Chapter 111: The Council of Wills
There is a place outside of known reality, and in it there are eleven of them.
They are not people and they have never been people. They are wills, drawn out of the will of the world itself, and they exist so that something as large as the Bazaar can make a right decision. They do not have names. They do not need them. They have been arguing, in one form or another, for longer than the species currently interesting them has had a written language.
Just like now.
“Four,” said the one who had raised it. “We have given three. This is the fourth. Singularities are not something we hand out because a man had a good afternoon.”
“I agree with the objection.” A second, slower. “The previous three went to the most elite of that species. Every one of them brought something valuable back out of a Level 8 world. That was the standard. This is a Level 5 explorer.”
“There is also the inventory,” said a third, who cared about very little else. “If we give it we will be left with one.”
“Incorrect. After this we hold two.”
The third did not like being corrected. “Explain.”
“The contest resolved. We won, and as winners we got another singularity. It has already been credited.” The fourth voice was patient in the way a thing is patient when it has all the time there is. “It would not be our last. We are giving the one we just won.”
“That is precisely our concern,” the first said. “Not his contribution. We all saw his contribution. Had that war run one more day humanity would have lost, and none of us disputes that. Our concern is waste. Give a Singularity to the wrong person and it does nothing, it is gone, and there is no returning it.”
“Waste.” A fifth voice, and this one sounded almost amused. “Have you looked at him? Truly looked? Haki. Nen. Spirituality. More than that, and more than one at once, and he has held all of them inside one body without it killing him. There has not been a vessel like that in a very long time. If a Singularity is wasted on him it cannot be used at all.”
“He had them,” the second said. “Past. You would gamble on residue. For all we know there is nothing left in that body but spirituality and the memory of the rest. There are traces. Traces are not systems. Do we spend a Singularity on a slim chance?”
“Yes,” said the fifth. “We do. He is the best prospect that species has produced since we opened to them and every one of you knows it. Name another who has done what he has done at the stage he is on now. You cannot, because there is none.”
Nobody refuted it.
The first will was quiet for a moment.
“Fine,” it said. “Let us vote.”
They voted, and the result was six to five.
The first will accepted it, because that is what the eleven of them are for.
“Then at least hide it,” it said. “Do not tell him what he is receiving. Let fate decide his path, and let it be on him to choose it.”
And the eleven said, together:
“So be it.”
He went down in front of about forty people.
Not gently. One moment Adam Varen was standing outside a supply tent in the late afternoon, and the next he was on the ground. The two members closest to him rushed to help him.
Adeyemi was there in ninety seconds. She could not find anything wrong. If anything his body was oozing vitality like no other.
Somebody found Ren. Having experienced something similar before, the only thought in her head was That damned idiot did it again.
He woke up on a cot in a medical tent.
Ren was sitting on the crate beside him with her elbows on her knees. She had been there long enough that somebody had brought her food, which was already cold.
“Hey,” Adam said.
She let out a breath.
“Don’t tell me this was from the Bazaar reward.” She said it flatly, but her hands were not steady and she was not hiding it well. “What did you do this time?”
“Haaah, well I picked the third option.”
“Let me guess, it was something like Sacrifice your brain to get a power to control space.”
Adam -.-
Ren rubbed her face. “You were out for nineteen hours. Adeyemi had to check on you every thirty minutes to make sure your condition was stable.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Stop it. You don’t have the privilege to worry about someone else, when you constantly do shit like this.”
He sat up, and that was when he noticed it.
He had expected the room to swim. It did not. He had expected the ache in his shoulder that had been there since the northern slope. It was not there either, and neither was the low grinding fatigue he had been carrying since the battle.
He felt, in fact, extremely good.
Then he looked at his own forearm.
There were lines under the skin. Fine ones, pale, running the length of the arm and branching out, like a second set of veins laid over the first and going to different places. They were not glowing. They were just there, and visible, and when he turned his wrist they moved with the muscle exactly as they should have.
He pushed his sleeve further up. They went on.
“Yeah,” Ren said quietly. “They’re everywhere. Chest, back, neck. They came up about six hours in. Adeyemi got two scans of them and both scans came back blank.”
Adam was confused. What was the reward?
Sage.
Nothing.
Sage.
[ I am here. ]
[ I am figuring it out, Host. ]
Take the moment.
She took eleven seconds, which for Sage is an eternity and a half.
[ Host. Your spirituality has changed. ]
Meaning.
[ It has properties of both Haki and Nen. It is at the same time affected by your will and vitality. ]
What does that mean?
[ It means this one reservoir of spirituality can be used for your pathway, Haki and Nen principles. I am sure it’s deeper than that but further information requires testing. ]
Adam looked at the lines on his arm.
What about the physical changes.
[ That is your spirituality condensed. Before it was more, well, spiritual. Now it’s both spiritual and physical. ]
Corruption?
[ Changed, not gone but adopted. Your spirituality carries traces of it. In simpler terms it is poisonous to everyone else but you. Your Corrupted Heart is now the connection point that brings spirituality to physical form, and in turn this dilutes the corruption. It is closer now to post-mortem Nen. ]
He sat there lost. This was a big difference.
Ren waited for him to get it together.
“It fixed the thing,” he said eventually. “I am free of corruption in a way. Also I got everything I lost, well mostly.”
“That’s good?”
“Yeah.” He turned his hand over and watched the lines move. “It’s very good.”
Ren was quiet.
“But,” she said.
“There is no but this time,” Adam said, smiling. “This is probably the first time I went through something like this and came out with only benefits.”
Ren looked happier than he was. In truth she was worried about his corruption more than him. She would think about him turning into some kind of monster every day.
Ren didn’t understand one thing. “What happened with your pathway?”
“Ah, that. It’s still there, I still progress like before, and guess what? I just digested my potion.”