Having found a new avenue of distraction, Re-Haan listens to the soft voice with all her might. She distracts herself from her body by fleeing into the world the words paint for her.
“A kid, fourteen years old, tortured me for a few hours. He did it so mechanically, without any emotion. I am sure that he saw me as just a tool to use, not as a human being. He left me for dead while telling me I should be glad. My parents and I were of some use to him, a noble inner core disciple of the mightiest sect in the province. He believed that saying thanks to a pile of broken corpses made up for the things he did.”
Re-Haan is fully absorbed, greedily analysing every word for information. The soft voice sounds like it lacks any emotion, but the paralysed dragoness can still feel a changing undertone through the words. The lilting tones of common speech spoken by all dragons - and thus all mortals - soothe her aching mind.
“I don’t know what happened. I think I died when I was around fifty back on Earth; my memories stop around that age. I was called Drew Lian back then, by the way, but I don’t really like that name anymore. Then my soul must have been transported to another universe, where it got stuck in the body of a mortal child. That, or I unlocked memories of an earlier life. I don’t think so though because I had none of the original bodies’ memories. The next few years were tough. Nobody except evil and dark practitioners wanted anything to do with an orphan. Just learning the basics of the local language took me years.”
She loses herself in the story. She flees her physical agony by listening to the words in a trance.
“People stopped talking to me as I never said anything in return. They last saw my parents and me being led off into the woods by a known cultivator from the Black Turtle sect, located a few mountains away from the little village. They all knew that I was lucky to be still alive. Living far away from a big sect was dangerous because of roaming beasts; live too close, and your life is at the whims of any cultivator that you meet.
“I was around twelve. I lived by helping on the fields, earning enough not to starve. I got a lucky break when I was sixteen. I found the corpse of a sect member far out in the woods. His skin was blue, so I think he got poisoned and died when running back. He had a small pouch, a scroll, and a gem inside his pockets. I looted him and ran away as quickly as I could.”
The voice is slow and unfocused. There is little inflexion, but its way of speaking does change now and then in a subtle manner. To Re-Haan, it sounds like someone just randomly speaking their thoughts while being totally occupied by another task.
“The gem saved my life. It was a piece of jade containing a cultivation manual. I learned the language most cultivators used by studying it. The cultivation manual described a way of growing stronger by absorbing certain energies. I finally managed to feel the qi present everywhere in that world by following the uselessly complex instructions. Then I started cultivating.”
The dragoness gets entirely lost in the story that weaves itself out as she listens. The voice tells her about the many sights it has seen, stories of adventure and danger. Drew describes his endless tests with the energy called qi, like building his own power back up after discovering a more efficient way to do things.
Stories about running away from a hostile search party through unconventional means or exploring trial grounds or ancient ruins. A weird thought pops up in Rhea’s mind, according to what little info she remembers, humans can become like, two hundred years? She suspected the weird man named Drew to be fifty years old. Or maybe ten years old, due to some of his behaviourisms. But now he has been describing an amount of a few hundred years at the least.
Was it humans that aged to two hundred, or one of the other races? The injured dragon’s muddled mind is unable to recall the specific statistics that she was once taught, but that doesn’t really seem important to her at the moment.
Time goes by as Drew describes his doubts and failures. Difficult subjects are described with brutal honesty. Faults are described in as much detail as the greatest success he accomplished. Rhea mentally chuckles to herself. ‘Nine of his ten best moments have to do with books. He seems just as book-obsessed as uncle.’
The dragoness feels some pain as she thinks back to the time of her youth. She thought that her uncle, the only dragon to ever craft glasses for himself, was a strange being. Now, she can see that he just got tired of all the draconic politicking and backstabbing and shut himself inside the library most of the time.
“…so after that fiasco, I got lost in the Endless Fractured Portal Maze of a Thousand Deaths. I met a female cultivator there, and we got to know each other as I deciphered the teleportation runes. Fifty years we spent there, waiting for the runes to align. I thought I would stay with her for the rest of my life, and I think I loved her.
“The moment we finally got out she broke a talisman, trapping us both and calling her sect. She knew that I had a massive bounty on my head from the start and played along for fifty years. She laughed in my face as I asked why she would betray me like that.”
The voice stops for a moment, and Re-Haan starts mentally begging for it to return. The pain has lessened over the long hours of listening, but being submerged in boiling water still hurts. The fact that is was ten times worse at the start does little to ease her agony.
“So, I crippled her, knowing that the loss of her cultivation base would free us both. Leaving her alive was a bad idea, as I spent the next seventy years running and hiding from a large sect alliance hunting me down.”
A strange feeling goes through Re-Haan as she listens to this part of the story. On top of the pain, she now feels like someone is grabbing her innards while twisting it slowly. She pushes that feeling away and pours all her attention into the story again.
More adventures follow, all told from first-hand experience. She hears how he broke into more libraries and deciphered secrets worth kingdoms, only to discard them because they were based on superstition. Every time another interaction with a female is described, the gut-twisting comes back.
