Rough Proof of Concept - Part 2 - (This chapter will conclude the final bits of establishing backstory)
(This is also the last chapter that will utilize a memoir-like format)
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When the Spatial Tear swallowed Aaron, the raw fury of fractured space shattered his body into pieces. Aaron’s absurdly powerful physique allowed him to hold that force off for half a second, a ludicrous feat for his bare flesh, but he was destroyed in the end, nevertheless.
However, that split second of leeway was enough time for his Soul to begin adapting to the ripples of shorn Space. The 412 Soul Arts he created, specifically the ones he had also practiced, supported his Soul and allowed him to resist attacks that should not be resistible.
He sustained horrific injuries across his Soul in a matter of moments, but was still able to hold on.
And then, to his inner angst, his supreme talent took the continued experience of his Soul being torn to shreds by Spatial Storms and used it to enter a period of enlightenment.
Due to that, all of his Soul Arts grew stronger and he eventually made a full recovery. The repeated tearing of Spatial Waves grew fainter and fainter until the point where they did so little damage that his passive Soul Arts were able to regenerate his wounds before he even sensed them.
And, thus, Aaron found himself set adrift in the mindless space of the Dimensional Sea, only able to sense the endless Spatial Storms that battered him. He gradually lost his sense of time as the years went by, trapped alone with only the memories of his failure to comfort him.
Aaron only later realized that he had once again managed to miss the perfect opportunity to die a natural death. He was able to survive with just his Soul only because he was sucked into the Dimensional Sea within a second of his body’s destruction.
Normally, one’s Soul would dissipate within moments of their body perishing, no matter what reality they were in. However, the Dimensional Sea was the space between realities, and was not bound by the concept of reality, in and of itself.
Ironically, Aaron had managed to find his way to the only place in existence that was capable of preventing him from immediately dying.
The only saving grace left was the fact that he was unable to maintain a full sense of consciousness while swimming in the Dimensional Sea.
Time went on.
Nothing ever changed…
Until it did.
After what might have been anywhere from a thousand years to one hundred thousand years, Aaron finally sensed something new.
He found a feeling he had never sensed before.
A feeling of brotherhood, a feeling of kinship at his very core, a feeling of ‘sameness.’
He drifted towards that sensation, taking advantage of his endlessly enhanced Soul Arts to maneuver himself through multitudes of Spatial Storms at the fastest speed he could muster.
And, just as he reached the source of that feeling…
He slipped between the barriers that blocked out the Dimensional Sea and found his Soul shifted into the 13 year old body of Natasha von Zefner, a slave and a fallen noble from a world very different from the one he knew.
Natasha was a 13 year old girl that had also, he swiftly realized, just committed suicide.
Aaron noticed mere moments before his Soul fully fused with his new body that he would die before he managed to become conscious in its current state. In the last moment he had, he ripped apart a huge chunk of his Soul and transferred that energy directly into his body, utilizing one of the Soul Arts he had created, the Life Unto Soul Art, in reverse.
This method was absurdly inefficient, chiefly because the technique was supposed to work the other way around, but still managed to create a minute burst of Ki. As his consciousness slipped away, Aaron’s instincts activated and directed that tidbit of Ki through the Crippled Soldier Ki Circling Art, a Ki Circling Art Aaron made in his youth as a joke.
It was the weakest Ki Circling Art to exist, something he had taken pride in at the time.
He never would’ve expected it to one day prove the perfect Art to draw on to save his life, its utter weakness perfectly matching the tiny bit of Ki he’d formed. He managed to establish the weakest conceivable Ki Circle, leaving him with Ki leftover that he immediately directed at his injuries.
Moments later, as his consciousness roused, he realized to his great irritation that this had been yet another excellent moment to allow himself to naturally die. He had saved himself out of habit, not because he was interested in life.
His complaints were swept away as the memories of his body began to flow into him.
He then realized what the feeling of kinship he sensed was from.
Natasha possessed the same unparalleled, ultimate, ungodly level of talent as Aaron. She had been undergoing enlightenment prior to her death, and that sensation of enlightenment held the embodiment of their identical talents.
As more of her past was revealed to him, Aaron slowly began to realize that, despite possessing the same level of talent, the two of them could also not have been more different.
Before she was enslaved, Natasha was the Eldest Daughter and Sole Inheritor of Duke Zefner, a powerful noble from the Kingdom of A’dar.
Unlike Aaron who had used his talent to further his quest for power, Natasha had used her talent to juggle a huge multitude of responsibilities aimed at furthering not herself, but her loved ones.
