Until the day I'd turned twenty, I'd wanted nothing more than to live forever in Revenia where all was as simple as it had seemed at twelve. The only depth and turmoil where internal, you would not find it shown easily, and the person who'd had the most to learn was myself. Though I'd changed their very law, I found myself learning through reflections of their old one, and the wisdom in putting the evils that crossed minds as laws.
Their children quickly broke their own selves of their selfish, material, and worldly yearnings. When they would discover what sins did, and saw the effects of theirs with a bit of time, almost none would continue any of them. Too many accidentally or incidentally learned what only a few would of their own will. It took quite a lot of subtlety and care to prevent myself from making most mistakes. Yet, I made some, errors which were minor but with potential for worse.
More than a few old weapons and tools lost or abandoned could be found around communities. Most all of those were just as they seemed, too worn to be anything but unclaimed, yet more than these were tactfully placed specimens that were there for good reasons. Oilcloth covered tools for cutting or transplanting invasive species near borders, between groomed and wild woods, usually tucked in a trees large hollow or a tar jacketed barrel.
Weapons encased in scabbards similar to those barrels, or with oiled leather sheathes covering their metallic parts and having cured wooden shafts or staves and other handles, these were not lost. They weren't abandoned, but stashes that had been cached where they would be used and cared for as needed, rather than constantly carried back and forth between locations where consistent usage occured within longer walking distances.
My mistake was the same a few knights made, and I'd been unable to tell the plants I'd thought of as a bounty of anti inflammation and fever reduction for the all too common infections of Revenia were not some wild patches of oddly-thick growths, not until enough of dawn had breached the spotty hillside canopy above me. By then, it hadn't taken long to look around and notice the nearby cache. Half buried by weathering, it was, but it had stuck out even at night as an outcropping of rocks.
What I'd thought was a rock long busted by thawing and dethawing was just that, except, it was refashioned as a cairn near the cusp of the hillside where a gully made by occasional flooding made a recession it had been nestled into. I'd studied it close a few minutes, to give myself an idea what transpired here, and do my best to amend my actions accordingly. They collected specific parts of the plants, and their seeds, yet of the rest there was little signs but the plants stalk and leaf stems and roots.
The stalks and leaf-stems were spread around the plants still growing and left to decay, but the roots and leaves were in a sealable container, which had plentiful small outlets everywhere around its bottom for moisture to escape and a few fair sized larger ones for heat regulation. The glass containers soft alloy clasp was a leverage design, but it didn't have much flexibility and was a little durable for the glass itself.
In the end I'd put the already dry leaf-sections and roots in my own drying vessel, a bamboo number that had graduated layers of cotton inside ranging from coarse and thick exterior ranging towards finer and thinner interior layering, whose opening and plugging were one and the same as it was rubberized suede handsewn around the center. Thonging of an otters leather were how it 'sealed', though the bamboo itself 'breathed' and as a result, expelled moisture.
Salt, and activated bonecoal were used commonly in such, but could absorb medicinal quality due to unwanted agents reacting undesirably, leading to many of the more lower quality medicines that came all too naturally along with mass-production. Most alchemists operated short-term of actions in their desire for long-term benefits, and would never learn better, because too many bought into low-grade medicine that could take far longer to do its job even if the costs to pockets and bodies was higher.
These same alchemists were the type to press pretty much any seed in any soil the same way and keep moving, neverminding to stop long enough to see if what they'd done was conducive to have allowed said seed to sprout once again, assuming that 'seeds were seeds' and 'plants were plants' without ever making the effort for theirselves to learn the differences. Money was the only motive, all that moved them on ever a destructive force, even as they lied to themselves that they were benefitting all they were wronging.
Plants that grew in muddy soils did not need be seeded deeply, as all that most seeds need is some moisture and shading to begin to grow, whilst those in sandy soils need be planted deeper lest wind and rain wash them someplace non-conducive where the environment naturally gathered much that was as likely to be nurturative as neuterative to development. Between those two were loamy soils, where some depth was good, and there was more room for error for most species.
There is a reason most plants grow in versatile soil, they are a versatile plant, and the major link between one thing and another here is that soils with a combination of clays, sediments, and loams offer a 'Middleground' neutral to the bulk of most every plant. Local weathers, elements, and conditions leave many acclimatized to regions, but there is a reason the concept of 'Middleground' was brought about to denote the medium in which most of life shares living on and in.
