativity. Indeed, our whole body is made up of vibrations. Let me explain: if you think of something in particular that you miss, you create and nourish that lack. So you have to reverse the process."
"Yeah, well that makes sense," grumbled Lexy in a low voice.
"It's not that simple," said Issei. "We ourselves feed our thoughts, which are transformed into matter. Even the holy, religious books are based on universal laws. What does a passage from the Bible say, for example? 'The things I'm afraid of will come to visit me.' Fear is a negative thought. You have to get rid of it. Nothing happens by chance because everything is connected. It's scientifically proven. Everything is made up of atoms. Nothing that surrounds us is motionless. The objects, the walls, the floor, and everything else are in perpetual motion, except that the human eye can't perceive it. It's the same for sound, thoughts, images. These energies have their own frequency, and a frequency is measured. In no case can the physical and spiritual world be separated from each other. There is no luck or bad luck. An action always has a consequence."
"What about free will?" asked William, puzzled.
"When faced with a situation, we always have a more or less long instant to react. Our reaction will inevitably have
a consequence, however small, on the course of events to come. Unconsciously, you mostly delegate this task to your brain, which spends its time analyzing tons of data that you transmit to it."
Issei put a finger on the side of his head.
"It's too perfect to imagine that we come from preexisting species, designed from molecules."
"However, in a sense, you say that the gods don't exist, that they are the invention of man, and that the universe directs everything," interrupted Asarys.
"When I speak of egregores, I speak of gods created by men. Thousands of years ago, gods and religions didn't exist. Beliefs have given birth to them over the millennia. Egregore gods exist only because of the man who fed them with positive or negative energies over time. If the egregore is fed with harmful energies, it gradually turns into a demon. By turning away from the Divine Source, man has created an imbalance between good and evil. Just look at what's going on in the world right now. All of humanity is threatened. You must trust your energies, your thoughts, and everything that has been given to you by the Mother Goddess."
The shaman went to the back of the room and put his hand on one of the many sculptures that emerged from the stone wall, revealing a row made up of a dozen swords, with shiny and sharp blades. Issei gently took one of these weapons and turned to us.
"We don't live in any moment at the present moment, because our vision has a lag which is about a third of a second."
Our guide started waving the sword in the air and twirled it above his head in small circles.
"Every movement you see and analyze is actually already gone. To face the tests which await you, you will have to exploit all your cerebral capacities and reduce this shift by a few thousandths of a second in order to be able to fight on equal terms against evil. Your survival depends on it."
The man pointed his sword at each of us, in turn, and stopped on me. A flash suddenly passed through his little hazel eyes, then his arm lifted behind his head to gain momentum. The scene unfolded at full speed. Without understanding what was going on, William threw himself at me, which made me fall to the floor. My head hit the floor hard. Paralyzed, I dared not move under the weight of his body. Raising my face, I saw the sword buried in the wall, just behind me.
"Are you crazy!" Ray yelled, mad with anger. "You could have killed her!"
He advanced threateningly towards the shaman, fists clenched, ready to fight. As for my two friends, they rushed towards me, their eyes wide.
"Are you okay? Are you hurt?" Lexy hastened to ask me, distraught.
William helped me get up before suddenly grabbing the sword, still stuck in the wall.
"I…I'm okay. It's going to be okay."
"You will regret that gesture," said William in a voice filled with rage. "How can you be so crazy as to try to take it out on just one of us?"
"I finally got the desired effect," said Issei, satisfied, without considering William's threats.
"Will, wait," I tried to stop him.
I managed to catch him as best I could and grabbed his arm before he threw himself at the man.
"Look at me, Will! Look at me!" I shouted, holding his face in my hands to force him to look away from Issei.
His jerky breathing gradually subsided when he finally met my gaze.
"If he wanted to kill me, he would have done it! Look at those swords behind him. We have to trust him. We have no choice."
William shook his head vigorously to regain his senses. I put my hand on his chest, which threatened to explode under the violent pressure of his heartbeat.
"Okay," he finally said, his jaw clenched. "But I'm keeping that with me."
He gestured at the sword in his hand and then sent a dark gaze at the shaman. It was the first time I'd seen him in such a state of rage. Obviously, a dark part lived in him, too. At that moment, Issei clapped his hands to get our attention again and said,
"All right! The break is over. Can we continue?"
Our concentration gradually returned to the room and we were again ready to listen to the shaman, but this time, with all our senses alert.
"You finally understand what I mean," said Issei with a smile on the lips. "The danger is avoided thanks to the mechanisms that our brain puts in place to analyze the images that reach it. All this with an anticipation of about three hundred thousandths of a second. Zoe, you owe your survival only to your friend's reflex gestures. If you had been alone, the sword would have pierced you."
William stepped forward with a low growl, but I stopped him immediately.
"You won't have a thousandth of a second in front of your fears," insisted the shaman. "You must get rid of them. Otherwise, they will cause your loss."
