Chongli

"Don't tell me I am stuck in the hidden dimension within the hidden dimension?" Alex groaned. "What is this? The fucking twilight zone?"

"You are stuck within your own soul's realm."

"So you are telling me that primeval beings can just enter any soul?"

"Ah, Da Siming. Only a few like him can enter a soul realm to read the key energy waves which form the components of your…"

"Soul," Alex completed his sentence while looking around at the bubbling magma around and below his feet.

The word 'soul' was becoming a dredge to him, almost like a bother or a necessary evil. Can't live without one or live with one.

*Pop* the bubbling lava went bursting his annoyance with the word away.

Disconcerting enough how the volcanic chamber made Alex feel almost at home, like he had lived in an active volcano once.

Walking on water was a miracle. But walking on magma - how would it compare on the same scale? Beyond a miracle?

Or just plain old burning hell in scale. Only hell would have sulphur and burning lavas.

"I can sense Kanghui and Arahabaki on entry too. Too bad, they have to pull out quickly," Chongli mentioned casually as though it was nothing while Alex perked his head up at the mention of the two.

"Why would they want to enter?"

"Well, not for you to know," Chongli replied to a disappointed Alex as he walked around. "What do you think of the final evolution? You are one of the few who could make it to this stage."

"Freaking IKEA of the supernatural. Want to find something and then you realise that there are a lot more," Alex grumbled in frustration at the recent events which took him to the hidden dimension as he poked the red hot bubbles on the magma, bursting them.

Alex used to like IKEA. Nothing like a weekend of screaming kids with frustrated parents tearing up, and the arguing couples in front of cheap plywood furniture as live entertainment.

Reality television couldn't compete with the live drama at IKEA.

"IKEA?"

Then he looked up at Chongli. "You don't know what IKEA is, do you?"

Instead of his fingers burnt, it felt like poking a warm bubble bath. Alex examined his fingers with great curiosity.

"Doesn't hurt, does it?" Chongli smiled and continued, "I know IKEA, a mega furniture store owned by the Swedish company, filling the human fantasies with the idea of the perfect home, ahhh…. a very nice place to watch couples fight," Chongli replied with a smugness, much to Alex's surprise.

"Hey! How did you know?" Alex exclaimed.

Chongli smirked. "Humans have strange hobbies. Who would, in their youth, go to a shop to watch couples fight for fun? Didn't you not term IKEA as the HQ of all relationship breakers?"

Alex snickered for a bit, recalling the details of how he watched a few couples break up from disagreement on colour or even the style of the furniture.

Or the cheap meatballs his father liked to munch down on wholeheartedly. Oddly, the frozen ones never tasted the same as the one in the IKEA cafe when they tried cooking it at home.

Parents, he wondered how they were doing. Then he remembered - Chongli used the same words when he was a teenager to describe IKEA.

"You stalked me from my teenage days?"

"No, I am part of you. And yet not you," Chongli replied.

"So why appear now?" Alex asked.

"Why not?"

"You could have stopped me from touching whatever device they called. You could have helped at the very least," Alex accused him.

"Why should I?"

Alex rolled his eyes at Chongli's reply. Are humans just a game piece for the leisure of primeval beings? Just existing for some laughable entertainment of the hidden dimension.

"But if you must know, I brought you here."

"How?" Alex exclaimed, then the device popped into his mind. "THE DEVICE IS YOURS?"

"Guilty as charged."

Without thinking and overwhelmed by anger, Alex lunged forward and grabbed Chongli's collar, pulling him face to face with Alex's eyes glaring him down. "YOU. YOU CAUSED ME TO DIE."

Chongli's eyes suddenly turned into flames, and Alex loosened his grip, aghast at his own actions. He was defenceless against Chongli. What was he even thinking when he confronted Chongli?

"Say, Alex, before you proceed, have you ever been in a brawl?" Chongli asked, with flames billowing out of his mouth.

"No, but you should know better - you were in me."

