Side Story 2: The Devil Within

I take a sip from the simple teacup, one of the few remaining, and calmly place it back on its saucer, looking with curiosity at the man opposite me. He seems unbothered by the mess around us, or that we were fighting to the death not minutes before. His cup sits untouched, coils of steam drifting upwards as he looks at me with a level gaze.

“You say you wish to hear my story.” I begin, my hands clasped gently before me. “And I owe that to you. But I wonder what it is that you hope to hear?”

He scratches his neck idly, the movement brushing at his clothes. They are simple, not too far from mine in their fabric and design, traveller’s clothes. But not a mark is on them from the earlier fight. An illusion, obviously, although I cannot tell what it obscures. He carries no weapons or markings, no clues as to where he comes from or who he is, but it is clear he is a master of combat.

He managed to stop me, after all.

“Well, you attacked me out of nowhere. Something tells me that wasn’t under your control, but I want to hear your reasons.” He replies.

“Knowing why will not change what happened. Clearly, you believe that I am not your enemy, and you have accepted my apology with considerable grace already. Surely, then, you are hoping to hear something else?” I ponder.

He shrugs, smiling wryly. “Fine, I won’t beat around the bush then. This house,” He gestures around us, being a bit generous in calling it as such with the half-demolished state it’s in, “most of its planks have been replaced, they’re of very different ages in some places. And it seems to be built on top of the remnants of a half dozen other houses, each older than the last.”

“Not to mention the sheer quantity of broken pottery pieces scattered through the ground. No ordinary person can get into this valley in the first place. There’s no cities or villages around for a few hundred kilometres, and there never has been. The only person here is you.” He continues. “You’ve been around a long time. A very long time. Too long, even considering that you’re a master of Ki.”

“Ah.” I nod in understanding. “You seek knowledge of immortality.”

To my surprise, he shakes his head sadly. “No. I’m looking for people I don’t have to worry about outliving.”

“You as well?” My eyebrows raise. For the first time in many years, I’m shocked. “How did it happen for you?”

“If I have to say it simply, I suppose I have the gods to thank for it.” He sighs, not sounding at all thankful.

“Ah, a gift from the gods.” I nod in understanding. “Much the same as how it happened for me. You did some great feat for which they rewarded you it, I would guess?”

But he shakes his head again. “Blasted if I know. The couple times I’ve met one to be able to ask, they just skirt around the subject. But anyway, you don’t want to hear my sob story. You mentioned something about doing a great feat to earn your immortality?”

“In a way.” I nod. “To be more accurate, being gifted immortality was simultaneously my feat, reward and sacrifice. You wanted to hear my story, correct? Now that we’re both on the same page and we both have plenty of time, would you mind if an old man told you his story?”

“Shoot away.” He leans back in his chair, becoming more relaxed. He still hasn’t touched his tea, but I’m starting to think that it isn’t out of caution. Perhaps he simply felt no hunger and thirst since he became immortal? “I’m not some young whippersnapper that’s itching to get out of here. You know, I’m really starting to like that word. Whippersnapper. Not that I have the slightest idea what it means.”

I take a deep sip of tea again, working it around my mouth to make sure it was ready for the telling. It had been such a long time since I had a guest. “Well then, pardon me for starting at the beginning. And if I suddenly attack you again, try and spare the tea set - I think I did rather well on these ones, and I’m a bit attached.”

To start with, my name is Einar. I was born in a city, not a particularly large or important one, but not a small one, either. The city itself crumbled long ago, so I won’t bother you with the name or where it was. Suffice to say that it was a city, and there were many people living and working there.

I was an orphan, without father or mother. To this day, I know nothing of them or my ancestry, how they passed, or if I was merely given away. To the best of my memory, I grew up in a local monastery. Living there was not rich, but it was not bad. We had food, clothes, a bed and a roof over our heads, although all four were simple and always in short supply. There were simply too many of us, and the city had no orphanage - or rather, the monastery was its orphanage.

The monks there were kind, and patient. I didn’t know enough in my youth to be able to tell, but I suspect that the monks were even older than they appeared, benefiting from bodies enriched and renewed by ki. For the monastery was not a place of religion - although we were permitted to worship any god of our choosing, excepting the evil ones, of course - but a place the elders had built many years before to train in, refine and teach the arts of Ki.

We, the orphans, were not students at the monastery, in the strictest sense. As part of our upbringing some physical training was involved, mostly just running around and helping carry things. We didn’t learn how to use ki or any of the techniques at all.