I'd put the cylindrical container of mine in the cache but had to do a bit more to make up for my trespass. There was a bed of outer bark for absorption of water, without any phylum as it was paired or carved off, and I found where more were inside a higher shelf in the cairn for replacing with the used chips. I replaced most everything, used the chips and prepared more, then put the bulk of wet leaf sections and roots to dry in the container there.
I weeded the plants, careful to leave those that might be transplanted and were particularly useful or hard to find, and obviously new growths from the plants themselves. I put a bit more than the price for what the yield of medicine would amount to, and then had fastened the container to leave. By the time I had gotten back to my company of squires, I had to give them what I found, then proceeded to return and start looking for where the individuals lived and let my actions be known.
The noble wasn't mad, and their son had already returned with my drying vessel, and given that back to me along with cheeky thanks they could grab lunch early and go check the trap line that led to where he would fish. Their mother had been a bit lax in not accepting I had almost stolen from them, but admitted it and that the restitution was sufficient, before she or I had been comforted. Akyrians were of another mind, they strived not to steal, so if they made a similar mistake it was harder for them to admit it.
Concepts of duality were not above the Akyrian mind, they only entertained the thoughts of it, while few of them had entertained feelings of it which lay in everyone. 'Light and Dark' and 'Known and Unknown', or 'Fire and Ice' and 'Hot and Cold' were easy to envision. Realization of feeling 'Good and Evil' and 'Healthy and Unhealthy', or 'Love and Desire' and 'Happy and Sad' were deeper.
You had to have had conditioned your thoughts by duality, breaking individual knowns of oppositions into singularity, as there is nothing in this world one can call truly still, truly solid, truly frozen or anything suggestive of a lack of motion and change or permanence of state. 'Change is the law of life.' 'Energy can not be created or destroyed.' Truths. 'Objects in motion stay in motion, objects at rest stay at rest, unless acted upon by outside forces.' Falsehood.
Matter is always being altered, changed, it isn't still at all and that's part of why literally everything makes sound passively - because it is moving at the molecular level. If these things were truly inanimate, the energy necessary for them to be acted upon would increase dramatically, as a lack of molecular momentum would dictate still molecules having no energy at all. Furthermore, 'Objects in motion.', are expelling energy more rapidly than a more still object.
If that statement had a shred of truth, then how would matter have ever settled into planets, when the Big-Bang began at incomprehensible and incomparable speed everything by this fallacies logic would have just kept on going. No, the universe has built in mechanisms we can barely concieve, as the mass within the universe had a tendency towards a resting state.
It is 'Inner Forces' within matter, and not 'Outer Forces' at all that dictate motions and reactions, as energy is the only constant universal force. All else is relative and variable except energy. Time, gravity, frequency, material and elemental form or even lack of such as physical elements break down and some parts return to quantum states, all of everything but energy is variable. The energy is a constant, it is all else encompassed of it changing.
If the mechanism for matter coming to rest had not already existed when the Big-Bang occurred, nothing would have been 'In motion' or 'At rest' for long, because we face a simple 'One or the other, either or.', type scenario. Either there was sufficient mass which should have held everything together, and especially the mass of the energies, which together would have held everything infinitely still. That's option one.
Option two is that the ensuing cataclysmic implosion would have happened quickly, as the energy fueling universal expansion was exhausted, which we can also rule out. There is no useful information, and very little truth to this flawed statement, that 'Objects in motion stay in motion, and objects at rest stay at rest, unless acted upon by an outside force.' Gravity is an internal mechanism of all matter, and motions require energy, energy never remains in any state indefinitely.
A sun is a great example, as after they go supernova, the matter expelled from the purge each stage of its life will begin to re-amass and collect over time. The inner force of masses gravity, this tendency towards rest reveals itself, more so of the heavy elements involved. Its final stage, a star will becomes its strongest in gravitational force, a neuron star if low-mass or a black-hole if high-mass. When a black-hole can approach the speed of light, we can say surely there is no truth for this fallacious concept.
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By fifteen I'd approached the last five years not as a squire, but as a man trying to take the serenity of stillness he had once felt and capture the feel of unchanging again. That time when even my thoughts and feelings were. They were just. They'd been so still that time yielded to me, and myself was behind me, instead of always trying to get ahead of myself. We all have a shadow that lights put behind us, but there is another is one you don't see.
