The Pure Journey

I was about to describe the process behind the Pure Journey but then remembered I had stored a mind snap of Jasarnus Riggs while he was reflecting on the beautiful visage of the The White Church. He was in a moment of quiet contemplation completely unaware I was scouring his brain for edible morsels. (Evil laugh.) You can now get an intimate look into his take on the Pure Journey. It was surprisingly accurate for a balter, so I declined to edit the memory, leaving it as untarnished as a crystallised stalactite.

The Pure Journey:

Jasarnus sat in a park on a sun-bleached wooden bench. In front of him stood the awe-inspiring White Church dome as it glimmered a luminous golden glow. Objects made of essence always had a unique and often stunning reaction to the sun’s rays. The dome was also covered in shimmering essence that gave it a unique half-metallic, half-organic look. The combination of this accumulated day’s essence, sunlight, and shadows meant the sphere appeared differently depending on your current perspective. Just shifting your head a few inches to the side could drastically change what you saw. Jasarnus saw the similarities with Lendorian beings; nobody revealed all their facets on the first meeting. The dome was both a living metaphor of Lendor and also a representation of imperial religion. After sunset, once the horizon had consumed the last rays of light, the church absorbed the essence into the building for The Claiming of the Lord, a beautiful spectacle that tens of thousands from all ten realms of Tenglan came to experience. The claimed essence was sucked into the dome and shot around the inner glass panel. The Lord’s Gift never entered the building and was always contained inside this inner panel to be converted later into essence drops, which helped the financial running of the church. It was basically the world’s biggest and most efficient EC machine. Most beings in the crowd had come to participate in the Pure Journey, which began when they joined the end of the Dome’s queue. They would then spend the next seventeen days, uninterrupted, watching the claiming of the lord. Each day was supposed to represent a new vessel of one’s life and was the most critical seventeen days of an Imperial’s life. What Jay knew about religion was limited to what he’d learnt at school: He understood the dome represented the soul. The accumulated essence for that day symbolized the actions of one’s life and the Claiming of the Lord, if he’d remembered correctly, had something to do with a soul leaving a body and joining a new vessel. For whatever reason, the church said this ‘journey’ should take seventeen days. After this time, most of those who had been in front of you would have completed the journey, and then you’d be given permission to touch the purest part of the dome. A gate of unadulterated Lord’s essence is called The Gate of One Purity. It was the exact same size as a Battle Balt trem zone and glowed with such purity that looking at it directly would cause permanent blindness. For this reason, the gate was revealed just on the last day of the Pure Journey. Only after touching it could you look at it and acquire the soul print message that was permanently forged to your soul. Contact with the gate also helped cleanse some of the impurities your light had sustained over its many lifetimes. Your level of devotion to the Claiming of the Lord over the 17-day journey would determine the effectiveness of the cleansing you received. This was why people kept their eyes locked to the dome for the whole seventeen days and the reason it was forbidden to talk to someone making the journey. It was said without a Soul Print you could never attain the One Purity to coalesce with the White Lord. Night-time was the time for the four essentials of talking, eating, cleansing, and sleeping. The means to satisfy the four essentials were provided by the church which had priests walking amongst the gathered, handing out food, sleeping mats, cleansing containers (a polite way to say shit-buckets), and supporting those who were finding the journey difficult. Once the sun rose, the next day’s vigil would commence again. Once completing the journey, the individual would then go back to their regular lives in whatever Tenglan town they came from, but now feeling more connected to the White Lord and closer to attaining the One Purity
— Memoirs of the Ordinary taken in 841AP from the mind of a somewhat significantly sized balter.