He turns to Lena with the blank look of a man halfway between existential dread and offense.

  “I understood none of that,” he says flatly.

  Lena, infuriatingly chipper, smirks. “I figured.”

  Her tone shifts, slipping into something more patient, more academic. “Okay, let’s start with something you understand. You’ve probably heard of the idea of a ‘spirit,’ right? Most religions have a version—soul, essence, animus, whatever. What we call the Astral Vessel is basically that.”

  Aster blinks. “So… the Astral Vessel is the soul?”

  “Not exactly.” She tilts her head, thoughtful. “We try not to use that term. See, there’s mounting evidence that the soul, if it exists, is in an even higher dimension—beyond us. The Astral Vessel is what you’d call a metaphysical echo of yourself. It carries your growth, your energy, your power. But it’s still… part of this system.”

  Aster raises an eyebrow. “Right. So we’re not talking about the immortal essence of my being. We’re talking about… a metaphysical avatar?”

  Lena grins. “If that helps, sure. The soul might be something bigger—something that nudges your path from outside the simulation. The Astral Vessel, though? It’s you, as the system sees you.”

  Aster groans, rubbing his temples. “Okay, sure. So we’re including simulation theory now? Great. But what does any of this have to do with meat cubes and floating glyphs?”

  “Everything,” Lena says brightly. “Because your Astral Vessel is designed to evolve. That’s cultivation. Every experience—especially suffering—creates Aether. Unaware people, like most of Earth’s population, go through life producing it slowly, using it to cultivate passively. A tiny trickle for every lesson learned and every hardship endured. Then you reincarnate. Then again. And again. Each lifetime adds a little growth to the Astral Vessel. But because they don’t refine Aether, they’re stuck in a cycle of slow returns. We—those of us who are Aware—compress that process through will, study, and practice. Around ten lifetimes, if you’re lucky, just to reach what we call Acolyte.”

  You’re telling me people are accidentally cultivating over lifetimes just by surviving taxes and trauma?”

  Aster stares. “So, the world’s just one big karmic treadmill, and unless you know the cheat codes, you spend ten lifetimes in the tutorial surviving taxes and trauma?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He dragged a hand down his face. “I can’t tell if that’s tragic or just bad game design.”

  She nodded solemnly. “For most people, that’s the only path. Reincarnation after reincarnation, a slow drip of karmic buildup, but even then, most of them never reach anywhere significant. The growth is inefficient—stagnation, karmic loops, wasted Aether. But when someone becomes Aware of the Astral Plane, it all changes. You gain the ability to accelerate your growth. Through Aether refinement, Scripture cultivation, artifact synthesis—all of it lets you cut down what would take lifetimes' worth of passive grind and jam it into a semester.”

  Aster slumps in his seat, arms dangling at his sides. “So, you’re saying that this,” he waved at the scroll, the meat, the floating glyphs, “is a way to speed up what would’ve taken ten reincarnations to do naturally. And the entire system of cultivation is just a catalogue of those shortcuts?”

  “Well, technically, each cultivation is not ‘just’ a shortcut, but an invaluable manual teaching you a path towards godhood, forged and tested by countless generations before us. Each one different, each one unique,” Lena corrects him.

  Aster didn’t respond. He was too busy thinking back to the slab of meat again, deeply insulted by its existence, wondering if it was too late to go back to being poor, depressed, and blissfully ignorant.

  "Someday I’ll pinpoint this exact moment, where I cooked enlightenment out of a monster bone, as the point I officially went insane. The fact that this works says more about the universe than I’m ready to deal with."

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  Aster dragged a hand through his hair, staring at the scroll again like it might bite him.

  “So that thing on her desk was, what, fast-tracked enlightenment sashimi?”

  Lena stifles a laugh. “It’s Aquaguana meat, but yes.”

  His sigh could power a windmill.

  “Let’s try a different angle,” she offers, leaning in. “Do you know how computers work?”

  “Yes. And I already hate where this is going.”

  “Perfect,” she grins. “Your Material Vessel—your body—could be seen as the PC, the hardware. Biological, physical, limited to the Material plane. Your Astral Vessel is the operating system—your OS. It runs background tasks, governs how you process Aether through your experiences, and manages your connection to the Astral Plane. Usually, you only ever see the interface—the Material experience. But once you become Aware, you pull back the Veil and start rewriting the code directly.”

