Chapter 108: Soul to Soul

  “You’re joking,” Kwame exclaimed.

  “Unfortunately, I’m most certainly not.”

  “That makes no sense. It’s very hard to believe.”

  “It’s quite easy to believe if you understand how my artifact works. Or used to work, for that matter. It has been too long after all. Things might have changed, no matter how unlikely such a change is.”

  “Just, just wait a second, please. It’s actually quite easy to verify your claim,” Moira said and immediately brought up her ring. A holographic screen sprang to life above her hand the next moment.

  “Oh, marvelous. Is this a new artifact? I certainly haven’t seen this one.” He glanced at Parth and Kwame. Parth’s hands were covered by his gauntlets, of course. But Kwame was nervously fidgeting with his ring, stopping himself from doing what Moira was doing. “I see that you have one too. So, it’s not an artifact, it’s something else.”

  The old man was sharp. Parth had to give him that. “Yeah, technology. Magitech, to be precise. Technology that works in tandem with magic.”

  “Astounding. Things have indeed changed a lot over the years. I see the armor that you’re wearing. Or at least what survived of it in young Parth’s case. But it’s quite different than the simple armor our batch was sent out with.” He spoke, not once taking his eyes off the holographic screen.

  He was standing opposite to Moira; the privacy filter wouldn’t be showing him anything. But his eyes dug into the screen in curiosity. He was just seemingly enchanted with the technology itself.

  “Uh, you still aren’t wearing any armor though,” Kwame said.

  “Of course I’m not. I’m not a warrior. Moreover, I didn’t need armor. When I used my artifact, I was untouchable,” he said with a grin.

  “Here, I’ve got it,” Moira exclaimed, interrupting the tangent they’d gone off on.

  Parth and Kwame shifted their focus to her screen, and to their astonishment, there was the Voyager profile of Vyasadatta. Way back from the seventy-second expedition. The offline data packets were still pulling through in these dire circumstances.

  “Hmm. Can you please answer a few questions for us? Let us verify with the information we have on hand. Then we’d know for sure. Don’t take it the wrong way, but we are inside the dungeon. We can’t let our guard down,” Moira said.

  “Of course, I can empathize. Please go ahead,” he replied nonchalantly.

  Thankfully, this was not one of the first few challenges. Information on those was sparse due to faulty transcriptions, the sheer test of time, and at times, just plain misinformation borne out of ignorance. Even during the seventy-second challenge, it was pretty much low-tech. Nonexistent tech, to be honest. But at least due to so many centurial challenges happening prior to that, and after fully submitting to Byrone’s edicts, there was a working system of compiling handwritten data.

  And when tech had advanced, everything had been transcribed and polished with all the latest information.

  “We’ll just be asking you some questions, and if you answer them correctly, then it means that you are who you say you are,” Moira said. Vyasadatta just nodded in response, so she began her interrogation. “How old are you, at least how old were you when the trial took place?”

  “I was seventy-seven years old.”

  “Where do you hail from?”

  “Suvarnagiri, Mauryan Empire.”

  That answer drove into Parth’s head how long ago the man was really from. When they simply mention the ninety-fifth, ninety-fourth, ninety-third expedition, and so on, it didn’t seem too long ago. But each dungeon awakening happened a century apart. And by the manner in which the man was acing these questions, he indeed lived on Earth more than two thousand years ago. Could be Yaawar as well. Their point of divergence in the timeline was relatively recent, after all.

  “Who was your king?”

  “More of an emperor. But, Chandragupta Maurya.”

  “Who was your patron?”

  “Tembol G’Ani”

  “Advisor?” Moira was not giving him any room to think, firing the questions in rapid succession.

  “Rabutan Z’Chi,” and it seemed like he had no problem maintaining pace.

  “Teammates, and their artifacts?”

  “Chak of Cival. Hurry Cane,” he then glanced at Parth and smiled. “Leandros of Dion. Pygilist.”

  Now Parth knew where the offhand comment about familiarity with the gauntlets and the flames came from. “Any other absurd and mind-blowing facts you wanna share with us?”

  “That waits to be seen. We are from different time periods. Of course, everything that we say to each other would be surprising.”

  “Do you have any other questions, Moira?” Kwame asked.

  “Just one. What did you bring to Tava alongside yourself?”

  “Stump and partial roots of the beautiful Pipal Tree I was meditating under. Unfortunately, the entire tree couldn’t make it during transportation.”

  Parth looked at Moira, eyebrows raised, waiting for the verdict.

  “I don’t think I have anything else. There is something weird in your file. But I believe we’ll come to it as we speak. It’ll be one more avenue of verification. If this is a trap. It is a very elaborate one.” Moira said with narrowed eyes.

