Monastery

A Chapter by Feng Zi

Chapter 1 – Monastery

Retina Verification … Processing … 93% completed … Processing … 98% completed … Processing … Completed.

Loading …

Loading Completed. Vision Restored.

A myriad of colours exploded before his dark, dull eyes before finally settling down into sensible picturesque vision. It was then, that Jun Tian realized that all the while, his eyes had always been opened all the time whilst he was blinded.

What a scary thought …

If Jun Tian could shudder, he would have had done so. Yet, he could not – not even twitch his slightest finger. There were merely two things he could do now – to think … and to see.

Better off than what I was in the past … all I could do was to think …

Of course, this mere vision was extremely crude … to the point that he could not even blink. But Jun Tian would leave that on to later days. He had carefully listed his priorities …

The first was vision. Forget the motor muscles in the eyelid. Jun Tian decided to begin work on his hearing.

System Command Prompt … Access Sector 153

He called up the Core, the ‘alter-ego’ of his nervous system, and immediately accessed and engaged his brain. Of course, he had dared not to carelessly tamper with the other sectors.

A single mindless alteration to any of the other sectors of his brain could possibly lead to countless of variations of unthinkable consequences. For one, he could suffer severe memory loss.

Jun Tian shuddered merely from the thought of this occurring. If he were to lose memories of his past month of work … he would forever remain a vegetable.

According to his current knowledge, only Sectors 151, 153 and 155, out of the thousands of sectors in his brain, were truly safe, mostly void of high brain activity, and hence available to him – at his expansion, to experiment on.

Jun Tian had converted Sector 153 into what he had named, the Core. The Core was forged as the basis of the ‘alter-ego’ of much of his nervous system. After Jun Tian had confirmed that over 70% of his organic nervous system was wasted away by his encounter with the assassin, Jun Tian had began to substitute the nervous functions with alternate pathways that he had drawn up within his body.

Months ago ( Jun Tian had himself lost track of time after three days into his vegetative state ), Jun Tian’s family was miserably massacred after witnessing an assassin at work.

And as Jun Tian would later learn of, and subsequently abide by, the Number One Rule of assassination was – Slaughter all witnesses.

All four members of his family were out in the alley, way past midnight, and the assassin ruthlessly attacked all four of them.

His father went down first. He had approached the assassin, after witnessing him setting fire to the corpse of his victim. It was a child.

“Mister … Mister! I’m going to call the police! You! Stay right there!” His father had roared. Anyone … anyone would have had been infuriated with the murderer of an innocent child. Not just any murderer, but one who would not leave the dead alone – the assassin had mutilated the corpse before lighting it ablaze.

And without a single word, the assassin had put down Jun Tian’s father. That was when Jun Tian noticed that the assassin’s fist was burning furiously. The assassin hadn’t started the fire on the corpse with a match or a lighter or any form of kerosene-like fuel.

The assassin had set ablaze the dead child with his hand.

With a swift wave of his hand, the flame on the assassin was extinguished. All this happened whilst the assassin’s other wrist was still clutched about the stump which was the neck of Jun Tian’s beheaded father.

There wasn’t any blood. No blood.

The wound was too smooth, too skillfully sliced through that no blood would spurt forth. The assassin released his hold and allowed the dead to fall lifelessly to the floor.

Jun Tian was held in awe. Or rather, his young mind of seventeen years could not possibly process whatever he had just witnessed. He merely remained silent. But his younger sister, however, responded in the most crude and simple form of expressing horror.

She screamed.

And she was almost instantaneously shut up. Jun Tian’s second family member went down. The assassin simply extracted her youthful heart out of her small chest. Slickly and calmly, he continued in the utmost graceful manner to finish off Jun Tian’s mother.

The last glimpse that Jun Tian caught, before he himself slipped into unconsciousness, was the silver mask that the assassin had donned on. Jun Tian was the only member of the four whom was standing under the moonlight, and when the assassin stepped into the moonlight to severe Jun Tian’s nerves …

The silver Mask.

The Silver Mask!!!

The faint movement in the background caught Jun Tian’s attention and he swiftly brought himself back into the present. It was then, that he realized that he was in a monastery.

Earlier on, Jun Tian’s vegetative frame/body was positioned in such a way that he was facing the wall. As such, he was unable to tell where exactly he was at.

