Aerien’s POV

 

“It is really quite simple,” Gaerien continues after declaring my manifestation of the old man as the source of the problem, “Of the seven primary chakaras, the Sahasrara differs the most in terms of whether it is masculine or feminine energy being passed through a person’s system. In case you were not aware, they are actually very different.”

 

“Hmm… that makes sense.” I say as my old man self.

 

“Wait! So, what are we supposed to do!? I don’t want the old man to go away!” My younger self protests.

 

“Oh no. Well, that WOULD probably solve the problem, but getting rid of him would be a very bad thing in the long run, so we really shouldn’t do that.” Gaerien responds to my younger self, giving me a light pat on the head. I begin to feel a little better after hearing that. The distress my younger self was feeling had even reverberated across our subconscious link and was getting my older self anxious at the idea. My older self hadn’t even entertained such thoughts, but thus is the nature of our existence now. It was no wonder it would disrupt our heaven’s chakara to this extent.

 

Actually, now that I looked at this entire space that was in disarray, it was clear this torn up and desolate looking place was the result of some kind of major imbalance. From what I had heard about the chakara, it was incredibly similar to spinal alignment in chyropracty. If just one part was a little out of alignment, it caused problems through the entire system. Surely the imbalance created in one of the major chakara by having my masculine and feminine minds competing with each other would be the spiritual equivalent of having spina-bifida, the spine being so bad that the cord actually protrudes out from the vertebrae.

 

I had thought the two of us were getting along and sharing this space rather well, but it seems even us being fairly accepting of each other was not enough to settle this issue.

 

“Well then, I will repeat the question. How do we solve this problem?” My previous life self asks the same question as my younger self had previously. However, from my perspective, there is little difference in whether she or he is the one to say it. Surely the mere fact that I think of myself as both of them at the same time has got to have a lot to do with why things are so messed up in here.

 

“Well, there are two good solutions to this. First, you have to decide whether you want to be male or female in the long term.” Gaerien says, looking toward my older self again. “Whichever you decide will determine what path we take from here.”

 

“Well, I don’t exactly mind the idea of being female” I say. “I mean, I already am anyway, right?”

 

“Hmm… well, that’s the easier of the two possible solutions then.” Gaerien says. “You said before that adaptability is a large part of your cultivations’ principles. You already seem pretty at peace with the idea too. All you have to do is reform your current image of your old world self into a woman. Once you do that, things ought to start settling down in here.”

 

“But wait! What if he wants to be a boy!?” My younger self asks. “I like him being like my grandpa!”

 

“That’s a far harder method.” Gaerien tells me. “You would have to separate your chakaras and make an entire second chakara system. Right now, you are two minds that are not even fully separate from each other, and you are even sharing the same spirit body. If you each have your own chakara system, you will also each have your own Sahasrara, each conforming to either masculine or feminine energy independently.”

 

“Let me ask you this.” I asked as the old man. “Which one do you think is the better solution? If you were in my position, which one would you choose?”

 

“Oh, the second option, definitely!” Gaerien replies. “Actually, I would have gone over it anyway even if she hadn’t brought it up, this is definitely the far better solution in the long run. I do not know how your cultivation works, there is a lot that’s unorthodox about it, but in most cases having both masculine and feminine energy is a major bonus to your cultivation.”

 

“Well, I have no real preference, but the kid seems to prefer I remain as I am so I suppose we will go with this true dual spirit thing of yours.” My old man self says. “Well then, shall we get started?”

 

My younger self gives a nod and this time we leave Gaerien behind on the floating island as we begin to hover into the air. In the short time I have spent between Gaerien’s and my own inner worlds, I have come to learn the rules a little bit. It seems that here almost any thought with intent behind it will transfer into action by our spirit projections. When applied to movement, this means that we can fly or even instantly teleport to any location within this space. As such, in the space of a single heartbeat, the both of us had vanished from beside Gaerien on that island and were now hovering on either side of the representations of our chakara.

 

This close, the intense light from the overly enlarged heaven’s chakara actually seemed to rock the space itself. I could see now what Gaerien had meant by the problems created by my masculine energies and my feminine energies being together in the same chakara. This would really explain why my energies were all over the place. It was like a dirty filter on a water faucet. Every imperfection in it would cause the water stream to spray off a small stream of water in a different direction. If I used that analogy and supposed that this energy was normally supposed to be a single beam going straight down, that would mean my heaven’s chakara is a complete and total mess.

 

If that happens to be the case, the fact that it’s so incredibly enlarged compared to the others, could this be something like a case of cardiomegaly, the enlargement of the heart? Being larger does not always mean better, especially in cases of things having to do with the body. Why wouldn’t the same apply to the spirit? In the case of cardiomegaly, the reason behind the heart growing larger is because something is causing it to pump inefficiently, either because high blood pressure is making it more difficult to pump blood through the body or because some heart disease has caused parts of the heart to die and thus more heart tissue had to be formed in order to make up for it.

