Chapter 78: Soul Mates

After cleaning up and setting down for the night Pneuma and Trint joined up in their Soul Space. The day had been long but productive. New connections, creations, and power were now available with the possibilities of Soul not yet exhausted. Trint was eager to try something a little different during the night.

“I’ve been feeling an itch or desire each time I enter my Soul,” Trint tried to explain, “You know the ability you have that lets us connect to the other Souls around us? Well, each time I travel along it I have felt a growing desire to try something like it for myself. I don’t think I can replicate exactly what you are doing but I feel I can do something similar. Like my subconscious wants me to try to reach further. And just into my periphery, I sense a thread that I want to pull related to your ability.”

“Well, I’m intrigued. How can I help?” Pneuma offered.

“I’m not sure but I want to try to connect to whatever this is, and I’d just appreciate you being near and see if you can help.”

“Of course, I will.”

They went to sit near the river Pneuma had created just outside the palace gates. Trint felt all but two of his creations inside his Soul, the other two he felt but they were not present. The ones inside this place were spread out as guardians in various parts of Trint’s Soul Kingdom sphere. All accept his human-shaped creatures. They were in the palace. He also had decided and Pneuma agreed to have a few nightmares and the Pneuma forms to be stationed in the underground half of their kingdoms.

Now settled and relaxed sitting by his tree in the center courtyard, Trint closed his eyes and relaxed his mind. Again, he felt something tug in the periphery of his senses. It was like seeing a flittering light just at the very edge of his peripheral vision. Without turning his head but using great focus he pulled on the thing at the edge of his senses to his right. Then suddenly he was traveling as if sucked down through a wormhole at incredible speed. He was no longer sitting in his Soul; he knew he was traveling somewhere else. With a sudden lurch, he found himself stopped and at the edge of a small Soul. The door to it was open and it felt familiar.

“Pneuma, can you hear me?” Silence greeted him. Nothing was visible around him, only the Soul before him. So, with no other immediate options apparent, he stepped through the door to this familiar Soul.

As he passed the threshold, he felt incredible pain and he fell to the ground unable to move. He seized up and then shook in a seizure. Then after an hour of concentrated pain and convulsions, his body lay still, and lifeless. No breath, no heartbeat, no brain activity for a solid ten minutes. Then a person approached and picked up the lifeless body.

From Trint’s perspective, he had felt an incredible weight land on him once he stepped fully into this Soul. The weight came in the form of a massive download to his mind which nearly drove him mad. It seemed to last for years in his mind. It was like he lived the memories that passed through his mind. When they stopped, he felt an incredible weakness and painful emotional scarring in his Spirit, but a strengthening in his Soul. He didn’t know how to process what just happened.

He had lived an entire life through the flood of memories. No, it was many lifetimes. It took him an uncountable amount of time for his strong Mind and Spirit and Soul to process the experience. After an unclear but extensive amount of time, Trint wrested control of the chaotic mix of information and separated the recent experience from his own life. During the extended feeling of lifetimes, he had nearly lost himself to the information and experiences. He thought for a while that he was the entity the memories were so real, and the experience was firsthand not like watching a movie but living it. The hundreds of years had slammed into his mind, and it had taken the last couple of hours for him to parse the difference between who he is and who the memories were from.

He immediately knew the entity as he recognized so much of the life but his consciousness waking to his real self, after dying in the downloaded memories had been a harsh experience.

The main reason why everything had been so confusing was that the memories and experiences were of another Trint. He had lived an alternate life. One that began before the system. His life had been different. Different choices were made resulting in a lonely life without marriage or children. Then the System arrived, and he was physically not injured but he didn’t have the advantages of Pneuma nor the adoption. He had made progress in the iteration but had given up hope after a hundred years of failure in i8. Resulting in a depressing and worthless existence. He had become a shell of himself. And not a good person by Trint’s current moral standards. The number of Resets Trint experienced was shocking.

His alternate self was not a great fighter and Trint had felt the deaths and the rebirths. There had been so many it was a dizzying and mind-numbing thing. The doubt that formed in his real mind and Soul had caused him to doubt his existence and he felt adrift when he returned to himself. The shell of a man was him. No, I never made those choices. I have my family. I have hope and purpose and I can’t succumb to being like that.

He fully understood the decisions his other self chose during the experience and knew in his Soul he would have made many of the same decisions given the circumstances. That thought alone disgusted him and he decided this wasn’t him and he would not become what these memories were.

