I was stunned. This time I didn’t have the benefit of soul-form to help me deal with the shock, but maybe I was slowly getting used to crazy things like this happening. I would probably have worried that I was losing my mind if I wasn’t soooooo far beyond that, what with having already been reincarnated and everything… My first pop-up message in almost a year, and I was okay with it: the content of the message is what got me this time.

At first I hesitated to press START, but to be honest… no gamer in the history of Earth would have been able to resist. Along with the message from the Celestial – I refused to thinking of him as anything even remotely disrespectful – came a… shift? It was hard to quantify, but something definitely happened and I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was.

Alright… so apparently cultivating is something people can do in more than the vegetation-growing sense. It did resonate with me though, I mean, why not be able to cultivate yourself like a garden? Actually that did sound pretty stupid. Either way, if the term was good enough with the Celestial I would do my best to adopt it. I quietly set the spoon down, not wanting to wake up my parents, and went online to see what exactly had been uploaded to the soul-link

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came a message as soon as I arrived.

I replied.

Mark sent a sense of laughter and relief (he was a lot better at using the soul-link than me).

I couldn’t help but smile in my head, and I tried to send the sense of it like Mark had. The next few minutes consisted of me explaining briefly what had happened, but I told him that the rest can wait for later. I hadn’t mentioned the superpowers yet.

Then I asked him, I sent an image of Jaws and Purple-Hair along the soul-link, trying my best to include a sense of who they were.

is the first thing he sent back… He then sent me a moving image of a richly dressed man and woman standing above a crib while looking down – the woman with a complicated expression, the man with a dignified frown. All of the man’s exposed skin, except for his face and his palms, was covered in a short dark orange fur – the rest of his skin was covered in light grey overlapping scales (patterned like mine, but bigger and thicker). The woman looked human, except for a pair of distinctly insectoid antenna sticking out of her hair: She was pretty, I guess, but the antenna made her look a lot more alien than I would have thought… especially because they were moving around constantly… eek!

I sent back, still ‘watching’ the video of her feeling out air currents or something.

he replied with a mental smirk Annnndddd… he sent more pictures of tits… Holy crap, we don’t even have adult hormones any more, how the hell could he like tits so much! I had a feeling that it might be part of how he was coping with this whole experience, but then again maybe he just did it to make me laugh (it worked). He continued,

I blanked for a fraction of a second. Did he just call the Celestial God? I… didn’t think I liked that.

Mark sent with a laugh.

Mark replied,

I waited.

He continued after a moment, He asked me.

I thought about it for a moment. I asked.

Mark sent.

I wasn’t sure what to think, but I felt like we were walking on thin ice here. Maybe it’s good the Celestial thought to put a warning protocol in with whatever he made for us.

I sent. I hadn’t looked into what the ‘gift’ was yet, so I honestly had no idea what was going on. I was pretty excited to check it out though. Mark was amazed when I told him about the Soul-Rope, starting to practice it right away. I told him, trying to send an impression about how important this next part was,

I filled him in about everything: The Merrik, the Painted Warriors, gravity-fire-guy, spinning-ninja-girl, and the god wolf. He actually took it pretty well, but then again he wasn’t there. To him these were distant awesome events – to me it was a crap-your-pants fright fest.