Chapter VIII: Trinity

Swords Temple, Demonic Wildlands Near the Great Plateau

Month of the Garuda 17, 172 ,328 DE

With my curiosity about my new steamer bike satisfied, I leave it at the compound for Old Man Jones to play with. He is almost as much of an otaku as Hoshi, but his obsession is anything remotely related to Artificing, which includes Engineering. My steamer bike should keep him occupied for a whole hour. Maybe.

My only priority is to grasp Trinity and create a Core Realm. With the ability to control Trinity and the formation of a Core Realm, I will finally be able to walk on the Path of Coalescence, the path to becoming a Transcendent, one of those who has crossed over the bounds of Mortality and become Elemental.

These Dragon Gods of the Celestial Court are Transcendents, as are the Daos themselves. They seek to dominate and control the Mortals of the Amalgamate Realms. According to the writings of the ancient War Masters, those who call themselves Gods walk a path different from other Transcendents. They gain Power from the belief and worship of Mortals. Once a Mortal Transcends, whether or not they believe and worship a God is immaterial; a Transcendent's belief provides no Power to another Transcendent. The Dragon Gods and the Daos do not want Mortals to ever Transcend, so they do not their Power suppliers. That is the reason the Path of Coalescence is outlawed.

If I want to Coalesce, I need to know a method for doing it. Having practiced the Scriptures of Body, Mind, and Soul Forging, the only place for me to find the method to Coalesce is the second room of the Swords Temple.

By the time I reach the Swords Temple, the sun is already hidden behind the Eastern Escarpment. The welcome from the great tree that flows into my Mind and Soul quickly turns to excitement and congratulations. The tree has to be aware that I have completed fusing my Mana with my Body.

"I'm here to figure out how to contact Trinity. I'm stumped, old tree." As the great trees leaves rustle angrily, I grin and wave at it, but the tree only rustles its leaves more intensely. I have a natural talent for pissing things off.

When I enter the Swords Temple, I sense something. Is it an awareness not my own? As I look around, I do not see anything. I check the individual rooms for the sub-scriptures, but I find nothing and move to the middle of the temple. Standing near the block of metal with the swords, I scan the entire temple while drawing in deep breaths to search for any out of place scents.

After finding no clue to what made me think there was something here that should not be, I frown and enter the room for the second sub-scripture. I have read the entire Scripture of Origin in the main temple many times, but I have yet to fully understand it. Parts of it make sense, and other parts might as well be illegible scribbles for all I can comprehend of them. Of the sub-scriptures, only the first room has been legible to me, but now, I can read the contents of this room. Whether or not, I will understand them is another story.

At a glance, more than thirty thousand words line the wall of the room. As with the main body of the Scripture in the main room of the temple, this subordinate Scripture begins to the left of the door. Sitting down, I start reading.

Trinity is Power. Trinity is life. Trinity is Death. Trinity is all. Trinity is nothing. Trinity is one of the purest expressions of the Cycle of Life and Death. Trinity forms from a circuit from Life to Death and back to Life. All Amalgamate existence walks that same path.

Trinity is often called an Elemental Power, or a Power that lies between the Amalgamate and the Elemental. That is both true and false. As a Power created directly from Life and Death, Trinity is separate from the Elemental Powers. It is closest in nature to the Od, but to you, who practices the Scripture of Origin, the truth of the Od is immaterial.

The core of all Amalgamate existence is Trinity. Trinity can be called the Essence of Amalgamate existence, but because Trinity is so integral to Amalgamate existence, most Amalgamate beings are blind to its presence and its very existence. They are not capable of perceiving the truth beneath the surface.

The Amalgamate Realms are Named as Amalgamate because they have no purity to them. They are the amalgamation of all things Elemental. In an Amalgamate Realm, Trinity has been fused with myriad Elemental Powers to create the Essence of the Realm.

Because Trinity is at the core of Amalgamate existence, Amalgamate beings are trapped within the laws of their Amalgamate Realms, blind to the actual structure of their Realms. At best, they can perceive the facets of Trinity: Mana, Psi, and Ki. For a normal being to be able to sense Trinity itself, they need special abilities or tools Made for that purpose. Or they must be a Triune, one who can channel and wield Trinity.

You, who have completed the fusion of your Mana, Psi, and Ki and sealed it within your Body, Mind, and Soul have no way to use abilities, nor are you a Triune. However, you can be considered a blank slate. If you are exposed to Trinity in its pure form, you will be able to perceive it. Whether you can grasp Trinity or not, that is entirely up to your own individual ability.

Trust in your Soul. The Soul is the most important aspect of life. Your Soul comes before all else. Your Soul is the origin of your species, your gender, your potential, your talent, your Life itself. Without a Soul, a Body or Mind cannot form and, after a Soul is gone, they are not truly alive. A Soul without a Mind and Body may not be truly alive, but neither is it truly dead. Your Soul is eternal; it exists before the Creation of the Mind and Body and continues to exist after their Destruction. Your Soul persists through countless reincarnations. You Soul can perceive truths that your Mind and Body cannot.