 

If I suppose the same principles apply here, and reason that the incredible size of my heaven’s chakara is in fact a sign of weakness and not strength… actually, I already know it’s weak. There is no question about that. But, if its large size is yet another sign of that weakness, then this is all the more reason why this issue needs to be solved. If the heart analogy really applied here, I would be long since dead to have a heart that disproportionately large compared to what it should be using the much smaller other six as a guide. I suppose the fact I haven’t felt any strong detrimental effects of this might have to do with the spirit body being somewhat more adaptable than the physical body.

 

My younger self gave a bit of a worried look at the thoughts coming down through the subconscious channel between us. “Don’t worry, we just have to solve this.” I told her. “Ok, I want you to just focus on maintaining your chakara body. I will take the copies and form the new body for myself.” I sent all the knowledge I had about chakaras to her. I had studied some acupuncture, so it was well above what most people would know about them.

 

After I sent the information, the manifestations of the lesser chakaras began to form over a ghostly image of an enlarged female child body. My younger self began to drag the entire manifested chakara structure, including the large source of energy and light above us, away from the center of this space. At the same time, I tried to separate my mind from it. I attempted with everything I had to no longer regard that chakara structure to be a representation of anything to do with me. Those were the chakara of my child self, not my adult self.

 

I was a different person, not the child. I realized now that the reason things probably got so messed up in here had entirely to do with the fact that I was integrating myself more and more into my new child body. This is what caused our masculine and feminine energies to begin clashing. I would have to be a separate person, something of a parent figure or advisor to my child self. Having firmly established this new role for myself in my mind, I began to manifest a new set of seven chakara.

 

They formed one by one, red first at the bottom, the root chakara. Above that, around where the naval would be in the body, orange for the sacral chakara. At the solar plexus was the most important chakara, the dantian as it is called in the Chinese, which basically served the same role as the heart for the chakara system. This one was represented by yellow. If any chakara has business being larger than the others it should be this one, although it is definitely preferred that they all be about the same.

 

After this comes the heart chakara in green, the throat chakara in blue, the “third eye” chakara indigo, and finally a violet heaven’s chakara located a short distance above where the head was. As soon as I manifested this last chakara, a ghostly male image appeared over them facing me. I nodded in satisfaction at the accomplishment. However, there is one more thing I have to do in order to make this thing complete.

 

Now that I have a manifestation of the body surrounding the chakara, I can focus on two more highly important chakara for the sake of my meditation. I look down to the soles of the feet, and just behind the ball of each foot between the muscular bulges and joints of the large toe and pinky toe, I manifested the sole chakaras. These were the chakaras that allowed your spiritual energy to escape the body and leave into the ground beneath you. As soon as I manifested these, I formed the image of the heaven’s energy flowing through my body and leaving through those chakara at the soles of the feat.

 

The violet heaven’s chakara above my male manifestation’s head began to change color, glowing the same brilliant white as the one above the manifestation of my younger self. A ray of light went straight down, piercing three of the chakara between it and the dantien, the equivalent to the chakara system’s heart located at the solar plexus. From there, the energy split in two, and then went down to the soles of the feet. A dark mist began to form around those feet, and then the entire masculine manifestation started to grow until the heaven’s chakara was at the top of this space and the feet were at the bottom. It now looked like a towering giant.

 

As this was happening, the massive light over my younger self’s head began to shrink. At the same time, the disordered energies that spread out everywhere seemed that they were trying to converge to all flow in one direction, but they seemed to be experiencing some degree of difficulty.

 

I looked between the two manifestations. The masculine manifestation was still far from complete. It only had the seven main chakara and two of the minor chakara. It was really only the bare minimum in order to create the heaven’s energy meditation. I knew this would be the bare minimum I would need to hit in order to really begin the process of splitting my masculine and feminine energies in order to allow my true body to start sorting itself out. The new masculine energy body was not enough to be considered complete, it was only enough to serve as a host for the problematic masculine energies that had been giving me problems.

 

Meanwhile, my true body held by my child self was nowhere near recovered. Removing the masculine energies from it had not allowed it to instantly recover or anything miraculous like that. It only removed the source of the problem, but the damage was still present. It would take some time for it to recover completely.

 

I felt truly exhausted after messing around with my chakaras, what could be considered the equivalent of the vital organs of the spirit body. My mental projections returned to the island, and my older self found my younger self clinging to him with sleepy looking eyes. He took a seat on the grassy hill, and then she immediately curled up in his lap.

 

“Well, you managed to go a LOT farther with that in one go than I thought you could.” Gaerien praised me, looking admiringly at the changed vision of the center of my spiritual landscape. A large ghostly image man stood tall and proud with an expressionless face looking off to the left. Behind his back, a small ghostly female form had curled into a fetal position facing away from him and looking toward the right. A large sun-like light still shone over the female form’s head.

 

Below them, the swirling vortex of the void seemed to be trying to coalesce around the man’s feet, but it still covered everything in the lower half of this space. However, it seemed to be far less chaotic in its behavior now.

 

“Well, what WERE you expecting?” My older self asked Gaerien, my younger self quite content to sit and cuddle in his lap.

