AIR 138-139

AN: Two more chapters will be out by the end of today but this is what I have for now. These chapters were tough to write and I'm still not sure I like them but nothing is perfect.

Chapter 138 The Fisherman Part 1

I was alone, then I wasn’t. 

I don’t dream. I was at the twelfth rank- no thirteenth now and people of my rank don’t dream.

People of my rank don’t make mistakes either. What was happening? My mind felt- it felt slow. As if I was actually asleep and dreaming. 

I avoided dreaming. It was the domain of God-Imperiums. If the Sea of Death was the domain of the death gods then the clouds above them held the Dreaming. The realm of sleep was the place between life and death, something that both gave rest and brought you ever closer to the end. 

“What,” I spoke. “What’s happening?”

I looked around, eyes wide open. I was next to a river. It rushed and flowed and pushed and stopped, but I didn’t look at it. I would go insane if I looked at it. I knew I would. 

A few feet away was a fisherman. He was old and reminded me of Chin in some ways. His skin was wrinkled and held a rod that dipped into the river’s waters. He wore a bamboo hat, an old stained coat, and green pants. 

He turned and looked towards me. 

“You’re a God-Imperium,” I stated. 

He nodded. 

“I hate God-Imperiums.” 

“I know,” he responded. 

“Why don’t I know about you?”

“You know of me,” the fisherman replied. 

My mind was hazy. All the panic and some of the rationality had been left behind and my consciousness had been altered. 

My eyes squinted. I looked at him, deep into his eyes and at his clothes and fishing rod. 

“No, I don’t think I do,” I replied. 

“You know me,” he repeated. “Everybody knows me.”

I looked at him again, something in my mind screamed for me to be cautious. Something told me to be afraid. 

“Come here,” the Imperium spoke. 

I walked over to him and just like that the feeling went away. 

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he commented.

“I didn’t really have a choice.”

“The book or the monkey could have prevented this. They should have prevented this,” he muttered.

Then he looked down in thought and looked around. 

“I see, so they’re trying to go around them and that damn thing let them.” 

Then he looked me dead in the eyes. 

“Tell them to talk to me when you awake,” he ordered. 

“No,” I replied. “They can just read my soul and figure it out themselves.”

The God-Imperium looked at me again. His gaze seemed small, it felt like nothing more than a glance, but I knew there was more to it than that.

“Don’t look at the river,” he told me. 

“I know,” I responded. “What is it?”

I felt like a child, staring at the dirt brown banks rather than the intriguing rush in front of me. I could hear it scream, I could hear it roar and flow and change. It sounded like secrets and truths, like answers and the pure expression of existence. It sounded like-

“Don’t listen to it either,” the Fisherman told me. 

“What is it?” I asked again. 

“Everything.”

I sat still and blocked out the noise.

“Who brought me here?”

I looked down at the dirt on the floor, my mind focusing on anything but the noise. The dirt shivered. It didn’t bounce or vibrate but shivered as if it too were afraid. 

“Everyone dreams,” the man stated. “Everyone is connected to the dreaming, more than the place of dreams, it is the place of thought. If the sea below is absolute death then the dreams here are the memories of souls. The empty desires of plants, the calm and persistent minds of insects, the raging waves of beasts, and the chaotic imagination of man. This is where it all meets. It contains entirely nothing yet bits of everything. It is the mirror of existence, the holder of all, and the cauldron of fate. To some it is a cloud, to others it is a ball of yarn, and to me, it is a river.”

These guys were allergic to simple answers. I would be panicking and bowing if this had happened before Wukong and the Tome, but there was no use in that. Some God-Imperiums cared about prestige, but most didn’t from my little understanding of them.

I simply wasn’t powerful enough to offend them. 

And this one seemed to not care about words otherwise he would have struck me down instantly. 

The best solution seemed to be honesty. It's not like I could lie to these creatures. 

“So how did they go around Wukong or the Tome?”

“They didn’t,” the Fisherman replied. “The Tome let you come here.”

“Why?”

“It knew I would be here, or rather it guessed. If it prevented them then it would expose its involvement. It's relying on me to act in its behalf, how irritating.”

Everything was so fuzzy. Everything was so strange. It felt like a wet blanket had been draped around my brain as if every thought weighed me down. 

“Stop listening to it,” the Fisherman repeated. 

“I’m not,” I argued. Then I heard it, or rather I noticed I had been listening to it this whole time. 

I focused, closing out the invading noise once more. 

“What is that?”

“The sound of everything.”

“Well, can you tell it to shut up?” 