It was for the best, I think. A bunch of kids, running around with Ki? Things could have gotten out of hand very easily. No, they waited until we were old enough to understand the consequences of our actions, until we were starting to mature a little.

They gave us each a choice: they would help us find jobs of our choosing, if it was doable, and we would start a life outside the monastery. Or, we could stay and help around the monastery - cooking, cleaning, tending the gardens, that sort of thing. And, if we chose the latter, we could also choose to become students, the work we did taking the place of the payment outsiders had to provide in order to be granted the same teaching.

The latter option was part of the reason that the monastery could be so interesting, and, on occasion, dangerous to new outsiders. It was impossible to tell when the person carefully dusting off the benches or watering the gardens was perfectly ordinary, or capable of levelling a building with their bare hands.

I myself opted to stay and learn the ways of Ki. I was young, and lacking in the perhaps misplaced self-confidence so many of my peers possessed. I thought of myself as untalented, and didn’t believe I had the skills necessary to work most jobs. Besides, I had never known the world outside the monastery, and I was afraid to venture out so suddenly, even though I had known the day was coming long before.

The reality is that I would have been perfectly fine. I ponder sometimes how my fate might have changed, had I decided differently. I might have lived a normal, happy life. Or it is just as possible that I would have become just another casualty.

But how could I have known that a decision made in my youth, hardly older than twelve years, would have such a large impact on my fate?

Because of my choice, I truly became part of the monastery. There wouldn’t have been more than two hundred of us, almost like a smaller community somewhat secluded from the concerns and customs of the city itself.

I pause to take another draught of tea, emptying my cup. It had likely been a few hundred years since I had spoken much more than a few words here or there, and my throat is making its discomfort known. Yet I’ve barely begun.

Reaching out with one hand, I pour myself another cup of tea, the sounds of the liquid as it fell the only thing breaking the silence.

“I can tell you have some training in Ki, but how familiar would you say you are with it?” I ask, swirling the tea in my cup and breathing in its herbal aroma.

“I know some techniques, but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert.” He shrugs. “Ki is most effective when used internally or at short range, and I prefer to keep my enemies at range, so I don’t have occasion to use it often. I learned it partially as a precaution for when other forms of combat wouldn’t work, and partially out of interest.”

“I see.” I nod. “Would you rather I skip over the training aspects of my early life?”

“Nah, keep them in.” He replies. “They add flavour. Not like we don’t have the time.”

“True enough.” I suppose it would be remiss for me to expect anything other than eccentricity from an immortal. Then again, I’ve never met another.

They started us off simply, gradually. They taught us stances, eighty-one of them in all. The stances… were not straining, not physically. The true difficulty lay in our tutors’ strictness. The tilt of the wrist had to be just so. The positioning of the feet down to the millimeter. The shoulders, waist, everything had to be perfect. Once we held one stance adequately well, they would move on to the next, and the next, and then back to the beginning.

When the training was over for the day, they would have us sit on the cold stone - I had almost forgotten just how cold it felt to me, especially in the winter months - close our eyes and meditate, focusing on our own bodies to the exclusion of all else. We trained like this for a year, every day - although only for part of the day, of course - unchanging.

At the time, we thought it was ridiculous. I would be lying if I said that a fair few of us didn’t at least think of backing out. After all, a good number of the people we’d grown up with we now barely saw anymore, out in the city with real jobs, living real lives like normal people. A lot of us had had thoughts at the start along the lines of, ‘I don’t know anywhere else but here’, ‘This is my home’ or ‘Life will be easier this way’. There were, of course, some that backed out of the training, choosing to stay as an ordinary cleaner, gardener or teacher for the young, or deciding that they did, in fact, want a job in the city.

We would still see them, sometimes - the ones who left to work in the city. They would tell us about their work, what they earned, show us new clothes and boots… And then they would ask us what we had been doing, and all we had to show them was the stances. To say that some of us were jealous wouldn’t be far from the truth.

As for myself, I kept on, along with the rest of those who stayed. I reasoned to myself that life outside the monastery would be just as hard, or even harder than what we were doing. And there had to be some reason for it, didn’t there? The ways of the monks were often mysterious to us in our youth, but there wasn’t a single person among us who would describe them as frivolous or foolish - and not just because we didn’t know the meaning of the former. Everything they did had meaning, had a purpose.

And this was no exception.

Every form of energy is only as dangerous as the one who wields it. I have no doubt that you have seen or heard of wizards and warriors that have wrought untold havoc and destruction. But for the untrained, there are few things that can go amiss playing with mana or physical strength, with the exception, perhaps, of some extreme cases.

