1 Prologue: A fateful car ride

Reincarnation. It's an idea a great many people have heard about. The idea that when you die you are reborn. Most people who believe in reincarnation and talk about remembering their past lives will tend to say that they were the assistants or maids of various famous people throughout history. It really is quite a curious thing that none of them are ever normal everyday people in their past lives.

Others talk about being a house cat in a past life. This, at least, seems more believable. After all, there is no reason to assume with reincarnation that you would always be reincarnated as a human. In fact, the aboriginal peoples of North America who believed in reincarnation would often not talk about past lives, but future lives in which they would reincarnate as an animal.

There are many cultural and religious origins for the idea of reincarnation. However, one of the most interesting and unexpected is the Catholic Church. This is a strange concept because Christianity teaches that when you die, your soul goes to heaven or hell depending on whether or not your soul has been saved from its sin. However, in the medieval period, a lot of folk had a problem with the concept of this. The key thing was the prospect that someone who simply did not accept Christ but was still a good person would go to hell regardless. This introduced the concept of purgatory, the highest and mildest level of hell in which people who meet this description would wander without purpose waiting for a second chance at life which would eventually be granted to them.

There are several things about reincarnation that make the idea look kinda shaky. Perhaps the strangest thing about the idea of reincarnation and remembering your past life was that nobody other than the really dogmatic believers ever talked about remembering past lives, and their stories were always rather incredible. If you talk to the normal person on the street, they would think you are weird for even bringing up the subject of reincarnation.

When you get right down to it, reincarnation is a subject that is completely unfalsifiable. There really is nothing to say it is not a thing, but there is also absolutely nothing to say it is and completely no way to test the claims it makes. In this way, it is about the same as any religious claim. I do believe in God myself, but that hardly means I accept all such religious claims. There are some things, such as this stuff about purgatory and reincarnation, that have always sounded a little off to me. It wasn't really important though, I really never thought very hard about it. That is, until I found myself in my current situation.

I had died under some rather incredible circumstances. I felt myself falling through darkness for a while after that, but now I find myself in a fairly warm and cozy fluid environment. I was fairly certain I had died anyway. That voice that called herself a goddess said I would die in exchange for my granddaughter's life. As a believer in the Abrehemic God, I was hesitant to accept such a thing, but to save my granddaughter I would gladly sacrifice my own life even to a demon calling herself a goddess.

All of this started after the weekend morning class in my dojo. I had just sent my students home. All except for one that is. My granddaughter who I was babysitting for the weekend so that my son and his wife could go and have a much needed vacation. I had taken her in to my class. This was not her first time participating in the class. In fact, she was one of my regular students. My son also still attended the adult classes. Our family practiced a heavy martial arts tradition. I had my son in my classes ever since he was in grade school. Of course he would enroll his daughter as well.

After class, I would take her to go get ice cream. It is every grandparents' happiness to be able to spoil their adorable grandchildren after all. Treats like this were not something to be indulged in frequently, but I felt that we could get away with it for today. She was smiling so brightly as we got into the car to drive to a good ice cream shop I knew about in the next town over. Unfortunately, we never arrived.

It was soon after we had gotten onto the freeway. One drunk driver was all it took to turn a happy day with my granddaughter into what would likely prove to be the worst day of her life. As a man in his 60s, I was not as strong as I was in my prime. However, having gone through a lifetime of a disciplined martial arts regime in the soft-fist styles, it meant my body had gone through several shocks of being thrown to the ground repeatedly. Such activity strengthens the collagen fibers and other connective tissues around your internal organs. It is one of the few activities known to have the ability to strengthen a person's internal organs against impact. As such, despite the brutal sudden stop, I came out of the experience relatively fine. My granddaughter however...

I had seen it as we collided with the car in front of us. I turned my head just before the airbag deployed, and I saw her small body that was too small for the seat belt fly forward, and then her head get snapped straight back as the airbag hit her straight in the face. After that, shards of glass rained down on her body. I got the same, but it was unbearable to see her 6 year old face lacerated by the raining glass fragments. However, as visually unpleasant as the bleeding lacerations were, the injuries she likely sustained immediately before that were the thing to truly worry about.

The crumple zone in the front of our car had done its job correctly. The front of the car had collapsed, but aside from the windshield breaking there was no damage to the cabin. This allowed me plenty of free movement after I beat back the airbag to remove my seat belt and rush to my granddaughter's aid. Going by what I had just seen, I immediately suspected a neck injury. So, rather than hold or cradle her injured body, the first thing I did was to reach over her and lower the back of the chair as I lay her down carefully. I called her name several times, getting no response. Her chest was moving, so she was still alive. She just wasn't responding.

