Jade asked “What grounds you in this reality? This planet, this solar system, this galaxy, this realm, this cosmos, this universe, whatever you call here, what do you think grounds you to here?”

Mira looked at Jade dumbfounded and said “You’re being very philosophical, I just wanted you to make some stuff so I wanted to show you my abilities. How did we get here?”

Jade replied “Your abilities are rubbish to me. Making something for the current you is like making armor suited for a baby that can only crawl; it would just be an easily broken toy to anyone smarter or stronger than you since you are so weak and foolish that I can’t create anything too complex and powerful for you to handle. Now answer my question”.

Mira was silent for a while before she sighed in resignation and thought about the answer for a while before saying “My senses?” Jade said “Not a bad answer, your senses determine the reality you live in. Very astute. Second question, what part of your being allows you to experience time”.

Mira thought for a while before saying “My mind?” Jade said “Not a bad answer again but it is not the correct one. What grounds us in our current reality is our sense yes very true but what type of reality do you think a mad man lives in? Or do you think that because a certain group of people have the same types of senses they will live in the same reality? The thing that gives our being a reality to be in is our psyche, the psychic energy that is in our head, or in other terms our spirit”.

Mira assumed a sitting posture in the empty air, as if she was sitting on the ground with her knees bent forward and said “Yes guru”. Jade chuckled and said “It sounds abstract but it is the truth of our existence. Our senses just send information to our minds which we use to process the details of our reality but the true anchor of reality is our spirit. The sense change we have when we evolved that makes us feel like we are everywhere within a certain range is our psyche.

A person can be in a class, with eyes that see a teacher, ears that hear the teacher and the whole sense immersed in the class but the spirit can be in a beach somewhere else. The question is then, is the person in the class or in the beach? The answer is both but not with the same intensity or focus-”

Seeing Mira’s eyes start to stare into space Jade knew she was now copying the person in his example; she wasn’t with him anymore. Jade clapped his hands to gain her attention and said “I’ll stop my rambling on spirit for now. For the second question, the part of your being that allows you to experience time. You said the mind, a better answer would have been the memory, the best answer would have been the soul. I will not explain how these concepts work with time since you don’t give a shit. Your energy is very special in that it contains parts of your psyche and mind”.

Mira looked at Jade like he had just told her he was her father. Jade smiled and said “Why else do you think it can talk to you? It is because it has a combination of Spirit and Soul that I call Persona”.

Jade had inspected the ball of diamond that Mira gave him not just by looking at it with his physical senses, he had also entered the Astral Plane to see what it looked like. He confirmed that it had some similarities with the persona he created before, only it was much fainter, smaller, segregated and didn’t have the capacity to gain memories like the one he created. He still considered both of them as Personas.

Mira said “Doesn’t that mean it can protect me from psychic manipulation? The same way it protected me from the Abdul’s time manipulating aura” Jade nodded and said “But that is just a basic property of the energy. Create a piece of it”.

Mira excitedly created a block of diamond and Jade attacked it with a beam of psychic energy. The diamond evaporated like cube of ice inside magma and Jade said “As I said it is just a basic property, you have to hone it for it to be of any use”. Mira nodded and started listening in earnest.

Jade didn’t want to lose her enthuse so he skipped the explanation of what soul and psyche really were and how they worked. He would have her read about them along with the biology she was going to learn. Her soul was on the verge of becoming stable and getting a soul ability. This was what Jade saw when he entered her soul through the Astral Plane.

He said “I need to attack your soul so that you can have a feel for what your soul is. The soul is connected to the spirit since it is just an extension of the soul hence it will be similar to a psychic attack except no amount of energy will protect you from it; it will be like you were naked in a war in a blizzard, you’ll feel really helpless. Do you want to go along with it or do you want to avoid doing this?”

Mira showed a serious expression. She thought ‘if Jade is giving so many warnings about this he really feels it will be a truly painful experience’. Mira nodded and Jade said “Cover yourself in diamonds; I want to see the effect the attack will have on the Personas in them”.

Mira merged with her diamonds and covered herself with them before nodding to indicate that she was ready. Jade said “Ok” and entered the Astral Plane using the Beyond-Death Soul Glyph. He exited his soul realm and entered the Astral Plane. Mira’s soul was a dense gaseous grey orb in her head and Diamond that covered her was an array of tiny gaseous white balls as small as sand grains all around her body, inside and outside it.

Jade floated toward her soul and tapped it as gently as he could. The tiny white gas particles covering her soul were helplessly dispersed by his tap and the grey gas experienced a great disturbance and the particles trembled chaotically. Jade watched Mira go completely insane the moment this happened.

…

A few minutes earlier, Mira braced herself for the pain that was about to come while looking at Jade who was just staring at her emotionlessly. Her IP told her nothing about Jade approaching her soul, why? Because of the Grim Reaper’s Cloak privilege.

She expected to feel something, anything, but she felt nothing until Jade’s soul lightly tapped hers. The diamond around her head disintegrated as the soul that made up a part of it was absorbed by Jade. The next thing that happened was a loss. She lost her sense of self for a brief moment and became the equivalent of a block of stone.

A moment later she gained her sense of self and fear filled her. She looked around for the source of the influence on her soul; her memories were jumbled up so she forgot that Jade was the one that attacked her. She blew up the diamond around her again and again in an effort to attack whoever touched the core of her existence.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

She screamed madly when she didn’t get the sweet notification from her IP that she had killed something. She went on a rampage afterwards, forgetting her logic and attacking everything in sight with only her diamond and her fists. She cried, laughed, spat, hurt herself and did other unusual things in her insanity.

…