52
A week has passed by.
I had done plenty of experiments on my power's usage and had established the following rules governing this power:
In a day I could use this power only twice. After the second usage, I felt super tired and then had to sleep.
This power allowed me to view all the memories of a dead person if they had died after I turned 18. That means effectively after 14th June 2018.
This power had no role in time reversal. It only granted the ability to see people's memories.
In the white room, I was in total control. The video played or stopped by my free will.
I started calling this ability as the Voice of the Dead or in short as the voice.
Therefore, I concluded that in previous times as well, it was because of the voice that I was able to see the memories of Ethan, Irena, dad and Ivan.
But when I used the voice, I only saw the memories on the black screen. I never interacted with the user of those memories. But in the case of Ethan and others, I did interact with all of them in the white room.
Was that an advanced version of this ability? I was not sure. It's only been a week since I had become aware of this power that had remained dormant in me for the past 4 years.
'Maybe time will make things better and I will be able to completely master this power,' I thought.
I also tried this power to check if I was able to see Seth's and Charlie's memories. But nothing happened. No result. This meant that both of them were still alive somewhere. I was really glad that I was on the right track to find them. But I couldn't have been any more wrong.
Years passed by and there was no change. My power remained the same and so did the rules that governed it.
* * *
October 2036:
I had recently turned 36. The world has changed a lot.
Technology has boomed and the world has become quite similar to the sci-fi world I had seen back in the movies in the 2020s.
But impossible things like immortality, time travel etc were still not achieved. Maybe they could become a possibility in the near future. One never knows.
I on the other hand had become a father now.
I married Irena in 2027. We had our firstborn in 2030 and then our second child in 2034. My life was in bliss. The contract was really living upto its promise.
Our family business also had flourished and we were earning quite a bit. I was also managing Ivan's cotton textile business along with Irena and we frequently visited Rille.
And then finally on the front of my investigation, I had made progress.
As soon as I acquired the voice, I started looking into methods to improve it. I looked into traditional literature and historical texts by great saints and there was just one answer: Deep Meditation.
I meditated for around 2 hours a day and as a person I have become much calmer now. My body also felt that it has more energy than usual and the daily limit of the voice had substantially increased to 5 from 2.
But the biggest change happened on my 36th birthday in this year's June.
I had now acquired a new power.
I felt that this new power was much more significant than the voice. Its scope was way beyond than that of the voice as it applies to all living life forms.
I called this power as the Color of the Soul.
53
With the help of Color of Soul, I was able to understand the cycle of life and death that this world is based upon.
With this new ability, I am now able to see the color of the souls of living beings.
This helped me understand the concept of life and death.
Living souls exist in the form of orbs. All these orbs are of similar nature in living beings. This orb appears in a combination of 2 colors: white and black.
As soon as a child is born, the color of its soul is pure white. This signifies Life energy. At birth, every individual has 100% life energy.
But with time, slowly and steadily a part of the orb begins to turn black and when the individual reaches their death then the entire orb turns black.
On the first look, I can see the distribution of the two colors and this gives me a brief idea about the lifespan of the person.
But I was careful.
Even though this ability has a great potential but it has severe repercussions.
Being able to see the life spans of your loved ones just makes one worry.
If one knows about the time of their death, then one cannot help but worry each and every day. I didn't want it to happen to me. So I refrained from using this ability on my family and friends.
I just trusted the contract and hoped that everything would be fine.
But now this ability gave solutions to many of my problems.
My investigation which was stuck for so many years finally had a breakthrough.
The solution was using the voice and Color of Soul together.
Using the voice, I was again able to see the previous lives of Ethan, my dad, Ivan and myself as well. In my past life, all of us died after I turned 18 so the conditions for using the voice still held true.
The thing which I wanted to test was that while using the voice is it also possible to use Color of Soul?
I started meditating and used the voice.
I was now back in the white room and I was seeing my life unveil in front of me. I don't remember exactly whether it was the 1000th or 2000th time I was seeing my life again in all these years.
The story was like a movie. I was now watching my life unfold from a 3rd person's view. I could see myself and others on the screen.
I then tried to use Color of Soul as well and only for a split second I was able to see the soul orbs of the characters of the past story.
And then, I blacked out.
I got up and saw that 1 hour had already passed by in the real world.
'So using Color of Soul and the voice together drains all my energy for the day. The duration of using them together was no more than mere 2 seconds,' I thought to myself.
There was a room for improvement. Rather I shall say there was a huge scope for improvement.
Being able to use both of my abilities together for just 2 seconds didn't help me at all. I need more time to actually see what was happening. But it did confirm that I could use both of them together.
This meant that finally, I'll be able to know the truth of my past lives.
