189 The Advent Of Change

I had witnessed an inexplicable event that defied all common sense... and it reinforced my faith that he would lead us all to salvation. .

...Of this, I had no doubt. A new season had arrived, and with its arrival had come change.

— The Eventide of Faith, by Haydn Kingscrown

A timid whimper reverberated out across the deserted mountain range as the world froze in abject fear. Alone, a lonesome figure stood in a delirious state, locked in between a hell of foreknowledge and a paradise of ignorance.

He was someone who had plunged into a bottomless pit of absurdity. In the middle of a fatal crisis, he had realized his own shortsightedness and leapt into the only thing that he thought could have saved him.

Since then, he had become aware of a concealed seam in reality inaccessible to lesser beings. As someone with blessed with the Outer Sight, Reed had begun to become privy to everything that lurked underneath the world. 

He could see them.

The rules that governed reality — the serenade of Space, the ebb and flow of Time, the causal chain of Fate, and even the monotonous pitter-patter of Structure. Everything that was meant to be kept hidden from mortal eyes for their own safety.

A life is born, and then it died. It was born again, only to perish once more. Again and again, without end...

A dust mite chewing on a dead skin cell defecated a particularly large amount of feces. It seemed rather content with itself as it lazed about on Reed's arm.

It was impossibly difficult concentrating while the Outer Sight was active. A single fleeting glance was enough to send Reed into places he had no intention of exploring. He had no interest in observing the life story of the dust mite on his forearm, but he had very little control over his newly expanded senses.

Three hundred years ago, a pair of lovers went hiking sixty-three kilometers away from where Reed stood. A romantic getaway for a recently married couple in a remote cottage in Safeel Forest. 

It was a trap for the husband. The wife was a Chosen hitman working for a noble family in the South with criminal ties to the Underworld. Unfortunately, they had both been in love, which meant trouble. The couple had survived at great cost, but it mattered little to him. 

All he had done was turn his head — that alone was enough to send him down this strand of information. Bombarded with an ocean's worth of knowledge per second, Reed struggled to concentrate as he shifted his eyes away from the scene unfolding in front of him. 

In the Eastern Sea, a lonely cephalopod by the name of Summer-Begets-The-Sweetest-Tides wondered why he could not find a mate that would accept his advances. 

This was what Reed felt whenever he used Outer Sight in reality, much to his distress. To him, it was both torturous in the extreme and endlessly enchanting.

All-consuming. Intoxicating. Terrifying. Addictive. Disorientating.

Nothing could compare with the extreme rush brought by the skimming into the innermost depths of reality. Using the Outer Sight was enough to irrevocably shatter an untrained mortal mind, much less one that was not reformatted to withstand it. 

The inconceivably massive bandwidth boost produced by the Outer Sight was the primary reason for the uniquely bestial form of insanity that all lesser Infested possessed. Every single soul to have been collected by the Infestation possessed this gift. 

Unlike Reed, they had been forcibly exposed to this influx of information without proper care. They had been attuned to something incompatible with their very existence...

"Hasek yefot ingosim!" he cried out in a foreign tongue with great fervor.

For many, the meaning of these words would have eluded them, but the powers they had would have not. 

The precious few would have recognized the accursed language and fled in terror had the heard Reed. They would have known that he had indulged in the fabled Elder Speech. 

Logos was the formal term for the Elder Speech, but most knew it as an indecipherable cacophony reminiscent to that of nails on a chalkboard. Each word in this divine language represented an immaculate, immutable truth of the universe.

Such was the assumption of the first Ancient Mulians when they first heard it spoken. And they had been correct. The Elder Speech was the work of beings with a greater understanding of the universe than even them.

Put simply, each word was a facet of existence condensed into a multi-layered linguistic format capable of expressing a tremendous amount of information. It was the purest form of communication ever devised, one that only permitted truths to be spoken. 

But unlike all who attempted to speak in this pure tongue, Reed was not limited by his mind anymore. Where they spoke it in broken, mangled phrases — which in return, produced the possibility of a fatal backlash — he was fluent in it, by nature of his Outer Sight. 

