Chapter 10

Ascension to the Earth Realm

The problem of doing something that you have never done before is that you cannot predict the outcome. We had tried to prepare for any scenario. We had brainstormed multiple times to imagine the world we would come to and had a plan of action for multiple different situations that we could find ourselves in. All our responses depended on the ring since we knew that we would lose all our external possessions in the ascension process.

Baring in mind that one common denominator, we needed to secure the ring to ensure that it came with us and that no one could steal it. I didn't consider the ring mine, but I had been the one mostly in charge of it and when Switch insisted on a chain of command, I found myself considered the leader of our little group. Control would shift to Switch if violence was involved. We took the fairly drastic step of surgically implanting the ring into the soft tissues of my left arm. We had used the anti-rejection serum and placed the ring near to a meridian. I had a week to practise using it before we tried to ascend.

We had sold off everything that we owned, spending the money on technology, resources and precious metals. We had stocked up on copper, tin and iron to cover different versions of primitive societies. Silver, Gold and Platinum for possible coinage. Precious metals are not that expensive after asteroid refining, but they were used as currency for a long period of our history. Drug formulations and fabricator patterns for a higher-tech world. We had even put all the furniture into the ring space.

We were sitting in the granny flat that we were renting off the new owners. The windows and doors were open, there were four braziers that would burn out in a few hours placed around Switch and the underfloor electric heating was on for both May and I, set on a timer. Other than that the flat was completely empty and when we left we were going to leave quite the puzzle.

We had tried our best to match each other in terms of fullness of our energy rivers. I had all of my secondary meridians opened. May and Switch were the same but had only recently opened their female sexual organ meridian (FSO). With the difficulties that I had with the consequences of that, I didn't want May in particular to open that meridian. With our third eye, we could see Switch's FSO system flowing much less than it was supposed to and the highest cause of death remained cancer and for women, it was cancer of the breast and ovaries that topped the list. The breast was covered with a frontal skin secondary meridian. The health benefit of opening the FSO secondary meridian outweighed the possible side effects in both Switch and May's minds. They both said they could cope with the increased libido.

It was difficult to time it so that we ascended precisely together as we all had different affinities. Generally, May was fastest because she only had a single element and that could be supplied easily. I worried about water leaks, I didn't want to leave a mess behind, so I was cultivating with wind that was naturally blowing in and the lightning. Switch was the slowest with only fire being generated around her. We tried to compensate for this by having Switch and I closer to being full, but it was a difficult thing to gage.

May still went first. I felt this rush of energy near me and when I opened my eyes I could see emitting a white light that got brighter and brighter before suddenly disappearing. All that was left behind was May's clothes.

I continued pulling in energy. I felt full, but it wasn't until I felt overfull that a hammer of energy hit me. I think I blanked out. The next thing I knew, I was blinking my eyes, feeling very different. I noticed that I was clearly outside, it was cold with a chill wind blowing. The darkness of night was slightly illuminated by a singular silver moon. My excellent night vision allowed me to see pretty clearly.

I was still sitting, but around me were these large rocks. Looking around I could see May sitting looking at me with a surprised look. I turned to look for Switch but she hadn't arrived yet. I could feel this strange stuff touching my face. I reached up and even before I could touch it I noticed my hand looked different. It was smaller than I remembered. As I looked at my hand in front of me I also could see in my peripheral vision that my chest stuck out more than I expected. I looked down and gasped. I had breasts!

“Uncle?” May asked.

“I think so,” I responded in a voice I didn't recognise. A girl's voice.

“What happened?” she asked.

I stood up. The fluttering feeling was my very long black hair blowing in the wind and touching my body. I looked down and confirmed that I was missing my male bits. There was hair there, but not enough to hide what should have been there. I couldn't help cupping myself there just to confirm.

“I, I er... don't know,” I said in shock and sat back down again, struggling to think.

Bright light lit up the night with a flash and suddenly Switch was there.

“Hi Switch,” I said with my weird high pitch voice.

“Who are you?” Switch asked, standing up and looking around.

“That is uncle,” May responded.

“She doesn't look like the prof,” Switch said suspiciously.

“I don't feel like me either,” I muttered.

Switch grilled me for a few minutes with a series of questions, including a few trick ones. When she was finally convinced, “what the hell happened?” she asked.

The questioning had allowed me to pull myself together and start to think.

“Best guess, it has something to do with the gene therapy I underwent for my prostate cancer. I was twenty-one at the time and I just did what the doctors told me to do. I'm guessing it messed with my Y-chromosome and when I was born anew it turned me into this.”

“Is the ring still there? Can you get me some clothes? I'm feeling the cold,” May said shivering.

I felt in my arm and could sense the ring but I had no energy in my meridians and with no energy, I couldn't feel them and without energy to put into the ring, I couldn't access it. Ice was still available for me to talk to and I started her investigating the world around me. But all our plans depended on the ring and that wasn't available so we were three shivering naked girls outside in a world we didn't know, surrounded by these huge rocks.