But the road ahead was long.
I decided to increase the meditation hours a bit more. I needed time to increase my energy base but I was happy with the fact that this method will finally help me uncover the mysteries which I have been trying to solve for the past 15 years.
54
September 2054:
I turned 54 this June.
Both me and Irena have gotten old and our kids have become adults.
My son is 25 now and he actively participates in managing the business along with me.
My daughter is 21 and she is still studying in her medical college. Both of my kids turned out to be good and we are proud of them.
My dad died last year when he was 80 years old and Irena's dad Ivan died the year before at 79.
They both lived satisfactory lives and they were happy till the very end. Their contracts didn't betray them and as mentioned they did get to live blessed lives.
I probably think that they might have already become apostles and the old age was hitting me and Ethan as well.
Due to the contract, I did believe that we still had a few years left with us.
But I had worked hard in the past few years.
I had already uncovered most of the mysteries.
Now I was able to use Color of Soul and the voice simultaneously and my limit was 30 mins a day.
I went to the white room and saw my old memories of Seth and Charlie using the voice.
Then used Color of Soul to see what were their life spans and how could they vanish from the face of the earth.
And what I saw was shocking beyond belief. Their soul orbs astonished me.
After seeing the colors of souls for all these years, I had a hypothesis. The two parents of all living beings, the God of Death and the God of Life, what color would their soul orbs be?
Would they be colorless? Or would they even have a soul orb in the first place? I didn't know. Nobody knows but to keep things simple I made an assumption.
An assumption based on the colors of the numerous souls I had seen. The God of Life's orb should be pure white. Similar to that of a newborn child and should remain the same for eternity for he is life itself.
On the other hand, the God of Death's soul orb should be pure black similar to that of a dead person for he is the embodiment of death.
I saw something similar to my hypothesis.
Charlie's soul orb was mostly white in color. This meant that he was also a living being. But the black part of his orb was less than even 0.1%. This was something that shocked my mind.
So for a normal 18-year old human whose life expectancy varies from 60-90 years, the orb's black component was in the range of 20% to 30% but his orb had such a low black component.
Mathematically, this amounted to the fact that if he was 18 years old when I met him, then his expected life span should be more than 18000 years. How can this be possible? This was absolutely crazy.
And Seth's soul orb was even crazier.
It was pitch black without a shred of white light. What does this mean?
Was he a dead person who just existed in front of me? Was he a zombie? Or….
Was he the God of Death himself?
My brain was bewildered. What the hell was happening here?
I again walked through my entire past lives using the voice and I finally saw how naïve I was.
I never once doubted my friends and I was looking for them all this time. What a fool I was. The system was rigged from the very start.
Before the first time reversal, when we went to the old lady's house there was no grand funeral for Ethan. We just prayed in front of his photo and came back. I also didn't mind it but the most basic question was why a poor old lady would invite the HOD to Ethan's funeral. There was no funeral of such a scale where anybody was invited.
But Charlie got a call from the HOD and that's why I went with him. But was that really true? Did he really get any call? I had no means to verify this. Even using both of my powers, getting this info was not possible but still this was weird.
The next strange thing happened when I just came back after the first time reversal and went back to Ethan's room. I could still think that maybe Charlie with his extrovert personality made contact with Ethan and became his friend but what the hell was Seth doing there? In the past life, he was always a hardcore introvert. He hated everyone. Then how did he come into Ethan's room? How the hell did his personality change this much?
After the time reversals, one consistent thing that I have observed is the behavior of people. The ones who are not chosen by the contract didn't remember anything. Their behavior was consistent throughout. Only the ones who had memories of the past behaved differently.
Charlie's behavior seemed consistent but who knows what he was hiding. But Seth's behavior did a 180. He became friends with us, the same people he hated so much in the past life. This was difficult to digest. I just went with the flow in my past life but I had been such a fool. These two were not at all what they seemed to be. And after going through the rest of my past life, both of them began to seem even more suspicious.
This justified my assumption that an external party was involved in messing up our lives. There was a chance that Seth and Charlie did have something to do with it.
A part of me was confident that the external party was none other than God of Death and his apostles but it was all still vague.
After going through the soul orbs of all the people in my previous life story there were four other individuals who caught my eye. Their soul orbs helped me understand what was happening and I also got some background as to why I was the only one with these powers.
55
The cycle of 18 years continued.
At 18, I received the power of Voice of the Dead. At 36 I received the color of the souls. And following this pattern, after my 54th birthday I witnessed another miracle.
This was expected but the type of miracle that I got was weird.
It manifested when I started to meditate on the next day of my birthday.