Not so for Ki. Fooling around with Ki is like bringing an unprotected torch into a coal mine. One wrong step, and the whole place is engulfed in a firestorm. Utilised by an untrained individual, Ki represents itself outside the body as pure force. The dangers of that alone are considerable. But inside the body? There is a natural way to things, pathways through the body. To some extent an initiate can instinctively feel how to circulate their Ki on a simple path, but if an individual is trying something and doesn’t know what they’re doing, they could cause their Ki to deviate outside the natural pathways, against the natural flow. At that point they will be in too much pain to control what they are doing, and their Ki will rampage throughout their body, tearing it apart from the inside.

The stances were to teach us discipline, to follow the experience and wisdom of the monks. They also taught us patience and calmness. And, of course, the stances themselves had meaning. After the first year of training, they started teaching us how to transition from one stance to the next. Each stance could shift into a total of eight other stances.

Suddenly, the eighty-one stances we could picture and assume with eyes closed became the six hundred and forty-eight movements, and we were floored. Before we had felt that we were learning so little, but now there was so much to learn.

So much, in fact, that we couldn’t possibly hope to learn it all in just a year. But the monks knew this as well, and started from nine core stances and the forms that branched from them, a comparatively small seventy-two in all. Even so, it was difficult.

The monks made us perform the movements at a snail’s pace, limbs creeping ever so slowly through the air in the courtyard where we practiced. Precision was key, and they aimed for perfection.

That year, we began to see the first inklings of the meaning behind their tutelage. We developed control over muscles we had no prior knowledge of, even those on our faces. It was a strange day for me when I realised that I could wiggle my ears up and down, independently, even.

Our balance became impeccable, being able to walk along a suspended rope with only a little practice. Not to mention our physical strength and flexibility increasing by leaps and bounds. It was to the extent that our work at the monastery became a breeze, effortless.

But again, it was difficult. Some more of us dropped out, and as we neared the last few months of the second year there were barely twenty of us that were originally orphans. There had been double that number when the training first began.

Some of us did better than others at learning the movements, as these things tend to go. I would say that I was around the upper-middle range of the class. Not the best, but fairly good. By this point, everyone who was actually bad at it had left, so we all did fairly well.

Then they started teaching us sixteen new movements, and we quickly realised that these new movements would allow us to complete a circuit of movements around eight of the core stances. You see, they had a diagram, of sorts, of all the stances that depicted them as nine eight-point stars, laid out in a grid of three by three stars.

At the center of each star was one of the nine core stances, and the eighty-one movements we had learned were from those core stances to the points of the star radiating from them. Each stance also had movements to the eight stances directly around it, that is, the ones up, down, left, right and the diagonals. The movement from stance A to B was also different from B to A, that is.

As a quick aside, I should mention that the whole system of stances was developed by the monastery itself to be simpler to understand and learn. Other places would have taught it differently.

But yes, a circuit. We weren’t sure what meaning that had, but it had to mean something. That thought was reinforced in our minds once one of us asked one of the monks about it, and we were instructed not to perform connected movements in succession without supervision.

It had to be something big.

Nevertheless, we weren’t stupid or rash enough to disobey the monks to try and discover what it was ourselves, so we continued to train in the new movements. In the last month of that year, as we went through the movements once again, the monk training us walked along us and saw nothing he could correct.

He walked back to the front and, once we had finished the latest movement, he told us that we were ready. Our training was done for the day, and there would be no training the next day. We were to relax, steady our bodies and minds, and prepare, because the day after that would be very important.

We, in a single, woefully insufficient word, were nervous.

Nothing like this had happened before, not in almost two years of training, and we weren’t sure what it meant for us. The monk had said we were ready - that was positive, but ready for what?

To be clear, we were young, inexperienced and having lived in the monastery for our entire lives, sorely lacking in knowledge in some areas. We knew that the monks were powerful and capable of many things that we were not. We had seen them lay their hands on cuts and scrapes and the wounds began to heal, breathe flames to light a fire and lift boulders multiple times their size.

We had heard of magic, and we had heard the word ‘Ki’ mentioned several times around the monastery, but quite frankly we knew next to nothing about either. We weren’t even sure what the training was for, beyond joining the ranks of the monks ourselves.

Still, we were told to relax, so we relaxed the only way we knew how: meditation. When the next day came, we spent most of it in a similar fashion. Some light exercises, some meditation… Then the night came, and we lay down to sleep.