She began intensive study from the age of 1, learning a wide and detailed amount of information, thus allowing her to help her father manage the Territory by the time she turned 5. She helped take care of her younger twin sisters after her mother died giving birth to them, raising them with the love a mother should have at the age of 7. She cared for the health of her father and comforted his mind, using her overwhelming instincts to see through his feelings and always be there when he needed her. She took over the duties of the late Madam, completing them perfectly and running the Zefner Estate by time she turned 9.
She did all of that while still making time to enhance her Mana, an energy source very similar to Ki, raising it at a speed on par with normal geniuses her age.
As the responsibilities she shouldered grew, she eventually developed a meditative technique that allowed her to give up on the need to sleep, creating time where there was none.
She personified everything Aaron hadn’t.
Their differences were highlighted as he scanned further through her memories.
Aaron failed in the end, but Natasha never even got the chance to fail.
A month after she turned 11, her father, Duke Zefner, was killed by an unknown assassin. As turmoil embroiled the Zefner Estate, Natasha forced herself to set aside her grief and confidently affirmed her rights as the Sole Inheritor, knowing that she was the only lifeline that the twins had left.
On the very next day, she and the twins left, headed to the Capital to undergo the Inheritance Ceremony while accompanied by her father’s elite private guards. She meticulously planned their journey, directing their route in utter secrecy and silence. She even put off the funeral of her Father, something that was considered extremely unfilial, to raise their odds of arriving safely.
Unfortunately…
Natasha was only 11 years old.
Her plans were the best she could make, but the enemies that had killed her father were powerful enough to ignore her efforts entirely.
The Zefnar Guards were ambushed and slaughtered in the middle of the night. Natasha was unable to detect how they died, godly talent or not. The foes set on destroying her family were extraordinary.
Natasha and the twins were captured by an assassin garbed in pitch black robes. Natasha used their capture as an opportunity to memorize every single detail about this assassin, her mind going into overdrive as she engraved the man’s gait, tiny habits that were strewn throughout his movements, and any and all features she could use to identify him.
‘If they aren’t killing us, it means we still have some sort of purpose. We hold some degree of value. I can work with that.’ She refused to give up and began searching for a solution.
The assassin grabbed the three of them and then rocketed through the air, unleashing a Halo of Mana that knocked the twins out and sent Natasha’s mind reeling.
The next string of memories Aaron found caused his empty, emotionless heart to crack, the tremendous walls he’d built around it leaking the first hint of emotion he had felt in a very, very long time.
The emotion of raw, furious rage.
By the time Natasha recovered from the shock of the assassin’s Mana, the girls had arrived at a Slave Caravan set in the middle of a large forest. After landing, the assassin-turned-kidnapped unceremoniously threw them to the ground and immediately waved over a slightly overweight Slave Merchant.
Natasha did the only she could in that moment. Once more, she observed her surroundings in exacting detail.
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She drew on the breadth of knowledge she had spent years building up, successfully recognizing the type of trees in this forest. Once she narrowed down a few general possibilities, she was able to use the position of the stars that were visible to mathematically triangulate their location, give or take a few miles.
She was able to conclude that, in the time that she had been unaware, between 25 and 30 minutes, the black-robed assassin had traveled more than 500 miles, leaving the Kingdom of A’dar and entering the neighboring Kingdom of Tonsoon.
Just as she was pondering how she could use this information, the twins woke up.
Natasha was 11 years old… but the twins were only 4.
The twins were smart for a 4 year old, but not on the level of Aaron or Natasha. They didn’t understand the situation.
Upon finding themselves outside, hungry, with skin rubbed raw by the Assassin’s rapid transportation, bruised after being flung to the ground, they did what any 4 year old would do.
They threw a fit and began to cry, the older twin, Sara, screaming loudly, while the younger twin, Yenor, stomped her feet.
The next memory Aaron came across was one that had been slowed down to an excruciating degree, the result of Natasha’s body straining to react.
The black-robed assassin turned towards the twins in irritation and then, in a heartbreakingly casual expression of cruelty, kicked up a nearby rock and used an unknown technique to fling it at Sara.
Natasha witnessed all of this as it was happening. Her talent enhanced her senses to the extreme as she attempted to dive forward and protect the girls. She grew so focused she also inadvertently experienced a state of mental growth, a weaker form of enlightenment.
However…
She was only 11.
She had yet to finish recovering from the shock of the assassin’s Mana, was hungry, exhausted, stressed, and scared.
She didn’t even manage to move half an inch before the rock cut through the air and slammed into Sara’s head with a sickening thud.
The rock shattered when it hit, immediately silencing Sara’s screams and ending her fit. Yenor witnessed the impact from only a foot away and also froze, the attack on her twin sending her into shock.
The assassin then turned back to the Slave Merchant, his gait indicating that he was pleased. The Slave Merchant, on the other hand, began to argue and pointed back at Sara, speaking annoyed words that Natasha didn’t quite catch. The last thing she saw before her vision narrowed was the assassin shrugging halfheartedly.
