Makun walked back the way he had come, deep in thought. One day had been enough to change how he saw the world. He knew about the war between Eastern Europe and parts of Asia that had started in 2027, and about the strange rumors of UFOs and all the wild conspiracies people threw around online. But what he had seen today was something else. Zuri, the presence, the market: it all looked like a well-established system that had existed for who knew how long. People could manipulate energy, attack with it, and own objects like that demonic mirror.
He was stunned, but he was also curious, and not only because this world might save him. Seeing it had excited him. It was new and far from mundane, and he wanted to dive into it. He remembered Zack mentioning a third-grade Adept, and he still had no idea what that meant or what the hierarchy looked like. The book would surely tell him.
A car came screeching around the corner ahead, far too fast, its tires smoking. Makun stopped walking. The car fishtailed, jumped the curb and slammed into a streetlamp ten feet ahead, right where he would have been if he hadn't paused. Metal crumpled and glass burst across the sidewalk, and Makun threw himself back from the spray of it. His phone slipped out of his pocket as he stumbled and hit the pavement face down, and when he snatched it up, a crack ran corner to corner across the screen. Steam hissed from the engine. The driver stumbled out, drunk and shouting something incoherent, and collapsed on the sidewalk.
It happened again. My bad luck protected me from worse luck.
He had noticed it more and more: on the way to the market, inside it, and now here. Breaking that link really had changed how his luck worked on him. The misfortune was still there, still hitting him constantly, but now it seemed to turn the worst outcomes aside, like a curse that had learned to aim away from fatal damage.
He stepped around the wreckage and kept walking.
Dawn was breaking when he reached his building, the sky lightening from black to deep blue and the streetlights clicking off one by one. He climbed the stairs slowly, his legs heavy and his throat still aching where Zack had grabbed him. Mr. Okoye would come today, probably sometime in the afternoon, to start the official eviction. There weren't many hours left, and there was nothing he could do about it right now. He was too tired.
He unlocked the door and stepped into the usual shabby misery. The paint peeled worse near the corners where the water damage had spread, and brown stains shaped like continents marked the ceiling where the unit above leaked and the landlord never fixed it. The linoleum was scratched and cracked and curling at the edges. The couch sagged in the middle, its springs long dead, and the coffee table stood on a leg propped up with folded cardboard. The single window had a crack taped over with duct tape, behind curtains that had once been white and were now gray with years of city grime. The eviction notice still lay on the table where he had left it.
This place was a tomb for ambitions. But it was his tomb, for a few more hours at least.
The bedroom was smaller, with barely enough room for the mattress on the floor and the tangle of sheets he had kicked off after the last nightmare. The single bulb flickered when he switched it on. He needed rest, but his body was exhausted and wired at the same time, adrenaline still buzzing under his skin, and he couldn't sleep. Not yet. He had the book, and the more he knew, the better his chances.
He sat cross-legged on the mattress and held it in both hands, looking at it with something close to longing. My way out of this. The leather was worn smooth and the pages yellowed at the edges, and the title was burned into the cover: The Goal of a Mystic.
He opened it. The first page held a small diagram of a spiral, simple and elegant, which seemed to pull his eyes toward its center, deeper and deeper, as if it were three-dimensional despite lying flat on the paper. Beneath it was a single line.
The true goal of a Mystic is reconnection to the Source.
That was all. Reconnection to the Source. What source?
He turned the page and found a handwritten note in old ink that had faded to brown.
This book is intended for all those initiated into Mysticism. Without certain aptitudes, you will not be able to understand what is written in this book. Some chapters will not even be able to be read by you. So the book is a guide and can provide you with a path for limited advancement. Then you are on your own.
Excitement flared in his chest. The veiled woman had been right; the book was truly valuable. He didn't know yet what he would find in it, but a promise of advancement was huge, something real and tangible he could work toward.
He turned the page again, to the first chapter, titled simply The Fragmentation, and leaned forward to read.
In the beginning, there was only the Source.
Not a god. Not a being. Not a place. The Source was totality, infinite potential compressed into impossible unity. Everything and nothing. Wholeness without division.
But the Source desired experience.
To experience joy, one must know sorrow. To understand light, one must touch darkness. To feel separation, one must divide.
And so the Source fragmented itself. Again, and again, and again.
Each division created consciousness. Each split birthed awareness. And with every fracture, the fragments fell further from their origin, becoming denser, heavier, more... material.
Makun stopped reading. His heart was pounding. The words resonated somewhere deeper than his intellect, as if they described something he had always known but never had the language for. The Source fragmented itself, and the fragments fell and became material. Became... us?
He looked up at the cracked ceiling and the broken chair, at the poverty and misfortune of twenty-three years of being ground down. Is that what this means? We're fragments, pieces of something whole that fell so far we forgot what we were?
His hands shook slightly. The book felt heavier now, not physically, but as if it carried a weight beyond paper and ink. He took a breath and kept reading.