Sachihiro

I’m sitting on the tough soft grass of Paradisum Park enjoying the night with my head tilted back and my eyes closed as I watch the night around me. My vibrational sense is on overdrive as I combine it with awareness in a twist of the mind that gave me a nosebleed when Sergei was still teaching me how to do this. The world around me is wondrously alive and active to my senses as I concentrate very strenuously even as I try to maintain the free state of a quiet mind.

Everything has a vibrational frequency, everything. From my skins that keeps changing slightly n a range as the cool wind fluctuates on my skin. The occasional loud noise as a child laughs still playing with one of the dire wolves or a contender in one the park rings is hurt more than she expected to bear makes me especially quickly with the way I now see the world.

The dragonfly eating a bee whilst still in flight has seven different frequencies from what I have so far been able to decipher. Every single one of the four wings each vibrating at its own frequency; the two antennas each at their own frequency, the head and the trunk at a different frequency from one another. But the vibrations aren’t static; everything is within a narrow range that would probably look like a cascade of shifting colour if I could see it with the naked eye.

Little Wind runs into my concentrated area of awareness dirty and bruised but giggles happily with an aura of pure contentment and accomplishment as he outruns his big brother Morpheus chasing him on two legs. The rascal pumps his little legs with all intensity with his arms also pumping like forging pistons in as he runs like his life depends upon it.

My lips twitch at the sight knowing that he has done something to anger his brother again and I’m the only refuge he can hope to find before Morph is on him like green on grass, giving him another beating whatever it is he has in mind this time. With my head up and my eyes closed they don’t think I can see them, none of my children do and this gives me a freedom to watch them interact with each other in their natural habitat and observe their behaviours when they think they aren’t being watched.

Wind dives at me and falls comfortably into my lap still panting but holding onto me tightly. I open my eyes and look down at the lush raven black head of hair as his face is burrowed into my tough coarse grey tunic to hide the grin he thinks I’m unaware he has on his face.

‘’And what are you running from now?’’ I ask holding him close pretending not to have seen the whole thing even as I look up at Morph helplessly standing there watching us with an aggrieved expression on his face. I can’t help myself I grin at him and after a second where his face goes through a number of expressions he grins back forgetting the trouble caused by his quarry and just being in the moment with me.

Meraki, a Hito philosophy that I am trying to instil in all my children with help from Kuyoki and the slowly growing Hito community that is allowed to reside within the city. A way of thinking that I can actually see being absorbed by some of my children and directly affect their day to day lives and how they view the world. All my children that take to the teaching have know the joy garnered from great success and how fleeting the feeling is, they also know the disappointment from great failure and how fleeting that feeling is as well.

By putting themselves deeply into their every activity and doing it with outmost dedication, ability and love they live in the now at every moment realising subconsciously that their lives are now in every second and not at some distant future. I wish all my kids could have caught on as easily as Wind has but they are all so different and everything I do or try to teach them has to be unique to each individual child.

It’s exhausting being a parent but again through meraki I see that it’s also the greatest of responsibilities and the greatest joy I could ever have achieved in this life, and it never ends. I will always be a father to these people and keep loving and moulding them as they love and mould me in turn.

‘’I just missed you!’’ the little rascal lies blatantly as he snuggles closely into me with his little arms going as far as they can around my torso.

‘’I’m glad ‘cause I missed you too, looks like Morpheus misses you as well.’’

‘’Really? He’s standing behind me still?’’ The rascal asks looking up at my face showing his beautiful dark eyes and long lavish eyebrows. The grin full of mischief and accomplishment on his face is too funny and I giggle at his joy even as the now 7 year old Morpheus. joins me his 6 year old brother with his little arms locking around my neck.

The three of us share a laugh for a few moments as I also take in the scent of grass and soil on their clothes, the fading warmth of twilight on their skin, I love them. Wind and Anandi are my first children with one of my concubine wives and I’m grateful to all my other mates at how malleable and accommodative they have been through the years.

Wind is inquisitive and smart enough to figure out that Shravanthi is his birth mother but generally speaking all nine of my mates are mothers to him and quick places of refuge when one of his siblings wants to get their hands on him.

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Morpheus, Orochi, Serenity, Rayna, Lysandra and Kira are all now seven years old creating a mad house at the place we currently call home. That’s not even including my youngest brother Billiard, Gaia’s second son Oakro and my two youngest Wind and Anandi. Both birthed by Shravanthi who is away now on one of the undine isles as her hunger for adventure and exploration prevents her from sitting still too long.

‘’Okay, go play I’m still busy enjoying the wind.’’ I say untangling myself from the two adorable creatures and they are off again chasing each other through the park, completely care free.

