Free Tier - Accidental Champion (Book 9) - Chapter 47 - What Is This Place?

Xavier found himself inside a room he’d never seen within his mind before.

The room wasn’t technically a room. It was more like the inside of a sphere. Slowly, he brought himself out of the full meditative state so he could do more than just observe the room, conjuring a mental apparition to hover in the air, slowly flapping their wings, as he looked around.

The room was completely empty, and yet it didn’t feel empty. There was knowledge here. And something else. A presence, one that he’d felt before—but only when his mind had been torn asunder in the midst of one of his advancements.

He flapped his wings idly, looking around the inside of the “empty” sphere, a frown turning the lines in his forehead into deep troughs.

“What is this place?” he whispered.

No answer came. He reached out for Roln. The mental construct was around, but he was remaining silent. He could continue to prompt the dead Wanderer, but something told him he didn’t want any part of this.

So Xavier focused on that presence. That set of eyes he’d felt watching him.

How was he able to feel that presence? He rotated his body, eyes searching, coming up just as empty as he had before. The inside of the sphere looked to be made from smooth stone. He flew over to the wall and brushed his mental apparition’s hand against it.

It felt real, solid. But he supposed that wasn’t strange. His mental spaces, and the simulations he ran, tended to feel just as real.

What he couldn’t see, but could only sense, was the feeling that there was something else here. That knowledge. That presence.

How could this presence be… here? Inside him? Or was this some strange window that he was peering out of? A window peering into…

Who knows where.

He continued to explore the room as his mind worked, trying to puzzle out what it was for. He’d found it through meditation, and it felt as though it was a part of his mind, and yet there was something strange about it.

Something that felt like while it was a part of him, it was also not a part of him.

“How could both those things be true?” he muttered.

There was no “up” or “down” inside this fear. There was no pull of gravity, even the fake gravity of a mental space. Xavier had spent enough time in the vacuum of space to be familiar with that weightless, directionless sensation, yet still he found it unsettling from inside the sphere.

Hovering there in the middle of the sphere, he stopped flapping his wings and crossed his legs beneath him, just as his real self and his other mental apparition in the central room of his mind was doing. He closed this mental apparition’s eyes and focused on simply feeling that strange presence he’d sensed before.

He’d thought that the moment he put his attention toward it, it would pull away.

But that wasn’t what was happening.

It was letting him examine it. Xavier even thought he felt a touch of curiosity from the unknown presence, so it was certainly noticing Xavier’s noticing.

What are you? Xavier asked, pushing his thoughts outward toward the entity.

He felt Roln shudder somewhere in his mind, but the mental construct was staying well back from what was happening.

The presence didn’t feel malevolent. It just felt… curious.

Was this… him? Was this his… soul?

But no, Xavier had felt his soul. Had tapped into it on many occasions. This was not that.

Xavier heard something faint. The smallest of whispers. He knew, instinctively, that it was coming from the presence he sensed, but he wasn’t able to fully hear it, as though something was interfering.

Xavier tried to tune out all the noise of his own thoughts, his doubts, his fears. He tried to make his mind as empty as the spherical room around him.

… you.

Xavier’s excitement at hearing a word from the presence almost made him snap out of the deep, Russian doll-like meditative state. He solidified his focus and asked again.

What are you?

The voice spoke back, and this time he could hear everything it said clearly.

I am Xavier Collins. I am you. But I am not you.

That made Xavier open his eyes—his real eyes. He let out a long breath before he shut them again and once more found that deep, meditative state.

It was easier to find a second time, though he noticed no notifications from his Combat Assistance Overlay popped up asking if he wanted any refinements. Roln hadn’t offered him refinements the last time he was trying to observe this presence in the middle of his advancement, either. Those refinements had only been offered when he’d been trying to listen to the rune song the System had been singing…

Xavier’s real body swallowed. Some sort of involuntary response. Even so, he found himself back inside that spherical room deep, deep within his mind.

You are me? My soul? My subconscious? Another version of me?

Silence followed his question, but the presence hadn’t retreated. It was there, waiting.

Xavier tried not to let his mind go too many places. Tried to make it stay exactly where it was. Empty, serene. Calm, waiting. That waiting tried to transform into impatience. He tamped it down. Several times.

Are you still there?

I’m here.

Are you going to answer my question?

I’m not sure if you’re ready, Xavier.

Xavier let the silence after those words sit. Roln had said something similar, and now “he” had said the same to “himself.” Assuming this strange presence was Xavier—he didn’t really understand how such a thing could be possible. The presence wasn’t inside him, or outside him, it just somehow existed, its eyes forever watching.

He could feel how intense those eyes were now, and somehow, he knew they were always pointed toward him. That they’d been pointed toward him not just since he’d been integrated into the System, but for his entire life.

