Chapter 58: The truth of the matter

Chapter 58: The truth of the matter

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”

Buddha

“The child is imbalanced.” sighed Grandfather.

After I had been caught out of the air, I had been held and carried all the way back to the island and up to the top of the cliff. Watching the world stand still, had, after my minor panic attack, been entertaining enough for the first hour of subjective time. The problem was I couldn’t yet respond. I retreated into my mind fortress relieved to find everything still the same although my command center showed the world moving incredibly slowly outside. Meanwhile, my stamina continued to tick down. At this rate I would be napping like a normal baby just when I was supposed to start staying awake a little longer. I couldn’t currently respond to them. But it was giving me plenty of time to think about my dilemma and I had found that if I meditated within my fortress I could wait patiently between their sentences and think slow enough to understand what I was hearing even if I could not maintain my meditation well enough to allow me to control my tongue and speak. I focused on mentally imagining myself breathing in and out while I waited for the inevitable questioning of my sister. It would arrive in the end. I just had to wait for it. Any minute now. Calm and steady. This had to be helping me level up my meditation, not to mention my listening skills.

“What do you mean?” asked Aleera. She was no longer panicking quite so hard now that she had an explanation as to why I was lying there in my mother’s arms without seemingly responding.

She had been particularly distraught on the way back to the cliff relegated to holding me while father sailed and grandfather kept an eye out for any denizens of the deep. At least I had not lost my ability to breathe. My hypothalamus that governed the automatic functions of my body seemed to be working independently or was unaffected by the increased speed of my consciousness and the elongated subjective time I was now subjected to. I waited for Grandfather’s response. It was like listening to or watching an incredibly slow game of tennis played on the TV. That was part of the reason I had my eyes closed other than the difficulty of trying to control them. When I watched the world move so slowly the faces everyone made seemed hilarious in slow motion and comedic in effect. It seemed that there was such a lack of control over so many of our movements that we never really noticed because they happened too fast for our eyes to see.

“What does imbalanced even mean?” she eventually asked exasperated by the new weird and wonderful thing her younger brother had managed to do.

Unfortunately, this just delayed my grandfather in responding even further from my point of view. Clearly imbalanced was something that my new trait had caused. The cause and effect was obvious as I was the one suffering from it. I was just wondering whether Grandfather had an explanation for it and hopefully a cure or solution. Having finally worked out a way to make their speech understandable I was hopeful that in time I would be able to control the rest of my body. It was just going to take some time. Something I now subjectively had a lot of.

“Imbalanced is really quite simple. It means that one of his stats far outweighs another to a detrimental effect.” He finally explained to my sister.

I had already worked that one out. How long was it going to take him to get round to a solution. Breathe in and out. 10 subjective seconds in and 10 subjective seconds out. I was going to be very calm by the end of this conversation if I could keep this going and not be driven up my mental walls by the wait. That there was a word to describe my current condition meant that at least I was not alone. Other people must have gone through similar if not exactly the same circumstances to warrant it and when other people had similar problems hopefully other people had come up with viable solutions. Just keep breathing. In and out.

“A cripple is someone who has managed to create an average imbalance between his body and brain stats. Too much brawn, the stats for strength, endurance and dexterity leads to a Dullard. Too much brain, on the other hand, the stats for senses, mind and clarity leads to a Cripple. Somehow Kai seems to have achieved this.” Here he paused for an agonisingly long time . . . “Probably by jumping off the cliff.” He finished.

We are only as sick our secrets and it appears my secret access to my stats even though I am still unable to allocate them has caused me bigger problems in the long run. A secret kept in the dark grows and become more harmful in the long run. This certainly seems to be the case here. It seemed that my Grandfather was far more aware of what I was capable of than I had believed but at the same time still ignorant of everything I could do. Is this my fault? If I had told them I could see my stats would I be lying here now? If I had told him how high some of them were would he have advocated the same training? But if I had told them of my traits would they still consider me human and not a monster? Throughout all of our growing conversations about stats and statuses not once had traits ever once been mentioned.

There was a stunned silence which for me stretched on silently for many a subjective minute. But in real time Mother and Aleera exclaimed simultaneously, “We did this to Kai?”

They might have helped. But in the end, I had done this to myself. Hopefully, I would be able to find the cure to it, by myself as well. I had managed work arounds before. I was hopeful I would be able to do the same again. I had my mind and I had been stuck in it before. In fact considering how much I had achieved in it before it was hardly the end of the world. I would just have to wait . . . Hmm, no. I was not going to wait another 9 years to allocate stat points to get myself out of this hole. But neither was I going to despair over it just yet.

“But that’s the point! We shouldn’t have been able to imbalance him. He shouldn’t even be able to become imbalanced! All growth before you are able to allocate your stats is natural and balanced. You might have a natural strength but it would never grow beyond what the rest of your natural stats could support. There was basically no way to know that this could have happened. I have only ever heard of this happening to people who either did it to themselves over the age of ten or those who were simply born this way. Even those who were born this way, can sometimes, if you help them allocate their stats properly on their 10th birthday alleviate if not eradicate their conditions. I have never heard of a child, without stats, suddenly developing an imbalance. It simply shouldn’t be possible!” A frustrated and unsatisfied Grandfather grumbled to both himself and the rest of the family.

While grandfather seemed to be repeating himself as much as justifying himself. It seemed to add weight to the idea, that simply by seeing my stats and skills, I had somehow managed to direct my growth, beyond what a normal child would have been able to do so. Unfortunately to a detrimental effect. I had always believed my growth to be beyond what a normal child could have achieved. Having had a functioning brain from the very start, along with a wealth of a modern world’s knowledge, I felt I had been assured a place myself among the geniuses of the Compass Kingdom’s history a combined version of Mozart, Pascal, Neumann and Da Vinci. But no I had crippled myself and this was after I discovered that I was not as special as I had believed on the Merchant’s ship when I found out that the rich could simply buy their offspring their experience and levels. Obviously, we are all born ignorant but I seem to have worked particularly hard to remain stupid.

“But what if he did?” Mother quietly asked as she held me tight to her chest in concern or possibly guilt.

Where was mother taking this conversation? What did she know? I had already been abused of the notion that I had hidden all my secrets from my Grandfather. Who else had I failed to keep my secrets from and what did she know. It was just as well I was unable to control my facial features at the moment as I am sure I would have given the game away many a time throughout this conversation. I was going to have to level up my acting skills if I was ever going to re-join society once more at a later date.

“Did what?” Grandfather asked confused.

We all waited for mother to respond some of us felt the time go a lot slower than others but we were all resigned to waiting for my mothers response.

“What if he had a status and stats from the very moment he was born?”