But after what felt like hours of tossing and turning, I was more awake than when I first lay my head upon my cot. I knew it was hopeless; I would not be able to sleep. My mind was too fixed on the coming dawn, my heart eagerly beat at my chest in anticipation. I thought to meditate until dawn.

The state of meditation is in some ways not unlike sleep. Perhaps I would open my eyes to stiff legs, but it was better than no rest at all. I could not tell you how long I sat cross legged upon my bed before my meditation lapsed into true sleep. How ironic is the body that it will not let us sleep when it is all we wish to do, but when sleep is far from our mind it is the first thing to approach?

The new dawn had come, and we were ushered out into the courtyard, as usual. In stark contrast to the usual, however, instead of a single monk heading our orderly lines, there were a dozen, including the head monk himself.

His name was Farvald. I didn’t know him personally, of course, but anyone who had been at the monastery for a while knew his name and face. I remember that he enjoyed meditating in the gardens, so I would pass by him on occasion when it was my job to water the plants or weed.

It became immediately clear to us that whatever was about to happen was very important. So we got into our orderly lines and stood ready to begin in what was normally a relaxed pose. On this occasion much more uncomfortable owing to the tense knot in my gut.

Perhaps if we had known what was about to happen, we would be able to be more relaxed. The unknown has always been one of the greatest fears in people’s hearts. Or perhaps knowing the true enormity of the situation, and just how badly it is possible for it to have gone wrong would have only made it worse. I could not say, but I doubt things were as they were for no reason.

As we had predicted, we were instructed to start going through the circuit of movements, at our own pace. ‘Our own pace’ was identical. We had practiced together at identical paces so much that anything else felt odd. I was only just starting the first movement, but sweat was already slicking my palms.

As we progressed from one movement to the next, the familiar motions slowly unwound the knot of tension in my gut. I may not have known what was going to happen or why, but I knew the movements. They were my solace.

After a short while, we neared the end of the circuit, and were promptly instructed to continue the circuit of movement until we were told to stop. So we did, feet beating softly in unison against the cold stone, arms twisting through the air… To me, it almost felt like I was dancing. It was not a storm of motion, not the frantic beating of limbs. It was measured, calm, and composed. One movement after the next, practiced to near perfection.

The voice of the head monk, Farvald, rang out in the courtyard, telling us that we would soon start to feel a burning sensation within us, an energy wanting to be unleashed. That the movements we were performing would guide the sensation on a path, and we were to focus on it, remember the path, and that we would naturally feel how to keep circulating it. His voice was so calm and certain, like his words were not predictions, but merely statements of things which he knew were to come.

The sensation came soon after, faint at first but quickly growing clearer and stronger as I continued. It was like the string of a bow pulled to its utmost, straining for a swift release, like a boulder teetering on the top of a mountain, a feather’s touch away from careening downwards. The feeling progressed around my body, guided by the motions, following paths that felt wholly unused. The energy - Ki - burned its way through them, painful, but at the same time, satisfying.

I was wholly immersed in the movements, in the sensation of Ki flowing through my pathways for the first time and, not having forgotten the head monk’s instructions, on remembering the path it took. It didn’t feel like I was doing it for a long time, but when I was finally snapped out of my reverie by a voice instructing us to gradually stop, I opened my eyes to the colours of sunset.

Chest heaving, clothes practically glued to my body with sweat and limbs trembling, I slowed to a halt. The Ki inside me was still only part-way through its current circulation, and I instinctively guided it the rest of the way until it reached its origin at the center of my chest. I started in surprise. Had I done that? It was almost unconscious, but I had controlled the Ki, not that I knew that is what it was.

Now that I was paying attention to it, my Ki was static, unmoving. My attention slowly returned to the world around me, where the others were in a similar state to mine, exhausted and sweaty.

We were congratulated, told that we had taken our first steps into being Ki practitioners. We were told not to experiment with our Ki without supervision, at least for now. We returned to our rooms and I fell into sleep quicker and more deeply than ever before.

When I awoke, I felt as if it was the very first time I had seen the world. Colours seemed more vibrant, shapes crisper and better defined. The chirps and calls of the birds seemed like a melody. Even the touch of the rough sheet covering me seemed more real than before. I chalked it up to my exhaustion when I had fallen asleep, that it was just my imagination, not that I didn’t enjoy the feeling.

Of course, it wasn’t my imagination. Ki changes the body, enhancing it, uplifting it. My senses really were sharpened, although it was only so noticeable because that had been the very first time Ki had coursed through my body. Although they would continue to improve as I practiced, it would be slower and more gradual than that first burst.

