They had found a dry space in a rusted shipping container to bunker down for the night, then left as Seria’s sun was rising in the sky. After a while of picking their way through hills of metal debris and junk, Veronika had noticed Scot following them.
“Um, can I help you?” She looked behind her and saw him standing in a shady spot, away from the stark rays that glared down on them between gray clouds.
“What would you like help with, Shepherd?” he innocently asked.
Veronika groaned. “Why are you following us?”
“Am I not part of your traveling party?”
She paused and mused on the idea. “To be honest, I never thought of it.”
“My assignment to Bing Bing was canceled when my mistress abruptly terminated her care for me. I am a free agent.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “And what was your purpose?”
“My assignment objective was to safely escort my mistress to the Bing Bing mining plant. But I failed in this, so my services were gently dismissed.”
“That’s all?” She continued to poke the matter to be sure he wasn’t going to betray her at some point for some unknown reason.
“Should there be more?” He innocently tilted his head to one side.
“Sheeze.” She dropped her caution and continued her trek.
Their walk eventually led to a shady clearing walled by haphazard stacks of shipping containers and mech debris, where they sat in the shade to take a rest.
[Veronika. This would be a good opportunity to apply the Biotic Chip Treasure we had picked up earlier] System chimed in with a suggestion.
“Right.”
She fished for the small thing in her pocket and stared closely at it.
It was a round chip, the size of a coin, and shimmered with a sky blue Bing Verslas coating over a foreign pattern, which was printed on the dark green hard silicon surface with gold ink among typical computer chip schematics.
Part of the pattern formed a snake sigil. Past-life memories flashed through her brain at a torrential speed.
System spoke with a male voice that was acutely familiar.
[... First chapter of the Mystical Lotus Enlightenment Manual, discovered]
Various spikes and bursts of spirit energy began coursing through her body. She screamed when she felt every fiber of her being was being pulled apart, torn, ripped and retied together to refortify the muscles in her body.
[Unlocking...]
An immense mass of spirit energy overflowed through her meridian channels: more were being made from conversion of external elemental energies.
The energy flow was a mad rush through her body, making it impossible to pull back or break away from it. Her mind and soul vision was being thrown into a vortex lined with complicated and familiar seal spell words.
“What is the soul? What is the spirit?” The male voice surrounded her conscious thoughts.
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“The soul is the body, with the spirit an energy flowing through the meridian channels,” she answered.
The questions were a key, and she felt sure she had given the right answers.
A golden seal unlocked before her, like a window opening. She was hurled into the opening space and engulfed in blinding light.
When the light and her vision cleared, she found herself standing at the center of a cella where the walls were bronze-gold metal reliefs of 12 symbols.
A male godly statue stood at the far end before an enormous gold door, covered with sacred symbols paying homage to justice and knowledge.
The door was ajar to reveal a small white marble vestibule. Beyond the vestibule’s opened door, she spied endless rows of stocked bookshelves.
She approached the gigantic statue of the handsome, young man, with fine and long dark hair that flowed about his angled jawline and tumbled down his broad back and shoulders. His cool dark narrow eyes held an expression of serenity to compliment the appeal of his soft flowing robes of silks and white cotton. He stood tall, in a benevolent pose: one hand was wielding a sword in a semi-arc and a full bloomed lotus flower was hovering in the open palm of his other.
A memory flashed through her mind of a time when a gorgeous artist was drawing this image of him to make into a sculpture.
She slapped a palm to her forehead with a chuckle as she recalled the statue’s title: I Am Greatness. Naturally, it had been a joke on the subject’s part, but the artist had been so in awe of him that she took the title and her work seriously.
“I can’t believe they erected it in the Law Bringer’s Main Hall with all the other sect legends.” Veronika laughed and relaxed when she realized where she was.
She had found her way to her own Soul Library. All the knowledge and treasure skills she had accumulated as Wu Chen was stored there.
This realm was connected to part of her spiritual sea, which resided in her memory nodes. She wondered if System was aware this area existed, then shook off the thought. It was a learning realm made from the soul, only she could access it and be aware.
However, she had to first find her way into her soul library by successfully breaking some of the preliminary test seals. In doing so, the first chapter of the Mystical Lotus Enlightenment manual would be discovered and unlocked. She remembered the splintering pain she had underwent when she had concentrated her spirit power to forge her soul library with this manual’s treasure skill. It was sheer luck that she had been able to break all the seals.
“No wonder my spirit energy went haywire when I saw my face.” She nodded as she entered the vestibule and walked through to enter her library’s halls, brushing her fingertips on treasured skills that temporarily bought bits of memory to her mind.
The shelves ran up to an endless and star-cloud sky, so it was impossible to see the top. Her cultivation had been that massive and grand.
“I am greatness and will continue to be,” she proudly said of herself.
Her journey through life and learning was far from over, and she would not squander her second chance. Not for a minute.
Her shoulders slumped, crestfallen, with a realization that she had, indeed, restarted her journey. The most she could acquire at this stage was one page of an elementary manual.
“It’s like I’m five years old again.” She sighed but brushed her negative vibes away.
While she was standing within her soul library, she could restore all that she thought she had lost, and continue to make breakthroughs. Vengeance through justice would be her driving force, as it had always been.
“First thing…” She stepped to a circular snake pattern at the center of a library room, on the floor, and sat down on the head in a meditative pose.
The circular pattern was the sigil that represented the spiritual energies of Nehebkau, the deity guardian loop of death and birth. By binding her soul essence to it, she could come and go from the library at any time in meditation.
She focused on the 12 reliefs and the powers they represented: laws of nature and the cosmos. Every energy was bound to them in some way, with the potential to be masters over them. This was the start of the immortal pathway.
“One seed of life to sprout eternal potential,” her whisper rebounded the words around the room with a combined voice of both her current and past self.
A heavenly golden light bathed the walls and floors throughout the library to register her being and confirmation of its owner: Wu Chen and now Veronika Shepherd. She was a small potato now, but no doubt, the name Shepherd would soon become infamous overtime.
When the process was complete, she rose and began to accumulate spirit energy into herself, with a focus on unlocking an elementary skill of Static magic. She returned to the real world, where her eyes opened to a clear and starry night sky.