Chương 245: Glimpses of the Truth

Ch. 245 - Glimpses of the Truth The next few months of Simon's life were the same day on repeat, which was almost fitting, given the way he lived his lives. That was frustrating for the first few weeks and felt like a waste of time. Maybe it was, but he'd come this far, so he decided to give it a little time. Eventually, after a few weeks, he developed a quiet rhythm and made peace with it.

He woke with the sun, swam across the strange little bay, ate a simple breakfast, worked all day to break off a few baskets full of stone, and then swam back to the city for dinner. It was the most boring life he'd lived since he'd been a blacksmith with Niko in their little village just north of Ionar. There was a peace in that, though, that maybe he hadn't appreciated enough at the time, and he vowed that this time he would.

He did his best to embrace it, and he even made friends as he learned what he could from context clues and eavesdropping on the conversations around him as much as direct questions. He eventually learned that the Hepollyon was the name for the entire caldera but also for the small city that clung to the wall around the outer temple. He thought that was confusing, but no one else seemed to.

He also learned, or at least suspected, that while he and the other gray-robed priests spent all day doing chores for the sake of enlightenment, the white-robed priests did something that involved magic. He couldn't prove that, of course; there were only subtle signs, like when he told his crew, "You know, I could just shatter this stone with a word of power, and we could spend the day cleaning up the pieces instead. It would go a lot faster," and they were very much against it. That much he'd kind of expected.

He had yet to meet very many people who were pro-magic, but the conversation that day had led to magic, so he thought he'd test the waters.

"Don't even joke about that," Iros said.

"That's something we might learn on our journey one day if we rise high enough, but here and now, it would only be disruptive to the plan." Kristos agreed, which was enough to make Simon drop it, but even so, it made him wonder about the plan. It was something his comrades often mentioned as if everything was proceeding just like it was supposed to. When you had an oracle as your head priestess, he supposed that was possible, but he was still skeptical.

Simon had dealt with enough multi-timeline events to believe that anything was really controllable or predictable past a certain point, no matter what Helades told him. Still, no matter how sore the simple rhythms of life made him, and no matter how many times he failed to find the right line to swim through those turbulent waters every morning and evening, he eventually fell into a sort of rhythm that brought him peace.

It wasn't long after that that he was taken off of his rock-smashing chain gang and given other simple, menial tasks. They didn't assign him to paint or anything, but truthfully, he hadn't even noticed that his robe had been replaced with a slightly lighter one until he was told that he'd be hauling soil from the lower slopes to fill some of the terraces that were now ready for use.

Hiking down a few thousand feet and then hiking back up with fifty pounds of dirt wasn't exactly a good time, but it was easier on his arms, and it gave him more time to think, which was what he supposed he really needed. Hauling soil wasn't something that he did every day, though, because it wasn't something that needed to be done very often. After that, he got to haul manure from the animal pens to bring that soil to life. That job had less walking but was far less pleasant.

Eventually, it gave way to slaughtering sheep, tanning hides, milking goats, and any number of other mundane activities. There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the assignments, and Simon was fairly sure it would have been far more efficient to leave him and everyone else in a single task for a lot longer than they did, but he wasn't the one who decided such things. The priests did not prize efficiency; they prized the mythological concept of clarity, which didn't help him a lot.

Despite the fact that Simon had been hard at work for nearly half a year at this point, he didn't feel a lot different. He felt a little more grounded or present, perhaps, but if he called the mirror and asked it to show him his aura, he saw very little change. By night, it was still just his dark silhouette. If he did the same thing somewhere bright, when no one was around, he saw that it was really more of a steel gray shroud around him, which made sense from the descriptions others had given him.

Negative a third of a million was enough to darken the soul but not to blacken it. Still, no matter how hard he worked, that pall over him didn't do much to brighten, and occasional checks on his experience totals showed he was only gaining a couple hundred experience points a week, which meant he was decades from reaching zero. Am I willing to devote decades to this task? He asked himself often, but he didn't have a good answer yet.

While he wasn't sure what he was getting out of this simple life, he wasn't miserable, and at least according to whoever was replacing his robes periodically with slightly lighter shades of gray, he was improving. So, he stuck with it for now. After a year, Simon found his way to the bakery, where he woke up early for several months and spent his time making flatbread and other staples.

That was perhaps the most satisfying period of his time there to date, but whenever he thought about the Oracle's words about being a hero to those who ate his bread or lived in the houses he built, he chuckled softly. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"Not the kind of hero I said I wanted to be, but here I am," he told himself more than once. Despite no longer working with him, Simon still spent time most evenings with Kristos and his crew. They'd shifted slightly since he worked with them, but the faces rarely changed. They were fun and largely avoided by other people who were further along in their path, but Simon didn't care about any of that. He had nothing to prove here. He wasn't planning to stay forever.