Usually while meditating I like to clear my mind and try to imagine an absolutely empty white place with a black dot in the middle.
I then try to focus all my attention on this dot and this always helps me to clear all the unwanted thoughts from my mind and meditate freely.
But today was different.
My imagination's empty white space had suddenly become pitch black like the space in the universe. And the black dot had become a white dot like a white shining star in the middle of the black space.
All of this was very strange but I had no control over it. No matter how much I tried, the old white space and black dot never came back.
As I kept concentrating on the white dot it started to become bigger and bigger as if I was moving towards it.
And then suddenly I woke up from my meditation.
In a blink of an eye, two hours had passed away.
This was very strange. Rather it was the absolute opposite of what happened with Color of Soul and the Voice.
Whenever I used the voice, then no matter how much time I spent in the white room, in real time it was never more than a second or two.
Color of Soul could be used as a solo power or in coordination with the voice.
When it was used all alone then the timeline was the same as that of the present but when it was used along with the voice then the timeline followed the voice's rules.
I again started to make a hypothesis.
Maybe it was the effect of the white and black rooms.
(I started calling the black space during my meditation as the black room)
Maybe the white room was a space where time stops or flows very slowly for the outside world and no matter how much time I spent in it, the time in the real world barely moves.
Whereas the black room was just the opposite.
The time that felt like seconds in the black room was like hours in the real world. This could mean that the time in the black room stopped or moved very slowly and the time in the real world moved with the normal pace but still, it seems to be very quick wrt to that of the black room.
***
At this old age, I achieved more or less everything that I wanted in life. My kids were doing good. Alex was working hard with me in the business and he also lived quite a fruitful life. Irena was happy and content with her life as well.
I had most of the answers to the truth of my life. I was content with everything.
But getting closer to the white dot in the black room piqued my curiosity. The simple question was, what was there in that white dot? Maybe that's what happens when one gets old and has fulfilled his life. Simple mundane things also attract his attention.
Day by day I started to focus more and more during my meditation.
There was even a day when I kept meditating for 6 hours in a go only to be disturbed by Irena. She became frightened that with age I had finally gone senile.
I then made a rule to not meditate for more than 2 hours a day and asked Irena to wake me up from my meditation after 2 hours.
But day by day I noticed a change.
Each day when I began meditating, the white dot was slightly bigger than the previous day.
It made me feel that if I continued this meditation for long enough then I may finally be able to reach the white dot and know what's there on it.
I continued the daily meditation.
56
June 2072:
All that meditation finally yielded results.
I had been doing the same meditation every day for around half a century now. I had become an old man of 72 years.
Even my kids had got married and their kids were also now teenagers.
But now I was able to meet my life's end goal. I knew my time to leave the world was quite near. I had estimated my life span to be around 70 to 75 years by looking at my soul orb.
It happened on 15th June, just a day after my 72nd birthday, the fated day as per the cycle of 18.
In the past 18 years, I had moved quite close to the white spot that it was now not a spot anymore. It looked like the moon being spherical in shape and as white as snow.
The previous day I could see that there was something on that moon. Something which looked like a person standing on the moon but he was still too far to be seen.
But today when I began meditating, I could see myself standing on the moon.
I could feel the land on my feet and this all seemed too real not to be true.
'So you have finally arrived again, young one,' said a voice.
I immediately looked ahead and saw a man standing in front of me.
'Young one? I am an old guy of 72,' I said.
But to my shock, I had become young. I could feel that I was no more than 25 now.
I looked at him and his appearance was even more shocking.
He looked like a carbon copy of mine. Only his hair was white instead of black and his eyes were red instead of black. It seemed as if I had worn a white wig and put on some colored lenses.
But wait. I have seen him before. Even though it's been more than 50 years but I did finally remember him. 'Aren't you my inner voice? The same person who guided me to investigate the truth,' I asked.
'Yes, you are correct Adam. We did meet some time back. But I am surprised that you were finally able to reach here,' said the voice.
Last time I had no powers but this time was different.
I instantly used Color of Soul to see his soul orb. It had now become a habit of mine to use Color of Soul to see the life of any new person I met. His soul orb shocked me. I was finally able to meet one of the few people whom I always wanted to meet.
'Yes, you are correct Adam. I am what you are thinking I am,' He said.
'So you can also read minds?' I asked.
'Yes of course,' He replied.
'That's expected of you. So finally I can meet you in person,' I said.
'In my few times on this planet, you are the only one who was able to meet me without much guidance. I applaud the work you have put in kid,' He said.
'It was all because of the powers that you gave me. I just became better at using them over the years,' I said.
'That's somewhat true but I bestowed these powers on many before as well. But all of them were unbothered. In your generation, life aspects like meditation are long forgotten. I am surprised that you kept doing it each day,' He said.