  “Splendid. Now that we have established that you can trust me to some extent. Let’s talk in earnest.”

  “Sure. What do you want to know?” Parth asked.

  “Firstly, I’m very curious about the state of my world. Obviously, Miss Moira here cannot help me with that. What about you, Parth and Kwame? Did any of you come from a world that had vampires? They might be hidden, but there were some. And their population might have grown by now. You must have seen them in Tava.”

  “No. And well, that’s one of the major changes in that world; Yaawar. The vampires pretty much took over.”

  “Truly? Did they turn everyone?” He asked in astonishment.

  “Kind of. Their plagues were pretty insane. So they turned to technology. They made artificial blood, then turned everyone into artificial vampires. They call themselves Synthires now,” Parth explained.

  “Astonishing. A lot has changed in two millennia, eh? Anyways, from the way you’re speaking, neither of you are from that world. Yaawar, was it? They hadn’t decided on a unified name during my time. We just called it the vampire world,” Vyasadatta said with a small chuckle at the end.

  “Yeah. Well, each language has its own name for the planet,” Kwame said.

  Parth looked at Moira from the corner of his eyes, noticing how she had been quiet since her interrogation. He supposed that she was waiting for that final confirmation to come up in conversation.

  “Too true. We called our home world different names, despite all three of us coming from the same planet. Caused a lot of confusion. The language potion did help, thankfully.”

  Parth noted that the potions were already present way back then in Tava. Of course, he had already gone through the technological development timeline of Tava. As much as he could in the limited time he had. That development was backed by the innovations from the Yaawar. But even then, he supposed that magic was far more advanced in Tava than in the other worlds. So the potions being long-standing was not really a surprise.

  “Speaking of language. How is yours still the same? I mean, languages tend to evolve over the years, don’t they?” Moira asked.

  “Oh, that’s pretty simple. I’m pretty sure that I was speaking a very ancient dialect when I first conversed with Parth. But he was so stressed that he didn’t really notice that my words didn’t match my lips.”

  “What?” Parth asked, trying to recall what he had seen.

  “Yes, you were mighty stressed about the trap, the golems, and the possibility of me being a threat. Such a small thing must have skied your attention.”

  “But your words are matching now,” Kwame said.

  Sure, the words matched, but the speech pattern still retained an overtly formal tang.

  “They are. As I said, I had a lot of time. I delved into the depths of magic because I had nothing else to do. This is a pretty advanced trick. You project your intentions. And you receive the incoming intentions in turn. It forms a bridge for language to be seamlessly transferred through intent. It’s the same concept that the language potion works on. Nifty, isn’t it?”

  “Quite freaky as well,” Parth said, not knowing what else to feel about it. He hadn’t felt any transfer of intent. At the same time, neither had he felt anything when he was under the effect of the language potion. It only affected the user, after all. So this might be something similar.

  “My apologies, we’ve digressed once again. I’ll talk to you about magic later. Shall we get back to what we were talking about?” He asked. To which, all three of them nodded in unison. “So. What is the state of our world? What empire rules the land I was born in? How far have we come?”

  This was going to be long.

  Parth spent the next twenty minutes just talking about the state of the world. How the landscape had changed. How kingdoms had disappeared, and new kingdoms had arisen from the ashes. About modern governments, modern technology, and everything he could think of. Kwame interjected here and there, pitching in with whatever he could. At the end of it all, Vyasadatta’s expression did not change much. He was still listening to everything with rapt attention.

  “Anything else you want to know?”

  “I believe my curiosity is sated. As an ascetic, rishi, or whatever you want to call me, releasing myself from physical attachment was my life’s goal. Ironic, considering the fate I found myself in. But I believe that’s all I wanted to know. It does sadden me that this barbaric dungeon has kept its doors open for so long. I’d hoped that this would have stopped sometime in between.”

  Kwame couldn’t hold back his curiosity at last. So he began asking questions of his own. Questions that everyone wanted to know the answers to.

  “How did you get stuck like this? And how do you still have your artifact? We have seen your successor, Timothy. Or Timmy, as he likes calling himself. He has the Unbound Phantom. We saw it. But it’s still there around your neck. Did they manage to make a clone of it? What’s happening?”

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  “I suppose it’s a valid doubt, given that the inner workings of the artifact wouldn’t have been advertised. How do you think the Unbound Phantom gives us intangibility?”

  “It phases you through mass?” Parth ventured.

  “A plausible explanation, but that’s not it. As you might recall, we don’t have any partial tangibility. We have two states. We are ethereal, meaning we are intangible and can float. Or we are material, where we are bound to the world as we are. This, my predecessors all knew.