While I remain lost in the Scripture, trying to perceive and comprehend its meaning, hours pass. Life's words are mostly simple. I understand every word and every sentence, but they do not convey simple meanings.

The Scripture of Origins goes around in circles. Every line gives hints, but nothing is clearly spelled out. If you want to perceive and comprehend the knowledge Life has left behind, you have to be capable of thinking and reasoning. She does not spoon-feed the answers to you and leaves much unsaid. I get the impression that if you are too stupid to understand the treasure of knowledge she is passing on to you, She could not care less.

At the end of the sub-Scripture, there is only one line that stands out as a simple fact. It is the very last line, and it is not a part of the Scripture itself. "In this temple, I have left a source of Trinity, the Dragon Slaying swords."

I look out the door of the small room, and my eyes fall onto the swords embedded into the block of midnight black metal. The Dragon Slaying swords? I do not see what else they could be.

Even though I have tried to pull the swords out of the metal block countless times, I have never felt anything from them. No, many times I would have sworn I felt disdain upon touching them, but I chalked that up to my imagination.

Walking silently to the center of the temple, I jump on top of the metal block. As I try to pull the swords out, I have as much luck as every time before, none. Sitting cross-legged, I place my hands on the swords, but I do not feel anything other that a bit stupid, when I close my eyes and contemplate the words of the sub-Scripture.

Time passes. I am not sure if it is a lot or a little. The only noise is my own soft breathing, and as with all sounds inside the temple, it seems muted. It feels like a warm breeze blows over the skin on the backs of my hands, but is it real or illusion? No matter how great a storm may rage in the outside world, the air in the Swords Temple always remains still as a tomb. No wind, no dust, no leaves can pass over the threshold if not consciously brought in by Jones or myself.

I do not think of myself as patient, but I am a hunter. I know how to wait for my prey to show itself, and Trinity is my prey. My breathing slows to the point it almost ceases, and my awareness of the world around me fades. After an unknown amount of time, a strand of silvery-grey luminescence appears in the corner of my vision, but my eyes remain closed. While I see the strand, I have no other awareness of it, no sense of its reality of unreality.

As I continue to focus upon the strand, the faint shadows of other strands, crisscrossing one another, slowly fill my vision. With more and more strands, they begin to form a silvery-grey image, and as the image becomes more complete, the silvery-grey strand I am watching merges into the background, completely disappearing from my sight. I am left staring at a silvery-grey representation of the interior of the Swords Temple, but the image slowly fades back to darkness. Once more, I am left staring at pitch blackness.

What happened? What does it mean? What did I do wrong?

I did not trust my Soul. I do not even have a clue how to perceive with it. The Scripture of Soul was the first I completed. My Ki has been fused and sealed within my Soul for almost nine years. With my Ki sealed, I am no different from one who is Ki dead. What I once learned of how to use my Soul, I have long since forgotten. Any capabilities I had have long since atrophied, and I have never learned how to perceive through my Soul in the first place.

I am a blank slate? While I understand the meaning of each word and the sentence as a whole, how does that apply to perceiving Trinity?

I try to empty my Mind of thoughts and become blank, but random thoughts keep flitting through my Mind. This is too much like the Academy's idiot Cultivation classes. I really suck at this kind of shit. You have to be a retard to contemplate your navel, like a brain-dead imbecile. Even if I did not know about the Scripture of Origin, I would never try to Cultivate the Fucking Daos. Blank slate. Trust in my Soul. Even if it comes from Life herself, fuck this shit. I am a Wolf, not a turnip. Being a blank slate ranks right up there with navel contemplation for retardation.

After a bit, I see another silver-grey strand. Is that Trinity? I try to grab it through force of will, without physically moving, but nothing happens. Like that will work. I have no clue how to use my Mind or Soul like they were my body. I have even less clue where to learn how. Old Man Jones only knows about using Mana. There were experts in the Mind and Soul among the ancient War Masters, but he had no talent and never studied their arts.

While I keep going around in circles and failing to get anywhere, more and more strands of silvery-grey light appear. This time they do not form an image of the world around me; they simply float in space doing nothing or randomly moving about. Are they Trinity or something else?

Some of the strands of light bump into me. As they do, I feel like a faint breeze touches my skin, but I still cannot perceive anything of Trinity itself. I cannot even sense anything that even resembles real Power contained within them. Are the strands not Trinity? Am I barking up the wrong tree, like a lowly dog chasing a squirrel it will never catch?

Unsure of what is the right course, I do nothing but watch the strands of light, while trying to make some form of contact with them. More and more of them touch my Body. After a time, as they touch me, they start to disappear. As each one disappears into my skin, I begin to feel the faintest sensation of warmth on it, but I cannot determine whether or not it is imaginary. A fainter tingling sensation seems to accompany the warmth, but it does not come from any physical location.

I try focusing on the tingling, but I cannot pin down the nebulous feeling. With no physical form, it feels like the ghost of a memory. Over time it becomes stronger, or maybe, I just imagine the feeling. As time passes, the tingling intensifies. It becomes concrete. Currents flow through a part of me that is not my Body. The feeling is like an electric loop that is not made of electricity making a circuit within a nebulous space within myself.