Xavier thought about all he’d been through, all he’d faced, all he’d accomplished. After all that, how could he not be ready to hear whatever this was?

Xavier wasn’t one to walk away from something, not unless he had absolutely no other choice. That was why he was still on this floor, after all. He could have abandoned it multiple times before, and yet he’d stayed.

He was stubborn to his core.

He knew knowledge was sometimes a curse… but now that he’d gotten a hint of whatever this was, he couldn’t just forget about it.

He had to know.

I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. Now tell me, who are you?

I’m the first version of you, Xavier Collins.

Again, Xavier was thrown straight back into his body. That revelation had simply been too much for him to remain in that meditative state. He looked around the room of the spaceship he was in, at his drones, at the walls, at the ceiling.

He was breathing heavily, and he wasn’t even sure why. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t encountered strange and amazing things before…

He shook his head and dived back down inside his mind until he reached that spherical room.

The… the first version of me? How is that possible? Are you… still alive? A Wanderer?

No. I’m not alive anymore, Xavier Collins, but my soul survives.

You’re a ghost?

Yes, and no. I have reached beyond such an existence. I do not inhabit any of the ghostly realms.

I don’t understand.

I do not expect you to.

You’re watching me?

I watch us all. And I am not alone in that. I am not alone at all. Every version of us that ever lived, whether their soul survived or not, their personalities, their memories, the lessons they learned and the lives they lived, are contained within me. I am me, I am you, I am us. The multiverse is a big place. A vast, unimaginable, unending thing that stretches on into infinity, and within the universe there are other, smaller infinities.

That is what I am.

You… aren’t making sense.

There are many phases of reality, Xavier. Many known existences, and surely more unknown even to the likes of me and others like me. The phase that I inhabit is separate from the one where you live and breathe. It is separate from the void. From the Otherworld and places like it. It is where souls go only when they become… ready.

I still don’t understand. How can you be the original me? You’re the presence who has been watching me? For my entire life? Why?

Because, Xavier, we are one in the same. Our souls are connected. Always. Even when a soul suffers a true death, they are not truly dead. Parts of them survive, here. Within me.

Xavier shook his mental apparition’s head, doubt creeping in, but not about what this strange—apparently original—version of him was telling him. The doubt was about having this conversation at all.

If you wish to end this conversation—

No! No. I need to talk to you. I need to understand. This myth, about where the Interdimensional Dragon came from… if you’ve been observing me, do you know what I’m thinking?

I know everything about you.

Then… is it true? And, if it is, how could it be? If you’re the original me, that means you were around before the System. Were you around in the first universe? You’re older than old, more ancient than ancient, but you couldn’t have lived a long life back then, could you? Without the System coming to Earth, the Celestial Energy wouldn’t have been strong enough for humans to last long.

Your assumptions come from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the universe was like before the System’s existence. Most Systems—for you now understand there are far more than one—leech the majority of the Celestial Energy out of a universe when that universe is born. Systems need that Celestial Energy to function. Because of that, it leaves planets like Earth deprived of the Celestial Energy they would have once contained.

So… Xavier took a moment to digest what the entity was telling him. Well, more than a moment, because there was a hell of a lot to digest. A hell of a lot to think about. So, you’re saying before the System was created, Earth had Celestial Energy? That would make it—

A completely different world to the one where you grew up.

You had powers, even without the System? You lived a longer natural life?

I much longer life.

Tell me about it.

The details of that life are not important to you. That is one of the most ancient of histories, a history forgotten by anyone out there alive today. Only those of us who live this existence remember a time so far back as that, even those Wanderers who lived before the System—so few of them that are left—lived trillions upon trillions of years after my time. The multiverse was large and ancient before the System came, after all.

Xavier tried to absorb that but struggled to.

He pushed on.

That means… that means a version of us, even before the System, could have become a dragonkin? Such a transformation could have theoretically been possible?

It wasn’t only possible. It happened. Multiple times.

And you… you would know what happened to those versions of me, of us.

Yes, Xavier. I know what happened.

Why would we turn into dragonkin in the first place?

Because you have always craved strength. You have always strived for more. And more often than not, you have gotten it.

Xavier felt his real body swallow again, felt his heartrate increase. But even so, he was able to maintain the required meditative state to continue the conversation, still hovering, cross-legged, in the centre of the zero gravity, spherical room somewhere deep inside his very being.

It can’t be true, what I suspect, what I fear. It makes no sense. I don’t even think Roln knows if it’s true.

Roln does not know, he merely fears it as you fear it. No one that lives knows the truth of that time, but there are whispers. There are always whispers. So, Xavier, are you going to continue to stall, or are you going to finally ask me the question that has been burning on your mind?

Xavier wasn’t one to walk away. And usually, he wasn’t one to hesitate or flinch.

Yet this… if this were true…

He asked the question.

Did the Interdimensional Dragon come from me?