"Well, I am dormant sometimes within you," Chongli replied. "It's like a deep sleep in a human when they are fully unaware of what goes on. Have you shot a gun to kill something?"

"Um. No."

"Punch or stabbed anyone?"

Alex shook his head, mystified at the questions. "No."

"Yet, you want to fight me?" Chongli's stare pierced through him as Alex loosened his grip and stepped away.

"Guess so. No guts." Chongli straightened out his collar.

"I know when I am no match. And you could have killed humans before. What is it? A thousand lives? A hundred?" Alex retorted.

"Heard of Jean Rostand's quote?" Chongli shrugged that irked Alex.

"No."

Screw it. First, Yata was quoting him the philosophy of Descartes, and now Chongli.

"Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god," Chongli recited and added smugly. "That makes me a god."

Damn the god-like complex of all these primeval beings, Alex cussed.

"Besides, it was accidental. Collateral damage, as you humans term it," Chongli said, irritating Alex beyond tolerance.

Killing all humans and Chongli didn't even seem to care with his tone, which sounded like someone going shopping for a big company and ordering the genocide of the entire human species, casually like notepads.

"Collateral? We have LIVES. We have FAMILIES!" Alex blew his top.

"So what? Your lives are fragile and no fault of mine. It is how physical beings are: humans, animals, insects or even plants."

"Grow a fucking conscience."

"What conscience? We don't go by the same moral rules. Humans create morals as guidelines in a society that is… limited and fragile," Chongli replied. "We are more concerned about the greater picture."

"What greater picture?"

"The existence of all things which are, will be and shall be," Chongli answered. "That's what the final evolution is about. To bring others to manage the balance of all existence. From a gargantuan black hole to the most insignificant life form like a virus."

"Then what's my purpose in this whole pyramid scheme of whatever you are talking about?"

"Find it for yourself. Or choose to be the next Zhurong. All choices lead to different pathways." Chongli opened his palm, which projected an image of the circulating cosmos.

"What do you mean the next Zhurong?" Alex glanced at the projection in amazement.

Every nebula, black hole, and planetary systems appeared in each constellation he used to gaze at when he was alive. The vast emptiness and darkness of space with shimmering lights circling him. Then a bright bluish star rotated near him and burst into a blinding light.

To Alex's amazement, the light from the fading star flowed into him as his whole body felt weightless, yet energised.

"Each burst of a star will cause fire to form, and that's part of the elemental powers of anyone who becomes the next Zhurong," Chongli grinned at the astonished expression stuck on Alex's face.

"There are only a four others in the entire hidden dimension that have this power. A rare gift, but it can come as a curse with our existence so long drawn out," he added as his palm closed, making the projection disappear, sending Alex into a downward spiral to the current situation.

"It's like a drug," Alex said.

Drug indeed.

What Chongli did reminded him of the dodgy drug dealers in dance clubs with their usual nudge and a whisper of 'hey mate, wanna try a dove? On the house'.

Alex hated that method of dealing. The trial was just to hook addicts and Chongli appeared to be reeling him in.

Caution is a must, he said to himself. Who was he trying to kid, anyway?

"For a couple of millennia, all fun and games, playing with true cosmos, intervening in planets, but after a while, it's boring," Chongli lamented. "Human lives are shorter, but they have a choice to end it. A choice which eludes the four."

"What happens if I refuse to be the next Zhurong?"

"You choose your own path. A reason I assigned the device to look in Kanghui's territory."

"Why her? I mean…" Alex thought for a bit.

There wasn't a lot he knew about Kanghui, except she was a former Chinese god of water and destructive floods.

"She is hot, isn't she?" Chongli winked.

"Oh come on… I never thought of her this way. Too scary."

"She can prevent the one whom you should, by right, replace, from making you the next Zhurong," Chongli explained. "Her powers of water are equivalent to mine of fire. Fire and water are antagonistic by nature, but she also wields the air element as a secondary, unlike the other three of her kind, and how she actually existed this long puzzled me."