I had been a nurse before I retired, so I had the proper medical training to know better than to move her excessively from this point forward if a neck injury was suspected. The next thing I did was to check her eyes. Both of her pupils were fixed and dilated. For those of you without medical training, that means the pupils had become large and were not constricting in response to light exposure. Constriction in response to light exposure is a natural reflex, and the only reason it would not happen is if the portion of the brain responsible for constricting the iris has been damaged. I knew at this point, the chances of her making it out of this alive were very slim. Even if she did survive, she would have lasting injuries that may even include full body paralysis.

I blamed myself for this. I cursed myself for this. I had the knowledge to be aware that this could happen. She was too young to be riding in the front seat of a car, and this was exactly the reason why. I had not minded that I did not receive her car seat from her father when he dropped her off, I did not think a bad situation like this could happen to me. I was a safe driver. How foolish I was. It doesn't matter how safe a driver you are if there is some idiot on the road. How could I have been so foolish!? This was my fault. It was my fault that my granddaughter had wound up like this. How could I have let this happen?

"It should have been you. That is what you are thinking, are you not?"

I heard the feminine voice in my head. I knew it was not the voice of someone in the real world. In fact, I immediately disregarded it as my imagination when I first heard that voice. It was nothing more than the guilt I was feeling manifesting itself in my mind.

"I bet you would do anything to take her place, wouldn't you?"

Heh, damn right I would. At this point, with the voice having spoken twice, I had thought it was just my self-speech. My internal monologue. However, I was not entirely certain why my internal monologue would sound like a woman, and why she was addressing me like a third person. Perhaps I had conjured it up because I wanted someone to blame me for the irrevocable and grievous mistake I had made with my granddaughter's life.

"I can help you out if you like. I can transfer all of her injuries onto you, and this child will be as healthy as she was before any of this happened. There will not even be a scratch."

This time, as the voice made some absolutely outrageous claims, it became far more firm and clear. This time it actually WAS as though it was a real physical person talking to me, and the illusory image of a woman materialized in the passenger side window.

"Who… who are you?" I asked in apprehension. The woman smiled with a satisfied smirk that I found enraging in this situation. If she said anything other than the next words that came out of her mouth, I would have probably let her have it. What she said though left me without anything to respond with.

"Me? I am a fallen goddess without worshipers. There is no-one who knows my name, and without worshipers I have very little power. However, if it's for you, I can grant this one wish if you will also do something for me."

As she finished saying this, she walked through the closed car door, her thighs passed straight through my severely injured granddaughter like she was a ghost, and then she sat in the back seat of the car before reaching forward to touch my cheek. This time, it was a physical touch as real as the my granddaughter's limp hand which I carefully and gently held in mine. "So, what do you say?"

There were a great many things that went through my mind at once. A fallen goddess? As I have mentioned before, as a believer of the Abrehemic God, this made her no different from a demon to me. If felt like a Faustian bargain if there ever was one. However, if it was for the sake of my innocent granddaughter who was blameless and was suffering and dying because of my mistake, then perhaps I really should pay whatever price she asked. So long as my granddaughter was unharmed and the price was paid by me alone, it would be worth whatever it was that she asks. There was something already in what she said that was bothering me, but I decided not to mention it for now.

"What do you want?" I asked her.

"It's really quite simple," she responded. "As I mentioned, I have no worshipers in this world, and this world is quite hostile to weak gods and goddesses such as myself. However, this world is sealed and very difficult to leave."

What was she getting at? Why was she telling me this, and what did it have to do with me? She was looking at me upon finishing this line as though it should somehow mean something to me, but I could not understand it at all.

"I have been watching you." She said. "You have learned a very interesting form of meditation. You may not be aware of it, but it is a little different from most people who practice your fighting art. The meditation that accepts the energy of heaven and then, using your body, you send that energy into the earth. It is a very ingenious meditation indeed that those who practice your art have found. However, I believe it is not the earth that you direct the energy into at all. That's the key that makes your meditation different, and powerful. Simply by performing your meditation, if you perform this meditation and continue to perform it straight through till the moment of your death, it should allow me the opportunity to leave this world that is hostile to a powerless fallen goddess such as I."