Yet, now, somehow had shifted him, without him knowing for he had lost his sense of touch, such that he was now able to take in the full view of his surroundings.

The monastery … or perhaps, it should just be called ‘ruins’, was merely a shelter, the simplest and most basic one Jun Tian had ever seen, whose walls were riddled with holes and the roofs leaking rainwater.

It is raining …

Never before, had Jun Tian regarded rain beautiful. But right at this very moment, something within his chest had been moved. It was truly the weirdest sensation, a man in a vegetative state could experience. He was touched, yet he could not feel.

After all, this was his very first sight of the sky he had taken into after months of imprisonment within his vegetative body – one that had lost all five senses, all, besides his ability to think. Yet, in spite of all the various losses, Jun Tian had miraculously obtained something worth much more … something much more precious than his five senses.

Invision.

Jun Tian had took pains to come up with a term to describe the special sight he was blessed with after his nervous system was thoroughly wasted away. He had, developed the wonderful ability to watch his bodily functions within.

He could watch his heart beat …. feel his blood flow within the capillaries … look at his brain heating away over the countless computations and calculations per second …

Invision.

It had allowed Jun Tian to construct the Core, and regain his sense of sight. He was confident that he could achieve much more with it, for invision had enabled Jun Tian to observe phenomena that no other man had witnessed before.

Symbols … Characters … Signs … Pictures … Jun Tian had no idea how he would describe them.

But as he focused upon the remains of his nervous system, he had discovered the millions and infinite streams of data flowing to and fro from his brain. The thousands of sectors in the organ repeatedly received and issued countless strings of commands in this strange language …

This language, Jun Tian had decided after long periods of contemplation, the speech of the soul, or Soulscript.

Studying the Soulscript was a severe pain in the a*s. There were millions of different symbols in Soulscript, each representing a specific individual form of data. Jun Tian would long have gone insane in trying to interpret the meaning of Soulscript, if he hadn’t had also obtained the power of memory.

His memory … he realized … was flawless … god-like …

All he had to do, was open up another sector of his brain which was secluded from much of the brain activity, Sector 151, and link it to Sector 153, where most of the interpretation was made. And whatever discoveries Jun Tian had uncovered, was deposited in Sector 151. In short, it was a memory bank.

However, as of current, Jun Tian was only able to decode a small fraction of the innumerable different symbols. But this was already sufficient for him to code for a new sense of sight.

To play safe, Jun Tian had unlocked another sector of his brain, sector 155, to serve as a back-up Core.

Who had happened to me? How did I escape death? Who moved me here?

Jun Tian thought as his gaze wandered across the roof the monastery. His body was laid across the floor of the shelter and he appreciated that. Peering through the huge holes of the monastery’s roof and looking past to the sky, Jun Tian noticed that it was evening already.

Abruptly, a bony hand appeared from above his skull, and reached for his mouth.

Jun Tian’s heart had skipped a beat, if not stopped, from the sudden entry of another being. It wasn’t that he was frightened – he was just surprised.

He watched in silence ( he could not speak, after all ) as the hand, one that was covered with grease and grime, stuffed what Jun Tian was barely able to recognize as rice, into his mouth.

The rice was grey, and a little mouldy at that. And Jun Tian was thankful that he had not restored his sense of taste.

But he was thankful.

Whoever the hand had belonged to, Jun Tian sincerely thanked him for his feeding. It had helped sustain his life. If he was left alone in his vegetative state, Jun Tian was pretty sure that even before he had decoded sufficient of Soulscript to restore his bodily functions, he would have long starved to death.

The hand now moved away and Jun Tian finally saw its master – a monk. He was old, frail and thin. Those were the words that cast the first impression of the monk into Jun Tian’s mind.

Perhaps, a more appropriate word to use was – skeletal.

The monk moved and stood over Jun Tian’s motionless body and peered into Jun Tian’s eyes. His mouth opened to speak words that Jun Tian would never be able to hear. And thereafter, the old man reached to shift Jun Tian and prop his back up against a pillar of the monastery.

Jun Tian was now able to take in a better view of the shelter.

The monastery was simply designed – four walls, a broken roof, two sets of doors ( front and back ), and an altar in the centre where three statues were placed ( two deities and one of the Buddha ).

Once again, Jun Tian’s heart moved as he took in full sight of the Buddha statue.

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