Key to the Void: A self-made isekai

“Sooo… I’m just… supposed to think about… speaking, right? And then it will work?” Rolwen asked.

“No, not thinking,” I said. “Thoughts are conscious things. Consciousness is good for learning a skill, but it is a poison to performing a skill well. This ‘talking with your spirit’ stuff’ Tia described is on a much simpler level. It’s similar to lifting your arm. You can’t learn how to lift your arm, you just know how to do it, and then you just do it.

“What we are doing now is a the same. Tia explained that our soul already knows how to talk. So, you just talk. That’s all there is to it,” I continued on with my explanation.

“To be honest, even though I’ve clearly gotten this to work out, I still don’t understand a lot of how this spirit manipulation stuff works. But, I know how to talk, so I just used my intent as a shortcut,” I told him. My explanation was not quite done yet though.

“Intent is something far more basic and primal,” I continued. “If you are just thinking about moving your arm, you won’t meet with much success. You don’t think, you just do it. However, you can intend to move your arm and make it work exactly as you intend it to move. Intent is not conscious, it is simply you making a decision that things will go a certain way. It is absent of conscious thought, so it will not interfere with you performing the skills you know how to perform already, and when you use your intent to perform a skill you will always be able to perform at the height of your capability.”

After a literal lifetime of previous experience with utilizing intent, I had successfully utilized it in order to do this ‘spirit’ thing Tia had told us about on my first attempt. As soon as I’d known it really was just as simple as deciding to do it, all it took for me to succeed was a shift in my mind-set. I’d gotten it to work almost instantly, and now I was trying to teach the boys how to do the same thing.

“There is something else to this.” I told Rolwen, right before trying another stunt. I put my hands below me and pushed myself to my feet, and then I slowly lifted myself into a standing position.

“This is what Tia meant when she said that we were already using our spirit to enhance our growth rate, but what we were doing was less efficient. Like she said, our souls already knew how to walk and talk. It just needed to… form spirit pathways, or whatever metaphysical stuff she was talking about. The reason we were developing slowly before is because we were using too much conscious thought in our efforts to train these new bodies. I do not know if controlling our spirits is the same as controlling intent, or if using intent just coincidentally happens to make our spirits do the correct things. Either way, as soon as you let go of your conscious thoughts, it just suddenly works. What you gotta do is to stop thinking and just do it.”

“No, you godda yell it,” Rolwen said.

“Huh?” I gave a positively baffled response to Rolwen’s comment.

“You godda yell, jus DO IT, and then dell me to wive my dweam,” he said.

I gave Rolwen a blank stare. “Are you trying to get me to quote something?” I asked, getting some amused giggles from him in response. I just sighed. “Alright, fine.” I said. “Do, or do not. There is no try.”

“Uhh…” Rolwen balked a bit when I gave him a different relevant quote from the one he seemed to want me to give him.

“Hey! That’s not fair!” Tia’s voice suddenly broke our little exchange. “How can you just stand up immediately like that? Even I can’t manage that right now!”

“Well, we have been training our walking for quite a while now,” I said. “Also, while you were rolling around like a tumble-weed, we were crawling. It accesses similar muscle and nerve centers to the structures for walking. What we were doing might have been less efficient for moving ourselves through space, but it’s a lot more efficient for preparing these bodies to walk.”

Yeah, maybe I was gloating a bit. After all, now I was back in the developmental lead over my older twin sister.

“Umm… can you help me too?” Levin asked from further across the room.

“Hold on a minute,” I said.

Now came the hard part. I had managed to stand under my own power, but walking was going to be an entirely different challenge. These feet were tiny, 

I staggered around a bit for a second, and then caught myself in a low horse-stance to drop my center of gravity and prevent myself from falling. Standing had worked out fine. Now, the goal is walking without falling on my face. Well, there are also some meditative poses in my repertoar that are appropriate to this process.

I focused on my legs, and the image of deep roots holding my right foot to the ground as it became like the trunk of a tree. I centered my weight over my right leg, and then spent around one exact second in a modified form of what might be thought of as a tree pose from Yoga before landing back on two feet. This time, I was prepared enough and didn’t stumble all over the place.

I caught sight of Tia’s grumpy face as I continued on with my uneven toddling steps that brought me closer and closer to where Levin was sitting. If her promise held true, she would be able to do the same as me by tonight. This would mean I will have to press my advantage in order to stay ahead. Once the boys are asleep, I plan to continue walking around the room until I have this thing perfected.

It may seem strange to be in competition over something like this, but I had long since learned the value of rivalries pushing both parties to improve at a faster pace. If I kept my mind on staying ahead of Tia, or getting back ahead of her when she passed me up, I ought to be functioning as well as a full grown adult by the end of the week given the rate we are already going after less than an hour.

I plop down heavily next to Levin, and begin offering him some personalized advice. I have years of experience as a martial arts instructor, so teaching people how to do things that involve action is nothing new to me. However, it is usually a matter of just watching to see what they’re doing, and using my intuition to figure out where it is in their mind that they just aren’t getting it.

It is at this point that a rather unsettling thought hit me. How do I see a person’s spirit? Actually, I don’t even know exactly how I am doing this myself. Earlier I was just giving Rolwen some tips based on my own experience, and Levin ought to have already overheard all of what I had to say when I was talking to Rolwen.

Of course, the answer to how to handle this situation was pretty clear now that my brain was working somewhat properly after that momentary lapse.

“Uhh… Tia, can you come help too?” I asked. “I need you to watch for what Levin is doing wrong.”

