Working with the Dream Spore was a complex matter, mostly because Aloe lost any notion of self whenever she fell asleep. Which was always instantaneous if she was donning any internal infusion other than toughness. Especially if her active infusion was acuity.
But dreams could be manipulated, so Aloe worked on her lucidity.
Sunlight met her eyes. It was a tainted one, deprived of color as the world worked on a greyscale, with only a hint of cyan habituating the horizon and the edges of some items forming ghostly silhouettes.
"It has taken a while, but I'm finally back!" Aloe groaned in satisfaction at her work, even if she didn't possess any lungs or vocal cords in this form to make that sound possible.
She was back at the grey world, or the world of ideas, as Umar's ghost had called it.
"Now, where am I?" she pressed her hands against her hips or tried to do so as she had no corporeal body, whether in tangibility or shape.
Unlike her first time, she no longer found herself in the middle of a street, but nowhere. Dunes of colorless sand and a black sun were all that she saw.
"Am I even in the Qiraji? The dunes look… weird."
It was hard putting into words what Aloe was seeing. She saw dunes, yes, but they were poorly defined. They felt like abstractions of dunes, a poor drawing, or a clay sculpture without any details, not the real deal but a poor approximation.
"This is the complete opposite of the city I was in the first time," she realized. "Everything was hyper-detailed, more real than real life. But this feels like… the background of a painting, only a stroke on a canvas as no more detail is needed. What in the nine hells is this world?"
Aloe had met the true solitude of this world. She had been forced to run away from civilization and had been in seclusion for a few months now, but this wasteland… felt even more lonely than loneliness itself.
"Actually… am I in one of the hells?" She tried to recall the Sulnaya teachings from her youth and the information about the nine hells.
The heavens were the first one, the tallest of them all. A hell, but one where suffering had been reduced to a minimum, the closest reality could get to paradise. That was the aspect that made Sulnaya believable to most practitioners. It didn't promise pain to go away, but it endeared to go forward, that it would lessen, that everything would get better.
The earth was the second hell, or where people lived. According to religion, people ascended from the lower hells to the earth based on their actions. That judgment continued on earth, and if they were good, just, and prolific, then they would ascend to the first hell. Otherwise, they would descend again to a lower hell.
The third hell… well, that was where the issues started. Sulnaya only preached about the first two hells and just explained that the rest were just messes of increasing suffering. An 'explanation' was that no one could know about the lower hells as everyone forgot their experiences when they changed layers, but that excuse falls apart when you start asking how people know about the heavens then.
The only real lower hell that there was information about was the last one, the ninth hell.
Oblivion.
A place where only the most despicable of beings end, a place where there's nothing at all. An infinite void of darkness and suffering.
"Not that different from my life," Aloe chuckled in self-deprecation. "But it doesn't make sense if I'm in a lower hell, how am I remembering my life then coming back to it at will then? Can I have some answers?"
Aloe asked the heavens.
They failed to answer.
"I don't know why I bother," she shook her head and sighed. "Anyhow, I should explore this place. I can now wake up at will, so maybe I can find something. Someone."
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Her thoughts went back to Umar.
"Nince-damned old man abandoned me without giving any answers." The incorporeal woman pouted. "If I find him again, I'm going to give him a beating!" She looked at her lack of fists. "An earful!"
Moving across the indefinite sands, Aloe noticed how much the environment blurred into itself. Reality struggled to keep itself in place: intangible, ethereal, imprecise.
"This is going to sound weird… but it's as if the dunes don't know they are here, as if they lack a perception of themselves." The more she looked at a specific dune, the more defined it became; no longer swaying around and merging with other heaps, but its own entity. "This world is making my mind huuuuurt?"
Aloe peered at the horizon, a beacon of light forming at a powerful and bright point. She turned her head to the heavens, and sure enough, the sun was still in its place in all its black glory.
"Huh."
