"Mortal, do you understand what drives your brethren to the flames like moths?"
The being he had come to know as God thundered through his mind. Still, it awed him that words could be spoken so.
For fourteen years, the outside world was a silent set of paintings he saw but could not experience.
People moved their lips in some form of communication he yearned for, but the slug in his throat denied it. Instruments, he had come to know them as, played and plucked while people swayed to their tunes, yet he could not understand it. Not in the way they did.
The elders taught him to read and write. That was his only connection—the only thread that gave him a chance to glimpse the wonders the world offered. But here, he heard sound.
"What do you mean?" he replied in the form of flickering images of words in his mind.
He had not learned how to form sound in his mind yet. As much as he wanted to, he did not even comprehend sound itself, so he settled for the method he knew best: words, scripts, and images.
"Treasure. Power. Lust. And if you have something that contains these three things..." God said.
Shen rose from his seated position. Most of the wounds he had experienced had healed more than a week ago. His progress on the chant had reached a vital stage. He was missing something, though he did not know what.
The mausoleum felt as lonely as it always did. The blue flickering flame and the God that often lay in the coffin made it all a bit better. He had come to accept his state. So far, he had not ventured further into the mausoleum; the corner next to the coffin sufficed for the most part.
"We will raise a Shrine above the ground. A beacon of hope for your fellow mortals to flee to," God spoke in a thundering voice that quaked his insides. "When they come seeking treasure... I will show them the immensity of Heaven and Earth."
Shen barely comprehended what was happening, nor did he know why he was receiving this information. It all seemed like secrets he should not be privy to. Then again, who was he to question the deity's choices?
Still, Shen mustered the courage to pose a question.
At first, he tried imitating the vocal resonance he gained whenever God spoke, but he failed miserably. All his attempts turned into thick strokes of a brush, printing words in the void of his consciousness.
"Why are you telling me this, God?"
"God is not my name. Call me Lin Wu, a Silent Sovereign," Lin Wu said. "I tell you because you are the rock on which I will re-establish my divine kingdom. I will be the ebb to your flow. I will give you kingdoms and priests. Power will not be something special to you... merely a consequence of your status."
Excitement flooded him. For the first time, someone bothered to put him on a pedestal and see value in his existence.
Clenching his fists until his knuckles turned whiter than a sheet of parchment, he made a silent vow.
"Look at your palms. Do you see their jade-like lustre? That is a sign that the seed of divinity has been planted successfully," Lin Wu said. "Do not beguile your current state. Your silence, while torturous to an average mortal... you are something else entirely. Artificial Divinity. A vessel prepared for me by something you will never comprehend, even at the height of your power. But it miscalculated. I care not for vessels. I care for priests."
Shen's hands had a dull green glow that stood proud amidst the deepening blue of the mausoleum flames. He had not noticed earlier, but now that he did, he missed the sun's unmistakable presence that offered warmth beyond the skin. It had always accompanied him through dawn and dusk.
Artificial Divinity? What did that mean? He stared at his hands and ogled the thick veins that curled at his wrists.
"Artificial Divinity merely means you were hollowed. Your soul fractured. Your sense of being splintered. Had I needed to, I could seep through those cracks and settle at the hollow point of your being," Lin Wu stated.
Maybe it was too much honesty. Through the supernatural touch of comprehension he gained, he understood what Lin Wu said. It terrified him. It made his fingers lock and his muscles clamp. What made it all the more eerie was the lack of a filter in Lin Wu's speech. He stated things with terrifying clarity, as if he were casually sipping a cup of coffee.
"Why tell me this?"
"I see. Mortals have a habit of hiding things. Whether you know or do not know matters less to me. It will not change, nor does it affect whatever plans I have," Lin Wu answered again with that same pervasive clarity. "What part of the scripture I gave you ails you?"
Shen understood that the topic had begun to bore Lin Wu. He had been given favor, so he chose not to anger the deity by lingering on it. Taking the hint, he gathered his experiences with the scripture.
