“Oh.”
“Yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that.” He glanced at the cabin. “How long’s he going to make us wait?”
“An hour, a day, you never know with him.”
Over the past several months Uncle Grey had been disappearing behind the barky walls of the simple cabin on a daily basis, always for several hours at a time. Nolan had asked him what he was up to on more than just a few occasions, yet the old ghost would always float away from the conversation without responding. Nolan had to admit that it was a bit suspicious that he refused to tell them what he was up to. He didn’t entirely trust him to begin with, and now the old man was acting shady.
Uncle Grey had fled into this world after being fatally wounded by two powerful opponents, and then died shortly after within the glade. If his body was actually inside of the cabin like Nolan suspected, then what could possibly drive him to step foot beyond those dark walls, let alone seclude himself in there for hours with his own corpse?
Nolan spent the next hour meditating inside of the Divine Spirit Fountain, though his frustration eventually got the better of him. “Goddamn it! It’s been four hours. Is he doing this on purpose? I can’t concentrate when he could come by any minute. What’s the point of getting in the zone if he’s just gonna ruin it?”
In the midst of her own meditations, Nyla wore a serene expression as her eyes calmly opened and locked onto Nolan’s. “I doubt he’s simply staring at the walls in there. He’s clearly doing something.”
“Yeah, but what could he possibly be doing? He’s a ghost. It’s not like he’s got a computer in there.”
“Computer?”
“A device people used on Earth. It basically stores knowledge and you can play games on it too.”
Nyla seemed to have a difficult time imagining the concept. “What an odd duality. It sounds like a peculiar treasure.” She waited until he calmed down a bit before asking, “Aren’t you at all curious as to where he’s taking us today? We’re making the trip for you, after all.”
“I don’t know. I might have been curious at first, but he hasn’t said much about it, so I’m not giving him the satisfaction of looking forward to it.”
“You guys are quite similar, I find it amusing.”
“Yeah, everything about me screams million-year-old ghost from another world…”
She rolled her eyes and then closed them, Origin Energy beginning to coalesce around her. She was politely telling him that the conversation was over.
You’re the one that’s similar to him. Whenever you start cultivating in the middle of a conversation, you might as well be floating away.
With nothing else to do, Nolan returned to his training. He intended to focus on his inner essence control so he remained in the fountain. Taking the flakiness of his teacher into account, he decided to treat it as if Uncle Grey wouldn’t arrive for a few more days and allowed himself to slip into a deep meditative state.
He was brimming with vigour as the energies of the world seeped into his body from the sparkling waters, extremely pure in quality. The exaggerated feeling of relaxation was incredible, though he had things to do so he couldn’t enjoy it.
He closed his eyes and cleared his mind with little effort. Focusing on his spiritual sense, the energy flow within his body became vividly apparent. Thanks to the nurturing properties of the Divine Spirit Fountain, it became much easier perceive the inner essence channels that spread throughout his body like a golden network of godly veins.
They’ve become a bit wider.
As he always did at the onset of his control training, he took note of the natural course of his inner essence, the vast majority of which resided within his dantian. Even so, his body was rife with an abundance of purified energy that constantly spilled out of his dantian like tiny solar flares. Now that he’d reached the first level of Profound Entry, the golden nucleus beside his heart had doubled in size and tripled in density, the vibrant light that it gave off now brighter than a shining star. The runoff of inner essence kept his body filled to capacity with robust energies, which would only be depleted if he over-exerted himself.
After tuning himself in to the flow of his inner essence, he heightened his concentration and focused on condensing the turbulent rivers that were his inner essence channels, calming the rapid flow of rich energies into tame streams that began to circulate a bit more efficiently than before.
Now, to condense it even more…
The moment that he let his mind slip away into his meditations a transparent form materialized beside him and an aged yet powerful voice tickled his ear.
“Hoh, seems like you’ve reached a higher level of proficiency these days.”
Nolan’s focus snapped like a toothpick in clamped teeth. “What the hell, why’re you so close?” He inched away from the annoying old ghost, who must have waited until Nolan had undoubtedly entered an intensive state of meditation before making a surprise appearance and ruining his concentration.
Uncle Grey let out a hearty laugh. “My apologies, dear disciple, but you’ll have to set your training aside for now. I’ve just finished constructing the arrayment that will allow the two of you to travel outside of this glade.”
“Where are we going, exactly?” asked Nyla, who had had stopped cultivating at the sight of her mentor. “I’d like to know before we set out.”
“Ah, have I not told you?”
Seeing Uncle Grey’s clueless expression, Nolan snapped, “What are you, a goldfish? Didn’t I ask you dozens of times?”
The old ghost pulled at his scraggly beard, his lips tilting downward at the corners as he began an absentminded string of mumbles. “Can you see me, Jaine? This lowly disciple of mine is comparing me to a fish!”
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell us where we’re headed and why you’re taking us there.”
“That is only natural.” Uncle Grey lowered himself to stand before them and assumed an upright posture. “As you’re both aware, a certain level of cultivation is necessary in order to travel elsewhere in this world. Luckily, our destination isn’t too far off from our cozy little glade, so I threw together a compound arrayment that will make it so that you will be able to travel a short distance away from here without any problems.”
