"Aaaagh! I'm so tired right now!!"
Vikram exclaimed at the ceiling when Maya had just finished cooking food and was bringing it to the living room.
His whole evening of western New Year's Eve (Dec 31) was spent negotiating a deal with Judy, while Maya stayed in her room studying Avi's old notebooks.
Initially, he had planned to use Jane to show that he was powerful enough for the Project VAANI, but he didn't need to as Judy was already convinced that she must have Vikram in the first party.
"Why is it so silent outside? Isn't New Year a big deal in the continent?"
Vikram asked as Maya was setting up the table.
Since Vikram had come back, their conversations were limited to Vikram asking rhetorical questions and her answering them to the best of her ability.
He had only been treating her like a disposable maid, but Maya was none the wiser for it.
"don't be silly bhaiya, New year is still two weeks ahead of us!"
"What-!? Ooh, Yeah"
Vikram wasn't expecting an answer but he suddenly remembered that the continent's New Year's day was celebrated on winter's solstice instead of a fixed date like in the Empire.
"I must be tripping if I can't remember even the simple details", he talked to himself aloud.
"It is fine bhaiya. You have had a lot of things on your plate these days"
Vikram irked a little. He didn't like being called Bhaiya but chose to silently take it in for the sake of his identity as Avi. What else was he supposed to tell her suddenly? Call me Vikram from now on? Would that work?
There have only been two people who had called him "brother" in his life and they were his step-sister and Casper. Nobody else in the Empire even dared to look at his dishevelled face let alone call him lovingly.
He had many names in the past: "Rakshasha", "Evil General", "Corrupt Noble", and "Devil", but none positive and definitely not Brother. Even his so-called brother-in-arms didn't dare to call him brother affectionately despite Vikram having literally left his life in their hands many times.
Suddenly Maya went closer and started to massage Vikram's head, her actions seemed so natural as if she had done it countless times before. But Vikram wasn't affected by her loving actions, either physically, or metaphorically, both due to his thick skull.
"Stop it! What are you doing?", he irritatingly lashed out.
"hehehe! You don't like getting a massage from your sister? *cough*"
Vikram grabbed her hands in annoyance and pushed her aside.
Although he made sure not to use any strength, he still bruised her hands which Maya immediately hid behind her body.
She had no complaints and quickly went over and sat beside him on the table to eat breakfast. Her smile was still the same as before.
The 12-year-old child had no clue that she was stuck in a toxic relationship with an uncaring piece of sh*t that could even kill his lover in cold blood for the slightest of benefits in war.
*****
{ 31st Dec 2022 - Midnight | Home }
"Jane, I'm going to be honest. I don't know what this ability does or how it will affect you."
Vikram knew his Ability's description because he had access to Akashvani. However, it was a common fact in Diaspora that sometimes Ability didn't accurately portray the effects of the Ability.
---
[ Paranormal Contract ]
Being related to Paranormal species allows you to not only communicate with the metaphysical but also form contracts with them and borrow their power.
Current Limit - 1 Bond
Max Bond Level - Spirit (low)
---
"It's okay. I don't care about anything else if I can get my revenge after following you"
"... not to mention, after two years of living alone and not being able to talk to people despite them being right in front of me, nothing scares me anymore."
Jane had not retained a lot of her previous nature and attitude, and in her current state, she was only driven by a sense of revenge and vengeance.
She had little grievances about having to follow a 17-year-old kid as her master if that meant she would be free of the incessant desire for revenge burning inside of her.
She didn't care if she had to burn the whole world to achieve her revenge, and she might have already done so if she wasn't stuck in her home.
The only remaining trait of her real personality was her kindness towards the weak and the children, but even that had faded after two years of her becoming a ghost.
"Okay then I'll use my ability"
Vikram was severely lacking any combat abilities and really wanted his second mutation as a Dwij to be powerful enough to help him survive inside Root. His experience and miscalculations from Dandi forest still haunted him. It had officially become his greatest failure as a General and Vikram had made a "Never Again" promise to himself.
Even though he knew that what happened in the forest wasn't entirely his fault and that he was being influenced by a variety of different forces: Avi, Kane, and the Parasite, he still suffered the same pessimism and self-loathing as all other geniuses of their time.
Now that Association had agreed to put him in the first party for Root exploration and Lotus was involved, he needed more power, and that too by yesterday.
'I must get that.'
He thought with veins popping on his forehead as gene power circulated around his body. An act so easy but still so difficult for him that he required extra effort to control the energy.
'... otherwise, the two system curse will tear me apart and eat me whole.'
His goal for entering the Root domain had always been to get rid of the "Two System Curse".
In Diasporan epistemology, Gods did exist but not in their traditional sense. Instead, the "System" was called "God" by the creatures of Diaspora.
