The same place, some time later.
What is it like to wake up after a long sleep?
Is it wonderful, or not?
The feeling of bliss after sleep is unforgettable, isn’t it?
Or maybe waking up is like flipping a switch: one moment you’re asleep, the next you’re not.
Or perhaps the process of surfacing from the depths of slumber is as slow as a sunrise over the horizon.
Everyone experiences it differently.
For me, waking up was like flipping a switch.
One moment I was unconscious, the next I understood that I was awake.
That feeling is wonderful in its own way.
No long “brain boot-up,” just instant readiness.
When you wake up, you open your eyes, right?
And what do you see?
The ceiling?
A wall?
I didn’t see anything.
That’s not even accurate: I saw nothing at all.
My first thought was that I had gone blind.
Panic set in.
Only after some time did I realize that I wasn’t just blind.
I couldn’t hear anything either.
No sense of touch, no smells.
It was as if I had lost all five senses in an instant.
How long that panic lasted, I don’t know.
Maybe hours, maybe days, maybe weeks.
Who can say?
Certainly not me.
I began to crawl out of the abyss of despair gradually.
First came resignation, then the realization that I couldn’t change anything, at least not right now.
Once I pulled myself together, I started thinking: where am I?
How did I get here?
What should I do next?
And most importantly, who am I?
And you know what?
After losing my five senses, I thought that was the greatest fear.
I was wrong.
I only truly understood fear when I realized that I couldn’t remember myself.
I remembered where I studied, where I’d been, what I’d seen, what my family was like.
But I didn’t remember myself.
I didn’t know my own name, what I was passionate about, what I thought about.
Nothing.
That is terrifying.
Truly terrifying, to lose yourself in an instant, to lose all your experienced feelings.
Only knowledge remains, stripped of personal emotion.
That fear lingered in the back of my mind for the rest of my life, if not longer.
I came out of that state faster, I think.
Probably because of the earlier despair I’d already survived.
My first thought was: what do I do now?
I can’t see, I can’t hear, I can’t move.
I thought about it for a long time.
The only conclusion I reached was meditation.
Yes, plain old meditation.
I couldn’t do anything else anyway.
As I recalled, there are two types of meditation: internal and external.
Since I wasn’t aware of the space around me, only internal meditation remained.
You know, the whole situation actually helped my attempts.
Nothing distracted me, and I didn’t really have a choice.
So I began.
One week after the first attempt.
The first try didn’t get me anywhere.
Neither did the second.
Only around the two hundredth attempt did I feel something.
That feeling reminded me of a ray of light in impenetrable darkness.
I latched onto it with all the fervor I had.
And after some time, I saw.
I saw IT.
A sphere.
You might think, so what?
A sphere is a sphere.
But this sphere was unusual.
Let me describe it.
First, it was semi-transparent.
Second, inside it was another sphere, or a core, or a kernel (whatever you prefer).
It had no color.
Truly.
When you looked at it, you simply understood that it had no color.
Third, attached to the sphere were six semi-transparent outer shells.
They were separate from each other but intersected in places.
Each of these six was different.
The first two were intertwined much more densely than the others.
They also seemed to be in stasis.
Over time, as I tried to understand each of the six shells, I realized that the first shell represented my body, and the second represented the energy produced by that body.
That’s when I understood what I was looking at.
From my past memories, I recalled reading a series of books by Rudazov called “Archmage,” about the adventures of a wizard.
In those books, the structure of the soul was described.
Here’s what it said:
The soul is divided into several principles, or shells, ranging from four to nine depending on the being.
Their names have numbers, so there’s no point in listing them.
It’s enough to list them by number.
The First Principle is the physical body.
By tradition, it is included in the general list, and it’s the only principle whose existence no one tries to dispute.
You can see it and touch it, measure it and weigh it.
You can cut it into pieces without magic or super-advanced technology.
But it is far from the most important principle.
The Second Principle is life energy, also known as prana, also known as Jiva, Nephesh, or Chi.
Terminology doesn’t matter.
Prana saturates every cell of the physical body, allowing the being to live, breathe, move, eat, and reproduce.
It is also produced by the body itself.
The Third Principle is the astral body.
It is visible to some extent, which is what mages see when they look at auras.
The Third Principle provides life after death, allows travel in the subtle spheres, and produces ba-hion.
The astral body copies the physical body, which is why spirits and ghosts usually look the same as they did in life.
The Fourth Principle is the central core, to which all the other shells are attached.
This is the most important part.
The only part of the soul that is absolutely impossible to destroy.
After reincarnation, only the core remains, with encoded information, though sometimes scraps of other shells cling to it.
The Fifth Principle is the emotional spirit.
This is personality, character, emotions, feelings.
This is the shell usually meant by “soul” in fairy tales.
A being deprived of the Fifth Principle becomes like an unfeeling machine.
The Sixth Principle is the thinking spirit.
This is the mind, memory.
This shell is concentrated in the brain cells, and the rest of the body barely matters to it.
Thanks to the Sixth Principle, the spirit retains the ability to think and remember after death, despite losing the brain.
The Seventh Principle is the magical spirit.
This shell serves to absorb and store mana.
It allows one to cast spells and perform magic.
In ordinary people, the Seventh Principle is dormant, and only in a properly trained wizard does it bloom in all its glory.
The Eighth Principle is the immortal spirit.
This shell grants its owner an infinitely long life, and humans do not naturally possess it.
Only immortal beings like celestials, demons, djinn, and a few others can boast of having the Eighth Principle in their souls.
The Ninth Principle is the divine spirit.
This shell exists only in gods.
From this, I deduced that I had no physical body, since the shells responsible for my body and prana were underdeveloped.
My Third Principle was mobile.
There’s no other way to describe it.
It consisted of many colors that intertwined and interacted but did not mix.
The predominant color was gray-blue.
That color, I felt, represented calmness.
There were other colors in my aura as well: fiery red representing my strong emotions, green representing my love of nature, dark gray representing my sins in life, and so on.
There were many colors, and each meant something to me.
My Fifth Principle was incomplete.
It looked like a sphere made of different threads tied into knots.
Many of those threads and knots were missing.
Those missing parts represented emotions and feelings.
My Sixth Principle was also a sphere, but made of blocks like LEGO pieces.
Some parts were missing, which I understood to be names, faces, and my relationships with different people.
But the saddest part was my Seventh Principle.
It looked like a tangled ball in the shape of a sphere, with a whole system of channels inside.
In the center was a core connected to the Fourth Principle.
This system had sent roots into all my other shells.
What was so sad about it?
It was underdeveloped.
All the channels were no thicker than a hair.
It was clear that the core barely produced any energy, probably mana, but the mana simply couldn’t “push” through the channels in sufficient quantity.
The core itself beat so weakly and slowly that it was barely noticeable.
I didn’t know what to do about it.
But I had to try, didn’t I?
As they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I hoped.