Chapter 202 (2/2)

Randidly looked at her for a long moment, and when he answered, he ignored the creature’s most recent question. “Why me?”

“Do you wish to be special? This world will leave you quite disappointed.” The creature answered, smiling. “I planted many seeds, you are just the fastest to bloom. What I needed was one who was not giving his ‘meaning’ to the System. One without a class, or a connection to a village. Your development… was unexpected. But it was a pleasant surprise.”

“My… meaning…?”

The creature paused, right in front of him. She was only as tall as Randidly’s shoulder, and had to look up at him with her wide, blue eyes. Like a frozen and poisoned sky. “Let me tell you a story. There was once a being who discovered a magical hole in the world. At first the being feared this hole, but the being quickly recognized its power. When the being pushed “life” through the hole, “meaning” flowed back out. And when the being supplied “meaning”, the hole produced “life.”

“This being was satisfied at first, but then his desire grew and grew, so he began to use that hole to expand his power. He gave his “life” to form enough “meaning” to create a “System” that would help him expand his influence. It grew and grew, and his hunger grew and grew, and so the being began to split small pieces off of the magical hole in the world, covering them with restrictions of “meaning” and planting them like seeds, allowing his influence to grow. But still the being sought more. So more “meaning” was created, and he began to use his seeds to syphon the “life” of the denizens of other worlds, fueling his expansion even further.

“For this being was willing to do anything to find what he was looking for…”

Randidly frowned, slowly parsing apart what the creature was saying. “What… is this being looking for?”

The creature just smiled. The bells around them continued to ring. Randidly ground his teeth, but then sighed, changing his tack.

“Why are you telling me this?”

Again, just a smile.

“What… is the difference between “life” and “meaning”....? What are they? What is life without meaning, or meaning without life?”

Finally a response: the creature laughed lightly, a beautiful, tinkling sound. “That… is a very good question.”

Again, the silence began to stretch. Then Randidly asked. “That hole in the world… it was an Aether Spring? The first one?”

“Technically no. In your language, it is an Aether Crossroads. It could exchange both life and meaning, producing both. The Aether Spring is the later invention, the seed given to villages. It absorbs life from the people for power, but only takes meaning from the central Aether Crossroads, through a series of intermediaries.”

Trembling, Randidly turned slowly and looked at the seemingly endless well of Aether inside of himself. And he peered down until he saw that strange empty space, that hole, inside of him.

“So that thing in my chest… is absorbing my life?”

The creature shook his head. “That’s the great surprise of you; you have grown yourself your own primitive Crossroads that can absorb both life and meaning. The system was designed to be split between two Aether Springs, the Village and the Tribulation. They were designed to absorb meaning from the Nexus, which is what the great Aether Crossroads is referred to as. But when one would fall to the other, those extra restrictions would be purged, and it would transform into a more easily absorbable form: something without those restrictions. A pure Aether Crossroads.

“Both Aether Springs included restrictions on how such things could be absorbed, so that neither of them could cause this to happen. What wasn’t expected…. Was that a person unrelated with either would have the strength to defeat the Tribulation, who had somewhat fewer restrictions on the absorbable form left behind.  It would effectively establish itself as an independent existence within the system, becoming a dungeon and losing its ability to absorb life from its subjects, solely absorbing meaning from the Nexus after its success, so the bindings were less complicated.

“After a few nudges…” Her eyes curved into half moons. “..they were practically nonexistent.”