  “But there is an aspect to it that the other users of this artifact, their patrons, advisors, even the royal family itself, might not completely know. The full workings of it, unless Byron mentioned it anywhere in his edicts. Since I’ve lived for so long in this state of mine, and I’ve had nothing to do but mess around with magic, as one might say. I think I have a very educated guess on how it truly functions.”

  “And what does it do?” Moira asked.

  “According to the Tavans. As far as the Unbound Phantoms are concerned, our bodies are stored inside the same pocket dimension that our artifact is stored in. The pocket dimension that’s bound to our tattoos. So, upon activation, the state is just reversed. The artifact is out there in the world, displaying a facsimile of our form. While our true bodies are hidden inside the dimension. That’s how the toggle works, or so they say. But spending so long in this state, I could find no other explanation for why I was stuck like this.

  “To give you more context. During my time, the trial of fire was our last one. We’d already lost Chak in the previous trial. Which we had completed very late, by the way. So we were stuck in that watery hell. By the time we entered this level of the dungeon, the fourth trial was almost already over.

  “As I mentioned, it was the last trial. And so close to completion, the dungeon was pretty active. The only refuge we could find was in the corners. And to our grave misfortune, we got caught in this trap. Leandros, my generation’s Pygilist, fell to the accursed golems that you just faced.”

  Once again, chilling Parth, as he got the context behind the previous words of Vyasadatta. The lava golems were indeed the worst possible matchups for Pygilists.

  He took a deep breath, centering himself before he continued again. “And we didn’t really keep track of the time. So when the trials ended, the dungeon closed its borders and prepared to hibernate. At that moment, I was still here, inside this trap, in my ethereal form. I don’t know what happened after that, but one moment, I had access to my artifact, and the next, I didn’t. So here I was, a floating spirit without an artifact to tether me. I subconsciously sought the only magical source closest to me. And I got tethered to the mana crystals in this trap. Ever since, here I’ve been. Stuck for so long, unable to move from this chamber. The tethering was an unconscious act, but one that I’ve been suffering from for ages.”

  At the end of that explanation, Parth did not know what to say. He couldn’t imagine himself in such a position. Being stuck in a chamber like this would drive anyone insane. And this man over here was speaking with a lot of clarity. He did mention being on the brink of it and healing, though. But Parth felt that right after such a heavy topic, it was not right to immediately broach that.

  “Wait, that does not make sense. You said that the trial ended, and you immediately lost access to your artifact. But that doesn’t happen. Voyagers who have finished the trial still have access to their artifacts until they die,” Kwame exclaimed.

  It was at that moment that Moira brought up her screen again.

  “Here, it does say that your artifact was recovered alongside your body moments after the dungeon was closed. This is what I meant when I said that there was something weird with your information. Because this was a mystery that was never properly solved. They couldn’t figure out the cause of death either. All they mentioned was that your body was intact without any injury, but you were not alive. And the artifact had returned to Byron’s armory.”

  Vyasadatta nodded in triumph, as if he had achieved vindication for something that had been bothering him. “Indeed, that’s why I said that the knowledge was incomplete. My educated guess is most likely the truth about the inner workings of my estranged artifact.”

  “What was that educated guess?” Moira asked.

  “The Tavans were only partially correct about the artifact itself. Our bodies are stored inside the pocket dimension, true. But the artifact does not appear out here in the world. I believe it stays inside the pocket dimension alongside our bodies. What’s projected outside is our soul instead. Just our soul. Tethered to the artifact, which stays inside the pocket dimension. It perfectly explains how the injuries that we gain in our material state do not appear when we transform into our ethereal state. Whereas, when we return to our material state, the injuries are still there.”

  “Couldn’t it have been just a flawed hologram or something like that?” Kwame asked.

  “That doesn’t explain the lack of pain when we are in our ethereal state. Even if it does. How else do you explain my current situation? I believe what happened was that the moment the dungeon closed, the connection between my pocket dimension and my ethereal self was severed. So, my artifact and body returned to Byrone’s armory. A body without a soul. The tether, severed. And my soul, floating here listlessly, tethered itself to the closest source of magic it could find. Therefore, I’ve been stuck here with these mana crystals. I could always feel the connection to these crystals.

  “There’s a reason why I’m so confident about this theory. When Parth removed those crystals, I felt the tether coming undone. It’s holding on by a thread right now. The moment you remove all the crystals. I’ll be gone. And it’ll be a relief. It’s not like I expected to live long anyway. Even if the severing did not occur, the dungeon would’ve just hunted me down. Either way, voyagers stuck inside the dungeon after the stipulated time do not survive. None of them do. I see this half state of mine as more of a curse than anything...”

