The Sage of the Mind

Disclaimer - The rights of the respective characters are with their respective owners. I don’t mean to violate their intellectual property rights and thus, only my original characters are my IP. 

The Sage of the Mind: Chapter 7

Axle’s Apartment, [31th October, 2006]

–Axle Riddle–

Hmm, this was getting a little exhausting. He had been at the shop all day, waiting for something to happen but aside from a mugging that was about to go wrong, he had not seen anything special happening. 

Maybe, it was happening but he just could not sense it. He mused to himself as he took a break in the break room that Mrs.Sanchez provided for him. It was just a small storage room that had been turned into a nap room of sorts with a small bathroom and a bed, already making it better than the 500$ studio apartments he had seen around the block. He was so lucky that his building was rent-controlled and the ROB had somehow negotiated a very low rent when he had moved in, allowing him the opportunity to pay rent and groceries without having to resort to a second job or stealing from drug dealers. Beginning 

“Alright, let’s try this,” He said as he sat cross-legged on the makeshift bed and focused on his range. The fog was ever present at the edge of his awareness but he could see that his range was growing day by day. But that was not the focus of this meditation session. He was trying to see if he could sense anything different using his spatial awareness senses. He had figured out that his telekinesis and spatial awareness were two different powers and so, he had to train both of them separately, although training one made it easier to train the other one, something about expanding his mind, he was sure.

He had seen some disturbances in thin air that had occurred in some of the alleys nearby the shop but when he had focused on that area, he had gotten an intense headache and had to cut short his powers. He had a feeling that he would have been discovered had he kept using his powers which was terrifying to think about because he was being powered, at least partially, by a power that encompassed an entire multiverse. He had also felt similar disturbances twice more in his range but at that time, he had been able to find those disturbances but he had only managed to catch on the tail end of a portal closing.

That had made him shut down his powers and pull the fog so close to his body that he could not sense the door of the shop. He had then figured out that the disturbances had something to do with either sorcery or the effects of a sorcerer doing god knows what, he did not know and he did not dare find out either.

Today, he was trying to see if similar effects could be found under the street, in the subterranean floors because if lore was to be believed, Vampires and spirits only came out at night but it was not as if they spawned out of nowhere. No, they hid for most of the day, away from the sunlight that would burn them away. That place was mostly underground so he had chosen to try and scan the underground.

It was a novel experience because so far, subconsciously, his powers had ignored the area underneath the visible earth. So far, he had only scanned through the areas above ground level, even if his powers could ignore the existence of walls or dirt. He focused his powers below and extended his awareness as far as he could see. He did not know how far he went but he had a feeling that he was not going as far as he could.

Right beneath him, he could sense the plumbing of the shops and then the nearby shops as well, as well as the massive amount of sewage flowing right under the streets. Then came the area under the sewage lines. He could sense some individuals moving at speeds way too fast for normal humans. He could also see that most of them were “not solid” in some way. He did not know how to explain that but it felt as if the individuals below were not as real feeling like the humans he could feel. Something about them felt odd. He tried to focus more on them exactly and tune out the rest of the white noise and was startled to find that all of them had paused running and were looking around, searching for something. Then, he realised that they did not have legs at all. They were floating on thin air.

“Shit!” He exclaimed as he realised what they were. Spirits and souls who had hidden themselves in the sewers below. His hunch had been correct then. He focused on them and tried to imagine a hand punching the biggest spirit right in the head with all his might. The other two spirits, as he called them, leaped away from the biggest spirit as he somehow(?) became even more ethereal for a moment before reforming as if nothing had happened. The bigger spirit then promptly fled the area, the other smaller two spirits following nearby. Only this time, he could see all of them floating at much slower speeds as they looked at their surroundings.

Soon, they exited his awareness range and he let them. Not that he could do anything about them at all because he had seen that physical blows had no effect on them. The first spirit had just reformed after a moment and he had no way of knowing if doing so multiple times could actually “kill” him or not. He also could not “take hold” of the spirits for some reason, as if they were not solid objects at all. Makes sense if they were spirits and souls instead of flesh and bones. Now, if the same were vampires, he could have just as easily taken hold of him, broken all of the vampire’s bones, and then punted him straight into the streets above, exposing them to the sun and killing them with ease.

Well, as if life would ever be that easy in real….life.