He talks about Earth some more, a place so advanced and skilled in something called science that wars became obsolete. He laments the fact that people still fought, without any proper cause. He sounds so bewildered at times, like a lonely old man not understanding the world around him. Then he sounds like an enthusiastic kid as he describes some aspect of qi or cultivation that he discovered through arduous trial and error.
The story slows down as higher levels of power are described. The actors in the story all become powerful enough to crush mountains with a finger, and Drew is no different. Fights against cults who keep humans like livestock and daring stealth raids on highly protected information vaults get painted in Re-Haan’s mind’s eye word by word.
Gaps of years where Drew does nothing but walk the lands in disguise, long periods of time spent refining some aspect of knowledge that sounds alien to the dragon’s ears. Then he starts preparing for something he calls ascension, and the story takes a sudden turn.
Re-Haan now catches the occasional glimpse of an image or feeling accompanying the story. Almost as if the veil in between herself and the mind who is speaking slips now and then.
Fighting off hordes of hostile cultivators, the ascension process goes fairly smoothly. Then, things don’t go his way once more as he is denied entrance to the higher planes. Re-Haan’s confusion grows as the valley with cute and murdering critters gets described. Then he describes the Tower, and it clicks.
He uses a large amount of time describing a random tree. Can you talk to trees? Then the voice describes squeezing the tree until it spills out into another place. Re-Haan’s mind is pretty muddled, but even she can understand that something about that story sounds off. She decides to ignore it for now - his voice drones on about the growing piece of space that gets developed.
This insignificant human, this being she looked down on is telling his own story, she has come to realise. He, who she didn’t even find worthy of talking to at first, has lived more than the
most ancient dragons. It continues as he tries to do things differently for once. Finding an injured girl inside of a dungeon is his turning point.
“Things don’t change if one’s approach doesn’t change. So here I am, on a new world for the third time. How much time do I have here? The chance of me never leaving this mudball is zero, so what will I leave behind? More angry people who lash out at the one endangering their position of power? Maybe I should be the change that I want to see in the world. God that sounds so corny.”
The story then continues to describe kidnapping some likely disciples. Thorough background checks to ensure no lingering seeds of betrayal get glossed over as he continues to narrate the adventure he has had on this world. From a bunny to a sexy dragon with very familiar eyes. Until the story ends the moment he walked into his pocket dimension, emotions locked up because of necessity while carrying an unconscious woman on his back.
“So now here I am, full with qi once again, repairing a dragon I have unfortunately very little relations with, cell by cell. Let’s see, did I miss anything important? I think that sums up my life so far pretty well. I guess I should do some more self-reflection and hope that the rest of my emotions calm down completely with that.”
A long, slow intake of breath fills the pause in talking. A slow exhale, and the voice starts again.
“I know it’s pretty stupid to keep clinging to the ideals of my first life. I should adapt to the situation, but why would I want to leave such a big part of me behind? Looking at the way high-end cultivators used to behave, cutting parts away from yourself is a bad idea. Who thought that severing parts of your own psyche or personality to gain power and advance in cultivation was a good idea?
“Living for a long time should make people more altruistic, right? Unless they purposefully numb their own heart, they will see what kind of long-term impact their actions have on the world. Is giving multiple people years of grief really worth killing someone over an insult? We’ve got the ability to think, after all. Shouldn’t that elevate us above revenge and anger? Then again, we got to evolve our intelligence in part thanks to those base emotions from the lizard brain, so that’s a bit hypocritical, I guess.”
Lofty words sound out crisp and clear. One sentence filled with conviction, the next spoken with a voice so unsteady it could break apart in a slight breeze.
“I could have cut away my emotions or attachments at any time through some kind of severing process. But is reaching the top worth it if your personality is nothing but a bloody skeleton, all feebleness cut away as the price for power? And I don’t think it’s possible to stop eliminating facets of yourself once you start, the nigh-immortal cultivators I met were just caricatures. They took a single aspect of their personality to cling to and removed the rest.
“I am not only my curiosity. I am also my anger and hate. I am my love and disgust. I will never cast these away just because my power doesn’t grow anymore. The only concession I make is to honour the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss.’
“Ascending with just my mind by fully unlocking my braincore made me crazy. Crazily logical. What is there to live for if every equation ends in heat death? Why continue on if all ends in nothingness. Talking to people is not important if you can see the end of the universe ticking closer, second by second. So, I want to be dumb and keep myself that way. I even run away from this world by not looking through the massive libraries that I gathered. Just because the interesting facts are surrounded by the darkness of the universe.”
Re-Haan is lost now. What was a fascinating story progressed into thoughts that seemed out of reach for the dragon. Dragon’s generally don’t do philosophy. Why bother going through the trouble of thinking things through step by step if ‘more power’ is an easily applied answer?
“This is hypocrisy, and I’m fine with that. I will change if I find a better way. That is my resolve. I will find the why of all. I will not throw away my ideals and morals just because they are inconvenient. This is who I am, was, and will be. My emotions come from this life that I have lived. I will control my feelings, and they will control me.”