  “That’s a lot to take in, and I’m not sure if I can believe parts of it, even,” Moira said.

  “Why not? You know that magic comes from the soul, right? Did this Timothy of yours display any prowess in sensing magic?”

  “Uh, he couldn’t sense magic per se. But he sensed something. He said that he was able to distinguish voyagers very easily from other people because voyagers had a metaphysical weight to them,” Parth replied, remembering how Timmy struggled to explain what he had been sensing.

  Vyasadatta shook his head fondly at that. “He just didn’t have the context to understand what he was sensing. He was sensing your souls, as a soul himself. In that state, those who are deeply connected to their inner selves have an easy time sensing such intricacies. That’s why it’s not consistent across the board. Some Unbound Phantoms can do it, others cannot.”

  “So, when he meant that I was kind of fat in that metaphysical weight sense...” Parth trailed off.

  “He meant that your soul has a lot of weight to it. I sense it too. Not to mention the monstrous amount of mana you possess.”

  “How does that correlate? So how is one soul stronger than the others?” Parth asked.

  “Who said anything about the strength of the soul? Mana capacity correlates to the weight of the soul. And for ordinary people, the weight of their soul is pretty nebulous. It’s neither here nor there; we can’t ever say. Only those who attained enlightenment might know. But for voyagers, the process of binding oneself to artifacts does something to the soul. How else did you suddenly gain magic? I don’t know what exactly it does. But it does something. Maybe it expands one’s soul. Maybe it intrinsically grafts the magic to the soul. I can’t say. All I’ve seen is that the metaphysical weight does increase. Your soul is no longer ordinary. None of ours are. And once we gain that weight, we keep growing.”

  Yet again, more questions than answers. And Parth was tired of it. “That still doesn’t explain what I’ve seen.” At Vyasadatta’s questioning look, Parth continued. “I see visions of these green doppelgangers. My doppelganger has the exact same magic as I do. But he does not have the artifact. Other than that and our appearances, we look exactly the same. Our voices are similar. Our build is similar. Almost everything is. Heck, even the armband tattoos that I have right now look really similar to the ones that cover his entire body.

  “And it’s not just a figment of my imagination. Andrea saw a similar vision, and right after, her sync rate shot up. During the previous trap, when we removed all the crystals at the same time, for a brief moment, we all saw each other with green skin and black patterns. The Inspectacle classified it as a hallucination due to the mana pulse. But the artifact might be wrong.

  “I’ve seen this village before in my visions. We were in a cavern a little while ago. And while sleeping there, I saw a vision of the very same cave. My doppelganger guided his daughter through the tunnels deeper into the cave, leading to a volcano. I woke up, followed the path, and lo and behold, I saw the exact same thing that I saw in the vision. Before that, we didn’t even know that we had set camp inside a volcano. What do I make of that? If souls hold the answer, is that a past birth of mine or something?”

  Vyasadatta listened patiently, his brows were knit tight in confusion. “I’ve never heard any of that before. And I don’t believe anyone else during my time has either.”

  Parth nodded in acquaintance. It was the same thing their patrons and advisors had said.

  “It’s not just the visions. Even my artifact has been acting up of late. It threw a massive tantrum, forcing me to come to this specific spot. And when I reached here, it was radiating sheer anger. I don’t know what to make of it. I know that I’m my own person. My emotions are my own. And I know that I haven’t changed all that much except for natural growth that my circumstances caused. But I still don’t understand.”

  The sage was silent once again, deep in thought. He then asked, “Is there anything specific that triggers these visions?”

  “The negligible, nonsensical ones are random. But the deeper ones have followed near-death experiences. And in this level of the dungeon, after I woke up from almost getting torn to shreds, it has just been going off nonstop.”

  “I understand,” Vyasadatta said. He then closed his eyes and assumed a meditative posture midair.

  “Please give me a few minutes. Let me peruse through my other senses. Let me scry anything that would aid you. The exact concerns are something that I haven’t heard before. And I can’t promise you that I have all the answers. If at all, any. All I can do is seek.”

  The entire chamber was silent for several minutes. Nobody said anything. All waiting for the verdict. They were all fidgety, nervous. They’d come here hoping for some answers. They got some. But once again, they got more questions than they bargained for.

  Vyasadatta finally opened his eyes. “As I mentioned, my state as a soul allows me to sense others. And when alive, I was a mana sensor as well. Upon death, that quality of mine has increased by several magnitudes. These are the two aspects I can observe.

