< Tao's Perspective: Noise of 1985 >
Locations: The Levant --> Damascus --> Aleppo
Stepping off the island onto the continent wasn't a change in geography. It was a change in reality - and reality, in 1985, was aggressively unpleasant.
The dry, exhaust-choked wind of the Syrian desert immediately replaced the pristine breezes of our sanctuary, carrying the distant, mechanical groan of military convoys moving across fractured borders.
Cold War dread vibrated in every human mind like a frequency no one had chosen and no one could turn off. For a psionic consciousness, even a deliberately muffled one, it had texture. The kind that left marks.
Worse was what moved beneath it: the Astral Plane in this era was a storm, mirroring the human condition the way a tide mirrors the moon, each feeding the worst of the other. I could feel the Shadow King gnawing at the edges of collective consciousness with the lazy confidence of something that had never been interrupted.
Humans were busy fretting about nuclear winter while being quietly harvested by an entity they didn't even have a name for.
I filed that under not my problem and kept walking.
Our boots crunched against the ancient, sun-baked cobblestones of the souk, moving past vendors selling brass lamps and counterfeit Levi's.
"The spiritual energy here is - " Ziyun trailed off, genuinely struggling for language.
"There isn't any," I finished for her.
"And the air tastes like oil," Ning added, pressing her thumb to her forefinger to test the greasy film, then brushing a layer of fine, gritty dust from her silk sleeve.
"Don't complain,"
They'd insisted on the full experience - no flying, no teleporting, no manifest palaces for sleeping. That commitment lasted approximately one day.
< Ziyun's Perspective : Damascus - the caravanserai >
The roadside inn in Damascus was not bad by local standards. By ours, it was a study in sustained offense. It smelled of camel and old agreements and something that had dried in a corner and been forgotten there.
The peeling plaster walls radiated the day's trapped heat, and the slow, rhythmic thump of a 'ceiling fan' as they would call it, did nothing but push the stale air in circles.
Ning, my sister solved it by floating a precise millimeter above the mattress in a trance that looked convincingly like sleep. I spent ten minutes weaving a cleaning talisman through the room until air suddenly smelled of ozone and lotus.
Whether it would have worked or not is not wasn't any concern, but it will give me a peace of mind - thought so until I felt someone rewarded me with the effect after ten minutes of seeing my effort. Tao, and even us turned off our divine defenses, but he even slept on the actual lumpy mattress.
He does things like that - chooses discomfort the way a cultivator would choose a difficult technique and went through with it. I've stopped questioning it.
Morning brought cardamom tea in chipped glass cups. To me, it was a poison,....no what do you call it here, Oh yes.. Chemical assault dressed as hospitality.
It was pitch-black and thick with coarse sugar, leaving a grainy residue at the bottom.
But there was a laborer two tables over who took his first sip and his whole face changed - that one small, genuine moment of sweetness in whatever his day actually was.
Tao watched it lazily lost in some thought. He paid for everything with local currency he'd materialized from a dimensional void.
The worn Syrian pound notes he left behind felt damp and papery, perfectly mimicking the grime of the local economy - meaning he 'liberated' it, from somewhere only he knows.
Ain't he a little thief? Anyway, it was his only authenticity compromise that actually worked so effectively during our travel.
The problem was us. We were too symmetrical. Too tall, too healthy, too composed. We looked like statues, prince and princesses charming emerged from wonderland and that had recently decided to try walking.
People couldn't place our ethnicity and it disturbed them more than it bothered us. Our accents shifted when we spoke, sliding place to place like water refusing to hold a shape.
We moved through the markets like royalty in bad disguise, buying trinkets we didn't need with gold coins that made vendors' eyes go wide.
We passed stalls heaped with fire-roasted mountain nuts called pistachios, their split golden shells exposing jade-colored flesh, beside great piles of astringent rust-red spice, and the sharp, loamy reek of dark-cured herbal soap-bricks ~ all of it overshadowed by large weathered stone arches .
It was totally different feeling that when my younger self went with servants and friends in the street of glory city.
***
Well all of us have a limited form of telepathy in one way or the other. It wasn't that difficult to figure out from mutant psionic powers. And we can hear the thoughts and sometimes it is too much to pretend to be normal.
We deployed cognitive filters against the constant harassment - remarks about skin, clothing, modesty, morality, religion for cultivators like us, ... the specific hostility reserved for people who seem to have something others don't.
Then I almost healed a beggar and Tao caught my wrist.
"Look closer," he said.
Not an instruction > a correction. I used my awareness properly this time, traced the causal threads. Saw the local gang. Saw what happened to able-bodied men in this district. The wound was the old man's shield. Healing him completely meant taking it away.
"Ease the suffering. We're tourists, not saviors. Not here." ~ He flicked a coin into the bowl and kept walking.
I didn't like it. None of us did.
But righteousness imported from a different world doesn't seem to automatically fit the moral architecture of this one.
The genuine moments kept finding us anyway. Men offered tea they couldn't afford, smiling through their own exhaustion. A poor family shared a meal with no expectation of return.
