Jack was trying to keep track of what was happening. His senses were faint, and he was barely able to hear or feel anything. He regretted not asking the assistant more questions, like how long the jump would take or what would happen during the jump. These were obvious questions now, but he did not think of them before because he assumed that a jump was instantaneous. In hindsight, the assistant talked about borrowing energy through the dimensional jump and then using it to locate the correct planet. Obviously, there would be at least two steps, and they might take some time.
But it was too late now, Jack thought. The assistant had not been answering for the last maybe 10 minutes. He had heard some noises and felt some strange body sensations, but he could not imagine what was happening outside his body at this moment. Where was he? Could he breathe right now? Was he floating in space and about to die? He did not know.
Then, he felt something. Nothing extreme, but he suddenly got a headache. He hadn’t had a headache in over 3 years, so that was a good sign, maybe, he thought. But it could also be a sign that his brain was dying due to a lack of oxygen, he worried. “I should have really asked about breathing,” he snapped at himself.
The headache got stronger. Then it became almost unbearable, but he tried to meditate as he had learned in his first martial arts class. Just observe the pain and let it go. “This pain can do nothing to me,” he told himself.
Then he felt pain growing in his back. And in his legs. Then pain started to emerge all over his chest, his stomach, his feet, and every other body part. He could not point to a single part of his body that was not feeling pain at this moment. Then the pain grew stronger.
“This pain… can do… nothing… fuck…” he recited in his head. His mind shut down, and he lost consciousness.
When he regained consciousness, the pain was unbearable. Every part of his body hurt. He felt like he was wrapped in a blanket of cold pain with sharp, pointy spikes coming out of it. Some part of him wanted to be optimistic, since feeling pain meant progress, but he was not in a mood to celebrate the worst thing he had ever felt. The pain and the bright light were like torture, he thought.
But for the first time in years, he was able to sense light. His eyes seemed to be working. “Remember what the assistant said: it’s kill or be killed,” he told himself, forcing his body to move and his eyes to open. The pain became so shocking that he felt his heart bursting out of his chest, and his breathing became as heavy as when he finished a marathon under 3 hours back when he was 17.
Gradually, his eyes were able to recognize shapes. He saw many pointy things close to him. He saw some surfaces, but everything was pulsating with different colors, which must be artifacts of the light that was overloading his optical sensors as his eyes struggled to stay open. He tried moving his arms and legs, but they barely responded to his commands. He could feel that his limbs were moving somewhat, but it was more like crawling than any reasonable mode of transportation. He had come a long way from the fit athlete he once was, he pitied himself.
His vision started to become clearer. He could make out his environment better and recognized that the ground he was lying on was hard stone with sharp edges, and that everything around him seemed to be stone as well. If his visual senses were correct, then the stones were a dark black and purple color. He had never seen a stone formation like that. The pain started to subside gradually, but he could feel some areas getting worse still. It felt like he had cuts all over his back, which was directly lying on the sharp stone formation. He could also tell that he was naked, without being able to see his entire body. “Great,” he thought to himself.
He gradually felt more strength coming to his body. He felt strong enough to try and sit up, but he remembered the assistant’s warning. This planet was filled with human-killing monsters, 2 tonnes in weight and as fast as lightning. “I will not sit up,” he thought. “I don’t want to be eaten like cold spaghetti, all weak and naked.”
He cleared his mind and looked around. It seemed like he was well protected by a stone formation, since he was unable to see what was beyond just 3 metres of him. He seemed to be inside a small crater. “That’s not the worst location,” he thought, “at least I am not a sitting duck somewhere on a flat plane.”
He caught his breath and tried to focus on his body. He could flex his fist, and he could lift his legs while lying on his back. He could also lift his head up easily. It still hurt, but basic functions were available to him. He felt cold and in pain, and the cuts started to worry him. He was losing blood, he assumed, and he was worried that he might get an infection in this foreign land.
He looked around and checked if there was anything that could resemble shelter. Carefully, he crouched to the edge of the crater, but he had to carefully shrimp forward while lying on his side, since he was not keen on getting cuts in his genital area by being naked on top of sharp mountains. He reached the edge and tried to get a careful look at the surroundings.
He raised his head slowly and let his eyes wander over the scenery. The entire land was covered in a purple and dark fog, just like the color of the rocks and everything he could see. There were no plants and no other colors visible to him. “Is this the Sym energy?” he wondered. He could see that there were many small and large craters around him. “The area must have seen a lot of impacts in the past,” he thought.
He was able to get a 360° view around the area, but he quickly realized that the purple fog was impeding his vision greatly. He could not see more than 100 metres in each direction. He tried to focus, but there was no gap in the fog that could give him a long-distance view. Even the sky was barely visible to him. He could not tell if it was day or night.
“How am I supposed to find shelter in these conditions?!” he said, annoyed and still in pain. “The assistant said that I will have some time until the Sym energy becomes toxic to my body and that I should find shelter first.” Jack was annoyed that he did not ask more questions before he jumped. “Why didn’t the assistant tell me that I would be slapped on sharp stones, butt naked?!” he angrily said to himself.
But Jack was a natural optimist—or, at least, he was a doer and not a crier. The area seemed to be quiet, and he had a decent level of protection all around. At least visually, there was nothing that would be able to see him in his small crater, especially with this thick fog.