  “As you can see, even as a bound soul without my artifact. A shade of the Unbound Phantom still rests upon my neck. That doesn’t mean that the artifact is here. Nor does it mean that I’m connected to it anymore. But it has left an imprint on me. That imprint has stayed. That’s why my soul still carries it. Artifacts are bound by soul magic.

  “But that doesn’t mean that they have emotions of their own. What you’re likely feeling is just your own subconscious emotions reflected through the gauntlets. Byrone, for all his brilliance, couldn’t really be a master of everything, could he? A master of precognition, sure. A great emperor, most assuredly. But a peerless artificer who mastered the magics of each one of these artifacts? Each branch, which would take several lifetimes to master.

  Vyasadatta shook his head at the impossibility of it all and continued, “It’s possible that he had help. Maybe he had blueprints. Or maybe he just stole it. Who knows? But I can say for sure that it’s not your artifact that’s bringing out these feelings. If it had a soul of its own, I would have sensed it. Nor do these things influence their owners deeply in ways apart from the magic itself. Because, as tethered souls, the Unbound Phantoms would have felt it more than the others. And even now, the metaphysical weight that I sense in you is of your own soul, no matter how magnified it is. I don’t see any other Soul.

  “So, either the feelings are artificially planted into your gauntlet by its maker. Feelings or a facsimile of them. Byrone is supposed to be some all-encompassing precog, after all. Maybe he foresaw a reason for making your artifact behave in such a manner. And I do believe that these feelings have got to do with the visions themselves. You did mention that your gauntlets have been acting up too much only after these visions, right?”

  Parth didn’t reply immediately. He took Vyasadatta’s words in, allowing them to rattle around his mind. Some of it made sense. Some, he didn’t buy. But the assurance that his soul was his own lifted an unknown weight off his shoulders.

  Once he had his thoughts in order, he replied, “Well, there was this one time, before the trials even. And it was not just me, it was Andrea as well. Her artifact acted up, too. We don’t know what that was about. But yeah, other than that. Until I came to this specific floor of the dungeon. The artifact was a hundred percent compliant.”

  “Then your answer lies in the visions. If the others hadn’t seen their own visions, no matter how brief, I would have said that the visions were an innate part of yourself. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. I’d wager that these were indeed planted inside the artifacts by their makers. Byrone, or otherwise. Maybe you’re seeing the past. We don’t know. We can only wait for the visions to come to you. Maybe this doppelganger is not really a doppelganger. You just perceive him as such because you are seeing through his lens.”

  Great, ten more questions in return for one answer. But he couldn’t fault the old man. He had indeed been helpful. “So, what do we do then? Just sit and wait?”

  “We can’t rush fate. Nor do we have the know-how to diagnose this even further. But I can better equip you. How long do all of you have before you need to head to the next level?”

  Moira and Kwame were silent all this time, hoping to get some answers to the questions that had been plaguing them. Plaguing their captain, most of all.

  “We have a little more than a week and a half before our allies return to the dungeon. We’ll need to meet with them for supplies. Then we’ll need to head to the next level,” Parth said.

  Vyasadatta ran his hand through his beard, deep in thought. After a few seconds, it seemed like he came to a decision, “Then spend that time here. I can’t promise to help you attain enlightenment overnight. For I myself haven’t attained it after so many years. Maybe I have. I wouldn’t know until I finally pass on. But I can promise you that I can teach you how to truly use mana. Not just superficially, but intrinsically. If you would have me as your teacher.”

  The three of them were silent. They looked at each other, a bit hesitant. They didn’t have anything better to do. They wouldn’t be embarking on a head start anyway, because they needed to stick close to the gates to get the supplies from their allies.

  “I thought you were ready to move on. This has been a curse for you, right? Why would you want to stay even a minute longer?” Kwame asked.

  “I’ve been patient for so long. What’s a few more days? Consider this my gracious gift to you for freeing me from this curse. Stay here a few days, train with me. And then once you’re ready to depart, bid me farewell from this mortal coil.”

  “Is it safe to stay inside this chamber, though?” Moira asked this time.

  “Quite safe indeed. Monsters do not venture inside this chamber. I’ve heard all sorts of ruckus when monsters fought the golems outside. But they’ve never ventured inside. Even the golems don’t come inside this chamber. It’s as if the dungeon masks it. So it’ll be the best hiding spot for you, as long as these final couple of crystals remain.”

  “Are you really sure about this?” Parth asked.

  “I am, children. Don’t worry about me.”

  Parth looked at his teammates again, and they both nodded in confirmation, “Then we’re extremely grateful for the offer. We’ll be under your guidance, teacher.”

  “That’s more like it. I suppose you’ll be tired. Take rest today. We’ll start early tomorrow morning.”