Then after finding his resolve, he felt a new peace and a strength not felt before. Like he had faced a demon version of himself and triumphed. Solidifying his Soul and resolve. His will would be indomitable. Then silence and peace wrapped him, and his mind found rest.

He awoke in a bed. That same unfamiliar, jarring experience of not recognizing where you are when you wake up in a new place, hit him. But then he relaxed, he knew the room, from the memories. But the relief was short-lived as he saw a reflection of himself sitting in a chair by his bedside.

“Ah, there you are. How are you feeling?”

Before responding Trint reached as far as he could with his Soul perception. He wasn’t inside the same Soul he had arrived in. This one was much larger by his estimates and had fortifications and a small force of beings occupying the Soul space.

“I feel fine. What should I call you?” Trint asked his doppelgänger, “T-Rex, maybe? You were known by your friends by that name, right?”

“That will do. And in case you didn’t notice some changes, we shared a lot more than just memories.”

Trint sat up full and swung his legs around to the side of the bed. That’s when he noticed his hand were cuffed in Earthlike police handcuffs. As were his feet.

“Don’t be alarmed, I know you, remember?” T-Rex nonchalantly explained. “I know you are stronger than me. You know I had never unlocked my Soul like you. But I must thank you for the lessons. I had years in this place since you arrived to figure out what those memories all meant. You taught me time moves differently inside one's own Soul. This one is mine, so I had time to learn even things you didn’t teach me. Those cuffs, I don’t know if they will hold you, but I never sensed you figured out how to make them. And this is my Soul. I now understand better than you, how a Soul should be ruled. And you are not the master here. You’re more like an infection inside my Soul. If I choose to, I can do some nasty stuff.” T-Rex threatened as he stood from the chair and turned his back towards Trint.

Trint began to use his incredible Soul control and will to break the cuffs. While he stood and stepped to grab hold of his captor. But despite his will and the effort he exerted the shackles held and he tripped over the ones binding his ankles.

“No no no. I warned you,” the evil Trint said as he stepped around the downed Trint and picked him up. “Don’t test my patience. If you learned half as much from me as I did from you, then you know my threats weren’t just bluffs. So, knock it off. I have plans for you.”

“What more can you want? I know you gained a lot from how this place has changed. What now?”

“I may have given up before we met, but I have already made it to i7 since you have been asleep. Do you know what a Soul Master can do in i7? Anything he wants. You might say I’ve grown rather ambitious in my time since our merger. You had to process my hundreds of deaths and lifetimes. I only had to process your few decades. It seemed I got the better end of the deal and you slept for long enough for me to grow, learn and progress in the System. What I want from you is Pneuma. I want to meet him. Now that you are awake, I’d like you to try contacting him.”

“You have some agenda?” Trint was able to sit up on the ground. “Why would I go along with anything you want when you’re treating me like a prisoner?”

“It is not that I mean to play you for a fool,” he said as T’Rex bent to lift Trint. “Here let me get those off now.” He removed the cuffs with a thought, and they dissolved into nothingness.

“Now that’s better,” T-Rex smiled for the first time. “Let me show you some things in a gesture of goodwill and thanks.” Trint followed his unwanted Soul mate out the door. “You had advantages. But I learned from them and improved in ways you never did. Pneuma, your Tree of Life, being a Sovereign, getting adopted. Shoot, having a great family. All pretty much handed to you. I see I could have made a few better choices early on and my trajectory would have been less tragic and more like your life. Still, hear what I’ve done since you arrived,” he said as he spun around showing off his Soul to Trint.

Trint used his Soul powered senses to view the enormous sprawling citadel around them. They were in a courtyard, much like his but without a tree. In the center was a fountain. The water rose like a natural spring and flowed over the edge to a bigger pool and the pool spilled over to a small stream. The area was very peaceful, and the stream was giving off a potent aura. The aura was different from anything Trint remembered experiencing.

“Can you feel that soothing and cool feeling?” T-Rex asked, “Even now the water calls to me, even though it is me and I am yet its master. What you don’t know because I know all you know and now much more. Is that you never even explored what Mana could do. You didn’t take the time and went straight to Spirit. You don’t know about elemental affinities. I’m surprised your companion never mentioned your unique affinities. Maybe that’s why they chose you? Hmmm,” he hummed.