'The shadow that darkness keeps ahead of us.' I had come up with this in only imagination, but there is always so much to be said of imagination, since all knowledge begins as fiction until it's clarity comes over time. 'If light gives your body a shadow you can see following you, what does darkness give you that is ahead of you which you can't see?' Was it death, the return to elements, the bodies own return to the dark earth in death?
Philosophical debate was when I came alive between campaigns, though there was a different sort of life in combat with graduatingly appropriate foes over time, and another one still in assisting Aerich as he battled what we were too young and frail to directly. I would not say I had saved him, though he had many times by then, although to be fair at best I'd spared him some hefty injury a few times. The gift of the Majestic Mule had strengthened bonds.
Those few years, by the time I was fifteen, had been the years in which all manner of wonderful gifts and books were sent towards the Akyrian people. Imperial gifts had been sent as well, though we were to return with a Trophy and Token gift, one more sought than any wealth by Emperor Valkyrian. The young of the Jenny's were always born two at a time, but no two were similar, and their profiles always different even at birth. The new law of Kilak was seen as favorable by most everyone.
The old was not forgotten because it could not be made apart of these people, and that wouldn't have served any to try to do, none had feared for the laws implications since shortly after they'd come about. Instead, crime had decreased everywhere, when the plenty coming cheaply from Revenia had made the surrounding area too stable for most crime. Our own treatment was no better, but our reception was always more intimate afterwards.
By twenty I'd found my answer, what it was, the thing that darkness puts ahead of you that's unseen and opposes what shadow us to light. Light gives a symbol of afterlife in ones shadow which it blesses us with, but it curses us with the reminder of our material body that is mostly dark inside and knowledge it follows us with the same shadow.
That is darks symbol, the body, oneself is the only person they can never lay eyes on naturally or directly. Unseen, no self can lay eyes into the eyes they call their own, even if they look at someone identical in every way. Eyes can reflect out or in, but a mirror nor reflection allows one to see directly into their own eyes, even when you see that reflection time, space, and unique perspective separate it besides a mirror.
You see a mirror and your reflection, yet it's not the self you see, just an illusion that your doing what you think you're doing. Much of the same things, time, space, unique perspective and knowledge, with personal bias besides keep us apart from direct and clear reflection. But what is it that allows us to reflect?
Looking at yourself? It does not require a mirror to reflect, nor take eyes to see the self, and no sensation of touch is required to be aware of where one is by feel. Knowns are usually the most intense of fallacies, by more than our own perspective, all of reality is truly vain and fleeting. It doesn't need alarm one to know the truth, as truth is self liberation. No knowledge is definite, we only share knowns as a reference point. If not, we would not agree to knowns at all, relatability of central points we concentrically agree on are all any knowledge really is.
While it seems as simple as that language and cultural differences are responsible, even at the individual level every knowledge meant something different for every person, yet for all of the different people with various potentials and learnings to have existed and left their impressions on the world but leave such little true knowledge is impossible. Only one real explanation existed, one known that explained how universal knowledge was impossible despite its obviously taken as given existence, just one answer.
'The Great Confusion'. Not just on a global scale, if it had been an instant thing only, we would've been able to recover and reunite. If it was also on the individual level a constant, then it would explain why various cultures had still retained their identity on earth, and signify why each individual mind was so individually inclined and independent. Had that been the moment, when we were all blessed with ego?
Only those who mastered their self could master their ego, as the ego is not a fragment of our mind, the real deal was it was doubt. Doubt, but more so scrutiny. It was scrutiny over all of the self as it struggled to become a better self. Ego was the compass that tried to tell you where head and heart could find balance and leave behind contention. The ego is not merely to 'justify' but guide one unto a just and healthy life.
The head and heart as one mind agree to try and be led better by it, and yet, the hearts desire to take what it wants can turn eyes evil when we let our hearts compass be misguided. The evil-eye is nothing more than the evil thought born at the moment it is taken into the heart and a person decides to animate their intentions. The third-eye, the pituitary gland, the philosophers stone, the perception of what we percieved our perception to be, that which synchronized all together.
Mind, body, emotions were all subject to the ego which rests between the lobes of the brain, regulating what the heart as mastermind sensed was appropriate as it sat between our logic and empathic sides. The mastergland weighed and reflected all that one knew and felt, it and the heart together in harmony were to love all you could see and know it loved you back since you treated everything as it wanted to be treated. Not always like it treated you, no, as that was not always good.