Our training changed after the awakening. The movements themselves became of lesser concern. More important was teaching us to control our Ki, guide it on that path. Of course, the movements helped achieve that, specifically the circuit of movements that originally helped us unlock and circulate our Ki, but there was no longer much focus on the movements besides those, at least for a time.

This training was strenuous in an entirely different sense. Not physically, not mentally, but we were unlocking and controlling something entirely new to our bodies. Stretching muscles that had never been stretched, so to speak. It was very difficult, at first. Sometimes I was able to control my Ki without even thinking. Sometimes I would try my hardest with no response.

It took us a month before the monks decided that we were capable of circulating our Ki unsupervised.

I’m sure you already understand that Ki, once unlocked in an individual, accumulates naturally. But it does so slowly, ever so slowly, until it reaches the individual’s limits - determined both by the strength of their body and the nimbleness of their mind. Certain unique states of mind, even such as the simple meditation, can increase the rate at which it accumulates. But still, one could meditate for a hundred days on end and not reach their capacity, depending on the depth of their meditation.

Ki circulation allows an individual the same benefits, increasing the rate at which their Ki accumulates by tenfold, even with a basic circulation path. If experienced enough, an individual could do this while moving, the circulation eventually becoming instinctive enough to be done even while in the storm of combat. Or, for when less violently inclined, in the tranquillity of meditation. Tenfold and tenfold increases become a hundredfold.

All these are the main reasons practitioners are known to be so reclusive. After a particularly exhaustive battle, one could expect a practitioner to retreat to a private space and meditate for as long as a week at a time to recover their lost Ki. Such a thing might seem strange or daunting to non-practitioners, understandably.

But as Ki flows through the body of a practitioner, it gradually changes it. An experienced practitioner can use their Ki as a substitute to feed the needs of the flesh, allowing them to go without food, water, sleep, or even without air, if need be, for extended periods. I’ve already mentioned, of course, that it enhances the senses and strengthens the body. It even increases longevity.

Is it possible to become immortal through Ki? Perhaps, but if so, such a method is outside my knowledge.

But I digress. We were not at such a stage. If we wanted to circulate our Ki, we would sit still and devote some time solely to that. We had been instructed to do so for at least an hour every day, if we could, although it didn’t have to be all at once. We found that this wasn’t a challenge, as we could simply do so for an hour before sleep. The rejuvenating effect would even ensure that we were better rested than if we had slept that extra hour.

The monks began to teach us about Ki, and about what it meant to be one of the monks. The monks were those that had dedicated their life to furthering the understanding and teaching of Ki, developing existing techniques and inventing new ones. It was a pursuit of knowledge, not for personal gain, but for the gain of future generations. Eventually, we would no longer be the students, but the elders, meditating on the ways of Ki and instructing the children.

It would be a simple life, with no riches or luxuries, but it would be a comfortable and fulfilling one. The monks, in general, could be expected to live long lives, in peace, away from the conflicts of the world.

I must say, as a youth who grew up without any luxuries, the thought of them did tempt me. Sorely. I wondered what it must be like to walk around with fur boots upon my feet, rich garments of silk upon my chest and idly munching on a freshly baked pastry as I went about my day, knowing that at night I would have a thick down-filled pillow on which to rest my head.

At the same time, I had lived as I had for my whole life, and it turned out well enough. I thought myself a good person, had good friends, and despite their previous attitudes, those who went to work in the city had started to express envy of our strength. Perhaps, I thought, even if I was rich there will still be much I want. Perhaps people always long for that which they do not have.

Besides, I had chosen my path, and I had walked it for two years now. To turn aside would be a waste.

We advanced. Slowly, as matters pertaining to Ki are wont to do. We learnt more stances, more movements, different circulation paths and patterns with different effects. There were paths that caused Ki to gather more quickly under the heat of the sun, or under the light of the moon, or among the elements or nature. There were ways for those not as changed by the effects of Ki to need only one breath of air where a normal man would need dozens.

There were ways to heal injuries, ways to pulverize rock and increase strength, ways to make the skin tougher than iron.

I would not say that we were once-in-an-age talents, or that we had resources and training beyond that of all the others in the land. But I feel that it would not be an exaggeration to say that we were some of the strongest people of our age - or, at least those our age below level ten.

Not that we knew how to fight. We would spar, sometimes, yes, and think ourselves very skilled, very strong. But simply knowing how to use the techniques is not enough. Knowing when to use them is much more important. Knowing what to do at any given moment in a battle is a skill that is borne only of experience. And neither us nor the monks had much interest in us learning how to fight.