The Fisherman looked over, raised a finger, and touched my forehead.

And suddenly I was awake again. Except I wasn’t, I was still dreaming, still in this place and still in front of the fisherman, but now my mind raced. I was aware. 

And I was terrified. 

“Keep together now,” the Fisherman said quietly. 

This was bad. 

There was a reason you weren’t fully aware in dreams. There were things there you weren’t meant to see, ideas you weren’t meant to have. It had been hard to ignore the noises earlier, but now, now it was almost impossible. 

“Mortals,” the Fisherman spoke. “Aren’t able to understand what they’re in front of. They come into this place in uncountable infinities and leave their pieces here all the time. But gods are creatures of their own making. They know better than to let themselves dream. The twelfth rank is where you separate yourself from everything and gain a true consciousness for reality. The light is blinding only if you have eyes.”

The noise around me screamed, the river roared and I could feel the weight of countless shadows hammering against my soul. 

Then the Fisherman put his finger down and everything dulled again. My mind slowed, my thoughts weighed and the noises were all the quieter. It was easier now for some reason. I could block out the noise. 

“Fate is the river of action, it is the woven fabric of desire and destiny, it is many things, all things and none. To be here is to witness it, to watch the river from the outside, and to not be the fish within. You are still a fish, yet to leap over the Dragon’s Gate.”

Again it was harder to think, it was harder to understand but I grasped at what he was saying. 

“I’m an immortal, I’ve achieved godhood. Haven’t I jumped over the Dragon’s Gate?”

“Mere rapids,” he replied. “The gate is the last struggle, the last bearing before true power. The last limit before one touches Imperium.”

I listened to the man’s words. My mind crept like a snail and my ears burned with rejected noise. 

I couldn’t help myself. I had to see it. 

I lifted my head and looked upstream of the river. 

I stared at the Dragon’s Gate. 

Chapter 139 The Fisherman Part 2

I went mad. I went insane. I went any and all words one could use to describe the absolute loss of sanity and my mind crumpled and crumbled and crumbled till it was no more. 

Then I came back. 

In front of me was a frowning old man. The Fisherman, eyes burning gold and furious. 

“What’s wrong with you?” He asked me.

Then he leaned forward and touched my forehead again. 

“A lot of things, you’re barely together as it is. You’re not even really here. A soul is many things, but most of it stays out of the dreaming. Only the thinking self comes down, the face and ego. Yours for some reason is mostly mortal, it is too small to understand what’s happening, too insignificant to know what it saw.”

The man walked around me, scanning me up and down as he did so. 

“Thief,” he finally spoke. 

“What?” 

“You stole that,” he replied. 

“I didn’t steal anything. I was forced into this soul and this mind.”

“Not the soul,” the Fisherman said with a shaking head. “The fate. You stole their fate, both of them.”

“What?”

“Look at the river,” he replied. 

“But you said-”

“If you can see the Gate and live, you can look at the river.”

I did as he said. 

And there I saw something, everything, nothing, the cosmos and the chaos, the shimmering nature of existence. 

And I almost went mad. Almost. 

There were no words to describe it, no thoughts to be had, no ideas to encompass it. I couldn’t see it. This part of me that was dragged in here was too mortal, too small. I couldn’t comprehend it. 

But I did feel it. I felt wonder and awe. I heard the song of existence and though I could not remember the melody or the lyrics, I could remember the feelings. 

It was like a dream.

 It was a dream.

It was one of those dreams where you would wake up with a sense of panic or joy. Where the emotion would linger but the memory would have long since passed. 

It was the breeze of a summer’s day, the cold of a winter’s night. The light of a dying sun and the darkness of an empty world. It was life, death, creation, destruction, yin and yang, and everything in between. 

This wasn’t the whole song. It was just a moment and though I did not know what was happening, even I could hear the tension in their voices. 

I wonder where it would go? I wondered how the song would end. I wanted to know. I wanted to listen and remember but I couldn’t. Even now, I would be lucky to come back with a vague sense of worry. I knew this. 

And all of this was just the surface of the river. I wasn’t even hearing the full song as it was being played, only one instrument and only one voice. 

I was in the song, I was singing it and even then I could not hear it whole. I could only hear those around me. 

Chin was here. The maidens were here. Nai, Cai, and even the beasts sang with us. 

It was a horrid song. It was a beautiful song. It was the noise of the river and the river itself. 

At that moment, I understood something about fate. It wasn’t doomed to be. It wasn’t destiny or control. 