His eyes widened as he felt yet another signature entering his awareness range. This one felt just as solid as normal humans. He focused on the vampire and once again, he felt that headache feeling when he tried to spy on the sorcerers but it was much weaker this time so he was able to push past whatever protection it was and focus properly on this person.

He focused even more on the internals of this person and was slightly disappointed when he found that it was just a regular human, just fitter than the average human he could sense. Well, that was nothing of interest to him so he was about to retract his awareness when he heard or rather, felt something being spoken to him.

“Please wait, O’ great Spirit!” He saw the person before bowing to thin air as his mouth moved. He could sense the person was the one who had spoken those words to him.

His jaw hung agape as he realised that this sorcerer had managed to trace him. How else would he have known where to send the message? He immediately prepared for an altercation as he took hold of the entire sewer around the man, ready to collapse the tunnel on that person and crush him underneath all the rubble. It might be ruthless but he could not afford for some sorcerer to find his location. Who knows what those sorcerers would do this time? He could not risk it so he was about to do it when he paused as he realised the person was prostrating to thin air, trembling in apparent fear.

“Hmm, maybe I can use this?” He mused to himself even though he didn’t take his hold off the tunnel. Maybe this person could be of use to him. He still made sure to search the entire area in his awareness range and found nothing out of the ordinary and yet, his mind could not reconcile with his instincts telling him to take advantage of this opportunity that had fallen into his lap.

“Here goes nothing,” He breathed out and manipulated a piece of stone that he then broke up into thin particles. He then manipulated those small stones to form a pattern in the form of a question mark and then after seeing that the person was still prostrating, nudged him to stand upright and then shoved the question mark in his face.

The person apparently saw the stones because his eyes widened immediately.

“Uh, spirit, sir?”

He rolled his eyes at the slowness of it all and then after making the question mark bigger, shoved it once again right next to his face, making him lean back slightly. The man then apparently got his message and then cleared his throat and spoke.

“Uh, did you see three spirits running through this area? I am supposed to be hunting them but so far, they have proven to be very hard to catch,” The spirit hunter apparently said and he paused to ponder on how to better take advantage of this situation. He had only dreamt of the level of control it would take to manipulate the air around a person and then vibrate it in a specific pattern to create a sound and that too a specific sound from far away. It would make an excellent control practice once he was done with his current one anyway.

He then rolled the small stones to find an arrow directing him to the tunnel the spirits ran through.

“Thank you so much, spirit, sir. If you need anything, feel free to contact this lowly one,” Saying so, the spirit hunter gently dropped something right underneath the arrow mark and skedaddled away.

Now, he had question marks right on top of his head as he looked at the running away spirit hunter. HE had so many questions to ask him but his inability to manipulate sound and fear of meeting in real life meant that it was all he could do for the time being.

Maybe, he could get lucky and then encounter a vampire that he could just toss in the air and then gather the dust off? He would love to experiment on something like that but his job, power practice, and then the overall urge to have at least a semblance of a normal life took most of his day, leaving him no free time to do anything else, even though he barely needed 3 hours of sleep every night to feel fully refreshed. He could make do with even 1 with ease, not that he would recommend doing that since feeling exhausted throughout the day was not a nice feeling, especially since he would punish himself for not sleeping adequately by carrying out the same routine he would if he was fully rested. That taught himself to sleep properly and at the right time instead of reading through the books he had checked out of the local library.

Man, public libraries are the best. He would even go so far as to say that the Public Libraries and National Parks were the best advantage that America had over other developed countries.

He took on the badge that the person had left behind and after scanning it thoroughly for something else, he swiftly made it come out of the sewers and then stowed it away in a place he knew only he had access to. In the inside of a chimney where he had hollowed out a part of the bricks surrounding it. He deposited the badge and then closed the area right away to see if someone would come and check up on it or not.

It was also the chimney of an old-style hotel that routinely had hundreds of customers daily so he doubted the people behind would be able to track every single one of the suspects.

He would check the area every day for at least a week to see if someone tracked it down and in the meantime, he would have to figure out some way of communicating in his awareness range. Since he had no telepathy, he would have to compensate somehow.

“Well, there goes my weekend,” He muttered to himself as he stood up from the bed and stretched, his short break over and his shift resumed now that Mrs.Sanchez was going home for the day.

Honestly, that woman was such a stereotypical oldie.

“Sleeping at 7?” He scoffed and then began wearing his apron to prepare for his shift.

You can read upto 5 extra chapters on my P*treon. It is the same name as my username,