"And how do we achieve that?" Ray asked, impatient to get answers.
"The eyes house the retina, the cells of which—"
"I can't take it anymore!" whispered Lexy, annoyed. "It's just a bunch of bullshit."
"…of the thalamus, that is to say, everything that reveals our consciousness," continued the shaman.
"Shut up!" Asarys articulated between her teeth. "We aren't here to have fun or relax."
"We can't wait for the practice. I am completely lost and unable to assimilate more information."
Asarys turned to Lexy, frowning.
"Practice? I should point out that Zoe almost got killed just now, right before our eyes. I think we've had enough of practice!"
"Is there a problem?" asked Issei. "Are you bothered to understand how our brain works and how our energies work?"
"No, no," Lexy said sarcastically. "Hearing all this is fine, but…"
She paused to send a dark glance to Asarys, which was immediately returned by Asarys, then resumed.
"Positive actions. Conscious and unconscious. Nerve cells. The cerebral tonsil. Just tell us where we can find the ruby. We get it, and we get out! Farewell Eros."
At that moment, I held my breath. William stared at my friend, taken aback, while Ray tried to pull his hair out at the root. I grabbed Lexy by the shoulders.
"It's more complicated than that, so don't give up now! I need you."
She sighed before nodding, then regained control of herself.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, looking down.
"I know," I replied in a comforting voice.
I scanned the room for Issei. He wasn't far from his collection of swords. Looking at it in more detail, I saw his hand move to another relief sculpture and gently wiggle it. I turned to my friends, arms wide open to push them against the wall behind us.
"Watch out!" I shouted before stumbling into Asarys.
The ground started to shake. I managed to get up with the help of William.
"An earthquake!" cried Lexy, panicked.
We all leaned against the wall to shelter.
"Issei? What the hell are you doing?" yelled William, whose voice was lost in the crashing noise of the exploding walls and floor all around us.
The candles on the ceiling suddenly went out and the roof of the building collapsed, allowing daylight to penetrate.
We were elsewhere, as if the temple and the room we were in had never existed. My friends and I were all lined up on the edge of a cliff that overlooked a bottomless void. The rock on which our feet rested crumbled and threatened to collapse at any time.
"Where are we?" shouted Asarys, on the verge of hysteria.
"Still in the temple. Well, I think," said Ray anxiously.
"Exactly!" replied a voice that rang far below us.
Slightly tilting my head, I saw Issei a few meters below. He was also standing on a huge rock. Unlike us, his seemed much more stable and safer.
"What are we doing now?" I yelled at him to make sure he could hear me.
"You wanted something real, right?"
The echo of his voice echoed on the walls of the many cliffs that surrounded us. Asarys, furious, turned towards Lexy.
"You're just a little bitch, you know that? Because of you, we're all going to die here in a
horrible way—"
"Stop," William cut her off. "Right now we're leaning against a damn cliff, on the brink of a damn precipice. Now isn't the time to fight!"
His arm was against me, like a bulwark to protect me. I noticed that we were in the middle of nature, obviously not far from the top of a mountain, or a little higher, with, before our eyes, a panorama made up of mountains. I could have enjoyed the sight in other circumstances, but at that moment, I was struggling just to not faint in the face of this fear of emptiness that completely paralyzed me.
"This is all an illusion. The room is equipped with thousands of visual, sensory, and sound sensors. Your brain ends up confusing reality with what we are trying to make it believe. Your conscience tells it that this is all a hoax, but there is nothing to do. All your senses end up submitting to this illusion."
"So, if we jump, we free ourselves from this illusion, right?" asked William.
"I… No, I won't jump into the void," I stuttered.
"There is no void," William told me in a reassuring tone. "Zoe, this is a subterfuge, a gag, okay?"
"You're crazy," cried Lexy, sobbing towards Issei. "You really have to be crazy to inflict this on people and play with their fears. For what, in the end? To get in our brains a lesson on the atom, the vibrations, and…and the cerebral cortex!"
The shaman didn't even blink. Standing with his hands behind his back, his patience seemed steadfast.
"Listen to me!" Ray said, speaking to us. "We are going to transform the environment."
"But how?" Asarys asked in a panicked voice.
"We need to focus all of our attention on something else. Remember the shaman's words, 'the human must free himself. ' Thoughts are transformed into matter."
"Stairs," I whispered in a flash of lucidity.
At that moment, all heads turned to me. Lexy looked at me like if I'd gone crazy.
"We can imagine going down by stairs," I said.
"Yes, that would be the best solution," Ray agreed. "William?"
"I think, in fact, that it would be the least risky way for everyone. Let's go!"
"Uh… Wait a minute!" exclaimed Asarys, holding her face in her hands. "Are you telling us that your staircase will just appear? With a snap of your fingers?"
DARK FAÏZ Book 2: Nothing will ever be the same again Page 9