Her eyes burned the sight of dark blood pooling on the ground underneath Sara’s head into her brain like a branding iron.
Her well-trained observation skills and knowledge of anatomy then let her immediately ascertain the seriousness of Sara’s injury.
Over the next split second, her brain made multiple rapid-fire observations as she sought out anything that could keep her from focusing on the present.
Once again, her supernatural observation skills worked in tandem with the vast store of knowledge she had, her talent instinctively letting her calculate how much time Sara had to live, while also predicting an extremely early onset of rigor mortis based on the Mana the assassin had imbued in the rock he kicked. She also surmised that the assassin didn’t mean to imbue the rock with Mana by reading his body language, a technique she had trained for years. The rock he imbued and kicked was something he did out of habit, not that that made it any better.
Exactly 8 and 2/3rds of a second later, the number she had calculated to the exact tenth of a second, rigor mortis began to set in and the truth hit her.
Her little sister Sara was dead.
Natasha’s mind began to shut down as she was overwhelmed past any conceivable breaking point that an 11 year old girl could bear. She welcomed the nothingness that appeared, embracing it to avoid the horror she was experiencing.
Unfortunately, her talent then immediately developed an innate resistance to shock and enhanced her mental state to yet another level, forcibly bringing herself back into full awareness.
The horrors she would face had only just begun.
Over the course of the next 2 years, Natasha advanced through 26 individual mental states and experienced extended enlightenment 11 separate times, enlightenment that was so frequently interrupted she developed the ability to maintain enlightenment even while performing her duties as a slave.
To highlight the significance of that, in just 2 years, Natasha’s mental level exceeded the highest state that Aaron had achieved in the course of more than 60 years, all while she possessed a body and cultivation that was incomparably weaker.
That enormous level of mental growth wasn’t obtained through any sort of training method or intentional goal, but simply because her mind would have broken if she failed to grow even one bit less.
She lacked the decades of varied experience, complex Martial Arts, and empowered Soul Arts that Aaron could draw on. The only thing her godly talent could latch onto was her mental state.
The talent she had always been thankful to posses swiftly became something she cursed as she was forced into an unending hell, every moment of her life slowed down by her greatly enhanced speed of thought, every detail of her torment captured by her genius observation skill.
The 2 years she lived before her suicide stood closer to 20 years in mental age thanks to the abnormal growth of her mind. Her memory became so perfect that everything she observed was now permanently captured in exacting detail.
She would never forget what her loves ones experienced.
Sara died the day they reached the slavers.
Yenor was separated from Natasha after they were formally sold to the slavers. Natasha was powerless to stop that, her attempts at talking met with a wall of physical abuse no matter what she said, a beating that ended only after she lost consciousness.
The day of separation was the last time Natasha ever saw Yenor.
She later found out that Yenor died 3 days after being transferred, something Natasha had predicted would happen when she realized they were being separated. Yenor wasn’t able to overcome the shock of Sara’s bloody demise, the death of Father, and the loss of her only mother figure, Natasha, all by herself.
There was nothing Natasha could do. 5 days after being separated, as she realized this fact, her mind once again attempted to shatter, and her talent once more brought her back from the brink of insanity, enhancing her mental state.
Natasha went on to be branded a slave that held no value, a Trasven, the lowest tier of slave, and discovered the real reason she and her sisters had been kidnapped.
The only value they held was the satisfaction the person that ordered their enslavement obtained, someone who possessed such a deep hatred for their father that they were willing to take that grudge out on his children as well.
The next 2 years of her life saw her learn firsthand why a Trasven was the lowest tier of slave.
After all of the mana in her body was dispersed, what was left was a defenseless 11 year old girl that was passed off from owner to owner without apparent rhyme or reason. The treatment she received ranged from being used as a tool to take out one’s anger on, to a toy to violate and torment, to an object that was examined and experimented on.
In the midst of this hell, she concluded that her treatment far exceeded the standards of even the lowest Trasven, and had to be the result of intentional orders left behind by her father’s killer.
That was the only other thing she ever managed to conclude in regards to the night when her life fell apart. No matter how strong her senses became, the most she could do was pick up tidbits of words spread outside each hovel she inhabited, none of which were relevant.
She could not die. She could not save anyone. She could not defeat the ones that killed her loved ones. She could not discover who killed them, or even why they were killed.
Time went on.
And, finally, an end to her suffering appeared on the horizon one month after Natasha turned 13.
After 2 physical years and 20 mental years of torment, her godly talent hit a wall.
After 11 periods of extended enlightenment and 26 advances to higher and higher mental states, Natasha’s complete lack of Mana, weakened body, and the sheer raw horror that stained her mind in every waking moment of her life proved enough to prevent her from rising to a higher mental state.
