Jack stood on the shore of Lake Valhalla holding a small wooden construct that contained the cremated remains of Fran, his adoptive mother. As he held the small wooden container, memories of his life before and with Fran flowed through his mind.
His parents, both orphans, had died in a car crash when he was ten, killed by a drunk driver. Having no next of kin, he had found himself in the foster care system. Still reeling from the loss of his parents, he had found himself in a strict religious foster household. His parents had been atheists and tended towards a consequentialism model of morality. Jack was free to disagree with them, but they expected rigorous and respectful discourse. His new "family" did not appreciate his "attitude" and things came to a head when he flat out refused to kneel and pray. His next "home" wasn't any better. It was sheer luck that his third placement was with Fran and Jacob. Their practical, no-nonsense worldview was similar to that of his birth parents and provided him with the sense of familiarity, of family, he had thought lost. By the time they adopted him, he was already thinking of them as his second parents.
Disaster had struck his life a second time when Jacob, his adoptive father, had died in a car crash while delivering parts for his employer, a national auto-parts supplier. At first, the investigators had thought Jacob had just fallen asleep at the wheel. But when the toxicology report came back, showing signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, they realized he had succumbed to exhaust fumes. Fran, both distraught and enraged, had sued Jacob's employer. Jacob had complained about the exhaust fumes many times, but the company had ignored his complaints. Fran had won the legal battle and collected a large settlement, but the struggle had left her emotionally exhausted. Throughout the ordeal, Jack had tried to help as much as he could, doing all the household chores, but Fran insisted he focus on studying and maintaining his grades.
Disaster struck a third time when Fran was diagnosed with cancer. She had been suffering minor symptoms, like weakness, headaches, and nausea, that they had assumed were caused by the stress of the legal battle against Jacob's neglectful employer. But when the symptoms didn't abate after their victory, the doctors were forced to re-assess her condition. And, by the time they diagnosed her with cancer, it had reached stage 4 and her prognosis was bleak.
Throughout her battle, she had remained firm in her stance that Jack should stay focused on his academic future. She had been very pragmatic in her outlook, telling him, "No amount of wishful thinking is going to change the outcome. I will die. The best we can hope for is that I last a little longer. I will be happy if I live long enough to see you graduate with honors."
In the end, she got her wish and attended Jack's graduation ceremony, but died a week later. Her final wish was to be cremated and her ashes scatter on Lake Valhalla. She was a fighter, and it seemed fitting that her final resting place be Valhalla.
When it became clear that the cancer would take her, Fran began planning how she wanted to go, and how she wanted her remains handled. She discussed her plans with Jack, telling him that helping her carry out her plans would help him process his loss and make it easier for him to move on.
When she mentioned she wanted him to spread her ashes on Lake Valhalla, a favorite hiking destination for the three of them when Jacob had been alive, he reminded her of the scene from a movie where two men try to spread someone's ashes in the ocean but wound up with ash in their face because of a sudden change in the wind direction. Fran had joked, "What? Don't want to take a piece of me with you?"
The container Jack held was their solution. It was constructed of many wooden segments and held together with water soluble, biodegradable tape. He'd wound some of the tape into a rope and sling so he could throw the container out into the center of the lake. And since he knew he would only get one chance to do it right, he had practiced with a replica container until he could confidently launch the replica in the right direction and at the right distance.
With some reluctance, he grasped the wood handle and lifted it until the container was suspended from the end of the three foot long tape rope. Then he started to spin it, slowly at first, then building speed, tilting the angle till the plane of rotation made a forty-five degree angle with the ground, then at just the right time, released.
As the container arched out over the lake, he felt an almost unbearable pressure in his chest, and part of him screamed to jump in the water and catch the container before it landed. But with finality, the container dropped into the water with a splash, sending ripples across the lake.
His chest aching, he watched as the container broke apart into eight pieces, and Fran's ashes spilled out around them and sank into the water. The pieces, almost perfectly equidistant, drifted directly away from the center of impact, like tiny funeral barges. It was everything Fran had hoped for, and as he watched, he felt the ache in his chest subside.
