Chapter 84: Trippy
Zoey was a great distraction. Or at least, her magic was.
However, Jimmy wanted to get back to meditating. He was nowhere close to absorbing the Sentient Feather that used to belong to a crow, and that didn’t sit right with him. He wanted to merge with the black feather at the very least, and then get to following through with the other tasks that the system had introduced to him.
There was a whole world waiting for him out there, and he didn’t like the fact that he hadn’t yet conquered whatever the world had to throw at him.
Jimmy vividly remembered dying less than two months ago, when he was a human, and although he was yet to understand why he had transmigrated into the body of a crow, he did understand that crows didn’t live long. He guessed that they lived less than a decade.
He may not have brought with him most of what made him human, but his indomitable human spirit still coursed in his veins. He was too stubborn to let go of his will to live. He wanted to live as long as possible, and subconsciously, he even wished to be immortal.
Meditation, in a way, was the first step he could take towards the pleasures of immortality. He wanted to figure out how far the feather’s great regenerative abilities went.
’I have to meditate, but how do I explain this to Zoey?’ He thought, ’It would be rude if I just had her sit here for hours.’
As the lady in front of them went on, giving him a small introduction of how illusion magic worked, an idea struck him.
He interrupted her, and asked, "Do you know anything about meditation? I mean, you seem to be great at messing with everyone’s heads, but, is there anything you can do to help them?"
"I’ve helped some of the elders calm down whenever they wanted to kill you," She said.
"So you can read minds?" He asked, curious, and nervous, as he didn’t want his secrets suddenly unraveled, "If you can, please don’t read mine."
"No, I can’t read minds, Jimmy. I can read faces." She answered, "Which is to say that I’m not a fucking idiot. It’s easy to tell what intent a crow has. You just have to look at them, and pay attention."
"Ah," He was relieved, "Thank you for your help with the elders. Here I was assuming that all you did was snitch on me, but thank you. I probably could’ve died a few times if those morons did whatever they wanted."
"You’re welcome," She said.
Realizing that he was steering off topic, he then asked, "My point was, can you help me? I’m trying to meditate, and I’m not doing so well."
"Meditate?" She parroted, "What’s that?"
It took Jimmy fifteen whole minutes to explain what meditation was about. It was difficult, because he was new to it himself.
Convincing someone that sitting in one place for hours could amount to anything beneficial was especially difficult.
Jimmy had it hard to make a case for himself. He especially looked like a maniac since he was pushing a feather around his beak, but Zoey eventually ended up trusting the goal he had.
After sifting through his below-poor explanations, she came up with a simple solution.
She said, "So you just have to be very calm, for a long time? I can help with that."
A moment later, she stood up, and focused an orb of green energy in her claw. The orb was nearly transparent, its steamy waves seemingly clashed against nothing.
"Now this will drain my mana to the bone, but it should help you," She said.
Flicking her claw forward, the orb beamed towards Jimmy in the blink of an eye, and dissipated in his chest.
"What was that?" He panicked.
"I don’t name my tricks," She said, "I don’t see a point in naming them, since I can put together hundreds of different illusion tricks, but you will feel very calm for a while."
Zoey’s explanation was right on the money. A great sensation of calmness hit Jimmy before Zoey could even finish her sentence!
The calmness evolved into a rapidly distorting perception of reality.
All he could hear her say was, "You won’t be any fun to talk to now, so I have to go. I’ll check up on you come next sunrise."
As she left, Jimmy saw Zoey as a bundle of colorful, geometric shapes put together to represent her body, as if he was in a bad, and yet finely tuned video game. He watched her float away.
He could tell that he was hallucinating, but he couldn’t care less. He wasn’t scared, as he understood why he was hallucinating.
A decent bonus in this exchange was that he hadn’t felt this relaxed in two lifetimes. Whatever Zoey did, she did a good job.
The colorful geometric shapes he was seeing had initially distorted reality for him, but now, he was convinced that there was no reality to distort.
A few seconds ago, even though the world beyond the tree he rested in was made of geometric shapes bundled together, he could still tell what those shapes were. Trees, insects, birds, whatever they were, he could recognize them.
However, now, solid creatures and or material were impossible to grasp, to notice, because to him, they no longer existed.
The geometric squares, triangles, circles, and otherwise, pulsated around him. He felt as if the shapes were yelling at him, silently.
"It’s my day off," He said, "Quick nagging me!"
The shapes did not stop nagging him. They pulsated harder, demanding him to perform.
"Take out the trash yourself for once!" He shouted.
Yet, that single moment when he lost his cool, helped him realize that he contradicted himself.
He asked himself, "Why am I hallucinating arguments about trash? I was a human, yes, but I was never married. No wife to yell at me about taking out the trash. Hmm... this doesn’t sit right with me, wait, yes, that’s it! I’m supposed to sit!"
Jimmy was already sitting, so he got the upper-leg in this unique experience. Nevertheless, he stood up, and sat again just to be sure.
The overall confusion he experienced was distracting, but beneath it all, he knew that he remained more relaxed than ever, and so he knew that he had to use that to his advantage.
To cut the distractions, he closed his eyes.
Colorful, not-so geometrical waves rolled behind his eyelids, but they weren’t as distracting. They were actually calming, in a way, since there were no pulsating shapes ’yelling’ at him to focus, and this led to him being able to actually focus better.
Jimmy’s breathing slowed down, and within what felt like minutes, he got into the basis of a meditative state. A scale that most beginners could achieve.
After some time, his progress increased rapidly. He reached that point that he couldn’t break through earlier on, and this time, he reached this point in what he assumed to be ten times as fast.
Thoughtless, calm, and without a strand of identity, he knocked on heaven’s gate, metaphorically speaking.
At last, the bracket, the same formless colorful gates that wouldn’t let him in before, cracked open.
Jimmy walked past the gates, and noticed that the world behind it wasn’t as trippy. There were no symmetrical, geometric shapes floating about.
Mother nature returned to normal. A green meadow greeted him, and it looked similar to the one he was from. Except the meadow was richer, and more alive.
With some effort, he floated over to a nearby creek, the same creek where he had shot the deer in the real world.
This version of the creek seemed bigger, the water flowed faster, and it went without saying that it looked more alive.
Beyond the creek, a swarm of bugs flew by like a violent ocean wave, and as the bugs disappeared into the distance, a bird materialized on the other side of the creek.
It was a crow.
"How dare you desecrate the sanctity of my haven?" The crow asked.
"You invited me in, didn’t you?" Jimmy answered, his thoughts, finally coherent, as if he was no longer tripping balls. "You must be the feather?"
"Do I look like a feather? I’m a crow!" The other exclaimed, "Gundor the Vast!"
"The Vast?" He parroted, "I think we might be related. One of my brothers is probably named after you. We call him Gordon the Vast. You might be fifty generations older than him, but does that name sound familiar to you?"
"I wouldn’t know. I’ve been down here for over four hundred years." Gundor sighed, "I understand that you caught one of my feathers? The feather invited you in here, I didn’t. It has a mind of its own."
"Your feather put up quite a fight," He chuckled, "A very confusing fight, but, I want to merge with it, so, may I present you my Arcane Comprehension?"