You would not harm yourself willingly, so if you found a wretch who knew no better, why would you counter attack? Soul, sight, and sense. My sight of 'head' and my sense of 'heart' were nothing without my spirit of 'health', which came to me at twenty. The soul comes last to house in the vessel more comfortably, when that house is more comfortable to be in.
I'd sought and found some of the same things about this world as my own in the imperial Revanian library, but the things I did not find were what revealed more. In short order I realized the world I was in had been my own, guessed I'd been misled and by what, since nothing good decieved folk. 'This was a time of some golden-age, before the confusion but after the flood.' This was my first reaction.'
Miasma actuated, with the greatest of fear for my soul, a fear of God that I might be damned for my actions. It was vile, Miasma, vile and yet all it was in truth was more dynamic consumption of the Worldly. To Drain; vitality by absorbing healthy tissues and fluids, calorie from fat in a body, stamina from the mitochondria of cells, health from white blood cells, and even hormonal secretions from the pituitary. It had more direct ways of killing, besides, as any weapon or projectile would return via miasma.
It all seemed to lack any potential for good, until I realized I had been not been cursed with a potential that was in any way limited to evil. I could give of the philosophers stones secretions, I could heal if I ran out of mana-energy as if an inferior counterpart, miasma was nothing more than a 'Sacrificial-healing' where you had to pay equal to the cost. Such a thing is only fair, and normal. Plus, weapons and projectiles need not be used against mankind.
Qi came final. The true ultimate of espers or elements, and where ki was physical, qi was beyond spiritual or limited to a singular facet. It superceded as lone alpha, but it omni supplemented as true omega, the way a devoted sovereign apex in his benevolence and grace would lead and support all of his allies. It didn't just increase all powers and energies by its own power and energy volume.
Its energy did not deplete when used by any other esper or element, unlike transferrence' limits of converting energies, the energy of Qi was like a permanent floor of energy for every other than itself. It didn't exhaust normally, or intake normally either. Of all one could do with it, move any place immediately or disembody, summon animals with animation or plants with creation, resurrection upon death cost one qi energy forever.
Quintessence of Quiescent Qi. It was only a first step, and the next was to leave behind my body awhile, but not so long or so far that I would die. Teleportation and Teleprojection were the things that stuck out to me, and there was no way I could miss out on a spirit journey I knew I had needed, but I would not be able to speak of those unspeakables afterwards. In fact, my hair had already gone pure white, even before I left my body good it was so. I looked like I had on earth, if healthier overall minus the unsettling hair color.
I was in Valkyria itself when I awoke, unable to communicate even if I had a desire to do so, and by then my eyes were as white as my hair and blind to the world. Blind, but only so long as I sought to see truth, and the most true things in the world were what all held in their hearts. Good and evil, intent, thought, feel, introspection, impression, I could intuit others intuition. I could see that which was true and false.
There was no greater high, there was no lower low, nothing was a greater blessing or cursing than truly-knowing. Lack of doubts, learning beyond reasons, edging throughout extremes, it was more overwhelmingness than I had ever experienced and yet I held on. In mere moments of being awake, and without having even left from my quarters, I saw my life flash very different from the first time.
Those horrors I had missed knowing from earth were hellish. The one that killed me was a single mistake, with a single lie, from the most close to my heart and love. Kate had cheated on me, and it was enough, plenty to die for and lose qi gladly forever. The film of blindness bleached my blue eyes, blind the normal way then, all of me corrupted following my heart, head, and health. Soul, sight, and sense all sealed.
It was plenty enough for me to navigate by the subsonic frequency of infrasounds subtle vibrations, ones that a silent and still heart not beating in ones ears any longer allowed to become a new form of sight. Chi, it was the internal mechanisms of Qi, the penultimate counterpart that allowed me to alter myself into any state. I could stricken myself with diseases or plagues, become female, change my species, my genes, or mere appearance to anything. Blindness to all but the silent sounds I'd never heard sufficed.
I could see matter, the elementary of the world, greys. Black and white or color were too much, subsonic-sound- sight wasn't, and because these were more quiet than silence the solace I felt in my sorrow was also quieted. It did not hurt then, the sharp pain of not being able to breathe, nor the sharper of head, heart, and health all dying at once together.
My conscious thoughts slept, or I would sleep, to dream. My conscience still wept, or I would weep, and scream. I and my hearts confluence crept away from each other, as we were as creep to one another now, torn at the seam.
'I will find true beauty, being blind.'