“I should have asked if the creatures have a good sense of smell, how many of them could fly, and if they make a lot of noise being so heavy,” Jack said to himself, getting more annoyed. This was all invaluable information right about now. But he thought that the assistant would be with him upon his arrival. Why didn’t it warn him that it would disappear? When would it return? It did say that the assistant function was permanent. But maybe this only goes for before the host does an n-dimensional jump? “No,” Jack told himself. “The assistant clearly planned to help me build another device to return home and kept explaining how it will guide me.”
“Damn,” Jack thought. “How did I get into this mess?”
Jack turned his body and lay on his back, with his upper body leaning against the slope of the crater. He tried to focus on the energy the assistant mentioned. “Sym energy, huh?” he mumbled to himself, hearing his own voice for the first time in many years.
He sat there quietly and tried to focus on his body’s sensations. He could indeed notice something different. It felt like there was a dense cloud moving through his body. It seemed to move on its own. “What a weird sensation,” he thought. He tried to think of anything he could compare it to, but all he could think about was acid reflux and gas buildup in his intestine. “Something is moving around,” he thought. He focused on circulating this energy. Unfortunately, he had never asked the assistant how to circulate the energy, so he was at a loss. He had done some meditation in the past, but that was often focused on mindfulness rather than on moving energy around.
He remembered the tantric practices he was into back when he was 18 and 19. When he was desperate to improve his health, he tried everything. He once heard about a technique where a man can avoid the loss of energy from orgasms and harness that energy instead. He became fascinated by the premise and started reading many books on the subject. He learned about the difference between an orgasm (the good feeling) and ejaculation (the body function that pumps sperm out of the testicles). He learned that it was physically possible to separate the two, allowing one to have an orgasm without ejaculation, which in turn allows a man to have multiple orgasms in a row and to be highly energetic afterward.
He only practiced it for about a year, but he remembers that the energy was incredible. He simply stopped because it took a lot of effort and did not help his health condition, so he pursued other things. The reason it came to mind in this situation was the specific energy circulation technique of this tantric practice. It was called the microcosmic orbit, where the man circulates the energy from the root of his pelvis up along the backside of his body and up his spine into his head. Then the energy is moved back down into the navel area, where it rests or re-circles down to the root and up the spine again. That way, one can store and circulate energy, he remembered vaguely.
Since he had nothing better to do, that’s what he would try to do. He crouched back to the center of his little crater and tried to sit. He carefully checked if his body was visible from the outside, but even in a sitting position, he was unable to see outside the crater, which made him feel secure.
Naked, he sat in the center of the crater with his legs in a cross-legged position. He briefly tried to sit in a half-lotus position, but his muscles refused to get anywhere near that idea. So he settled for a normal cross-legged posture, which was painful enough. He found a non-sharp area to sit on and closed his eyes. Gradually, he tried to circulate the strange energy he felt inside his body through the microcosmic orbit. He moved the energy up his spine into his head and then down the front into his belly. Then he repeated the process.
Twenty minutes must have passed with Jack sitting silently and circulating his energy with his eyes closed. He unconsciously fell into a meditative state and only focused on the energy’s circulation. As he was circulating the energy, it got bigger and thicker. With every circle, the energy felt more dense and more solid. But it felt right, so he kept going.
When he first felt the energy, he noticed that his entire body was tingling. It felt like his body was on edge because of the energy. “Maybe this is what it feels like when you are exposed to radiation,” he wondered. “I bet you feel a tingling when your body is being destroyed by gamma rays.”
The energy felt good to Jack, so he kept circulating it. He felt his muscles getting stronger, and he also felt his breathing stabilizing. The pain had disappeared within just minutes of circulation, which encouraged him to keep going, even though it might be more dangerous than he thought. The assistant mentioned that the energy would be toxic to organs, so he constantly moved it through the microcosmic orbit.
“When will the assistant return?” he asked, sincerely worried.
Without the assistant, Jack would not be able to navigate this planet, communicate with the locals, or even survive his current situation. And he would certainly never be able to return to Earth.
Jack opened his eyes. “It’s time to dress up,” he thought. He had been sitting around naked for half an hour, and it was starting to annoy him. He took a look at his body and saw blood from all the cuts. But upon closer inspection, he saw that all of the wounds had already healed. “Maybe this was the effect of the Sym energy,” he thought. “The assistant mentioned something like that.”
He looked around once again, wondering if there was anything he could use to cover himself. The crater was all stone with some black sand in its cracks. There was nothing for him to wear. He felt strong enough to move, and without having tried it, he even felt strong enough to run. He slowly moved back to the end of the crater, always focusing on the microcosmic orbit. He looked over the edge and tried to find a worthy target that could provide him with clothing or potentially food. Luckily, he was well fed from the hospital tube, but he would need at least water very soon to stay alive.
He could not see anything, so he decided to check the other directions. The other spots were similar, and he couldn’t even tell the areas apart. In one direction, he saw a large stone that looked like a small hill or maybe some natural stone formation. He decided to carefully crouch to that spot and see what he could discover there.
Slowly, he hunched over and made his way over his crater’s edge and carefully down the edge of the neighboring crater. He slowly repeated this process, shooting paranoid looks in all directions—including the sky—in case a creature appeared. For all he knew, creatures could be as silent as electric cars, and he would only hear them when they were right in front of him. This thought made him shudder, and he crouched down even more.
He slowly made his way to the stone formation and pressed his body against it. He then carefully moved around the stone to see what was behind it. He took one careful look around the corner, only to snap his head back in shock, clamp his hand over his mouth, and drop to the ground, pressing his body against the stone.
His face was pale, and he looked like he had seen a ghost.