'So I know my life's end is near. Is that a reason that I am finally able to see you?'
'That's true. But it's also because I wanted to meet you. You are the one because of whom I had so much fun in this life,' He said.
'I see. I am glad I was able to be of some use to you. But you said I am the only one in your numerous times on earth. I read you only came down here like 5 times. Isn't that true?' I asked.
'Those 5 times are only the times when the world was able to decipher my presence because I let them know. Because these were the only times when I was really needed by the living.'
'Else I do come here once in a century. So it's been many a time that I have visited your kind.'
'Now I have a question for you kid,' He asked.
'What?'
'You now know everything unlike any other human before. Only you tried to seek the truth when like the rest of them you could also have chosen to live an ignorant life. Tell me, kid. Do you hate us for all the things that we did to you?' He asked.
I stood mum for a minute.
'I did hate you all. You played with our lives as if it was nothing. But now when I have reached the end, I don't have much to complain about. I spent my lifetime with the woman I loved. My children and grandchildren have been such sweethearts. I felt blessed during this entire life. What more can a person ask for?' I said.
'You are a good kid,' He said.
'Kid! I can read your mind. Your words and your thoughts match well. But you have a lot of questions for me don't you?' He asked.
This guy completely read me.
I did find the answers to my questions but still had no means to confirm whether I was correct or not. I wanted validation.
'Don't hesitate. Ask your questions.'
57
I finally had the chance to confirm all that I had found out. I started with my list of questions.
'Firstly I want to ask what is this apostle contract?'
'You tell me what have you found out?' He asked in turn.
'So by the name, it's pretty obvious that this contract could be used to create the apostles of the God of Death but what exactly is an apostle?'
'An apostle is a servant of the Gods. He is responsible for carrying out the duties assigned to him by the gods. In your case, the contract that you and the other three have signed is to become an apostle of Zord, the God of Death.'
'Apostles of Zord are also called grim reapers as you might have heard about them in folklore. The grim reaper is an entity that is responsible for declaring God's judgement when a being dies. It is they who decide whether one goes to heaven or hell or are to be born again,' He said.
I myself was also not far from the truth but His words confirmed my findings.
'Next, I want to know the conditions of becoming an apostle?' I asked.
'How much have you deciphered?' He asked.
I understood that He was a playful fellow. Before telling me the entire truth He always wanted to know what I had found out. I followed His pattern of communication.
I found out the following for becoming eligible to be an apostle:
The person should have ended his own life.
The decision to end one's life should be influenced by God else every person who commits suicide will become an apostle.
The person should be given a second chance to live the life they wished for.
'Bravo! Bravo!' He shouted as He clapped for me.
'You are really good at deductions kid,' He said.
'Anybody can be good at deductions when they have worked for half a century on finding the truth,' I joked.
'That could be. But still, it's commendable what you have done. For the contract, the conditions are more or less what you have already told me.'
They are:
The human should have ended his own life on account of getting tired of the world. It should be the Project's influence that made the human end his life.
The human should willingly accept to become an Apostle.
The human should be given a second chance to live the life they wished.
'What is the Project?' I asked.
'The Project is simply the process that exists to recruit apostles. In a century Zord recruits 4-5 apostles. This time's apostles were you, Ethan, Kelvin, and Ivan.'
'Alright. I get that. Then tell me next. What are the identities of Seth and Charlie?'
'Tell me what did you find out about them?'
'I saw the color of their souls. Seth's was pitch black and Charlie's was pure white with just a fragment of the black shadow. Until a being is dead, its soul cannot be completely black. This made me think that Seth was either someone related to Zord or maybe Zord himself or he might be a zombie. Whereas Charlie on the other hand also seemed somebody inhuman. He, I believe was working under Zord but I don't know his real identity,' I told Him.
'You are almost there Adam. The black color that you have mentioned is actually the death energy. When a being is born, its soul orb is pure white constituting of only life energy. But with time, the life energy starts dissipating and death energy starts to enter the soul,' He said.
'Seth is indeed The God of Death, Zord. His soul is an endless pit of only death energy. Whereas Charlie I think is one of the ranked apostles of Zord since he participated in the Project.'
'What is a ranked apostle? And what do you mean by participated in the Project?' I asked.
'There are 10 ranked apostles under Zord. Only they have the authority to participate in the apostle creation project. What was the name of the apostle who made you sign the contract?' He asked.
'I think it was Sabastian,' I said.
'Then Charlie must be Sabastian. The 6th ranked apostle of Zord.'
It was now clear what those colors of the souls meant. And using the same logic I very well knew who the person in front of me was.