Much time passed without much of note happening within the monastery. Even things such as illness or disease didn’t leave a lasting mark, as we were also resistant to those. Accidents of the scale that can kill or even just harm someone experienced with Ki are few and far between, and the monks of the monastery were very careful when experimenting with new techniques.

I myself was partial to healing techniques. There are always people who need healing, but not just people. The technique to speed up the body’s natural healing process with Ki was well known within the monastery, but applications outside of humans and similar races were less studied. The step to animals was not a large one, not until I tried healing some smaller animals, like birds. They were much more delicate than I was used to, requiring much more finesse.

Power, Precision, Practice. That’s what it took, and a lot of the last one, particularly when I started trying to heal plants. Plants are nothing like us in their structure, or even in how Ki flows through them. It took me the better part of four years to get a handle on how to do it properly. That accomplishment earned me some respect among the monks, and I felt as if I had finally earned my place there as I added my understanding on the matter to the hall of techniques, where all such knowledge was kept for our peers and future generations to ponder on and learn from.

I was no longer a boy, but a man, though if there was any difference to how I was before, it would simply be the weight on my shoulders as I helped care for and teach the next generation of the neglected and forgotten, a weight that I did not bear lightly, however calm and collected I presented myself as.

It was around this time, I think, that the rumours began to surface. There was a monk among us who generally took care of any trips into the city market to buy things, when it was needed. If I were to guess, it was him who first shared the news, him or perhaps one of the outsiders visiting the monastery, it’s hard to say.

Murders, brutal murders of the type that had never been seen in the city before. People ripped limb from limb, fist sized holes straight through the chest… Well, that’s what the rumours said. We didn’t pay it much mind, at first. What troubled the city rarely troubled the monastery, after all, and the guards would find the culprit before long. And they did, but the culprit was killed in the ensuing struggle. No tragedy in anyone’s eyes.

Well, it wouldn’t have been. If it had stopped there.

The next day, one of the guards who fought with the original killer was found by his neighbours weeping over the corpse of his wife… With his hand embedded in her chest. When other guards arrived at the scene, he apparently went mad, fighting and killing the few guards who had come with his bare hands.

It was like a madness that spread throughout the city, but only to a single person - usually a man - at a time. The killer would be found, there would be a massacre, the killer would end up dead, but the next day there would be a new killer.

The city was consumed by it over the span of a single week. Many fled, many more perished. The monastery was the last to be affected, more by virtue of its isolation from the rest of the city than anything else, I think. We rarely left, so who was there to be afflicted by the madness?

But, inevitably, it did happen.

I remember smelling smoke. There had been some fires in the city, but this smelt closer. I looked around, and saw the source right away: The hall of techniques was on fire. I dropped my watering can and ran inside the burning building. That might sound like the opposite of what you should do in this sort of event, but I knew a technique that made my body resistant to fire, so it wasn’t able to hurt me, and as I mentioned practitioners are able to hold their breaths for significant lengths of time.

My first concern was that there might be people inside that didn’t know these techniques, people that might be suffering in the fire. To my dismay, however, what I found inside the building was a melee amidst the flames, the hall’s custodian howling with laughter as he unleashed flurried blows against several other monks.

As I mentioned, the monks at the monastery were far superior to ordinary people in every physical aspect, but most of us didn’t know how to fight. At that moment, somehow, the pacifistic custodian did, and he was overwhelming the others with ease. For a long second I stood, shocked into inaction at the scene unfolding before me. But before long the custodian noticed me and brought the fight to me, despite my indecision.

I was outmatched. I understood that instantly. It wasn’t necessarily that he was stronger or faster than me, although he was by a bit. But he predicted my every attack, knew where I was going to move before my feet even shifted, tricked me right into the path of a falling beam. Wounds accumulated rapidly on my body, stymied only by my equally rapid healing techniques. Even after the others re-joined the fight, the advantage of numbers only let us stay our ground.

Then, something like a gust of wind blew through the hall, extinguishing the roaring fire in an instant. It was the head monk, Farvald. In mere moments he had the rampaging monk restrained, holding the man’s hands behind his back in an iron grip.

For the barest of instants, I thought it was over. He would be locked away somewhere for the rest of his life, and things would slowly return to normal.

But Farvald underestimated the ruthlessness of the deranged monk. We all did.