  Aster gives her a long, suffering look. “So you’re saying I’m jailbreaking my own ghost.”

  “Exactly. You access the dev tools. You stop being bound by the default settings. That’s what removing the Biofield—the Veil—really means.”

  He stared at her, trying to hold the fraying edges of his logic together. “Okay. But then, where does consciousness fit into all this? If the Soul is the user, and the Astral Vessel is the OS, then what the hell am I?”

  “Good question,” Lena said, her academic tone maddeningly serene. “If we consider the Soul as an external entity, the theorized real user. It would make your consciousness a type of self-generating AI, emerging from the Astral Vessel over time. A byproduct of experiences, feedback loops, spiritual memory, etc. It feels autonomous, because it is. But it's shaped, gently guided, by the Soul. That’s why people sometimes make irrational decisions that lead to massive growth. It’s the Soul’s input pushing growth.”

  Aster raises a hand. “So, my free will is actually just... auto-suggestions from some extra-dimensional version of myself?”

  “More or less,” she shrugs. “Those gut instincts you get. Intuition? Dreams that feel too real? That’s theorised to be the Soul pinging your system from beyond the firewall.”

  “I swear to god,” Aster mutters, “if I find out the reason I almost got eaten by a Void Wyrm was because of character growth…”

  She bursts out laughing.

  But he isn’t done. “So to clarify: So we’re ghosts, running on metaphysical Linux, occasionally getting advice from our soul which is some eldritch gamer versions of ourselves in another dimension, my life’s been one big software patch, and now I’m expected to extract energy from mystical fish meat using a spell named after religious reverence—so I can evolve my metaphysical firmware and punch ghosts harder?”

  “I mean… yes.”

  “And when we step into the Astral Plane, we’re hacking the code directly.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Right.” Aster exhaled. “Cool. Good. Just making sure I’m still following this fever dream.”

  He buries his face in his hands. “You people are all insane.”

  She pats his arm. “And now you’re one of us.”

  Aster gives her a betrayed look.

  “So what’s the endgame here?” he asks finally. “If this whole process is just a big spiritual upgrade ladder, where does it end? Enlightenment? Immortality?”

  Lena nods. “Eventually, after Acolyte, there are six more ranks. And the last one is called Godhood.”

  Aster’s voice cracks. “I’m sorry—what?”

  “Godhood,” she repeats. “Not omniscience, not all-powerful—but enough to bend the laws of the Astral and Material Planes. You’d be functionally divine.”

  He’s quiet for a long moment. “Yesterday, you told me the gods people worship are just pyramid scheme mascots. Today, you’re telling me I can turn myself into a god through proper meat preparation and spiritual coding?”

  “Welcome to Galamad,” she says, smiling sweetly.

  Aster doesn’t respond. He’s too busy wondering if it’s too late to go back to being poor, depressed, and blissfully ignorant.

  “Do I have you so far?” Lena asks, tilting her head, like she isn’t sure whether to hand Aster a certificate or a therapist.

  He exhales, dragging a hand down his face. “Yeah. I think I’m getting the gist—spirit-as-software, meat-as-power-source, ghost-upgrades-as-curriculum. Totally normal stuff.”

  Lena grins. “Then let’s move on to the practical part.”

  God help me.

  “As I said, the Astral Vessel grows by accumulating Aether. The type most people generate is Psychic Aether—passive, slow, and impure. But we’ve got access to Elemental Aether. It’s cleaner, more concentrated, and tied to higher energy like Fire, Water, Earth, and so on. The higher up you go in the Astral Plane, the purer the source.”

  Aster nods slowly, thinking of the pile of dissolved meat. “So that smoky blue crap she extracted earlier—that’s Vapored Mist Aether?”

  “Exactly,” Lena says. “It gets refined through faith into a vapor and then absorbed into the gate that corresponds to that Hue and Typing. Each Astral Vessel has seven of them—spine to skull—and each one connects to a type of Aether. Mrs. Lerato’s typing is Water; her diaphragm gate is tuned to Mist. So when she absorbs refined Mist Aether, it flows directly there.”

  “And this does what? Makes me stronger?”

  “Over time. By opening each gate, you remove its corresponding cosmic limiters. Mist Aether affects control, precision, and perception. The more you refine and absorb, the stronger your attributes related to Mist become.”