The blankness she desired finally began to swarm her thoughts. For the first time since her father died, a smile appeared on her now heavily scarred, disfigured face.
She gradually lost touch with reality as her senses shut down. The blankness swallowed everything.
And then, as if to mock her…
When it seemed utterly impossible for anything to go wrong…
Her cursed, horrific, hells-be-damned talent used the new experience of nearly-complete mental blankness to enter enlightenment.
And, thanks to the resistances she had grown after having previous states of enlightenment interrupted, Natasha was unable to stop it.
Natasha’s mind raced ahead of her as the blankness of insanity started to fade…
In that moment, for the first time, she found a use for her absurd speed of thought.
She instantly pondered, debated, raised multiple arguments and then finally made the decision to kill herself in 1/20th of a second, before enlightenment returned her sanity, a decision she was too mentally resilient to allow normally.
In the same moment, Natasha realized she also had a use for one of her other skills, a talent that had only made her life as a slave miserable.
She pulled on her extreme observational power with every fiber of her being.
In the following 1/20th of a second, Natasha analyzed everything about her body and everything within a certain distance of her location, calculating the best way to kill herself, how far and how fast she could move in her current state, how much time she had before her current owner checked on her, and exactly how much time she had before her enlightenment cured her insanity.
Then, relying on her instincts to guide dozens of factors, she made a near instantaneous decision.
Natasha raised her hands to her face…
And ripped out both of her eyes.
Excruciating pain bled through her body as her enhanced nerves fired, resulting in agonizing torture that would have killed a normal 13 year old from shock alone. Even while partially insane, her ridiculously powerful mental state still didn’t let anything interrupt the fast-growing state of enlightenment.
It did, however, cause her to rapidly begin losing blood.
‘My talent has grown my skin to be too resilient to injury in the past 2 years. I’m currently chained to a wall and unable to muster enough energy to utilize gravity to my aid.’ There was only one place that had never been cut, slashed, burned, or pierced.
Her eyes.
As blood began to drip down her face, Natasha felt herself begin to grow lightheaded. Even now, her talent tried to adapt to the injury. However… that adaptation was shut down before it began as Natasha’s original period of enlightenment took over.
Against all odds, in the 2/20ths a second she had to plan, Natasha found a useful way to use her resistance to having enlightenment interrupted.
Shortly thereafter, Natasha’s sanity returned.
Once again, she began to smile.
‘I would save myself right now if I could… but I can’t.’ Her focus was split as she analyzed her condition, her restored mental state overcoming her overwhelming urges to commit suicide.
Natasha’s grin widened, causing the blood dripping down her face to drip into her mouth. Most of her taste buds had long since been seared off, but the few ones that remained were sensitive enough to recognize the metallic tang on her tongue.
‘I’m going to die shortly after passing out from blood loss, in approximately 7 seconds.’ She was hardly bleeding, but her physique was so pathetically weak that, without her talent pulling a miracle from thin air, this much blood loss was already close to fatal.
The seconds felt like hours as they began to pass, her enlightenment continuing on regardless of the fact that she was dying. Natasha felt the state of her mind flutter and grow, advancing forth at an unprecedented rate.
Seconds into hours, hours into seconds.
In a time that was both far too long and all too short, Natasha fell unconscious due to bloodloss and began sapping the last bits of her lifeforce.
Absurdly, even now, her vast resilience to interruptions during enlightenment resulted in her maintaining a state of enlightenment regardless of the fact that she was unconscious.
If she had been awake, Natasha would have been delighted at this result. It answered one of the questions she had debated with herself in the past 2 years, but always failed to answer; namely, the fact that mental enlightenment and the growth of one’s mental states were indelibly related to a being’s Soul.
Finally, after countless failed attempts and false hopes…
Natasha began to die.
Her Soul loosened its hold on her mortal coil as her body began to cool.
And then, in a series of fortunate coincidences that might not line up even once in 100,000 years…
While Natasha’s Soul was loosening its attachment to her body, it began to slowly disperse to whatever afterlife lay in the great beyond. In that transition period, Natasha had yet to fall out of her state of enlightenment.
And it was that exact setup, the sensation of enlightenment, that Aaron felt. The state of Natasha’s transitioning Soul crossed the barriers of the Dimensional Sea, allowing Aaron’s Soul to find her.
Natasha’s Soul left, vanishing like a leaf in the wind.
Aaron’s Soul cemented itself to its new body, like a nail hammered into stiff, dying wood.
And, after witnessing the end of his world, embracing the death of his body, and casting his Soul across the Dimensional Sea years unknown.
The Master of Murim that wished for death, once again, failed to die.
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