Simon had long since figured out that the main forms of entertainment here were social, and by social, he meant drinking and sex. One usually followed the other, and some nights devolved into actual orgies, but Simon never participated. He wasn't really into the free love thing, and he was here to detach from the bonds of the past, not form new ones with the future. There was a library, but he wasn't permitted to enter it, which was unfortunate.

So, instead of getting drunk, he spent his evening either telling his friends stories about some of the sanitized parts of his adventures or meditating. The former made him popular, even if he claimed they were all stories from his homeland and not anything he'd seen or done personally. However, it was the latter that made him feel as if he was making progress.

It was hard to focus on stilling your mind when you could hear the sounds of drinking and laughter from the dining hall, or cries of pleasure from the baths, or worse, a neighboring room. Still, the longer he did it, the more everything fell away and the faster his robes brightened. He was certainly rising through the ranks faster than everyone else.

Though there were hundreds of acolytes, and he couldn't remember even half of their names, he recognized enough of them to know that very few people moved up more than one shade a year. Most didn't move up at all, especially amidst the brighter colors. Simon, on the other hand, had risen up half a dozen shades over the course of his time here, which made him more than an outlier. No one said anything to him about this, but he could feel resentment in their eyes a couple of times.

A few of the women even attempted to seduce him to learn his secret. When that didn't work, a particularly pretty man had tried, but Simon had no interest in any of that. Even if he did, though, he had no secret to give them. As he worked through small ideas, and his vision of what the world should be slowly fell into place, he just felt more centered, and no matter how many times he tried to explain to someone, there wasn't anything he could do to help them.

Which is practically what the Oracle said to me, not so long ago, he realized. He'd been in Hepollyon for nearly three years when his simple pattern was disrupted one night, and he was brought before the Oracle once more. This time, it wasn't as a guest but as a student or perhaps a disciple. He was brought to her by priests wearing plain clay masks again. This time, she met with him in a well-lit temple on the water's edge near the center of the city.

The white robes often congregated inside it during the day, so he'd long known that it was an important ceremonial place. Inside, though, it was less fancy than he expected and more like a lecture hall or an auditorium than one of the gilded, statue-bedecked temples of Ionar. It had a raised, four-tier amphitheater at one end and a large sandy area in the middle that looked like a zen garden in the way that the sand was carefully raked smooth. The Oracle wasn't near either of those strange sights.

Instead, she stood by the pillars nearest the lake, wearing her veil, and facing out into the night. When he approached her, she said, "I hear you are making excellent progress."

"Hear?" he joked.

"Could you not simply see?"

"I could," she agreed, not turning to face him.

"But there are a great many things for me to watch, so I generally rely on the words of my priests within this place, for my eyes are needed elsewhere."

"What is it you see?" he asked.

"I'm sure you can guess, more or less," she answered with a shrug as she finally turned to him. He was going to ask about the zombies. That didn't seem likely since it hadn't even been four years, and they were likely a decade away from his starting point. However, before he could ask anything else, she asked him, "Can you see the currents yet? In the mornings, at least?"

"I… I still have difficulties with that little exercise," he admitted.

"If I watch the people ahead of me, I can often get a pretty good idea of where I can swim, but—" The truth was that he largely steered right each morning, going in the part of that little inlet that was entirely cold. It was miserable to swim in ice water, of course, but it was better than the random jolts of pain that he got for drifting a little too close to the boiling lake.

"Understanding and extrapolating are fine talents, and they will serve you well, but they are not seeing," she admonished him. He nodded at that but didn't try to interrupt her as she continued, "I, for one, can see that your soul has stilled quite a bit since we last spoke, but the fact that you can't means it will be hard for you to progress much further."

"And how am I supposed to do that, exactly?" he asked.

"With the mirror, I can—""It is a filter, not a window, Simon," the Oracle explained tersely, "And it will never show you anything she doesn't want you to see. Use it if you like, but learn to move past it."

"And what? See my aura if you like, without my reflection?" he asked.

"If you like," she answered dispassionately as she scrutinized him.

"I find the currents are easier for most, given their contrasts, but your way has worked for some as well." He stood there for several silent seconds, looking at their reflections as they sprawled across the water and willing himself to see her glowing aura or his dark one. In the end, nothing came, though, and he was left to ask, "To what end?"

"Why, to answer your question," she said with a smile.

"You haven't changed your mind on that, have you? It's not often that one of her chosen actually comes here with an open mind instead of easy answers. The possibilities are endless." Simon was pretty sure that no one else from the Pit could come to this version of this place, with the possible exception of his evil twin, not unless it spanned multiple versions of the world in the same way the dragon's flight did. If there were other people being reincarnated in the same world, he would have noticed that by now.

He was sure of it. Still, as soon as he tried to inquire further about that, she dismissed him.