John's disembodied spirit watched the room for an indeterminate amount of time. It found that it could float around the space at will, but not leave it. It could also return to the body and look through its eyes, getting a better sense of the state the body was in, but it was largely unnecessary.
Eventually, an unfamiliar cultivator opened the portal through the wall and fed the body more pills. The last cultivator must have been scared off by the the outburst, but John's spirit found it hard to care about such trifles now. Remotely, he sensed the pills going to work inside the body. There was a vague uncomfortable feeling in its gut, the pill energy coordinated with something in his body to flood into the organs with a boiling sensation.
The spirit drifted peacefully for several more cycles of pill feeding and water splashing. The body writhed in discomfort the entire time, and there was one last bout of filth. The new cultivator once again opened the wall, this time manipulating the water directly to scour the body free from all contaminants and the doing the same process for the ceiling, walls, and floor. With a wave of a hand, a clean white robe once again wrapped around the body and was forced to sit on a chair.
The chair glided out of the cell to line up in the larger room with the others. John's spirit, no longer bound to the cell walls, followed behind idly. Few had survived this bizarre torture, it seemed. Less than half of the starting number remained, sitting on identical chairs.
The spirit inspected the surrounding people, taking advantage of its new mobile perspective. There were obvious changes, almost everyone was taller, the spirit realized. Symmetrical faces, longer limbs, better proportioned bodies. Several people giggled uncontrollably under their breath. Some had tear-streaked faces and puffy eyes. Most were silent.
The elderly cultivator in the center of the gathering started to speak. "Good morning to you all." This was the same thing he'd started with last time, there was no protesting this time.
"We have finished preparing your bodies. There is one last step to take before you can officially join the sect." He waved and an incense stick appeared beneath every chair and was immediately ignited.
Smoke started to curl up around every prisoner. John's spirt felt an intense pain as if an invisible leash had yanked on him, pulling him unstoppably toward his original body and shoving him inside. John frowned. The smoke had a mind of its own, seeking out John's mouth and nose eagerly and gathering in his lungs.
Something in the room shifted uncomfortably. The air felt pregnant with meaning, but John couldn't place it. It felt like he had made a terrible mistake. Like the room had revealed itself to be upside-down the entire time.
The old man's face twisted, black ink flooding his eyes until nothing remained but an empty pit. His features took on an unusual and off-putting sharpness. It grinned so wide John thought its face might split in half. Yellowed, dagger-like teeth filled its mouth. A long green tongue licked up his face and caressed its left eye.
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
Its smile dissipated into a deep frown. It spoke in both a whisper and a shout. "Thou wilt go mad from the revelation I open unto your eyes!"
The smile reappeared just as quick, as the man started dancing from foot to foot in overwhelming glee. Spinning and skipping he made his way over to John while belting out in an irregular sing-song voice. "Some-thing is a-coming. John! Somethingisacom-ING! somethingiscomingsomethingiscomingsomethingiscoming." He collapsed next to John in an exaggerated fall, placing his head on John's lap with a face twisted in a huge exaggerated pout.
"It's coming for.... You!" It smiled again and resumed its giddy dance. "Its because you are the best one John! You. Are. The. Best. One!" Its face twisted beyond anything recognizably human. Now it was holding a banner that read 'JOHN IS THE BEST ONE', waving it and leading a marching band of identical copies of himself, all playing strange discordant tunes on alien instruments and wearing bizarre outfits.
It was too much. John tried to close his eyes but it required great effort. His eyes felt as heavy as if he had stayed awake for a week straight, but they refused to close instead of being difficult to open.
The band disappeared. "Uh-uh-ah," the demon man was waggling his finger. "You've got to keep your eyes open, John! Ke-ep them O-pen!" The last part was shouted in a an wild and cracking falsetto.
John shook his head and tried to squeeze his eyes shut as tight as possible, to no avail.
"Keep them open! Keep them O-PEN! O-pen your EEEEYYEEESSS!!!" Belting out a huge vibrato, the demon forced John's eyes open with pointed talons.
The pit in john's stomach stretched into an infinite void that seemed to shatter reality as dread pressed in on him from every direction. He wanted to puke but hadn't eaten any food in weeks. He dry heaved anyway. He seemed to vibrate. The singing of the demon got muffled into unidentifiable reverberations. The world around him slowed into discrete images that flashed by, the ceiling, and the floor, and the chair, and the other participants, even the demon all came apart at the seams, revealing a black nothingness in the slowing images of reality.
John was pulled in a direction he didn't know had existed. Reality and unreality stayed in place as John was pulled out into a great cacophony of all sounds, and John was joined by an infinite choir of screaming to match his own. John saw he was a single paper cut-out in an infinite chain stretching to the infinite past and the infinite future and all lead to the wheel. The wheel dominated everywhere he could perceive. His time as John was just a splash of paint on an infinite canvas of hell, just a facet of the wheel itself as it crushed everything good and orderly out of existence. John realized he was a part of this wheel and had always been, it was not John it was a cog in the infinite machine. Everyone had been counting on it to be prepared, to get it together in his short stint as John, but he had failed. The ultimate lesson and he had fucked it up, and now he was going back to being a cog again. For all time. Forever.
Several eternities passed. John once again came to consciousness, still stuck in a damnable stone room, lined up like pigs stuck on uncomfortable chairs. The old cultivator had regained his human looks and normal eyes. He floated the prisoners and himself up and through the now-missing roof.
"Lets begin." He said.