Three Mortals Rise To The Heavens Chapter 1 and 2

Chapter 1

Mort's Point of View (POV)

I woke up that day with a sense that something was different. Being the optimist that I am I made the presumption that it would be a good thing. Considering that I had prostate cancer twelve years ago and it had come back with a vengeance two years ago, most people would probably be surprised that I could maintain my optimism. Despite my terminal illness, I found facing my reality with anything other than optimism, depressing.

It all began with a knock on my door. The knock itself was surprising. We were in our third worldwide epidemic in the last ten years, this time involving a deliberately mutated cat flu and as an at-risk person, I was under isolation rules. This meant when I answered the door I was expecting a package of some kind, not my neighbour's daughter, May.

May had stepped back the government-mandated two-metre distance and was looking down at her feet in a very sad posture.

“Hi, May,” I said, using a light tone of voice, hoping to lighten the atmosphere.

She looked up at me with puffy red eyes with such a look of sorrow that I felt a strong urge to leap the distance and gather her in my arms. I resisted my natural response and tried to convey warmth in my gaze.

“My dad...,” May said, or at least tried to before falling silent. I waited patiently. “My dad has died,” she managed to get out and more tears leaked out as her crying began again. Her head dropped.

I couldn't take it anymore and gathered her up in my arms, holding her tight. Initially, she resisted and tried to push me away, but I knew that was because she was trying to protect me, so I didn't let her and held on until she gave up and sobbed into my arms.

When she calmed down I let her go and she looked at me like I was an idiot. “He died of cat flu. You can't touch me or you might get it,” May said.

“Too late,” I said with a smile. “I was given a year to live two years ago, don't worry about me. Come on in and tell me about it.”

It turned out that May and her father came down with it at the same time. After two days of fever, May had recovered but found her father dead in his bedroom and didn't know what to do so she knocked on my door.

She was only twelve years old so it wasn't too surprising that she was feeling overwhelmed. I was actually renting the granny flat that was attached to her house and she had been a fairly frequent visitor, bringing me baked goods and playing chess with me. At least, until I had to isolate myself, then we started playing chess in virtual space. Her mother had either died or gone missing when she was young and she had never mentioned any relatives. She was a sweet girl and with no children of my own, I had ended up thinking of her and treating her as a niece. She called me, 'Uncle'.

After a little bit of food and drink, she started yawning. I put her to bed in my only bedroom and started making inquiries.

Civilisation hadn't quite broken down, but it was struggling. Hospitals were full and only essential services were running. A body bag would be delivered and it would be my responsibility to get the body situated and moved to the front garden for collection. The body would be cremated fairly quickly and the ash stored for a later funeral. Social services agreed to put me as the temporary legal guardian of May.

Cat flu had an abnormally long incubation period which made it difficult to control and required long isolation periods. On the plus side, I had time to make arrangements for May in case I died. Since this was the third epidemic in the last ten years there were protocols in place which meant the number of deaths were expected to be low and life would go on. Technology had reached a stage where isolation wasn't that big a deal. Virtually everybody had an internal quantum computer with virtual reality integration and most jobs did not require physical social interaction. Jobs involving travel and holidays would be badly affected but after the first epidemic, most people in those jobs also had income protection.

Sorting everything out took most of a week. I didn't let May back into her own house until I had received the body bag, filled it, placed it correctly and knew that it had definitely been removed. Still, May didn't want to sleep in her house and despite bringing a single bed across, every night she crept into my bed and only fell asleep in my arms.

Her father had an insurance policy and May would eventually end up a wealthy girl. In the meantime, I had to work out who else could take over when I passed away. It was only when I was introducing May to my good friend Switch and explained my thoughts that my mortality really hit her and we had another round of crying.

Switch was an interesting character. She appeared gentle and kind. If you were her friend that was the way she acted, but she had the ability to be completely ruthless with her enemies. Her turnaround from one to the other was so fast it was like someone flicked a switch, hence her nickname. She was a loyal friend and had stuck by me through thick and thin.

May went quiet for a couple of days after the meeting, thinking things through and making up her mind before she approached me with a surprising proposition.

