Under Josh's Aural Sight, the Tear of Nekusassu was a dense mass of black Essence. Just under its surface, countless layers of silver specks orbited in ellipticals of varying axis. Many bright clusters flowed in a myriad of divergent directions, reminding Josh of nothing less than what it was: a view of the deep void in accelerated time.

My God! It's full of stars...

Then, there was no time for independent thought.

Josh was the void at the center of thirty intertwined spokes forming a chariot's wheel. It rolled down a hill and into battle against the soulless invaders from the other side of the Great Wall.

He was the empty space in a water pitcher soon to be filled for pilgrims after a long desert trek.

He was the emptiness in the ground a mother badger had dug up to create a birthing den.

He was the blank spaces of a canvas—the crisp white between a master’s sketched lines before the precious colors made from saffron and arsenic were applied.

He was the infinitesimal gap of time between the frequencies of lilting choral voices—the soft silence between the notes of lullabies keeping the terrors of the night at bay.

He was the in-between that provided purpose and gave definition. Indispensable for significance and value. Required for communication. Mandatory for function.

Josh was meaning, and that was as it should be.

He was Spacetime.

The scene changed. Josh was alone, existing as a vast emptiness so great that no living being could ever hope to see an end to his beginning. Then he was amid a primordial singularity so dense, an entire iteration's matter fit in a sphere two meters across.

Suddenly, he was everywhere in between. In all places the matrix of existence unfurled like a flag in a light wind as energy transited throughout its rippling surface—all points united and moving uniformly. Yet each position was still free of each other with no physical ties. Waves moved without any intervening time. Oscillating forces from subnuclear-field-state changes buzzed while photons and other quanta glided like humpback whales across bottomless seas—all occurring in this tiny microcosm as well as infinitely in the vast stretches of the unending void.

Josh was ubiquitous and unified.

This is as it should be.

He was Spacetime.

The scene changed. Josh was at the front of a voyaging canoe sailing in rough, stormy seas. Waves pitched, accelerating the large twin hull his people had carved from the mightiest Koa trees they could find. The ship carried the whole tribe through the boundless moana to their new home. Though they had yet to find or even see the new island... they would. Voyagers knew the way.

Children cried, and women took shelter, but he and his alaka'i stood firm. Strong arms and backs kept the lines taut as the wind raged around them. Ever forward; to the hope of a safe harbor and a new life.

He stood in the forward section of a vast starship, staring intently through the transparent steel plates of its forward bridge. He and his crew were entering an unknown and uncharted plasma nebula. Purple forks of lightning filled the sector and lanced against the surface of his ship, flowing like water over them and beyond. They would be the first to enter and hopefully… survive.

Josh was an infant crawling across the floor to a ball his father had rolled across the paving stones in his backyard.

He was a nucleus in a long chain of others riding on and being accelerated by the energy fields surrounding all things, propelled by field states of other atoms and particles, both real and virtual.

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Be the journey known or unknown, finite, or never-ending, Josh was motion.

This was as it should be.

He was Spacetime.

The scene changed, and Josh was in one place and then he wasn't. He was stationary, and then he was moving at speed. Not just speed, but speed. More than he had ever known. His motion increased until time slowed and stood still. Everything impacted him, but very little reduced his possibilities or altered his potential. While in motion, Josh held all probabilities. He was never confined to one location or manifestation. Even as the most fundamental component of existence, both a field and a particle conceptualized with an infinitesimally negative charge: the electron.

Negative. Inverse. He could become the opposite of himself. He could travel back in time. He could absorb quanta of energy from the electromagnetic spectrum. He could travel instantly to the limits of the iteration, or he could simply pass on the impetus to his less elevated brethren for them to do the same or any number of a near infinite variety of probabilities. All things were possible and occurred in their time and spontaneously reverted to the most probable again—until spontaneous reversion occurred again, only to be free to do it all once more.

Josh was infinite possibilities.

This was as it should be.

He was Spacetime.

Yes, I am! I am meaning, ubiquitous and unified. I am motion and infinite possibilities.

I am Spacetime!

Josh sat up with a start under the Earthen Shield. Sen jerked his head at his sudden movement, and then smiled.

~Welcome back, brother!~

A state of wide-eyed wonder after Attunement was kind of the norm, and not just from the incredible jump in strength and new abilities. Having your consciousness altered to better understand the underlying basis of the iteration was always one hell of a psychedelic trip, but this time, Josh's brain was really whirling! Though he had only been through three Attunements so far, Josh was willing to bet dollars to gerbil pellets that Spacetime was on the lunatic fringe as far as pulling him out of the family-man, suburban Netflix-watching frame of mind he sometimes forgot he came from.

He rubbed his closed, freshly regrown eyes... It was bizarre to be in such a confined area after having been so... spread out, yet still in touch and impacted by everything around him at any given time. It would take a minute just to get used to having a body that couldn't change to the exact opposite of what it had been less than a nanosecond ago. Josh looked down and noted that the Spacetime Attunement had picked his healing up several paces. His arms, legs, feet, and hands had grown back in the few seconds he had 'been back.' New, soft, and pink—his skin had sprung up around his reformed muscles in less than two seconds. It wasn’t quite as fast as Kyon Shi had regenerated in their last fight... but pretty close!

Besides, the old bat-head hadn't been a living spirit being. He’d been a spiritually risen undead. Reforming dead tissue was not really healing like what he and Sen did. Perhaps Kyon Shi's regrowth was more like transforming his gray Core's energy directly into physical matter—scrolling it out like a 3-D printer? It didn’t really require getting his cells to metabolize proteins, membranes, etc. To be honest, Josh suspected that the Essence healing he and Sen did was something very similar to the conversion of energy to matter according to Einstein’s famous equation. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared: E=MC^2. Only this conversion seemed to be coupled with the intrinsic knowledge of what that mass should be… Maybe he, Sen, and the undead did something very similar to restore their damaged bodies, but Josh's gut told him that having to integrate the spark of life into new growth was different in a significant, yet unquantifiable way—even if he couldn't explain exactly how right now.

Regardless, these were all questions for later. Sen was raising his eyebrows, eagerly checking to see if Josh was ready to assume the Earth Shield and let him take his ride on the fabric of... everything. He was right, of course. They needed to get out of there and find whoever thought blowing them up and burying them under a collapsed mountain was a good idea. Whoever they were needed to be thoroughly disabused them of that notion.

The Clone appeared behind Sen and could somehow be seen without obstruction, even though he was amongst the avalanche around them. The blue shine of his ever-involuting fractals was brighter than ever compared to the low and cracking golden/orange glow of Sen's Earthen Shield.

"Joshua Elias Tanner. Assume the Earthen Shield so Senyak can attend to his Attunement. There are things you need to be aware of before we depart this place."

Josh instigated his will to form a shield and pushed its expansion from around himself to beyond the boundaries of Sen's existing shield. It propagated in even less than the usual fraction of a second, breaking through Sen's shield with the sound of crystal being shattered inside a tight linen wrapper. It even expanded the space they were sitting in by half a foot as it pulverized the rocks it pressed against into gravel. Sen's eyes goggled at Josh's new strength and he seemed on the verge of asking Josh about the experience when the Clone cleared its throat and narrowed his eyes.

Seeing that further delays would not be tolerated. Sen laid back, closed his hand around the Tear of Nekusassu, and began.

~See you on the other side, brother...~