With a sudden, wrenching movement of his arms, he tore out of Farvald’s grip – leaving both his hands behind. With stumped wrists gushing blood, he embraced Farvald and smashed his head against the head monk’s. The impact caused Farvald to fall backwards, but didn’t do much actual damage.

Not so for the madman, whose skull had caved in. As the light faded from his eyes, his expression changed from an insane grin to intense fear and he flung himself backwards - into me. After that one last movement, he didn’t move again, slumping down onto the floor.

I felt a huge rush of something pouring into me followed by a suffocating, claustrophobic sensation, as if I was stuffed into something not designed to contain me. Then I exploded into motion, but I wasn’t the one moving me, if that makes sense. I was just a spectator in my own body, unable to stop what my body was doing, unable to even close my eyes.

My hand shot forward as I looked on in silent horror, Farvald still not comprehending that I was now his enemy even as my forefinger pierced through his eye and burrowed deep into his head. Whoever or whatever was controlling my actions wasted no time in attacking the other monks still there.

When I finally left the hall, my arms were encased entirely in blood. Needless to say, nobody was left alive. What happened next was a slaughter, a bloodbath, killing anyone and everyone that I crossed paths with. Within my mind, screaming wordlessly as everything I had ever known and loved was torn apart by my own two hands, one question plagued my mind: Why won’t you let me die?

I shouted it, soundlessly, over and over. Somehow, I knew he could hear me, but he just grinned all the harder and kept on killing. It wasn’t until long after that I figured out why he didn’t kill me, move onto another, stronger body. It would have made what he did much easier. I knew he could; I’d seen it happen, felt it happen.

It was because I cared. I cared about my fellow monks, I cared about the children, I cared about the goats and even the flowers, heaven knows I spent enough of my life helping them grow. Simply put, he took pleasure in my pain. Revelled in it. It’s what he did, found someone and made them rip apart the things they loved with their own two hands just because he enjoyed their cries and screams.

Through my body, he killed a lot of people that day. Eventually enough people in the monastery realised what was happening, banded together and planned to capture me. They thought I had been possessed by a demon, or something of the sort. Perhaps I was. I still don’t know who or what the being inside me was, originally, except that it was – probably – a man. Regardless, they had pieced together somehow that killing me would only make things worse, and so intended to lock me away forever.

Against all expectations, he, I, we, however you might call it, fled. Evidently, he thought that it might work. He fled the city where I had lived my whole life, now practically destroyed, and continued along the road to the next city for a good hour. Then he stopped, and I suddenly realised that I had control over my own body again, although I could still feel his presence, lurking in my mind.

My body was covered in wounds, my clothes little more than tattered rags. I think he knew a little bit about using Ki, but not much, so he hadn’t even been healing himself, just taking everything that was thrown at him without a care in the world. It wasn’t his body, I suppose. I started to heal myself, but then I paused. Did I want to? If I died out there, in the middle of the road with nobody around, maybe he wouldn’t have anyone to take over. It had seemed like he had needed his old body to be in contact with my body to transfer over, so would he die, truly and completely?

I didn’t know. Maybe he would just move on to the nearest person, and my death would just be one small blip in his murder spree. Then again, maybe I didn’t care. My world had been ripped apart, after all. I had nothing left to hold on to. I raised a hand and stabbed it towards my heart, only for it to stop just above the surface of my skin.

He had taken control again. My mouth opened, and he spoke. “Your life is mine to take.” Then my body was mine once again. I tried again a few times after that, with much the same results. I gave up before long, and healed my body. I would try and turn from the road to walk away from civilised land, away from people he could hurt, but he would turn me back every time. After the first couple attempts he started breaking arms or legs as punishment.

I could heal them, but the pain was still agonising.

So, we continued down the road. There was a stream, where I cleaned off my body, and we came across some other people, who he killed and took the clothes of. Not looking so much like I had taken a bath in blood, we actually managed to get into the city without much problem, although I doubt he would have cared much if we were barred access. At the time, he didn’t take control over my body, and I was free to go where I wanted.

As such, I went to the church.

I knew nobody in this city would be able to stop him, or if there was someone who could, I didn’t know it. My only hope was the gods. So, I prayed silently. The priests offered to help me, but I ignored them. They would only think me mad if I told them the truth – so would I, if someone had told me the same only a few days before.

For some reason, he didn’t stop me. No doubt he assumed that there would be no reply, and he was right, for the most part.

I prayed at dozens of altars to dozens of gods, telling them the terror that dwelled within my body, what it could do and that I would give anything to stop it. It had taken away my life, and then wouldn’t even let me die. You could say I held a bit of a vested interest in seeing it stopped, no matter the cost.

