All my senses, from mundane to magical, were telling me that there was no one behind me, but that did not mean I did not hear the voice of a woman speaking in my ears.
"Did you hear that?" I whispered.
The Hollow Avatar was quiet for a moment, then it said, "I heard nothing."
’Odd,’ I thought, "Can you not access my memories?"
"I share the same soul substrate with you, and accessing your memories is seamless, yet I cannot trace the sound of any voice in your ears."
I shook my head. "No, you cannot be right. I heard a voice clearly in my ears, and it was a woman. She said; The greed of men knows no bounds, and for power, they shall take and take, until there is nothing left."
The Avatar was quiet before it reiterated, "She is dead, and there is nothing here to speak."
My frown began to deepen, "Then who said that?" I asked, and the Avatar did not answer, and I never thought there would be a day when the Avatar might be confused about something like this.
Yet, I know that I was not wrong; someone had spoken to me, and even if the Avatar could not hear it or access the voice in my memories, it did not change the truth.
"You’re not dead," I said aloud, into the cold green room.
A pause. The single flickering disc on the floor pulsed once, and I saw the attention of the Avatar shift to the disc.
I swear, I tried not to laugh when I felt the flavor of surprise in the Hollow Avatar. I never thought it knew the meaning of surprise, or how to express it in any meaningful manner.
"No," the voice of the woman replied to my question, and I froze, "Not yet, but my traces would be gone very soon."
"Why can I hear you, but the..." I tried to find a word for the Hollow Avatar without revealing its presence, but knowing that I had already dropped the ball by saying what I just did.
"I am a Jade Oracle; that thing inside you is an ancient relic of the Primordial Age, and it serves the Stone Oracle. It is too limited to access my substrate of meaning. There are no more traces of the Stone Oracle in the heavens, and it is without any root. I could allow it to hear me..."
The voice paused, and my eyes widened a bit at the amount of... was it humor or annoyance... that I heard in her voice?
"Why do you not allow the Hollow Avatar to hear you?"
"It called me dead when I was still three hours away from dying; that was annoying. Also, you called it a Hollow Avatar, how... very interesting."
I blinked, yes, I was not wrong, the Jade Oracle was not speaking like a machine, and if I was not standing in front of her gigantic body, I would have believed that I was speaking to a normal woman.
And here I thought that my life could not get any stranger. Shrugging, I asked the question I should have done from the start: "Who are you? Are you the Jade Oracle?"
There was a slight pause: "I mean that should be obvious from my jade green body, and the fact that the relic buried inside you must have the knowledge of the evolution of the Celestial as ordained by the Creator."
"Why are you... Are you not a machine like the Gate Wardens? Why do you seem so... alive?"
The bright and pearly laughter that followed almost made me flinch, "Hahaha... I could not imagine that this day would come, how amusing. Do you know that for me it is the opposite? I am amazed that meat sacks like you have any intelligence or personality to speak of. Your bodies are fragile, and your lives are mere wisps before the endless tides of time; there is no reason you should not be crawling on the dirt, scrounging for scraps for your survival, and yet, here you are speaking to me... and making me laugh. Oh, I should also point out, have you looked at the state of your body recently?"
I looked down at myself. The silver-white threads of my trousers were humming, and I could barely process the fact that I was fundamentally wearing lightning
My chest was bare, crisscrossed with the faint glow of my channels beneath the skin. As I breathed, my channels would glow and dim with my breathing, and my white hair fell across my eyes, reminding me of what I had lost and gained.
I slowly came to the understanding that a part of me had not fully agreed with the changes inside me, and I had not looked at myself in the mirror well enough to acknowledge every change that had taken place with me since becoming an Adept.
It was easy in the previous loop to theorize about the change that I was going to experience as more of my channels were transformed, but seeing these changes with my naked eyes was something else.
What would I become if all of my channels were completed? Would I even have any relationship with a normal human anymore?
Still, with all these changes I could see, what came out of my mouth was, "My body? I look fine. Everything is where it is supposed to be."
"Fine," the Oracle repeated, and there was that note of humor again, warm and sharp and utterly at odds with her headless, wingless, kneeling body. "You have been used as a freak experiment from an ancient prototype of a Celestial Killer. You carry a Law Shard in your chest like a second heart. Your soul is welded to a fragment of the Stone Oracle’s old network, and you will never have a root. Your channels are growing through your body like weeds through a cracked wall, as the Hollow Avatar is a killer and not a craftsman, you are a clockwork boy who would shatter to pieces at a slight touch... and you say you look fine."
She paused, and she whispered, "You are a catastrophe walking. A beautiful, fragile, impossible catastrophe. And you do not even know it."
I opened my mouth, closed it, opened it again, and then my loose mouth spoke before my thoughts, "Are you always this... chatty?"