Such an incredible statement. I had contemplated the divine and the nature of the universe in the past, but I still had my feet grounded in the realm of facts, the physical, and skepticism. It seems somewhat odd for someone who practices a metaphysical meditation such as the one she had just quite accurately described to say they have a basis in skepticism, but it works out. I had felt the results of the meditation first hand, how much more free it made my mind and how much better my performance was when I was in this meditative state that I had always figured the images must be triggering something real. I didn't make any claim to know what, but it was real enough in its results for me to stop worrying about it. So, to suddenly hear that there was a goddess interested in some form of effect from this meditation… and there was also another thing. She DID also mention 'the moment of my death.'

"So, my death is a part of your price, huh? You keep saying you are powerless. What guarantee do I have that you can save my granddaughter? I am certain if you are as weak as you say, it would be quite difficult to save someone from injuries like this. On the other hand, I know from experience that it takes far less effort to kill someone than it does to save someone."

At these words, she simply smiles. "You are quite right," she says. "Actually, I truly doubt I have even the amount of power necessary to take your life in the way you said. However, as I told you before, your meditation is special. You are accepting the energy of heaven into your body after all. So, I will be touching your soul and skimming off some of that energy. I will use that to transfer your vitality into her and heal all of her injuries."

There was so much about this that was strange. If I had been in my right mind at the time, I would have about twenty objections and even more questions for this mysterious self-proclaimed fallen goddess. However, as things were, my mind was on one thing and one thing only. That was my granddaughter and my guilt at her current state.

"Fine. If you can do it, then do it." That was all I said. If she could do it, that was great. And if all she wanted me to do was go into my standard combat meditation, that was an easy thing to do. I really had nothing to lose. Well, aside from my life if what she said was true. However, if I did loose my life, then presumably that would mean it had worked and she had fulfilled her promise.

I let out a breath, and then I let one of my hands go from my granddaughter's. This meditation was a combat meditation. This meant that it was incredibly difficult to do correctly while holding still. Therefore, in order to make it effective, I began moving one of my hands through some motions resembling moving from one guarding position to another. I moved my hand to my chest and then let out a breath as I visualized all of the spiritual energy in my body being expelled out into the void around me. I envisioned myself vanishing completely as a person. In this state of emptiness, the energy of heaven was able to flow into me and replace the energy of myself that was once there before. This energy as well was also expelled.

This is how it works. Energy likes to flow, and it is bad for it to be stagnant. The only way to take more of the energy into your body is to expel it. This is the entire principle of the heaven and earth combat meditation. To accept the energy of heaven and then immediately expel it as it fuels and invigorates your motions while giving peace and awareness to your mind. I became aware of all the other voices around me. It was not just my granddaughter and I who were suffering. I could perceive groans and frightened voices from all around me. Shocked people reacting in horror to the scene of carnage before them. I could only imagine how many people were already dead because of this incident. While this meditation boosted my awareness of all of this going on around me, it also gave me peace. I was not bothered by any of it. Even my guilt at the state my granddaughter was in began to disappear. My self would fully disappear and my body became a vehicle of pure intent.

"Excellent. Let's begin." The self-proclaimed fallen goddess approved. While it was her that was going to be doing the work, the constant motions of my free hand over my granddaughter's chest made it almost seem like I was the one doing some form of arcane magic upon her broken body. In a strange sense of contrast, all that she did was to simply touch her once again incorporeal hand to my chest and reach inside of my body. "Oooh!" She cried out as her head snaps back like she had received an electric shock. She had a very satisfied smile when her head had risen back up and she was once again looking at me. After this, she touched her other hand to my granddaughter in the same way.

As soon as the fallen goddess' hands were touching both of us, the effect was instantaneous. My hand which had been waving about over my granddaughter's body immediately dropped down to the center console of the car. I did not feel it make contact despite the distinct slapping sound it made. I had lost all physical sensation in my hand. A second later, my body fell back against the door as I collapsed like a puppet that had had its strings cut. After this, I could feel my consciousness rapidly fading. Just before I lost consciousness though, I could hear some moaning and groaning from my granddaughter.

"Grandpa?" Her angelic voice rang out and I breathed a sigh of relief. It had worked. She had pulled through. That self-proclaimed goddess had really done it. In my final moments, I remembered what she had asked me to do. And, to keep up my end of the bargain, I focused hard on expelling all of myself, every single last spiritual and metaphysical thing in me, out into the void as I continued to make more room in myself for the holy power that kept flowing into me to replace what had been driven out.

