Something is coming. A change is coming. I feel it approaching every passing day. Jack feels it too. She’s gotten hungrier lately, and more sensitive to the flow of power and fate within the world. As for me, sometimes, I find myself overcome by a delusion. A sense that rather than being myself I had been replaced by this “thing”. An immense entity that was much more knowledgeable, much more intelligent, possibly much smarter, and definitely much more powerful than me, yet for whatever reason still insisted on dedicating a portion of its vast intellect to the task of emulating a copy of the original me.

Jack thinks that sounds kind of awesome when I try to explain it, but I think that’s terrifying. Why? Well with each passing day, I grew increasingly concerned about the possibility of that other-self deciding that maintaining the original-me, the dumb-me, was just a waste of its time. In which case, I couldn’t help worrying about what would happen when it finally stopped pretending to be me.

What would that mean for me? What would that mean for Jack? What would that mean for "us", and our whole being married and in love thing? And shit, what would that mean for the Shattered World at large?! I love my Jacky to pieces, but I was still not entirely certain she wouldn't immediately go, full-on "devourer of worlds" if no one was there to talk her out of it. She was a sweet, kind, loving woman (most of the time (and/or) to me at least), but for all that, her outsides were 90% curves, her insides were filled with 90-degree angles and brutally sharp edges. As, for me, I talk like I'm the one keeping her from going buck-wild, but I've grown old enough to recognize my own darkness. Becoming the Empty-Archivist and learning as much as I have of how life and the cosmos, operate has hollowed me out gradually. If I go all "beyond good and evil", I can't say that I won't turn into something even scarier than whatever Jack might turn into.

As if this wasn’t worrying enough, my system had been acting up lately. My potential was rising in a way that was incongruent with what it should be. I found myself able to invest talent without actually "spending" that talent. Most of the “glitches” had been largely beneficial thus far, but seeing something that I relied on that much, have problems, was distressing regardless of the result. Imagine if one day, you suddenly realized that you couldn't draw a deep breath anymore, but you also didn't need to breathe...Freaky, right?

***************************************************************************************************************************************************

In other news, Jack and I had recently learned that cultivators that didn’t like interacting with “mortals” too often weren’t necessarily just being snooty assholes. I mean...most of them “were” snooty assholes, but not all of them.

Apparently, when you cultivate your mental attributes enough the effects it has on your cognition, also affect your ability to interact with the world at large. Quantum supercomputers don’t really like having to talk to 16-bit PCs. They can do it, but they have to jump through a lot of hoops to match up with the much slower, much less powerful, much less efficient, hardware setups.

Even when the gap wasn’t as dramatic as that, there were still issues. One could potentially start feeling the disconnect as early as the Extraordinary-Rank. When your mind worked faster, remembered better, noticed more, and was just overall 1000 times more powerful than the average person’s, the world you knew before could quickly start to feel distant. Jack was some kind of demon-mage, and I was...whatever hell I was turning into...and thus our mental stats were somewhere in the range of 300 billion times and 1 trillion times more potent than the average person.

What does that mean, you ask? What does that even feel like? I’ll tell you when I’ve figured that out. I’m still at the stage of occasionally zoning out and finding that my mind has sort of just gotten away from me and started doing its own thing. It's a very weird feeling to realize that you've essentially gone to another planet mentally, but you didn't notice because you're faculties have reached a state where you can perform better while phoning it in, than most of the people who are actually trying their best.

And when you actually focus on shit, you just get lost in it. Like, intensely lost. Like, "there's a serious chance that I might not come back from this"- lost...There's a reason why heart-demons, and obsessions, are dangerous for cultivators. The more our mental stats rise, the more likely we might end up falling inside the wrinkles of our brains and getting stuck.

On the upside, Jack and I were having some of the most intense sex we'd ever had in our lives. Sometimes it got a little spooky how much our sensations and perspectives blurred, during each engagement, and there was a slight worryingly possibility that our growing intimacy might result in a permanent merger of our beings, but for the time being, it was quite literally "fun as fuck"

In more practical terms, I’ve found that my rate of acquiring new stories has risen again, and my rate of study has become straight-up broken...but like in a good way. Jack has found that her exploration of my archive and acquisition of new spells and techniques has exploded. And we ‘both’ have found that it takes us much less effort to essentially partition our minds to create mental clones and parallel-processes that could operate semi-independently.

Oh, and while we’re at it, we can’t forget to toss in the factor of the heightened senses one seems to receive regardless of what path one cultivates along. That’s important too. Ever stand next to someone who's not entirely aware of their B.O., or the flecks of spit coming out of their mouth? Now imagine being ultra-aware of it because all your senses have been honed so finely that you can literally see the cells dividing above and below the surface of their skin if you focus hard enough. Imagine being able to actually see the germs that live in those globs of spit, and in the thin layer of oil and grease that's coating this repulsive stranger's skin.