A child pressed a handcrafted trinket into Yuyin's hands and ran before she could respond. I was a little jealous but how to complain, Tao gave her empathic control.... Moreover I feel I have an overbearing unapproachable aura in this new form. It could have been with me...if I were my past self.
Xiao Ning crouched for a group of children following us through a market, opened her palms, and let blue-white light crackle between her fingers like a tame storm. They screamed with delight and scattered. Well some indeed called her freak, but hey aren't we ones anyway.
We gave blessings where we felt too pitiful to even look - small, quiet ones that left no visible signature. We also saw the rot: people bound to beds for lack of basic medicine, religion weaponized as control, a priest selling seats in heaven to people who only wanted bread. Power doesn't change people. It just removes the reasons they had to pretend otherwise.
"When left unchecked," Tao once told, watching a local official shake down a shopkeeper with the practiced ease of long habit, "they become remarkably consistent in choosing wrong. Power doesn't change people. It just removes the reasons they had to pretend otherwise."
Are'nt we also same? I thought in my mind.
< Yuyin's Perspective: Aleppo --> Amazon Basin >
"It is very annoying. My world is very colorful in emotions. But too much feel disgusting to be around, like sweat sticking to mortal skin. And I mostly switch back to my spirit to gain absolute stop to the mutant ability. Switch it off for better."
In Aleppo, a drunk soldier decided to assert himself. He saw three us, different women and one man who looked too unbothered - and to certain kinds of men, unbothered reads as invitation.
He reached for Ziyun's sleeve. The malicious intent was visible to all of us before his hand moved. I didn't need to extend my ability, it was practically oozing out of his body.
He was moments away from freezing to death. But someone decided to be lenient.
The surroundings quieted, the way air does before something breaks. I got a feeling even thoughts got stretched. Cheap blended Scotch was about to become ice shards.
He really made her too powerful isn't he? And I am left to become radar that picks these nuisances everywhere we go. Well I can sense him more, he just haven't realized the vulnerabilities he imposed on himself and senses he gifted me.
"Yuyin. Don't kill him." I heard master calling me.
Tao didn't look up from the map. Is it a task for me because Ziyun will make this place an arctic continent if she let loose? I could see that he expected it sometime in our journey but not so soon; that I can feel such a defeated emotion from underneath his spirit.
I followed his instructions. Didn't kill him. My gaze met that man. His lungs stopped breathing while he was awake. Left standing in the middle of the silent crowd unaware.
He hit the pavement like a dropped safe, cracking it, when I felt he was loosing it. Then lay there gasping, trying to reconcile what his body had just experienced with no explanation attached to it.
Time, or senses...I can't feel the difference...returned soon after.
Conversation continued. No one seemed bothered. "He almost touched my sleeve," Ziyun said, dusting the spot off.
"Proportional," Tao agreed eyeing me, stepping over him. "Mostly."
***
No being completely sealing our senses shut from then on.
The harmful ones kept meeting coincidences after that. A misstep at the wrong moment. A sudden gust. A power cut timed with uncomfortable precision. We preferred ambiguity.
Tao lead us to believe that human systems heal better when they can read outcomes as bad luck rather than intervention. The paperwork of being obvious gods is more trouble than it's worth.
We traveled south and west through the place named Levant by land, by ferry, by whatever method preserved nuance that speed erased.
The rusty iron hull groaned against the swells, the salty night air thick with the smell of engine grease and deep-sea brine.
On the deck of ferry crossing the Pacific, Tao watched the moon rise over the water and suddenly said,
"It is not black and white. It is a messy, gray soup. And the soup has a flavor."
I said it tasted like diesel, which the smoky ship seem to rely on. He smiled and called it authentic. We moved on.
***
Mostly it was nice. People minding their business. We are doing our.
Anyone who formed intentions toward us found their plans unraveling through a remarkable series of inconvenient coincidences. Guns jammed. Shoelaces tied themselves together.
It seems, mortal world is too chaotic.
But the world bent just enough to keep us comfortable without announcing why.
***
The forest of Amazon swallowed us after that. "Too many bugs," Ning complained, swatting a flying blood sucking insect called mosquito by locals, that shattered against her passive body shield.
The canopy was drowning in life - emerald and thick and indifferent to us. The air turned into a heavy, suffocating blanket of moisture, smelling intensely of rich, rotting loam and bruised orchids.
We ate with a Yanomami family who seasoned their meat with silence and offered us the best hammock without being asked.
Two weeks later, we watched a different tribe roast a captured poacher over a slow fire and argue about whether the liver belonged to the shaman or the widow.
Tao let it happen and even forbade us from interfering with great conviction of his own. At-least the man died already, why waste their food source in name of human morality.They monkeys too. I don't know whether he was joking or not. But I felt him amused.
According to him, shamanism here actually had some mystical connection to some demon. But more than that, he said it was pointless to do anything.
I didn't understand. I feel no emotions from him afterwards. Is his heart so cold? I anchored myself to him to feel safe and it is comfortable. Most bliss I found but sometimes it is contrasting to the reality around.
In his own words, some events are necessary for narrative to unfold. We are just in a story book. Anyway, I didn't get it.
" Humanity is a wide river. Sometimes it runs clear. Sometimes it carries bodies."