A Tale Of Times Passed

The old wooden door slammed behind James as he excitedly sat down in his room, cutting his jog short as the ramifications of his idea raced through his mind. Grabbing the now much stubbier tallow candle on his table, removing it from the holder and placing the stalk into the holder hole like an incense stick.

'Breathe…' thought James, calming himself slightly, suppressing bubbles of roiling excitement as he carefully lit the tip of the stalk. The scent of the stalk was magnified by orders of magnitude as a white smoke slowly plumed from the ember eating its way down the stalk.

Similar to the burning incense, James' mind calmed slowly but surely as he took a deep breath in. And a deep breath out. Closed eyes and knelt knees, James adopted a simple meditative position and let his thoughts drift by. His anxieties, thoughts, and feelings were all occluded by the smoke; everything going through his mind was gently washed away in a gentle stream of smoke and blown away like ash in the wind.

Gray turned to black as a familiar feeling enveloped his mind. He was here. His eyes opened gently, not seeing the shack he now called home, but instead the grand library stretching for hundreds of metres around him in every direction. "I'm finally back in this place" said James out loud, his thoughts and speech being one and the same given that he was in his own mind.

Taking an unhurried look around the library, not having the chance in his previous visit due to the hurried circumstances, James noticed that the books on the shelves each seemed to have an array rune inscribed on the spine. Simple books, such as his memories of childhood experiences playing with friends tended to only have 1 array rune with a correspondingly simple label appearing in his vision as he focused on the runes. For example, when looking at the book about a memory of a sunny day in the park, an array rune labelled "warm" appeared.

Conversely, when looking at very complicated memories, such as his knowledge of physics, the book was plastered in dozens of runes ranging from "momentum" to "thermal": every phenomena or concept he understood had a rune. Complex interactions and combinations of principles interacting seemed to follow rules of combining runes, for example, "friction" was made of 3 runes superimposed onto one another, "convert", "kinetic", and "thermal".

Thinking of the book of arrays, the book flew in front of James and opened itself to a chapter on rune combination. It seemed that combination runes consisted of a command rune that could perform an action, and some number of other runes to act upon.

Taking the liberty to continue reading through, he learnt various other useful bits of information about runes and their limitations. Runes could only be branded onto non-living objects, or directly onto the souls of living objects. Trying to brand someone's arm with an array would do nothing, but branding their clothes would work. Similarly, certain arrays could only make sense when applied to living or non-living objects - attempting to commingle these types of arrays without knowing what you're doing could lead to disastrous results.

Highlighting this, the book mentioned an example from ancient times: the undead. A profound array master - or wizard as they're more commonly known - lived in recluse with his beloved wife. His wife was not a cultivator, she was a mortal woman, but having been fed various potions and elixirs over the years by her husband, she lived for over 10,000 years, retaining her youth the whole time.

10,000 years was a long time but in the eyes of the wizard it was nothing but a speck in the millions he would live with his talent and extremely high cultivation level. Time passed on and the worry of his wife's passing began to irk the wizard, he tried convincing his wife to begin cultivation, saying it wasn't too late and that he could provide her with even more miracle medicines to improve her talent - no matter the cost.

His wife simply laughed every time; a sweet smile adorned her face as her luscious black hair bounced as she did but her emerald green eyes betrayed the sadness in her eyes as she would stare back at him every time and reply "Don't be silly dear". As time went on and his wife grew closer to death, her appearance staying young but her eyes growing cloudy, the wizard decided to enact a drastic plan. One that would mean he'd never need to see his wife's eyes show that look of sadness ever again.

He began constructing an array. A grand array. The likes of which the world had never seen before; one to grant a soul to the dead. Using the principles of life, he built models to emulate the inner workings of the soul. The way he went about this? Studying his own. Ripping pieces of his own being out and literally carving his consciousness into this project piece by piece, he began slowly going insane.

In his insanity, the ancient wizard deemed his project complete, and next to his wife's deathbed he sat complacent, not a single tear falling down his cheek. In those thousands of years, his wife's hidden sadness had never waned, and in his insanity, the wizard had never questioned it - but now there was no time for questions. His wife let out one final smile, one of pure happiness, and one not tinged by that familiar sadness.

She spoke some final words as her eyes shut peacefully, but the wizard did not hear. He did not listen. They weren't final to him, never again would there be such a concept! End and beginning merged into one in his mind, and so did means and ends. Morality, causality, reason, all thrown out of the window as he activated his grand array: condensed down into a lustrous emerald of pure energy - the core of the array.

Branding his wife's fading wisps of soul with this emerald, the array sprung to life. And all was well for a while. But only a while.

Her closed eyes sprung open in shock. Her broken soul sending endless droves of pain through her very being as the array artificially reconstructed the dissipated portions of her soul. His model, having been built on his own soul, was too different. The artificial cultivator's soul took over her own, wrestling away her last dregs of humanity as both parts imploded. If not for the emerald array holding everything together, this would've been the end of this tragic tale, but the emerald crystal marched on with increasing insanity matching that of its creator; the fragments of artificial and dead soul melding and merging into something that wasn't quite alive or dead. Something new. The first of the undead.

His severed soul finally losing its connection to himself, the ancient wizard regained some semblance of sanity for the first time in thousands of years, realising what he'd done. As was his moral obligation, with tears streaming down his face, he cut down his "wife" in cold blood. Burying her and fleeing far away from his home, from his sins, the wizard thought he had washed his hands of his mistake. Tragically, he ended his life; realising his wife's sadness to not have been for her own mortality, but rather her worries for the future of her husband - he joined her. Ridding himself of his cultivation,  he rapidly aged and withered as his mortal soul could not handle the old wounds of being sliced apart, and self-destructed.

The, now much older, wizard stared pensively from the top of the mountain he stood upon, his snow-white hair flapping in the wind as he straightened his back and took a deep breath. A final breath. Opening his eyes, he sighed, "My mistake was truly too dear was it not? Cassandra, I wronged you. Now you shall wrong the world".

Before he could exhale, his breath sharply left his lungs; a pair of short, black fingernails pierced through his chest, blackened blood dripping from the tips of the jade-like fingers poking through the holes. Vomiting blood, the wizard died on the spot, an eternal smile of self-deprecating regret hanging upon his face as the fingers retracted and his body limply crashed down the face of the mountain.

The book concluded with a cryptic message: 'Cassandra the Vampire Queen remains active. Rewards will be bestowed to any cultivator who can deliver information on her whereabouts to a Sept Envoy'.

"What the hell is a Sept Envoy?" asked James. Hesitating for a second and hoping for a miracle, James could only sigh as the book didn't provide any further information on who or what he was asking about.