“A compound arrayment?” Nyla asked.
“It combines the functions of several arrayments in order to create a more powerful, albeit more complex one. For instance, the one that I’ve created is a marriage between an advanced barrier arrayment and one that alters a person’s aura, a cloaking arrayment. Once I activate it, it’ll alter your auras in a way that will ‘trick’ the seal into allowing the two of you to travel unimpeded within half a league of this courtyard.”
He’d already told them of the categories that arrayments were broken up into. Basic, intermediate, advanced, and finally, grand arrayments, which he assured them that they wouldn’t encounter for quite some time.
“I thought you couldn’t create arrayments in your spirit form,” said Nolan with suspicion.
“Normally, I can’t.” Uncle Grey gave a sigh of lamentation. “The arrayment that I’ve made was very difficult to create, and it required a good deal of inner essence. While I can still create formulas and spiritual diagrams, I can’t activate any of the more difficult ones since I’m just a spirit without any inner essence.”
“Not unless you had access to your own blood.” Nolan gave the old ghost a narrow stare. “Your body’s in that cabin, right? Your blood’s probably just like the fox’s, perfectly preserved, right?”
“Nolan, be respectful. Don’t forget that he’s our master.”
“It’s okay, Nyla. He is entirely correct.”
“And where’s our destination?” Nolan reiterated.
Uncle Grey pointed in a seemingly random direction. “A hundred paces past the treeline.”
“So close?”
A knowing look settled on the old ghost’s face. “This is an entirely different world th
an Venara, one that should only be known to the three of us. The only thing that we know for sure about this realm is that it met a terrible end some countless eons ago. People, culture, civilization—all are a complete mystery, long lost and forever forgotten.
“Even so, I can still claim with absolute certainty that this forest is rife with hints about what happened in those final days. I believe that the key to understanding what happened to the peoples of this realm lies hidden within this small woodland.”
“What makes you say that?” Nolan asked.
“It’s too early for me to explain.” He held up a hand to hold off Nolan’s inevitable retort. “There is much you need to learn before I can share my thoughts with you. That being said, perhaps you might glean a bit of insight once we reach our destination.”
Nolan remained silent, as he knew that any further questioning would be fruitless. For now, his only option was to place his trust in Uncle Grey.
Seeing that they had finally quieted down, their teacher considered them carefully. “I am about to bind the arrayments to your bodies. Are you ready?”
Nolan nodded, as did Nyla.
“What you are about to see are the diagrams for an advanced spiritual arrayment. The formula is indescribably complex.” With a wave of an arm, two radiant triangles appeared before him. “Humph, if only you knew how impressive your master was, then you could appreciate my workmanship.”
The triangles were about the size of Nolan’s torso and seemingly made of light. These ‘diagrams’ were each filled with tiny runes that shone with a dazzling iridescence, along with peculiar shapes and patterns. It almost seemed as if Uncle Grey had arranged his inner essence in a certain way and summoned it for them to see, but Nolan could tell that the shimmering creations before him had been constructed with more than just inner essence. They were multi-coloured, after all, like gasoline in a puddle of water, or the film of a soap bubble.
Identical to one another, the spiritual diagrams hovered two metres above the ground and were both visible to the naked eye, which surprised Nolan greatly. He’d never seen an arrayment before, but had been under the impression that he would only be able to perceive them with his spiritual sense, as was the case with Origin Energy and inner essence.
Because the inheritance from the slab of rock had granted him a subconscious understanding of the Universal Language in both spoken and written form, Nolan recognized a few words within the arrayments. He stared at the shimmering, rainbow-like diagrams, taking a moment to appreciate the appealing sight. Those sort of look like mathematical formulas.
Lips curving upward in satisfaction, Uncle Grey traced a ghostly finger through both diagrams with the exact same movements, visibly altering the runes and patterns before they coalesced into small strings of symbols and then shrunk down to the size of a finger. Startlingly, the floating characters had become jet black.
They changed colour. Hmm, altering the writing clearly instigated the change. He must have been activating the arrayment.
Uncle Grey shook his hand as if he were shooing away a dog and the shining symbols flew toward Nolan and Nyla respectively, settling on their left forearms. The light faded all too quickly, leaving black versions of the same symbols lingering on their arms like strange tattoos. The single sentences were written in the Universal Language and very simple in their composition, so Nolan could read them clearly. Each one read, ‘Enhance aura and versatile barrier.’
It states its function? Isn’t that too redundant? Since the caster of these arrayments had apparently been the best Arrayment Master of his time, he guessed that this would be true for all arrayments. If possible, after he began studying them Nolan would try to change that.
“How do you feel?” Uncle Grey asked.
“I don’t feel any different,” said Nyla.
Though it was the same with Nolan, he realized that he couldn’t sense Nyla’s cultivation. I can’t sense it because the aura level is too high. Probing himself, he found that he was still at the first level of the Profound Entry stage.
“I can’t sense Nyla’s cultivation, but mine is the same. Did only hers work?”