That was one of the most significant realizations Reed had come across since his rebirth. 

The Outer Sight and the Elder Speech were a connected set.

The first tool allowed one to utilize the second one without any issues. To use the Elder Speech without the Outer Sight was equivalent to giving a blind man control of a ship in the middle of a typhoon. 

That was why they had so strongly expressed their feelings the first time I accidently spoke. Why they had forbidden me from using it. Not even they had the qualifications to properly use it... and certainly not myself at the time.

The long and winding chain of history coiled around him as his sight stretched back to the very moment he uttered his first words of the Elder Speech. A blurred vision of the past presented itself to him as he observed the causal ripple of his first time speaking pure words aloud, but he did not seem too focused on it. 

No, his gaze was directed elsewhere. Neither at himself, Lu'um, or even the frozen world around them. He could see nothing aside from what he had no method of recovering.

The only thing he could do was observe with a stomach full of regret. And for someone who could, in a literal sense, force heaven and earth to bend for him, there was more infuriating and soul-crushing than to be denied his greatest desire. 

In a cruel way, it was a sobering experience — it kept him grounded; kept him from growing too comfortable with his newfound abilities. He knew better than to let himself get carried away, to say the least...

Reed turned his eyes away from the sight and let the vision fade. If he had spent any more time in that lost time, he feared that he would not have been able to leave it. There was still unfinished work left to be done and not enough time for repentance. 

"Syilav' iijot biryn—" Reed whispered before his voice turned an abnormal drone, almost as if he had shoved a swarm of insects into his throat. His voice had changed into something unquestionably alien, a pitch resembling holo-vision static and a dying creature's bellows. 

Unlike his inexperienced contemporaries, he could properly utilize Elder Speech in the way it was intended to be used. 

Speaking the words was only the beginning. Even visionless fools could recite a couple of words if they were taught how to pronounce them. But this would only elicit an elementary effect.

A cause (a pure word) would produce an imposed effect upon the world. This was as simple as could be, but Reed could do far more than spit out a couple of words — he was capable of splicing them. 

He had taught himself how to cut, or hack apart words and recombine them with other words to create... interesting, never before seen effects. 

Hence the term, Logic-hacking, was coined. It was a playful double entendre he had thought up, though Reed doubted anyone would find it cool except himself.

The world around Reed warped in a flurry of color and sound as it spun endlessly. He had Logic-hacked the words, "space" and "time" in an imaginative way.

He had rearranged the properties inherent to the words and then fused them back together in a reversed order. 

Where space once possessed a physical property, it no longer did. That had been cut off and stitched into time itself.

Where time once possessed an intangible property, it no longer did. That had been cut off and stitched into space itself.

Reed had spoken a new word that had never been uttered, and with its arrival came change. 

Timespace — In a literal sense, the physical domain of time. 

He had forced the world to do a thing that could not exist normally. Reed had altered the universal constants that the world operated on to produce reality as it was understood and experienced. 

Time itself had been rendered a more palatable concept, one with three distinct physical dimensions. And in return, space had been reduced down into a single non-linear dimension. 

This was, without a doubt, a grand violation of universal order. In a different era, Reed would have been sentenced to a final death by the Ancient Mulians had they witnessed what he had performed. Even they, who opposed the use of pain and death as punishments for terrible crimes would not have allowed what Reed had performed go unanswered.

He had made a mockery out of everything they stood for and had possibly endangered the very Structural Integrity of the Universe. 

Only God, the Creator of the Universe, had the right to tamper with the laws of the Universe. To them, for anyone else to attempt such a thing was the highest taboo possible. 

But none of that matters anymore. It's already beyond saving anyway... 

He strode forward, marching across a jungle of overlooked memories and past giant mountains made of remarkable events.

In this otherworld of time, seconds, minutes, hours, and years were tangible physical distances instead of abstract, fleeting shadows. An entire world formed of an endless number of events and memories comprised this beautiful, ethereal world. 