Having nothing better to do, the cultivator strode toward the brightness. Moving across the strange world was even more strange as she had no body, so her movement was not limited to her physical capabilities, but her mental ones. The corners of her vision blurred as she rapidly approached the light. Yet the closer she got, the more her speed seemed to decrease. Not at a fault of her own, but because the world got more defined as she approached. Distance became a palpable thing, a value and not a suggestion.
In a handful of seconds, her speed ground to a halt, and the landscape became detailed. There was still sand around, but the dunes were no longer untextured blobs of translucent clay, but piles of individual grains of sand. The more she walked forward, the more defined they turned. The change in landscape had grabbed her attention so much that she failed to notice the changes in the most important landmark.
What she had seen wasn't a beacon, but a city.
"Oh, this is weird." She suddenly found herself transferred to the city walls, but her size was not the one she expected.
Everything overwhelmed her in size.
Aloe was already small, but suddenly, everything became massive. Too complex for her tired mind to understand. The shadows of mist resembling people appeared again, confirming that she was, indeed, in a city.
She looked around her elevated position on top of the city walls and found a blinking mist shape moving around. Like before, the shape of a person appeared and disappeared every so often, as if someone was drawing and erasing it, only capable of updating the picture every handful of seconds.
The even-less-defined mist shape of a woman trailed behind the moving person, and the more she looked at them, the more defined they became. After a minute, they were no longer a blur, but a guard with a pike in hand. And like her first impression, it was towering over her. If it wasn't because Aloe thought she was the one getting smaller rather than the other way around, she would have said that the guard would be five meters tall.
"This is… interesting and all, but where am I?" As much as she wanted to toy with this 'world of ideas', what she wanted more were answers.
Without hesitation, Aloe dropped from the city walls down to the streets. The fall wouldn't have hurt her when she still had her real body, so without one it was even harder to break the ankles she didn't have.
"This street is big and there's a lot of people…" The houses she passed by had even more detail than the original street she had been on, enough so to hurt her eyes – or what she had for them – and the passersby were redrawn at a faster rate than normal. "Does the amount of people influence the redrawing time? I guess it makes sense, after all, if I look at someone they get more defined and detailed, so perhaps the mist beings can detail each other."
The more she walked down the populated streets, the smaller she felt. The increasing amount of detail was hurting her in ways she didn't believe possible, but the pain wasn't a deterrent for her, so she continued going.
"I don't know how to explain this, but when I'm here – in this world – I feel more… lucid. As if answers come alone to me, I'm more… enlightened."
Something about her words felt odd, unbecoming of her. Influenced by outside forces she couldn't quite acknowledge as they were understanding. Outside of the perception and senses of humans.
"That reminds me, where's Umar?" By now her size had decreased to that of an infant, maybe a babe, but her voice kept the same ring.
People towered over her to colossal degrees, but she wasn't scared as more than once she had passed through the misty beings. She couldn't interact with them, nor could they. Defining them was the only thing that she could do to them, and they appeared to be unable to reciprocate.
"Umar!" Aloe shouted as she didn't have any better way to search for the old man's ghost. "Are you here Umar?"
She continued shouting and walking for a while, but nothing changed. Well, change that she could see. Orbs of black and red materialized in the distance, but Aloe failed to notice them. And so did the orbs with her.
"Ugh, everything's turning blurry," she yawned. "I think my time in this world is coming to a close for now."
As the cultivator said so, she noticed something on the horizon. It had always been there since the start of her walk, but only now had her mind decided to acknowledge it. What seemed to be worlds away from her with her diminished size, Aloe saw a dome. The light of the dark sun reflected on it, revealing a metallic surface. And even if the world of ideas was deprived of color, Aloe could – somehow – tell it was golden.
"No…" She took a step backward by reflex. "No, no, no! How? Why? WHY? Why here?"
Aloe grabbed her head, and she collapsed to the ground as she began panicking and hyperventilating. Before she could muster a second thought, she was removed from this hell.