“Uhh… sure!” Tia said and then launched herself from a sitting position high into the air and landed in a summersault that looked almost like she was on a direct collision course with Levin. Both of us had a moment of panic before Tia contorted herself half-way through her tumble and wound up landing in a sitting position on the other side of Levin from me.

“Uhh… yeah.” I said. I guess the best way to deal with her at this point is probably to just ignore stuff like this. Having decided on this as my course of action, I turned back to Levin. “Alright, let’s try this then,” I said to him.  “Try saying ‘Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.’”

“Whah?” The sudden lurch back to the main topic seemed to catch him completely off guard as he scrambled to have his mind catch back up with what was being asked of him. “Uhh… Ok, umm…. Haaa… huuu… ieee-zen-buuuurg-su… gahh! I’m not doing it wu-ite!” Levin said.

“Ok, why? What went wrong? Tia? Can you help us out? What did you see in his spirit?”

“Hmm…” She said and licked her lips a little. “Well, same problem as Rolwen, I guess?”

“Were there any differences from what you could tell?”

“Hmm… Well, Rolwen just seemed to have a lot of tension. Levin’s aura seemed… shaky? It was like Rolwen had something in the way, and Levin is just uncertain about how to start at all.” Tia said.

“Alright, that’s excellent! Thanks Tia,” I said. “Well then, you heard what she said.” I told Levin. “It sounds like maybe you are just not sure you’re doing it right? Maybe you are afraid you are going to fail, so you aren’t even actually trying?

“I am twying!” Levin declares angrily.

Ok, maybe I could have phrased that better.

“Right, right. Sorry. That’s not what I meant.” I told him. “Let’s see…” Something was tickling at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t quite place it. But, just like with intent, I had long since trained myself to listen to these odd instincts and do as they told me, even if I did not understand them.

It was usually the case that these were insights of intuition based upon knowledge buried deep in my subconscious. The subconscious mind has several times the capacity for memory compared to the conscious mind, and memories from your subconscious mind can even be utilized by the reasoning centers of your brain without you even realizing that’s what it is doing. Usually, reasoning that is based on your subconscious manifests as gut feelings or subconscious urges.

It is entirely possible for your subconscious to lead you astray. It is multiple times more powerful than your conscious mind, but you still need to train it to think properly just like you need to train your conscious mind. Subconscious thought-processes are only effective and trustworthy in people who’s conscious thought processes are already quite sharp.

In my case, I had gone through the effort of training my mind, and right now it was telling me to ask about something very specific in regards to Levin.

“Levin, did you have an older sibling in your past life?” I asked.

“Huh?” Levin seemed a little confused at this sudden question, but his mind caught up quickly enough this time. “Y-yeah. An ol-der bwo-ther.” He said.

Yep, sure enough. This time my subconscious was drawing on my parenting experiences. As my subconscious suspicions were confirmed, my conscious mind caught up as I suddenly felt a lot more certain of my path from this point forward.

“Let me guess,” I said, “he was always better than you at everything. You could never beat him. You lost every game you played together with him. Am I right?”

He gave a hesitant nod.

“And how old were you when you died?” I asked.

“Fow-teen,” he said. I could only imagine the look on my own face when I heard his answer. It sounded like he was definitely the youngest among us. I didn’t know how old Rolwen was, but he acted a lot older than fourteen. For now though, this conversation was with Levin.

“Yeah, you were young.” I said. “You probably got used to the idea of losing, so you aren’t even expecting to be able to succeed. So, were you just talking like you normally talk, and kinda wanting to talk better? You knew deep down it wouldn’t work though, right?”

Levin didn’t respond. He was just frowning at the ground.

“That’s what I meant by being afraid of failure. You won’t succeed like that. The trick to this thing is a little special. If you go into it absolutely certain it is going to work, it will. If you go into it expecting it to fail, it will fail. Whatever you expect to happen, that’s what’s going to happen. So, you need to use your intention to make it work, and let it give you confidence that it will.

“You don’t have to be afraid of failing,” I told him. “Here, think of it this way. Try again before Rolwen. I’m sure he was listening to what I just said. Wouldn’t it be great if you managed to make this work before he can? So, it’s like Tia said. Your spirit is the control that your soul uses to drive your body. Your soul already knows what it’s doing. It remembers how to talk. So, all you have to do is make the part of the connection that goes to your mouth and helps you speak stronger. You do that by just having the intent to speak the words you want to speak.”

“Mmm…” Levin groans. He looks up at Rolwen’s general direction in the dark. I know Levin can’t see him, but I can. Rolwen has a pretty mischievous glint in his eye.

“Youu bedder try now,” Rolwen babbled in as close to a sing-song tone as his halting voice could manage. “I’ll beat you… if… you... don’t."

“Mmmm!” Levin groaned again. “H.. Heisen… Heisen-burg! Heisenberg! Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle!”

“Yess!” Rolwen cheered and flopped over toward Levin. He started blindly groping in the dark until he finally encountered my outstretched hand. I grabbed his wrist and pulled him forward, placing his hand on Levin’s shoulder. With his quarry found, he enthusiastically clouted Levin on the back with his clumsy toddler hand. “Wight! Good ‘ob!” he cheered. “My churn now! Hezansbawgaga unsawa… blah!” Rolwen began blowing raspberries in what seemed to be meant as a humorous manner, trying to salvage some small amount of dignity by playing it off as a joke, after that somewhat embarrassing display. I’m not sure if he actually expected it to work or not, but it seemed to serve the role of making Levin feel better.

After that slight intervention, things seem to be progressing apace. I do not think it will take very long for the boys to get caught up to speed with Tia’s trick at this rate. They just had a few mental blocks that had to be removed.