Then, the deepest sigh Re-Haan has ever heard resounds. She feels power from those words. An unshakable but changing power. Power that is there for a reason, not just because it is or because of power itself. She feels like there is an answer nearby, but she lacks the ability to move around the corner to see for herself. All her troubles could be solved if she can just grab it.
Dragons sleep a lot. Re-Haan herself has only been awake for a total of one day out of twenty. And she was shunned partially because she was awake so much of the time. Now she feels like there is something more to life than napping the years away, like the questions she didn’t even know she had along with perfect answers are just out of reach.
So, the transformed, humanoid dragon escapes the pain in her body further by reaching out. She concentrates fully on the spot moving through her body where the pain is less and reaches with all her might.
Her mind warps as she connects to something.
Chapter thirteen
███████
F INALLY!
My twisting guts calmed down as I re-asserted my life. Recounting my experiences and morals is a good grounding experience. I’ve never used self-reflection to even out my brain chemistry to this extend, but it seems to work.
I am tired though. So very, very tired. My body is filled with energy now that I have enough qi again, but my mind just wants to sleep. That extensive monologue was just as mentally draining as the emotional turbulence. I really hope that Tree can’t hear; I said some pretty embarrassing things. Self-reflection does nothing unless I am totally honest with myself, so there’s no helping the fact that I was airing all my dirty laundry along the way.
I look down at the shapely back my hand is still rubbing. My greedy hand is systematically travelling across her pale skin as the automated process scans and repairs. I also really hope that Rhea is as unconscious as she seems.
“Just a dream, nothing but a dream,” I mumble softly, more to myself than anyone else. I think I hear a slight laugh as my hand travels across her spine, but I’m sure it’s nothing important.
The repair process is still going, slowly piecing her back together. Cell after cell gets scanned and compared. I’ve analysed some cellular processes sufficiently by now and those functions are being repaired. Progress is slow, though. I guess that I made just a scant few percentages of progress in the time I have been talking.
I slump down on top of the form I am kneeling over, my hand now rubbing over her long, white hair. The process keeps going, but I don’t pay it attention. Instead, I’m distracted by a small shining light just out of reach. It feels warm, so I gravitate closer. The warmth of the body below me is comfortable. I idly note that the repair process speeds up by half due to our increased skin contact.
I give in to the desire to close my eyes. I subconsciously move towards the warm feeling, embracing it as I fall asleep.
⁂
No more pain! Skipping around a bit, Rhea is feeling pretty great. She’s not quite sure how she got here, or where here is, but moving around free of that overload of pain has her in a pretty good mood. Then two strong arms appear out of nowhere and snare her up into a warm hug. She immediately freezes like a deer in the headlights, not moving a finger.
“Hmmmh, warhhm…” Slowly mumbled words rumble from overhead. The arms shift a bit and tighten around her waist as she is casually lifted from her feet. She is then swayed back and forth like a teddy bear. She feels something touch the top of her head.
“Hmmmh… shmellss, hm, nice.” The voice makes her freeze further, totally overwhelmed by the situation. Dragons never touch each other except when they fight or mate. Weird thoughts start flitting through her head as she tries to struggle free but is helpless in the iron hug. She starts to feel warmer again. But this time the heat isn’t from an external source.
Somehow, she understands all of the
hidden meaning behind those lazy, sleepy comments. The need for escape and comfort fighting with the need for isolation and independence is clearly heard from the soft voice.
Although the dragoness called Re-Haan is a little scatter-brained now and then, she is fully aware of the current situation. All the pain was a clear sign that something bad must have happened, and she is smart enough to put two and two together. So, she fully realises who the person hugging her like a lifeline is.
Tentatively, the hug is returned. Slender arms wrap around the hunched figure who is clutching her tightly. She closes her eyes as she gives in to the affection.
“Hmmmh.”
The soft noise she makes comes along with a feeling like, ‘This is quite warm indeed.’ He nuzzles the top of her head as she buries into his chest.
“Hmm,” this one means, ‘And smells nice too.’
Gravity seems to disappear as the two vague forms keep hugging. Now he makes a noise, loaded with meaning. A soft hum in return conveys an answer. An entire conversation plays out as the half-conscious couple plays around with this form of communication. She stifles her laughter as he conveys a beautiful picture of a caricature red dragon with a few sounds. She gives off a few angry noises, simultaneously conveying the picture of a smile.
Slowly the sounds change in tone. They become suggestive and more heavily loaded. Soft breathing gets Replace with panting as they converse with only sounds.
⁂
Alright, that was fun BUT ENOUGH!
I grab Rhea’s head in my hands, my hazy mind now filled with a different type of energy. Tilting her head up to me, I peer into her eyes. “I am going to have amazing sex with you now. I will stop if you say, ‘Dragon’s rule.’ Nod if you understand.”
I keep looking into her pale eyes until she deliberately tilts her head up and down. It takes a while, and I can see the internal struggle in her eyes, but I just keep staring. We have been sending each other randy thoughts for at least ten minutes now. I don’t really know where I’m at the moment, though I can make a few guesses. Communication seems a lot easier here. It feels like we both have some kind of super-empathy.
The Dao of Magic: Book II Page 11