It wasn’t something guaranteed to happen, but something that would.

Fate was a living thing. Anything without life acted as it should. It had no choice, no will, and thus no possibility. But life and the living chose, we acted and existence remembered our choices. 

Fate was the thing between birth and death. It was every breath and every moment, every choice, every desire, every instant of impact. Dane had died and so had Bill, but from that death, I had been made. I was their impact. I was their remaining and active action. 

“They gave it to me, I think.” 

“No,” the Fisherman replied. “They died. They ended but you force them to remain. You make them live again.”

“I didn’t choose to exist,” I replied, finally taking my eyes away from the river. 

“No one does.”

“So…” I looked around. “What’s the point? Why am I here?”

The Fisherman ignored me and walked over to the river and sat down at its edge. I followed him and did the same. We both looked out to the river. I listened to a song and watched the reflection on the surface. I understood nothing, but felt everything, if only for an instant. 

And he looked far deeper than I ever could. 

“Do you know what lies ahead?” He asked me. 

“I have guesses,” I answered. 

“An eternal war. One that will touch everything and leave its scar on existence.”

“Sounds horrifying. I’m sure if I were fully aware I’d be panicking right now.”

The Fisherman pulled back his rod. It was just a stick with a string on it. It had no reel or hook. But still he cast it and I watched as the string disappeared beneath the ripples. 

A moment later, he caught something and yanked it out of the water. It was a small fish or a shrimp of some sort and it smelled like it had already died. 

He held it in his hands and inspected it before moving his hand over to me.

“What is it?” 

“Take it,” he said, pushing his hands forward. 

And I did, then I knew. 

It was a memory, a shadow of a place once long gone. It was a world filled with history, a place of war and peace, life and death, and stories, oh so many stories. I remembered them, I remembered reading and listening and watching them so eagerly. 

I remembered Earth. 

I saw my parents. I saw my life, my job, my history, our history. I saw countries grow and die. I saw us crawl out of caves. I watched as the first ever wheel was made and I saw the first wolves who sat by our fires. 

I heard languages that no one would remember. I saw gods that would be forgotten. Religion, culture, history, art, I saw it be birthed a million times and die a million more. 

I saw China, I saw Britain, I saw the Aztecs, the Indians, the Japanese. I saw them come to be, in all their horror and glory. I watched the world age into steam and cars and kept watching it all the same. I saw space, I saw us traverse it. I saw us scatter, I saw us create. I saw us fall to stones and watched us come back all over again. 

I saw and saw and saw and saw it all. 

Then I watched it end. I witnessed the end of my universe, the end of my world. 

No one knew us. Some remembered us as a dead realm, the Tome knew us as less than a footnote in existence. But no one felt for us. No one cried for us. No one remembered us, not really. 

“Why?” I whispered. 

“You are the last survivor of your people and of Dane. You are alive and yet you sit there and do nothing.”

“I’m preparing-”

“To hide, to sit still and react.”

I looked at him and for the first time, I saw emotion. 

“That damn book knew I would do this,” he breathed. “You disgust me. You have stumbled and fallen into greatness and yet you cower? You have been given a chance to do something, to persist and change the world as you so choose and you just hide?”

“I want to help others-”

“You want to help them hide and sit still as the world churns and breaks away? Do you think that saving a handful of mortals is peace? Do you think that one realm of billions is enough? When you could do so much more?”

“I can’t change anything. I’m not an Imperium.”

Then the Fisherman- no the dragon turned to me. And in that moment his blue and gold scales shined brighter than the river. His tail trailed over the river. His eyes looked at me with disdain and his whiskers dipped into the depths of fate. 

“Neither was I,” he spoke. 

I saw fish. I saw them by the thousands racing up the eternal river. I saw them fight the currents and struggle. I saw them be doomed, be doomed to fail and fall back down and struggle anyways. 

“I was nothing,” he spoke. “Less than a mortal man, less than a qi beast. I was a mere carp with nothing but desire and still, I climbed. You want something and have the power of the twelfth rank. You came to be as a god and yet you refuse to act? You want to hide? What a waste.”

And I saw him grow from a mere carp to a qi beast to a spirit beast to an immortal, a god, a God-King, and then I watched as the fish leaped over the Dragon’s Gate.

“You are lazy, boy. You are a coward. Your insignificance is a thing you can change. If you have not the power then seek the power, but do not waste your time walking among mortals in a small moment of peace. Everything dies and your village, no matter how persistent, will fade as well. Choose to cultivate and fight now or spare yourself the suffering and die.”