Chapter 2

“Uncle, I know you have been ill for a while and you have been told that you do not have long to live. To be honest, I knew you were ill and already considered you my uncle, so I begged my father to help you. My family has a secret that has the potential to heal almost any illness. Whether or not it can help you is down to luck, but my father forbid me from talking to you about it. He said to me that it is a family secret that must never be revealed to outsiders. Well, he is gone and you have proved that even if we are not related by blood, we are related by spirit. You and Switch are prepared to be my family, I have to treat you the same way,” May said before handing me a diary.

“That is my mother's journal. She started one when she was eight, about halfway through that volume, mum turned fourteen, which is when the secret is usually revealed. I found out early because I read mum's journal. I know where the instruction manual, the ring and the pills are, so if you want to give it a try, let me know. I spoke to my father about it and his comment was that mum was very talented so I shouldn't expect the same results as she got. Dad wasn't able to cultivate at all. It will be a matter of luck as to whether this will help or not. I know you are not going to believe me, but mum didn't die or run away, she ascended. I saw it with my own eyes when I was eight. She could feel it happening so called us together, put the pills, manual and ring in front of me and challenged me to join her when I could.”

“She ascended?” I asked.

“You'll understand more when you read the journal. She turned into a white light and disappeared right in front of my eyes. Her clothes dropped to the ground,” May answered.

I had a lot of questions, but, rather than quiz May, I took the book to my reading chair. These days most journals and diaries are electronic and kept within our internal computers with pictures and video recorded. It was unusual to have an actual real physical book in my hands. While I started reading it, May went off and came back with five more volumes that she put on a table nearby.

I skipped through until I found her mother's birthday and then started reading seriously. I took a picture record of each page and labelled it under the Ng family. May's mother, Liu, didn't describe everything, mainly she talked about her emotions, but you could read between the lines with the information you were given. Initially, it was a bit frustrating as more questions were raised than answers, but I changed my attitude and decided that I would read through it all and then re-read it before I tried to formulate my questions.

The Ng family believed that there were nine worlds all linked by the Gods. The bottom world was called The Abyss or Hell and had the least amount of density and energy. Each world had more and more energy and it was the duty of all Ng members to ascend to the fourth world, which was called the Terra realm, where the majority of their clan existed. Previously it was possible for people and other creatures to travel between the worlds, but about twenty thousand years ago, for some unknown reason, such travel was stopped. Now the only possibility was to ascend through a method called cultivation.

Cultivation was a method of bringing the energy of the world inside the body. This would result in the body getting rid of all the toxins that the body accumulates through using food as an energy source and begin a gradual transformation towards a body run purely on the world's energy. The body gradually becomes more immune to disease, stronger, more resilient and denser. There is a limit to how much energy the body can tolerate and when it reaches that limit, the body will naturally ascend to the next world, reborn into a body that can tolerate more. Theoretically, the body can ascend through all the levels and become a purely energy being in the ninth world, called Heaven realm.

The realm that I was living in was the Mortal Realm, or world two. All I had to do was begin cultivating and my body would be resistant to disease and naturally heal. Excitedly I asked May to get the instruction manual so that I could begin cultivating. There was actually a hidden safe that May led me to that she helped me open. Inside there was a booklet that looked like a copy of a copy, a couple of glass bottles and a gold ring. I took the bottles and the instruction manual, leaving behind the ring since I hadn't got to the point where the ring was explained.

The incubation period for the cat flu was between two to three months, so if I could make enough progress between now and then there was a possibility that I could survive and eventually even cure my cancer. I'm not sure my hair would ever grow back and I wouldn't stop taking my medication, but this was a real ray of hope. I had tried all sorts of experimental therapies both medical and alternative, and the fact that I was still alive long past when the doctors thought possible, showed something had helped. My money was on the gene therapy since that was supposed to stop the spread and since then, although scans showed that the metastasis spots had grown, there were no new areas.

Liu did talk about trying not to hope too much since there was the chance that she would not be able to cultivate or that her talent would be too slow to do much more than slow her ageing. From what I understood the Mortal realm was very low in energy so being born with the ability to cultivate was not high and Liu was the first in multiple generations to be able to do so. Without the pills, the chances of being able to cultivate were almost zero. Because the Mortal realm had so little energy, humans got almost all their needs from food which meant lots of toxins built up in the body. Toxins reduced the body's ability to move the energy around and to cultivate one needed to move the energy around and be able to both feel it and use our minds to control it. The first step was to remove the toxins and I could start this step while reading the rest of the journals.



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