"I find it impossible to comprehend... Severing the Body from the world."
Silence settled between them like dust for a while. Then he heard the coffin lid slide aside until it hit the ground with a deep thud that vibrated the earth beneath him.
Lin Wu emerged from the coffin, sat on one of its stone walls, and gazed at him. Shen could not help but catch a glimpse of the being's hair. It did not remain white; he saw a subtle strand of fire-red dangling at the edge of the strands on the left.
Immediately, he tore his gaze away toward a mural.
"To sever the world from the body is to reach a state beyond nirvana or mahayana," Lin Wu's voice sounded closer, even though the deity's physical displacement remained zero.
Shen felt himself sink an inch into the ground. Looking down, he saw that wasn't actually the case.
Rather, Lin Wu's weight was rewriting his senses in a manner that made the sensation true. For a moment, he felt the cement ground splinter into his bare feet. Another true illusion.
"The world has countless tethers it uses to weigh a being down. Were you truly mortal, you would need to ascend the realms like any other before being given a chance to comprehend it in mind, spirit, and essence," Lin Wu said. "The first are the most obvious. Emotions. You will have to sever each emotion, one by one. There are seven desires, and therefore seven stages to master this scripture."
Shen listened. He finally found where he went wrong. He had assumed severing himself meant reaching a state where he simply ignored the world. That was not the case. Lin Wu flicked a finger his way.
The mausoleum swirled while his perception remained anchored. Colors merged. Gray walls blended with blue flames into a thick, whirling paste. Nausea settled in. A hot sensation arrested a tiny vein in one of the chambers of his heart. His breath hitched. Red plumes of smoke sprayed from his lips as a migraine pierced his brain.
A moment later, everything stilled like a lake.
A faint red thread shot from his chest and pierced through the ceiling. As it extended outward, flurries of memories, fists slamming into him, fluttered through his mind.
"I sense a deep rage in you. Nurture it. Then, sacrifice it to the self. For one cannot sever what one has not experienced. Each aspect of rage and wrath you come to understand brings you closer to the benefits you seek."
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__Outside the Forbidden Grounds__
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Lui Gang stalked a wild elk through the streams of Clawed Finger Forest. Countless times it had evaded his arrow by a hair's breadth. The problem wasn't the arrows or the elk. It lay with him.
The way Shen's life ended sat on his chest like a heavy stone. No one at home confronted him about it, though rumors that Mo Lin had been punished for bullying reached him. It was all he needed to know.
A few days prior he had hoped to visit, but the Mo Clan doors were closed to all outsiders. Denying him entry said more than it should have.
Now, he knew that his parents knew, yet they allowed the sensation to hang in the air. Even now, his breathing was off. His fingers twitched, veering the course of his arrows.
The elk taunted him from the distance, half-hidden behind an ancient tree with a thick trunk. It was one among a series of crooked trees whose branches twisted into each other, forming an eerie forest of "clawed fingers."
A tremor shook the ground beneath him. He lost his balance. Then, silence caught him—it wasn't an expression, but a reality that carved itself into his senses. From afar, a bright purple light erupted. With it, a wave of thick Qi flooded in all directions.
It swept him, flinging him into the trees. It blew the air from his lungs and weakened his core.
Slamming into the ground, he bolted toward the village.
On his way, he saw it. His ears found it hard to trace any activity or sound. His sense of balance had been replaced by a sensation he could not grasp. He didn't stop; channeling blood Qi to the soles of his feet, he shot through the forest.
Behind him, a massive temple towered over the forest. Haunting skulls hung on the eaves, jingling with bone-crunching sounds.
Damned be his enhanced sight that caught pieces of decaying flesh along the temple's spine and fresh blood dripping down the coarse exterior.
He didn't feel fear. It propelled him faster than he had ever run.
The Clan needed to know.