Worrying about time felt like a fool’s errand in a place with no days and no nights, let alone a realm as broken as Vir’s mindscape. And so, he didn’t, casting the very concept of time out of his mind to throw himself into relentless meditation, broken only by the infrequent need to clear his thoughts. Not even sleep interrupted him. He required little even normally, and in this place, such basic needs as sleep, food, and water were entirely absent. It was, after all, a construct of his mind.

  As such, every minute of every day was devoted to the progression of Vir’s Chakras.

  And progress they did.

  The Warrior Chakra came more easily than Vir had feared, its revelation obvious—the spear to his shield.

  Yet it was only recently that Vir had come face-to-face with the fact that sometimes, a shield was insufficient to protect on its own. His battle with Annas had proven that sometimes one needed the spear to protect those he cared for. To protect the realm. To vanquish those who would seek to end it.

  It was then that Vir’s understanding of the Guardian shifted, expanding into a being who protects proactively.

  The hesitations he’d once held—of not wishing to impart a fate worse than death to anyone—were silenced by the realization that power was useful even when unused.

  The mere threat of the Warrior Chakra was enough to make his enemies think twice before crossing him. With the Warrior Chakra, Annas would not have treated Vir so lightly—would not have attacked with his own Chakra so freely.

  And while Vir didn’t know if he would ever use the ability against an enemy, he needed it to mend his mindscape. That alone was enough to push him past the mental block that had stalled him earlier.

  How long ago had that been? He honestly couldn’t say. Had months passed out in the real world? Or had it been years? Perhaps centuries?

  What was Maiya doing? Was she even alive anymore? What of Cirayus? Of Greesha? What about them?

  He could only pray that the passage of time had only slowed with the expansion of his mindscape. He had to, for Vir's already shaky soul might very well crack under the weight of the knowledge that Maiya was not in this world anymore.

  For all his strength, for all his recent growth, Vir didn’t think he could live in a world without her. He didn’t want to.

  Idle thoughts. Purposeless thoughts. Vir ushered them aside.

  With the Warrior now open, Vir banished Annas’s foreign Chakra from his soul, purifying the fractures in his mindscape one by one. Yet the Warrior on its own was not enough to truly mend the damage. For that, he needed a Chakra that could actively undo damage to the soul—the Chakra of the Heart.

  As the only Chakra capable of mending that damage, it was essential to close the rifts in his mindscape, though as Jalendra has made abundantly clear, no Chakra could restore him in his current state. Not even if he had a thousand years.

  No, the Heart would simply lay the stage for what Jalendra referred to as his ‘reforging’.

  Vir was already bracing himself for the agony Jalendra promised would come with it. His predecessor left no doubt that it would be the most painful experience of his life. Worse than any torture any mortal could concoct.

  Considering how much pain Vir endured thus far, that was saying a great deal. He had experienced more suffering than most demons would in several lifetimes, and that was before this eternal hell of agony that was living with a fractured soul.

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  And so, after the Warrior, the Heart Chakra became Vir’s primary goal. Where the Warrior Chakra was the spear, the Heart Chakra was the healing touch—the warm blanket of compassion.

  Thankfully, this Chakra resonated more closely with him than any other. Vir was a healer, and while he might have lacked the healing arts of the Panav, he very much believed himself to be a mender of broken bonds. An ender of wars. The Uniter of Realms. His goal was to heal the demon realm unlike it had ever been healed before—by not only uniting it, but by ushering in an age of prosperity and wealth previously unimaginable. A land where old wounds could finally be closed and forgotten. Where clans would comingle and clan identities would never again be the cause of pointless wars.

  The Heart seemed to resonate with this conviction, opening after only a few months of diligent practice.

  And with the Heart opened, Vir went to work mending the rifts in his mindscape—a challenge made greater by the fact that both the Warrior and the Heart had expanded the small meadow into a burgeoning Godshollow, complete with the soaring trunks Vir had come to know and love during his youth.

  The Godshollow, however, brought with it even more scars, abyssal voids, and evidence of his shattered soul. Months pased, and Vir spent nearly every second of it mending rift after rift, thousands upon thousands, until there were none left.

  At long last, his mindscape resembled something close to normalcy.

  “Funny,” Vir said as he walked with Jalendra through a path within the great forest. “Were it not for the intangible pain that pervades every pore of my body—I would think myself healed.”

  The great sage wore his signature white robe as always, walking with his hands clasped smartly behind his back, and Vir couldn’t help but try and imitate some of his mannerisms. This was a demon who had obviously been a king and conducted himself as such.

  Jalendra’s frown fell away, softening into an expression of sympathy. “Many wounds may be covered, yet the rot remains. The damage festers beneath, corrupting and consuming. For you to return as you are, you would be nothing more than a shadow, tormented for the rest of your days. You would live in agony, barely functional, and wishing for death with your every waking breath.”

  Vir winced. He knew that feeling intimately—he had lived with it all this time, after all. All these untold years and decades, trapped in this mindscape.

  All the more reason to hurry things along. No matter what torment awaited him, it could not be as bad as this crippled existence. For no single pain could match a pain that lasted a lifetime.

  “What is the next step?” Vir asked.

  “The Third Eye,” Jalendra replied. “Though, you will find that meditation alone will not suffice. Not for the second highest of all the Chakras.”

  Vir counted his blessings for having his predecessors here to guide him. While his journey wasn’t identical to theirs, there were enough similarities to narrow down potential avenues for advancement, and everyone from Jalendra to even Ekanai had helped him correct his course when he’d embarked on a wrong path.

  Even with their help, he was forced to backtrack and try again, but Vir knew he’d have spent ten times as long beating his head against brick walls had it not been for their aid.

  Having grown intimately familiar with the process of opening his Chakras, and with the help of his predecessors, Vir made swift progress.

  As he soon learned, The Third Eye almost universally relied on awareness. Of one’s surroundings and of one’s own self. It demanded he notice everything around him, from the tiniest critter to the sighing of the breeze.

  It was this very awareness that opened his eyes to his own existence. His strengths, his flaws, and the core of who he truly was.

  Vir had always tried to be present and aware in life, but never on this level.

  After countless days and nights, he saw his surroundings so clearly that it felt as though he were watching from above—an out-of-body, bird’s-eye perspective.

  He saw his heartbeat and understood his place in the cosmic tapestry.

  In a moment of startling clarity, Vir saw all, even with his eyes closed. For he had opened the Third Eye.

  Had he not been forced to spend all of his time in this place, Vir could scarcely guess how long it would have taken him. Years? Decades? Slowly chipping away, not driven by agony and existential crisis, but a weak desire to grow stronger?

  He could scarcely believe how great of a motivator staking one’s life truly was. It was precisely why those who ventured into the Ash either died trying or returned reforged and nearly unrecognizable from their past selves.

  And now, at long last, Vir was ready to tackle the Crown Chakra. The most difficult of them all.

  “The moment you open the Crown,” Jalendra said, “you will be ready. There will be nothing to stop us from restoring your soul.”

  The Third Eye had done more than grant awareness—it had expanded Vir’s mindscape to the Godhollow’s very edge. And standing upon the great boughs of the tall trees, Vir could almost make out a familiar village in the distance.

  Excitement surged through his broken veins at the thought, and he immediately set to work on opening the Crown.

  As the highest and most lofty of all, Vir was under no illusion that it would come easily. Yet he did not despair. In this place where time had no hold, success was only a matter of effort—and effort was something Vir possessed in spades.