 

“The seven primary chakara are easy enough to form in one go, I kinda expected you to stop there though. But, you went ahead and attuned the Shahasrara and the Manipura to their proper functions, and also manifested the sole chakara on top of that.”

 

“Well, I take it Manipura is the sanskrit name for the third chakara at the solar plexus, correct?” I asked her, again as my older self. “Anyway, the sole chakara are an incredibly important part of my meditation since I have to expel the energy from my body in order for it to function correctly. That’s why I manifested them. I figured if I could get it functioning in the masculine body at least then it would solidify the masculine version of the heaven’s chakara and take the burden off of my real body. As for the err… Manipura, I was familiar with it somewhat from some study of qi-gong I did before I discovered my current art. So, I naturally was familiar enough with it that I just naturally gave it its proper function.”

 

“So, getting all the important things out of the way all at once? That’s crazy ambitious, but I think I can respect that.”

 

“Well,” I say, “I have never been the type to be held back by fear or hesitation. I say get it all done when you can. That’s also why I’ve been driving so hard to be able to walk and talk at such an early age. I really see no point in sitting around when I could be doing something to make myself better.”

 

“Hah! Well, at the rate you’re going, I’m guessing you will be able to get the entire second chakara system set up within a week.” Gaerien says with a smug grin as though she’s challenging me to do exactly that.

 

“That’s not unreasonable.” I tell her. “It all depends on how much time I want to spend in this imaginary world I suppose.”

 

“Oh, about that,” Gaerien says, “with multiple manifestations like this, it ought to be possible for you to have the two act independent of each other. So, while one acts inside this space, the other can control the real body out there. How about you just give your real body over to the kid entirely for a while and focus in here? I’m sure you can make all kinds of progress like that.”

 

-

 

Eirlathion’s POV

 

Since the incidents of earlier in the day, after the queens message and the sight of her carrying the great tree and the entire royal capital attached to it, there was a general tone of unrest in the village. Eirlathion knew that sooner or later the elder would be calling on him for his assistance in determining how they should respond to this matter. As such, he had decided to act first, asking Túeth to mind the children while he was gone. She seemed hesitant on the issue, but the emergency nature of the situation left her with no grounds on which to protest.

 

Just about the entire village had gathered in the central clearing, the meeting area of the village, what would be called the “town square” in a human settlement. Several of the faces seemed anxious, there was some fear as well, but in many of the faces there also seemed to be a certain burning passion. It was already well known that the tainted ones were a brutal and vicious folk, but this village had come to know it better than most having taken in a survivor of a neighboring village that had been annihilated.

 

It was not only Túeth that gave them a connection to that village either. Several of the people here had friends or family that had lived in that village. There was nothing they could have done at the time, but now that the tainted ones had appeared again they were ready and eager to avenge the deaths of their loved ones. Several of these individuals had even carried their bows and blades on them to the clearing, plainly eager for the fight.

 

There were likely to be several of these individuals who would gladly respond to the call to arms and travel to the scar of heaven as the queen had requested. However, that was not the topic up for discussion, and with the elder’s persuasion they had all been convinced to stay in the village. The reason for this was, they were one of the closest surviving villages to the scar of heaven. In fact, the very closest on the western side. As such, this village could serve another highly vital function for the sake of the war that was about to begin.

 

“So,” the elder said, standing out and facing the crowd with Eirlathion at his back. “for the sake of those who will be arriving here in the coming days, we will need to vacate as much space as we can. Master Eirlathion can accelerate the growth of a freshly planted Lakira tree only so much. Families will have to move in together to occupy the same house in order to vacate space for our new arrivals.”

 

That’s right. One of two things could happen with this place. It could easily turn into a refugee camp for civilians. However, the far more likely scenario is that this place would soon become a defensive encampment protecting against enemy forces that tried to approach the scar of heaven. It was for this purpose that they were making their preparations.

 

‘GOOD, IT LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE ALREADY ORGANIZING.’

 

The booming voice that echoed in everyone’s minds seemed to have come from the northern sky. Everyone looked up to see where it had come from, and what they saw was a scaled serpentine body held aloft by a pair of dull white feathered wings like those of a large bird. It was around 12 feet in length, with a wingspan almost that same length across from one wing-tip to the other, and scales that were a deep crimson red. It flew in a large lazy circle around the clearing before it fluttered its wings and hovered for a moment near Eirlathion and the elder, just on the other side of them from the crowd, before gravity suddenly seemed to have decided to ignore it and allow it to simply suspend itself at its current location in the air.

 

‘MY NAME IS EVERON. BY ORDER OF HER MAJESTY, I AM TO TAKE CONTROL OF THIS VILLAGE AND SEE TO IT THAT IT IS READY TO SERVE AS A DEFENSIVE ENCAMPMENT SHOULD THE ENEMY APPROACH FROM THIS DIRECTION. IT IS VERY GOOD THAT YOU HAVE ALREADY BEGUN TO TAKE STEPS TOWARD THIS EXACT PURPOSE.’

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