Entire flower fields made of first loves and declarations of eternal fidelity could be seen everywhere he journeyed. Love was a weed! It grew and proliferated out into the furthest reaches of time, far beyond what he could see.

Daisies of pure love, orange blossoms of eternal love, hyacinths of jealousy, and even carnations of rejection... 

The sight of a world covered in flowers was enough to render Reed speechless and even make his jaded heart throb anew with genuine passion. 

Immense sequoias — life histories of extraordinary people — sat beside smaller pine trees and humble apple orchards in bloom. They were all equally splendid, bearing unique scars of the trials and tribulations of their lives from birth... to death. 

Deep below, where Hope was dim and Fate was heartless, was where the damned lived. Near the bowels of the earth, in deep caverns never to be explored, they would remain as their punishment.

It was a tremendous sight to behold — the entire history of the continent of Mulia. How he wished to show the people closest to him this incredible scenery, but he knew it would not be possible. Their unequipped minds would never be able to process the information, not without their brains cooking themselves into a soupy mess... 

Alienated from everyone he cared about, a part of him felt the all-too-familiar melancholy creep around him. He had not felt this way since before he arrived in Mulia.

Billions of years stretched out for what seemed like an eternity to Reed as he felt how truly insignificant he was compared to what laid before him. 

And this is just one continent of a single, rocky pebble of a planet. If this is the timespace of Mulia, then what would the timespace of Mu look like? 

And what of the solar system that Mu resides in? Or what of the galaxy it inhabits? It's just one galaxy in a single universe that's part of an entire multiverse...

He was an ant in the face of this wide world.

...No, less than that.

Less than an electron in an ocean of stars. In fact, it was debatable whether or not he even registered as anything in such a vast and stunning realm of marvels...

And for a moment, Reed fell into despair. It took hold of him as questioned why he continued to struggle to survive in a dying multiverse. Why he so desperately wished to save the feeble last spark of life that was Mulia? 

To save the people of Mulia from eternal damnation at the hands of the Infestation?

To protect his loved ones?

To right the mistake he had committed? 

To prove himself? For whom and for what?

To be a hero? 

To live another day?

To...

No... it wasn't any of them; It was all of them. He desired for greatness that could not be so easily described, despite what he told himself and others. 

The image of various figures flashed inside his mind. Specters of people who had given him what he always required the most — their tender guidance, their little morsels of wisdom — something that had never been afforded to him in his past life.

A light to shine away the ignorance, fear, and hatred that had been festering in his heart of hearts. To put his Faith where it belonged, beside Hope, in order to carve a better future. 

Here, in the meadow of time, the echoes of his guiding stars called for him to draw all the strength he could muster. To confront the accursed Fate that haunted him with a chest burning with Hope that no darkness could ever dispel. 

Reed had arrived at his destination after a long voyage measured in memories, nightmares, and grains of sand. He stood at the precipice of a daunting chasm that held unnatural filth within it not natural to Mulia. The taint of the Infestation was an easy thing to identify, as nothing compared to it in repulsiveness. 

Bereft of the Mark of Responsibility , the reset nodes located within the last two fissures would not answer his calls. He had lost that right when he shook off the burden. A feeble attempt at blackmail, one that He had devised in preparation to quell Reed into compliance.

If Reed wanted to save Mulia, he would have to accept the bearing of the hateful brand and come to terms with it. But that threat no longer held any power on Reed, not after he came to realize what he could do with his newfound abilities. 

You made a mistake, brother mine. But I don't fault you for it; not even you could have imagined what could be accomplished this power. After all... it was the one thing you could never obtain, no matter how desperately you wished for it. 

Although the evil slumbering in the chasm intimidated Reed, he knew it would not compare to the suffering that would befall Mulia should he flee.

It needed to done, no matter the pain he would have bear. 

Reed took a long, deep breath and filled his lungs with courage, and then... 

"————!"

He roared out a new word that he had fashioned in the Elder Speech. One filled with unprecedented strength unlike anything ever witnessed in history. 

And it would change everything from then on. Mulia would never be the same again.