However, there were not one, but a countless number of Gods/Systems each belonging to their own respective world. Just like Akashvani was to Blue Planet, Arajakta was also a God of the Chaos World.
Even after inheriting Arajakta's power, Vikram had no clue where this Chaos World was. The only vision he had received during his evolution was of a black void where free-flowing energy entities like the Parasite were abundant like the ocean.
He couldn't be sure of whether the Parasite had eaten away everything or whether the Chaos World was always empty, but he knew one thing: the ocean of Parasites was not an army he would be able to control even if he were to reach Heaven-level right now.
Yet they were being controlled by a single consciousness called "Hive". After their defeat at the Dandi Forest, the Parasite had been quiet and that worried Vikram.
'What if Hive is just quietly monitoring and waiting for their chance, just like they did during the Dandi Forest.', he thought.
Even if Akashvani was superior to the system of the main world in Diaspora, it wasn't omniscient in its incomplete broken state and couldn't control the other system or their powers directly.
That is why Akashvani had even wrongly labelled "Akashik Parasites" as a "Gene Pool" and the abstract mind called "Hive" as an ability "Viral Thought". When they weren't so.
This had happened because both Systems, or gods, were simply two sets of principles that could never meet, like oil and water.
Akashvani or Arajakta were systems, a set of algorithmic principles that, for some reason, favoured certain creatures over others and oversaw the world they belonged to with unfathomable non-human interests.
"Only that son of a b*tch protagonist is immune to the effects of having two systems. He is Akashvani's inheritor after all"
Vikram complained thinking of all the nightmares that were to follow if he couldn't get the "item" from the root domain.
'I don't want to be like the children of Annapurna'
Every Shika with the title of Descendant had a second name, Children of Gods, and Vikram too, after his evolution had become one: Child of Arajakta.
Descendants were not only powerful, but they were also the calamity created to overturn the natural order of a world. They were like viruses in a computer system that destroyed the system from within, an abomination.
In the history of the Blue Planet, only a few of the descendants had lived past two years of their awakening and hence Vikram worried that he too only had a couple of years to live at the maximum.
[ ... System is God and God is a system. It acts according to its own bizarre rule, and humans are but a simple binary of alive and dead in the eyes of that indifferent machine, flawed fundamentally and inevitably doomed.
He remembered a line from the novel.
**
Vikram channeled the gene power inside his body and moved it in circles creating whirlpools around the base of his scrotum.
This was the first level of the "Prana Breathing Technique", the Root Chakra.
"Prana Breathing Technique", or Animus Unity Manual - The Aum(ॐ) was a technique of uniting the volatile force of gene power with a rhythmic breathing pattern to increase the gene power's effectiveness. The key phrase of the technique was "Unity" which referred to the successful assimilation of "Gene Power" into "Body" (or Cells).
Vikram was currently only at the first level of Aum, but it was already equivalent to the second level of Association's Gene Technique.
[ Paranormal Contract ]
Vikram called the ability in his mind, forcing Akashvani to go into action.
[ Initiating the contract ]
[ Identifying the target]
His gene energy automatically flowed outside from his palms and covered the patiently awaiting Jane in front.
---
[ Jane Fonda ] - Spirit (low)
[ Ability ] - Atomic Authority
[ Bond ] - None
[ Bond's Condition ]
Get Revenge (0/5)
---
[ Condition for contract met ]
[ Contract has a favorable opinion of the host ]
[ Contract has accepted the temporary bond ]
[ Advancement of Jane Fonda's status as 'Contract' will be initiated ]
[ Initiating the exchange ]
*****
{ Mind space | Vikram }
"Huh-! Where am I?"
Vikram opened his eyes back in the living room of his house. He was sitting upright on the navy blue sofa just like the afternoon before.
The sun was still directly pointing at the centre of the living room brightly lighting up the place, but when Vikram looked outside it was dark.
Dark clouds with white thunderstorms constantly trembled the glass windows extending till the ceiling but Vikram heard no sound of the thunderclaps.
"What is happening?"
He stood up in fright.
Despite his close to 30 years of life, he couldn't make sense of what was happening to him right now.
But when he stood up, he immediately noticed something. He was slightly smaller than before.
His height, as if slashed by a quarter, only reached up to the chin of his previous build. He looked down and all his senses went flying out the window.
He was wearing a lengthy white gown reaching his knees. The tied blue knot around the waist was more girlish than the contrasting pink slippers with bunnies on top.
The worse was the slight bumps around his chest.
From the deep neck-cut out of his white gown, he could see two spherical fat sacks creating a crevice like the grand canyon in the middle of his chest.
"WHAT THE F*CK!"
He grabbed the temple of his head as he screamed, and right then he noticed something else.
His missing left arm had also grown back. Just like the pair of fat loads hanging by his chest, his left hand also didn't belong to his body.
"WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!!"