It wasn’t until I stood at the altar of the god of death, questioning the fate that had brought me to this, that I heard a voice whispering into my mind.

“The god of death?” The man sitting across from me questions, his tea now sitting cold in front of him. Such a waste. “Of all the gods, he was the one to reply?”

“Thinking back, it’s not such a surprise that he did.” I shrug. “Of course, it is always a surprise when a god communicates with any mortal, but if one were to be interested in my situation, it would be he. It turned out, after all, that I was possessed by a wrathful lingering spirit, which was perfectly in his domain.”

“Never replies when I have something to say.” The man grumbles. “But anyway, some sort of vengeful ghost, is it? Never heard of anything like that, at least nowhere near that dangerous.”

I nod. “I should certainly hope not. No, this one is completely unique, I doubt another of its kind will ever emerge. Probably only the god of death himself knows what terrible circumstances bore this specific monster.”

“That’s good. Dealing with something like that would suck.” He muses, before casually saying something terrifying. “Though, I’d probably just encase them in molten iron or teleport them into the depths of space or something like that.”

“Good thing there’s no need for that.” I caution.

“Yeah, you seem to have it covered.” He nods. “Anyway, god of death. What happened there?”

Yes, of course. The god of death informed me about the being inhabiting my body and offered me a solution: he would make me immortal. If I never die, then the spirit would never be able to pass to another. I would be its prison for eternity.

“The god of death could’ve just destroyed it though. I mean, he’s the god of death.” He interrupts again. “Why didn’t he do that?”

“I couldn’t say, I’m not the god of death.” I reply. I had asked myself the same question enough times.

He shrugs. “Fair enough.”

Regardless of his reasons, that was the offer he gave. Few are aware, but the god of death is not just the god of death, but also the god of sacrifice, or more specifically, self-sacrifice. His offer was true to his names.

I was hesitant. If I accepted, then wouldn’t the spirit be able to live forever, controlling me? But the god of death reassured me that the spirit was not as strong as it made itself seem. It could only actually control me for about an hour every day before growing tired and having to recuperate. It’s because of this that I’m able to be isolated as I am. I am perfectly capable of leaving this valley, but even if he takes over me and does so, there’s nowhere he can go, nobody to hurt out here. Once he tires, I return.

Once I understood that, I agreed, and I became immortal. Then I found myself a map, and left for the place that seemed the most remote, the most abandoned. He tried to stop me, but I realised at that point that he had already used up most of his time for that day. He broke my arms, legs, whatever he could to stop me, but I just healed and kept moving.

I tried entombing myself a few times, collapsing a mine while I was still in it and such. I would be buried beneath a mountain, but still alive. Unable to breathe, see, eat or drink, but alive. But eventually, he dug his way out. It never held for long. Isolation ended up being the best choice.

Eventually, after years of him trying to control me through pain, I grew numb to it. Now, he can’t hurt even me. I built myself a little house, out here in this valley that no normal person can reach, dug a well, grew myself a little garden, made myself a tea set from the clay… He does have a bit of a fit every now and again, but I can rebuild. As you said yourself, I have the time.

I have kept practicing with Ki over the many years, paying specific attention to the resilience of certain parts of my body and neglecting others intentionally. As I stand today, even my eyes and the flesh of my ears, throat, tongue, chest and every other vulnerable place are stronger than mithril. As for my limbs, they are hardly even as strong as iron. Even if he tried, he’s no longer able to kill me, because I’m not able to. And he has tried, the few times before when people have ventured here.

That’s my life, nowadays. Simple, but not unfulfilling. I have my garden, the songs of birds, and bed to sleep on. That’s enough for me.

I drink the last of my tea. The teapot is now empty, save for the sodden clump of leaves at the bottom.

“Well, that’s a story and a half, alright.” He nods.

I shrug. “I’ll understand if you don’t believe me.”

“Nah, I believe you.” He says easily. “I have ways of telling if people are lying. And trust me, when it comes to unbelievable stories, mine takes the cake.”

“Oh?” I raise an eyebrow. “Would you care to reciprocate by telling your own tale, then?”

“Sure.” He nods. “I don’t have the whole ‘old man regaling the young’uns with his stories’ thing down pat yet, though. Honestly speaking, I’ve mostly been rather tight-lipped about it all, so I guess you could say storytelling isn’t much of my thing.”

“There’s always time left to learn, isn’t there?” I say.

“That there is.” He agrees with a wry smile. “My story, well, it’s a bit different to most people’s…”