Lab C: Chapter 14 - The be with out, while being with...

What is time to a man who has reentered the material world so deep into the Earth’s crust that he would never be detected by humanity?

Misery.

And to a man with no preference, it is no challenging notion.

When he came back from the void, he didn’t do it clean. His skin had become one with the rock and the rock had tried to make space for him. It was just so that he did not die. This was no concern to him at first. At first, this seemed to be the newest challenge.

He did not mind it. At first.

Then, came the whispers. Distant at first. The monk wanted to reply but he could not move. They came closer, and he wanted to hear them, but they were not mortal words. The whispers came from the stone, reverberating from something he could not understand.

If you are lonely, someone will come to speak with you. And if you seek to speak with no one, no one will come to speak with you.

So far from any other mortal mind, the monk was now experiencing more one sided conversation that he had in his entirety of conscious life.

He bore this and was sustained. He was unperceived and yet wholly under the awareness of something.

The calm of surrender reached him in a new, wholly profound. He could be nothing to anyone, he could be out of space and yet, reality would still find a way to see him. It was the surrender of void in the entirety of self existence.

The whispers could not have come from anywhere but his perception of them, and yet they were of a creeping existence far out of any thing in his perceivable reality.

Shattered, he wholly accepted the void and returned to falling. This time with his eyes open and his perception open. In it’s core, the Earth bore something which burned at him. He looked into it and saw naught by red. A red which he did not want.

This desire to be apart from, this fear and anguish at the color he had been falling towards, propelled him up and up and up.

All sense open, he watched the layers fly through him and he laughed.

When the red faded, his lost the balance, and was stuck again in stone. Time passed and he found the non-preference desire of non-existence with direction again.

In and out, in and out, miles of Earth he had to work his way up from.

Eventually, feeling empty space and still seeing nothing, he landed in a deep cave. At first, there was nothing but the grind of his stone skin on smooth rock. He clenched his hands and though they closed into a fist with perfect precision, he could not feel where they met, only the pressure of bone pressing against bone through numbed, hard flesh.

His body swayed with weight, proportion and height he did not know. His hands and feet, his neck, knees, elbows, they all felt wrong, farther then they should be. Despite this, he wiggled in this body, in the darkness, and simply enjoyed that he was no longer stuck.

Then, he heard it…

guttural breathing.