“You can’t sense my cultivation? It hasn’t changed.” Her eyes suddenly lit up. “Oh, I see.”
They were unable to sense one another, though their auras remained unchanged to their own perceptions.
Nolan pinched at his chin while nodding slowly. “Pretty cool, old man.”
His compliment put a crooked smile on Uncle Grey’s face, which looked a bit wild beneath his unkempt beard. “Let us be off then!” The elated ghost took the lead with a silent flourish of his simple robes, leading them in the direction he’d pointed toward earlier.
When they arrived at the treeline a couple minutes later, Nolan was impressed to see that the boundary that marked the range he could travel had seemingly disappeared. He almost felt as if he were in the forest that surrounded the park by his house in Collinsville, but the complete lack of biodiversity struck a strange and unnatural cord in the atmosphere. Be it bugs, animals, flowers or any other plants, there were none to be found. Aside from young trees, only dead silence lived in this empty forest.
Uncle Grey glanced at Nyla. “No need to be nervous, we aren’t going far.”
They continued on into the forest with quiet steps. Once they’d walked thirty paces in, Nolan exchanged anxious glances with Nyla. If he remembered correctly, this was currently the limit to how far she could walk into the forest.
They passed it.
Nolan glanced at the black sigils on his forearm. A few seconds later, he looked up to stare at the back of Uncle Grey’s head, or rather, through it. We should be about fifty-five metres in. This is normally as far as I can go. As with when they’d passed Nyla’s former limit, he didn’t feel a thing. They walked on for a few more minutes, the forest dominated by leafy greens and murky browns for as far as the eye could see.
The dense swathes of trees came to an abrupt end not far ahead of them. This looks familiar…
They emerged from the forest a few moments later, and Nolan almost couldn’t believe it. They were standing at the far edge of another glade that was roughly the same size as the one that they’d been living in for the past year. Though the dimensions were identical, the centre of this one was much different. In lieu of a courtyard and a cabin, the focus of this field was a small shrine that had been carved out of smooth, black stone. A rounded set of steps led up to a small construct that reminded Nolan of an outhouse, though this one had been meticulously whittled down so that the walls were thinner than his fingers. The tiny building was unremarkable, yet endlessly thought provoking.
Nyla couldn’t contain her surprise. “Who would have thought that there would be another glade so close by?”
“Uncle Grey,” said Nolan. “What’s going on here?”
The old ghost continued walking, his face calm and unfettered as he approached the centre of the glade. “If there is one, then why can’t there be two?”
“Are there more than two?”
Uncle Grey’s eyes carried a glint of approval as he glanced back at Nolan. “There are many more. Several hundred, or so.”
“Are you kidding?” Nolan could hardly believe his ears.
“I told you, this forest holds many untold truths, most of which still elude my understanding.”
“Alright, what do you know about this world, old man?”
“This forest should have been raised for the sole purpose of housing these glades, or more specifically, the inheritances that they contain.”
“Inheritances? Wait, like the Ancestral Body Technique? You’re telling me that there’s one in every glade?”
“That’s right.” He stopped walking once they were just a few dozen steps from the shrine. “I spent a great deal of time studying their makeup, and came to learn that these techniques cannot be bonded by just anybody. In any case, I was unable to learn them myself, though if it’s you…”
“Are they l
ike my core cultivation method? You can only learn them if you have no cultivation?”
“Honestly, I do not know.” He resumed walking. “When you told me of your circumstances back on Venara, I ran through everything I knew that might help the two of you increase your odds of survival. After witnessing the superb quality of the Ancestral Body Technique that you’ve been cultivating so zealously, it reminded me that the martial techniques and skills hidden away in the surrounding glades were also of superior quality.”
As they arrived at the stone steps, the absence of sound was unnerving, as always. The ascent didn’t take long, and very quickly they were standing before the tiny shrine, which appeared much plainer now that they were so close to it.
The front side was completely exposed, reminiscent of an open coffin of simple make. The thin walls housed a single, miniature statue that brought to mind the totem poles of the indigenous peoples of Canada, though on a much smaller scale than the ones that Nolan had seen in pictures. He had no way of describing the carvings on the stone, which seemed many in number while at the same time giving off the impression of a completely blank slate.
Why do I feel like there’s nothing there? Tons of stuff’s been carved onto this pillar. The stone was sleek yet devoid of shine, which made him feel as if he were staring into a dark chasm.
“For curiosity’s sake, why don’t we have Nyla try to bond with it first?”
“This is an inheritance?” she asked skeptically, fixing the peculiar statue with a wary stare.
“A high-quality one, at that,” said Uncle Grey. “Now, prick your finger enough to draw some blood, just a drop is fine. Then press it against the stone.”
She followed his instructions, and there was no reaction.
“I can’t say that I’m surprised,” sighed Uncle Grey. “Nolan, give it a go.”
Following his teacher’s instructions, Nolan bit his right forefinger and then watched a small amount of blood begin to pool at his fingertip. He extended his hand until it was just a hairsbreadth away from the small statue, and then took a deep breath.
The Grey Ghost: Book Two of the Archaic Ring Series Page 25