Standing at the water's edge, he watched the little pieces of wood as they drifted across the surface of the lake, his mind drifting with them. For a time, memories of his time with Jacob and Fran also drifted across the surface of his mind, but eventually, his desire to stay was overcome by his need to complete the return hike before sunset. So, with a hollow lightness, he turned and began his trek back to his car parked at the trailhead.
The trail leveled off somewhat as he finished the climb out of the lake valley and began the trek across the mountainside. This stretch of trail lasted a little over one mile and gave a pleasant view of the valley below and the mountains on the other side. It was late afternoon and the northeasterly direction of the trail meant the sun was mostly at his back.
He was not looking forward to what came next. He and Fran had talked about and planned what he should do when she passed, and she had insisted that he donate all of her and Jacob's clothes and other personal effects. "Keep one or two mementos to remember us if you must, but get rid of the rest," she had said. "Don't let our old possessions anchor you to the past." They had already gone through Jacob's belongings and also packed up most of Frans belonging as well. She had insisted that doing so while she was still alive would save him the trouble once she was dead. Still, there were a few things left to go through, and he wasn't looking forward to it. But, he had to admit to himself, she was right that it would have been much worse for him if they had left everything until after her death.
About half a mile before the downslope section of the tail began, was a short section of trail that was eroded and posed some difficulty traversing. There were rhododendron bushes on the left and a steep decline on the right, and nothing to walk on but roots and bent rhododendron branches. Jack had just started navigating this section, clinging to rhododendron branches with both hands while side stepping from root to root, when his vision went black.
He instinctively clenched his hands tighter, only to discover he could feel … nothing. Not only could he not feel the rhododendron he had been clinging to, he couldn't feel his hands, his feet, or any other part of his body. When he tried to take a breath to say, "what the fuck?", he found there were no lungs to expand and no air to inhale. He was bodyless, floating in a void of nothingness.
Once the initial shock of finding himself bodyless in a void of nothingness wore off, he found that he was calm. For some reason he found the void soothing, peaceful.
Am I dead? He wondered. Is this the start of my afterlife? As he contemplated the possibility that he had died, he wondered what would happen next. Was he awaiting judgement? Was he stuck in limbo? Was he about to be isekai'ed? Since he didn't have lungs or a mouth to yell, he tried mentally yelling into the void.
HELLO? ANYONE? GOD? TRUCK-KUN?
Nothing.
So, he waited. At first he thought about the future he had planned — go to college, finally get laid, maybe go into cancer research. He honestly wasn't certain what he wanted to do beyond college. Science interested him, and he thought he might want to go into research, but he also liked the idea of getting involved in the space industry, maybe go into space, or at least work on something that gets sent into space.
His thoughts eventually quieted, and he found himself just being. But as his mind drifted, he felt like he was expanding, becoming, not bigger but, somehow more. More what, he didn't know. It was a strange, but oddly pleasant, sensation. With no way to track the passage of time, he did not know if it had been minutes, hours, days, years, or centuries, but eventually his quiet contemplation was disturbed by a series of message in glowing gold text appearing. They were not so much visual messages as they were messages inserted directly into his mind, and the messages felt gold and glowy.
[Synchronization Initiated]
[WARNING: Soul strength below threshold]
[Synchronization Paused]
[Initiating emergency soul enhancement]
[Soul strength has reached minimum threshold]
[Synchronization Resumed]
What? Soul strength? Was this a System, like in the novels he'd read? The first few messages, the ones prior to [Soul strength has reached minimum threshold], felt distorted, like hearing voices under water or trying to read a sign through a heavy rainstorm. It also felt like they were old, like they had been generated a while ago, but he was only just now receiving them. He assumed this was because of his soul's weakness, preventing him from properly receiving them until it grew strong enough. This also brought up the worrying possibility that souls actually existed. Something he had discounted till now. Then, two more messages interrupted his thoughts.
[Synchronization Complete]
[Genesis Heart Installation Complete]
Genesis Heart? Before he could think further on the origin and meaning of the messages, his world exploded in light and pain.
He felt pain in his back, hips, his left elbow, his right wrist, and his left foot all throbbed in pain. The back of his head was also aching. His body probably went slack when the System started installing and his head was probably the first thing he hit as he fell backwards down the slope.