There’s a reason about 1 in 5 cultivators ends up getting described as somewhat mysophobic/germaphobic. The world is gross. Life is gross. Eventually, that stops bothering you because people can adapt to anything, but if you're not a certain kind of person, it "will" have some effect on you as you become painfully more aware of everything taking place around you.

The final result was social interactions having largely turned into a grueling, prolonged, jarringly surreal, ordeal. We’d probably eventually adjust to the change, but for now, talking to people who weren’t operating at the same “frequency”, was like watching an old movie, on a faulty, old-world video player with a stupidly high-definition screen and audio setup.

The movie kept buffering, and making all these harsh dreadful noises, and the film plainly refused to play at a pace that wasn’t ultra-slow-motion. Also the movie theater kind of stinks, and you’re pretty sure you’re sitting in something sticky...Meanwhile, a trillion thoughts about a trillion other thoughts, we could be doing, or saying, were constantly passing through our heads.

That difference between our consciousnesses, and our overall interaction with reality, paradoxically made our thoughts feel like they were happening at a much slower, much longer, timeline. Like we were mountains or trees, and the humans around us were these weird buzzing things that we’d have to stop and then think hard about, to remember what they’d been trying to say a thousand epochs ago if we wanted to try and follow the conversation.

In my case, because the cosmos loved irony, my socially awkward behind had absurdly high charisma stats. Which meant that I could essentially read people’s thoughts even without actually “reading their thoughts”, or using a similar mental technique. 65 to 75 percent of the time, simply watching someone’s expression, body language, synaptic impulses, hormone levels, and spiritual energy, was enough for me to know what someone was going to say even before they said it.

So I wasn’t just stuck watching a movie in slow-mo. I was stuck watching a movie in slow-mo, that I’d already watched dozens of times. Even if I did occasionally “misremember” a few parts of the film. Thankfully, I had my stories helping me greatly shorten the adjustment period.

*************************************************************************************************************

“Yo, you okay?” said Sigi.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Sorry about that...I’m fine...Don’t worry. I just tend to get lost in my own head a lot more, these days,” I said. Chuckling sheepishly.

“Hey, it’s fine, dude. Just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” said Sigi. Smiling and nodding. He seemed to get it. His cultivation might not have been as high, but it was high enough that he'd likely experienced similar states of mind-body disconnect.

I nodded too because it seemed like the thing to do. Then the conversation resumed. As awful an experience as it was...tactilely speaking. It was nice to be out, hanging out again. Since the burning-man, my breakdown, and our subsequent ten-year seclusion, it had been a while since Jack and I had hung out with people that weren’t us. Due to the way everything had gone down, we still hadn’t made a lot of headway into building ties and connections in the sect, and we didn’t really have any friends in the sect yet.

“So, could you tell us more about the items you wanted us to move for you guys?” said Alina.

“Eh, oh, right...So, the sect gave us some land, we used it as an anchoring point to create/expand our private dimension...Jilbert, here, has turned out to have quite the green thumb,” said Jack.

“Overall, I’ve grown enough herbs, fruits, and vegetables that I’ve currently got roughly 22 billion tons of spirit-energy rich herbs and produce sitting in storage,” I said.

“.....”

“.....”

“.....”

No one said anything. No one said anything for a very long time. It was starting to get uncomfortable when thankfully Alina followed up with a,

“And when you say spirit-energy rich…?”

I pulled a carrot out of my inventory, freshly peeled and rinsed. I handed it over to her.

“Here...This is just some of the normal food stock that I’ve grown. Stuff like that has the smallest amount of spirit energy in it for the stuff I’ve grown,” I said.

Alina and Sigi split the carrot between them. Alina took the first bite, and Sigi followed soon after.

“Bullshit!”

“Is it bad?” I said. Feeling weirdly self-conscious.

“Eh?! No...No! It’s not bad. Fuck, this is fantastic. It’s literally the best carrot I’ve ever eaten,” said Sigi. Seeming oddly agitated.

“And...I’m just going by feel here, but it seems like the spirit-energy in this has been adjusted so even mortals could eat this safely…” said Alina.

“Well, yeah...It wasn’t necessarily my main goal, but I didn’t want to have to cook separate dishes if I ever had non-cultivator guests over for dinner, so I made sure that all the energy inside my carrots and herbs have been adjusted for the purposes of optimal consumption,” I said.

“Huh...Well, I just went up a stage just from eating half a carrot stick so...I’m pretty sure we’re in business,” said Alina. Smiling widely, a certain strange sharpness flashing in her gaze.