Chapter 161: Lady Death
"Does it taste good?"
Hearing someone’s voice behind him, Peter spat out his coffee and turned around, only to see a young Asian man with neck-length hair. He wore an outfit that reminded him of Bruce during his training days with Ra’s al Ghul. On the right side of his waist, he carried a katana, which made Peter tense up. But he did not attack because this was not real.
"Who are you? How did you get here?"
"Well. That is a good question, my friend. We are, in simple words, umm...."
Us.
"The ideal word is THAT, yes," the man said, making Peter frown.
"Us, we? Grr! Just answer how you got here and who you are!"
"I already answered you. We are you."
Next to the man, several silhouettes appeared. One wore a samurai outfit. Another wore military clothing with a distorted face. The remaining silhouettes were completely blurred.
"I do not understand what this is about you being me," Peter said with a furrowed brow and a serious expression.
"Do you ever feel drawn to places you have never visited?" the man asked.
Peter started thinking about the answer. It was simple. He had seen many photos of different places and felt briefly drawn to them, so much so that he had made a list of places he wanted to visit.
"Have you ever seen a photo of a place and known you had been there?"
Quickly, he remembered a photograph of a place in Himalayas.
"Do you know things you should not know?"
Upon hearing this, he thought deeply and remembered that he had never fully practiced blacksmithing.
Yet when he made the axe, he had felt completely in his element.
Thinking even further, he wondered why he had ordered such a room to be built if he had never practiced that craft. He had simply given the order to create one and nothing more.
"Do you grasp things as though you were recalling skills rather than learning them? How is it that you can grasp and learn a language in a short period of time when others take much longer?"
"My intelligence allows me to learn things in record time. A simple language is child’s play."
"I have a much more interesting answer," the man said in Thai.
"Oh! Enlighten me, great and unknown wise man," Peter answered in Thai without thinking.
For a few seconds, he did not realize it, but then his eyes widened slightly.
"Curious?. You speak Thai when you never learned the language before right?" the man said.
Peter looked at him with much more attention than before.
"What?"
"You are one person, but with different lives."
Peter tensed when he heard this.
"And you know the answer."
"Reincarnation."
"Yes. That is right. You can forge an axe or a sword because you were once a blacksmith. You speak Thai because you once were one."
"I am sorry to disappoint you, but that is impossible." And moreover, because I would know, and the One Above All would have told me or given me a sign, right?
"Souls move from one body to another, which is basically the spiritual equivalent of, ’Wow, you were lucky,’ or, ’Better luck next time.’"
"Do you feel safe behind this cynical act?"
"It worked wonders for me 80% of the time." And the other 20% is ruined by Parker’s luck.
"The visions or dreams you have been having most of the time are not moments from your other selves."
Upon hearing that the man knew about the dreams and glimpses of his other selves, several alarms started going off in Peter’s head, immediately classifying this person as someone who knew far too much.
"They are memories."
"That is absurd. This is not any version of reincarnation I have heard of. Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh... they all believe that every life begins with a blank slate." Well, not the vast majority. If you are lucky, you can keep writing on that slate even after you die, and I was one of the lucky ones.
"When you use the katana, do you not feel that the world slows down? That you can cut even steel as though it were paper? Do you feel your blood pumping like an engine, your pupils dilating, your mouth going dry, your fingertips itching, and that insatiable urge to cut everything in your path?"
"What?"
"It is complicated to explain, but our link to you was never strong enough for you to have visions. And if you did, you believed they were fantasy dreams. You had some, but they were incredibly rare, so rare that I could count them on my hands and still have fingers to spare.
You had a blocked memory, or as you call it, the Fractured Disc. But thanks to that thing behind your neck, our link to you became stronger. And with the change that happened to you, it became much stronger, so much so that you could finally have visions."
"What kind of changes are you talking about, and what does my tattoo have to do with it?"
The man before him grew more serious.
"The tattoo you have there strengthened our bond through death. It is a gift from someone very powerful who has authority over death, and that power carries a fragment of that essence within it, reaffirming our bond with you."
Those words were a great wake-up call to him, because he finally knew about the gift.
Death