I wipe the smile from my face and get back to concentrating on my now primary sense and my vibrational sense ability. It’s been years since I put aside my pursuit of the warrior path for things that would likely be more useful in the fighting to take place in the coming struggle.

Since the day I left the Tundra with Mira and Asriel I have been exposed to teaching after teaching, skill after skill, discipline after discipline and thought that is all well and good it’s also been limiting to my growth. I dabble in sorcery and summoning even though I can only summon things I have a spiritual connection to.

I am primarily a swordsman but my axe and dagger skills are never neglected for very long and even with my swordsmanship I’m by speciality a two handed long-sword wielder but duel wielding Kata and Razor is something I enjoy so much that I haven’t summoned Honour to my side since my initial mission for Shadow in Tiba way back when. But there are benefits to having her at Zillah’s side, one of which is her learning a great deal in the Underworld from the Lilithian Daarksider, things that cannot be done by beings with physical bodies.

My Awakening to mana and sex has distracted me from many things I should have pursued further but had to delay in order to grasp my new abilities if even a little. Water casting comes naturally and it only took practice and a little help to get the grasp of the basics, but the cast techniques are so intricate that I wonder how I would have managed had I not been blessed by Wisdom herself.

My desire, drive, obsession to build a tribe around myself is an exhausting task I struggle with daily. Having sacrificed so much of my pride as a Barbarian, as a father, as a man in order to have what I currently have with so few enemies or holmgang challenges. Most of the family only knows of one such challenge because it was declared by a fool publicly in the city.

But Mira and Ikigai know I’ve fought six death matches in the six years we’ve been in Sandaria and I feel I think about enough time has passed for another fool to try and take what’s mine.

Basically I’ve been busy being pulled in too many directions for too long and dabbled in many disciplines and potential disciplines to fully realise my true potential in any single one. According to Master Zaraya if I had more time this would be an ideal investment in myself for when I reach tier 4 and someday Ascend to Omega. But I’m only a tier 1 on a scale where a tier 4 is 4x exponentially more powerful than a tier 1 on average and Omega is coming to me.

So I have been working my ass off every day for the past five years refining every single skill and ability I have to the exclusion of all else. I take no new Masters; I take no new sparing partners nor advice or technique. It could be the most stupid decision I have ever made or one of the top 10 inspired ones.

With ma or anyone else I meditate, with Ava or Iki or Om I do yogadia and stretches, with Om, Nikita and Andrew I do visualisation, with da or Eldritch or Gaia I practice my axe wielding, with Saya or Iki I practise kenjutsu, with Uruka Sempai, Mira or Om I practice my zanjutsu, with Soal I run the library and practice general sneakiness, with the fae Sergei I fine tune all my mana based abilities and generally all my none physical skills.

In that way I guess I could call him a master to me, he is still more of a boss directing my Shadow assignments than anything else but his direction has been vital. My library and I are a way point for many a spy, asset or ambassador working in some capacity with the Conclave. Though I’ve truly only fought seven times since being here it hasn’t been a boring few years.

I find my centre and flow again as I simultaneously let my chakra circulate while listening to my awareness as it watches the vibrational frequencies of the nature around me. Everything speaks to me is some capacity, the trees vibrate, the soil, the rocks. But I’m not there yet, not at the point where I can actually read the language of their hidden frequencies.

Living and active creatures though are another matter. I can see the flaws and weak spots in people when I concentrate this way, the tree rat’s tail would be very easy pull out, the wolf wrestling with two children a stone’s throw away had a weak left back knee.

I can see some of the power living creatures are hiding; the same wolf has a very interesting frequency at every paw indicating bunched up power that would be explosive when used. The same tree rat has a very active nose and its teeth are very dangerous when their power is measured in proportion to their size.

But even as I can’t fully understand the language of the rustling wind or the vibrations of the air as it transfers the sounds we make that we call speaking, I do know it’s beautiful. And even the inanimate sometimes hints at some of its secrets. I watch the frequencies of my kids as they run around within my influence, them I know intimately even as they are ever-changing moment to moment.

To look and only see through the eyes is so limiting, how did I ever live this blind to the world? How did I know anything with only six primary senses? I will always be grateful to Asriel and the path he put my life on, or is it the fall of the meteorites all those years ago that sealed my fate as a pursuer of power?

Saya is back home and she brought with her several friends as usual, she never tells me where she is sent but thankfully the guys at the Proelium like me. She brought a boy home she wouldn't let me see, a young man from Earth whom I’m interested to speak to, there is something about the world whose birth saved my life that I find strangely fascinatin-

My concentration is interrupted by the cold, smooth communication of spirit sent to me in an instant from the underworld, from my girl missing me and missing being unsheathed even as she revels in learning the dark secrets that only Zillah can teach. I hope setting that thing back into the world doesn’t turn out to be the worst mistake of my life.