He blinked a few times, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, then he tried to move and realized he was half embedded in a rhododendron and through the branches he could see empty air, then trees in the distance. He was at the edge of a steep drop off. The rhododendron had probably saved his life. It was the circle of life. One rhododendron tries to kill you, the other rhododendron saves you.
After taking a minute to assess himself, he slowly rolled to his right and extricated himself from the rhododendron. As he rolled onto his back, the mountainside came into view. Fuck. That is one steep climb.
He wasn't sure how much time had passed, but the shadows were longer and he did not want to try hiking back to his car in the dark. So immediately he rolled onto his hands and knees and started the arduous crawl back up to the trail. He could contemplate what happened once he was back on the trail.
After what felt like forever, he finally made it back up to the trail and past the rhododendron that had nearly been his demise. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the time. 6:42pm. It looked like he had lost about 2 hours and, being late August, meant the sun would set around 7:30pm. He had about one and a half hours before it would be too dark to see without a flashlight.
He looked at the battery charge indicator on his phone. 72%. Hopefully, that would be enough. The flashlight feature on his phone was power hungry, and he wasn't sure how long it would last.
He was worried that his left ankle was sprained but as a took his first few tentative steps down the trail he realized it wasn't sprained. Instead, he had probably smacked it against a rock or tree trunk as he had tumbled down the slope like a rag doll. The pain of each step eventually faded into a dull throb as his attention was consumed with making it safely back to his car.
The sky, visible through the trees, was edging into purple when he reached the fork in the trail and turned right to head down to the tail head. And, about half-way down, he finally relented and turned on his phone flashlight.
It was with some relief that he stepped out onto the hard packed gravel road and made the short walk back to the trailhead parking area. He panned the light from his phone across the lot and saw that there were two other cars in the lot besides his gray Nissan Sentra. They probably belonged to people who were camped at Lake Janus, or were hiking part of the Pacific Crest Trail.
Throughout his trek back to his car, his focus had been on putting one foot in front of the other and hadn't given himself time to consider what had happened. But, as he slowly lowered himself into the seat of his car, his attention turned to what had happened. Did he really get a System? Or did he suffer some kind of head trauma induced hallucination? He didn't have any memory of falling down the slope so he wasn't sure if it was the System installation that had caused him to lose his grip on the rhododendron and fall, or if he had just slipped and the head trauma had erased his memory of the fall. And, after the [Genesis Heart Installation Complete] message, there had been nothing, no indication that he had a System.
In many LitRPG novels, the System only responded to certain words or gestures. Feeling embarrassed, even though he was alone in his car and there was probably no one for miles, he said, out loud, "Status".
Nothing.
"System Activate."
Nothing.
"Help, Tutorial, Information, Abracadabra, Shazam, Talk to me damn it!"
Nothing, Nothing, Nothing.
No response.
Was it all just a hallucination? He'd checked the back of his head and there was no blood. He had miraculously avoided getting cut or impaled during his tumble down the slope. And no blood implied that he didn't hit his head very hard. In fact, the earlier throbbing had already reduced to a dull ache. What had really happened? He didn't remember reading any novels that involved something named Genesis Heart, so he wasn't sure why he would hallucinate about one.
Why did systems need verbal interfaces, anyway? Why not have an intuitive mental connection directly to the System. Remembering the sensation he had when he'd first "blacked out". He focused on what it felt like before the messages appeared. As soon as he tried again to feel that calm floating in nothingness sensation, his vision went black and he, again, found himself floating in nothingness.
Does this prove I'm not suffering from brain trauma? He wondered. Thinking about returning to reality, his vision returned, and he found himself back in his car. Then he focused on the nothingness and again found himself back in the calm nothingness. He exited, then re-entered the nothingness. Then again. As he repeatedly transitioned into and out of the nothingness, he found that the nothingness gained tangibility in his mind. Like it was a separate space, he could enter and leave. When he entered the nothingness for the seventh time, a message appeared in his mind with the same sense of golden glowyness.
[Achievement: Solidified connection to Soul Space]
[Reward: White Room]
Before his mind fully registered the new messages, the nothingness was replaced by a plain white room, and he could again sense his body. The floor was slightly darker than the walls and the ceiling glowed a soft white light. And it was empty except for him.