Unable to do anything else, I can only continue monitoring the feeling, and slowly I become more aware of the circuit. Eventually, I have a clear mental image of the circuit. It forms an outline that looks similar to a picture of the arteries and veins within a human's Body, but there are strange gaps in the picture. At points, the flow starts from nothing, and at others, it disappears into nothing.

I have seen a flow like this before, or more accurately I should say that I used to be aware of one. Before I completed the Scripture of Body Forging, Mana flowed through my Body in this way, with the same kind of starts and stops, from and to nothing. I knew that the Mana was moving to and from my Body to my Mind and Soul, but I could never perceive them. Just because you think, it does not mean you perceive and are aware of your Mind. I think I finally perceive my Soul, at least the part of it where the silver-grey light flows, but what in all the hells is my Mind?

Since I can now perceive at least a bit of my Soul, or at least, I think it is my Soul. I have long since known how to perceive my Body, but how do I trace this silver-grey light into and through my Body? What do I need to do to "see" it?

When it comes to ideas and concepts, I am not very intuitive or imaginative. I think fast and I have strong reasoning capabilities, but I cannot just pull new ideas and concepts out of thin air. I need clues and facts to puzzle my way through something one step at a time. One by one, I focus on the points where the silvery-grey light disappears from my Soul, and at the same time, I try to match them up with my awareness of my Body. After a few dozen attempts, I manage to find a connection between my Body and my Soul.

Knowing where the silver-grey light is flowing out from my Soul, I keep my awareness centered on the point where it should be entering my Body. It feels like it takes a while, but I finally sense what should be the silver-grey light. The only problem is that I am not aware of it as light. I only have a feeling of warmth, but that warmth flows through my blood vessels until it eventually disappears. How I perceive my Body and my Soul differ significantly, and I do not know if that is as it should be.

I take my hands off the hilts of the swords and retain the image and the awareness of the silver-grey strands of light. I just need to perceive it in my Mind, but I have no idea how to expand my awareness to my Mind. I do not even have a clue of where to start.

Feeling frustrated, I leave the temple. Standing in the glade, I stare up at the night sky. I retain the awareness of the light and the warmth while watching the twinkling of the stars ? How much time has passed? Hours? More that day?

Two days. The thought is not my own, and I spin around to stare at the great tree.

You are confused about Mind? You have no one to teach you? The tree has far more sentience that I ever expected, and something about its thoughts give the impression that it is female.

"Yes."

I am the guardian of this grove. I was Created by Life to protect the temple and the Swords .

The tree's branches rustle angrily. Not even two hundred thousand years have passed since my Creation. My span of years numbers in the billions. I am not old. I shall punish you for calling me old. I shall drag your Mind from you Body. Separate it from your Soul. Force you to see the world as I do. Prepare for punishment.

I do not even have the chance to scream. Pain flashes through me and I find myself staring down at my own Body a half-dozen feet beneath me.

The Soul is the source of Life, but the Mind is the foundation of Awareness. The Body and the Soul borrow the Mind's awareness, but each has its own ability to perceive. The Soul can perceive the underlying patterns of all things. Look upon your pattern and suffer. This is your punishment for calling me old.

My perspective shifts, and I am looking down from a far greater height. A torrent of knowledge floods into my Mind, and I see everything in the world as strange twisting lines that look like someone took a skein of yarn and beat it with a whisk. But I also see threads of silver-grey Power moving through the twisted mass of yarn. Light and warmth radiate from the thread, along with other properties that I cannot identify. I am seeing myself from a perspective not my own.

One twisted mass of threads is my Mind. I do not know how I know it to be my Mind, but that does not change my certainty. A silver-grey rope connects my Mind to the mass of twisted threads, which is my Body, and an extra shadowy layer of threads lies superimposed over that for my Body. Is it my Soul?

I do not know how long I stay as I am, but I realize that I know how to perceive the threads of the patterns that make up the world. A number of the books Old Man Jones has collected talk about this. As soon as the understanding hits me, pain flashes through me a second time, and I find myself back in my Body.

You have suffered pain. Punishment complete.

"If I keep calling you 'Old Tree', will you do that to me again."

Obnoxious Wolf .

Sitting down where I am, I turn my focus inward and try to find the state of awareness that I just experienced as part of my 'punishment' from the tree. It takes some effort, but after what feels like a few minutes, I manage to 'see' that mysterious view of crossing, interconnected threads. I have no clue what it means of how to interpret it, but at least I can see it, the patterns of the world. More importantly, I can perceive and even feel that strange silver-grey Power. I just hope this is Trinity.

As I look around, I see a strange mass of threads, which is completely out of place in the glade, not too far from me. As I retreat from the strange view, I see Old Man Jones leaning against my new steamer bike.

"Old man, what are you doing here?"

"Brat, how long were you planning on staring at your belly like some shaved eunuch in a monastery?"

"Did something happen?"

"While you've been playing idiot for the past five days, a bunch of those northern jewel idiots have been sniffing all over town for information on you. Looks like you faced down some big shot idiot from the Kingdom of Amber and stole one of his bikes."

I laugh. "Is that all?"

‎