I experienced a falling sensation as my consciousness faded to black. It seemed like I was falling, and the holy energy was all around me. It felt warm as I was swept up and carried by the currents. I don't really know when that sensation stopped, but at some point the warm feeling of holy power was replaced by a warm feeling of security. At this point, I felt calm.

This is the state I have been in for an amount of time that became impossible to track. It feels as though I am floating in some form of liquid. Sometimes, I don't know why, but I feel afraid for some reason. I also hear some muffled sounds. Large and deep sounds, and some that are higher. The deep sounds seem so much bigger and louder though, it is like they are rocking my entire body. When these sounds become more frequent, I start to feel scared for some reason. I have had some thoughts of recognition of what this is probably all about, something about my medical knowledge from being a nurse that explains it, but whenever I try to think about that I quickly loose the thought.

Lately, it is even starting to feel fuzzy, the fact that I even died. It all feels like this is some kind of long dream. This dream… actually, I kinda remember dreaming about this before when I was a kid. I was really young at the time, around 6, maybe even younger than that. Every time I would get sick I would have that dream as though it was haunting me. Now it felt like I was inside of that childhood nightmare.

The time I have spent in this place that is without light or darkness is so long it has become impossible to track. I have stopped noticing the warmth. It all just feels the same now. It is starting to feel cramped too. For the first time, I have started to feel something, something like bones. Somebody's elbow pushing up against me. It seems like there is some kind of rubber-like film between me and that elbow on the other side pushing into my chest. It is at this point it seems like something is becoming more clear. I realize where I wound up, but for some reason I can't speak the words in my mind. It makes sense though, it seems I really did die then. This must be that reincarnation thing, it actually was real. With this in mind, I begin to feel a strong affinity for the other person sharing this space with me. I know at this point that this person will be my first friend in my new life, and a very important person to me for most of my upcoming childhood.

Once again though, for some reason proper terms for what this person is to me simply will not come to mind. It seems I have been here for a very long time, and it seems I have forgotten several things in that time. I still remember a lot though. I remember that I died, I remember that there is something very important for me about the place I am in now. It also makes sense now why I feel afraid of those voices outside.

Now that my hands will work, I reach down and touch the cord running into my abdominal area. I remember now why it is that I get scared. It is because of what is running through this cord whenever those voices start getting particularly active. It changes the chemistry of my environment, and the substances that come in make it so I have no choice but to feel scared.

'Hold on' I say in my mind to the other important person I know is around. It is the person who is really feeling scared, and her feeling scared is the reason I also feel scared. 'You can do it, just hang on.' I thought toward her. I had started to learn to associate those sounds with the fear that was going to happen after a while, but I started to notice sometimes now I would hear those sounds but I would not feel scared. Now that I knew why it was happening, I was able to break that association. In fact, because I knew what it was, I would feel happy for this other important person every time I heard those sounds without feeling scared. And then, the times when I did wind up feeling scared, I would tell myself it's not my own fear I was feeling and I would fight it, and then I would feel very sad for this important person to me.

In the times that I felt afraid, I had no choice but to move my body. Without sight, and the dampened feeling of being in a fluid, I frequently wound up hitting everything around me. At this point, I had the smooth rubbery walls of the place I was in that I kept hitting, and then there was also the other person in here with me. They also got really active whenever we both got scared for the same reason. We wound up hitting each other a lot. I tried not to hit them, but it happened sometimes. I was beginning to get the sense that they were trying to avoid hitting me as well. After this happened for a few times, a question began to surface in my mind. 'Do they know?'

Once again, I had lost the words to explain what this thought meant. However, it seemed like it was a rather important question. Somehow, it made them the same as me. I was beginning to notice by this point that my ability to remember the words and the things I had forgotten before were becoming better. I knew it was because I was getting closer.. closer to the time I was ready to leave this place. I knew that the closer I came to leaving here, the more I would be able to remember of my life before this one. The reason I couldn't remember things was because this body was not able to use the information I had in my head very well, but now it was becoming easier as I was starting to develop.

'Brain, that's the word.' My brain. My fetal brain was beginning to develop more and more, and as the structures developed I was able to recall the information from my previous life better.

After some time, it began to feel incredibly cramped in this space. My sibling, my twin brother or sister, was pressed up tightly against me and neither of us could move very much. I keep thinking for sure we must be getting close to the time when we should be born, but no matter what it just seems like we have to wait longer and things get more cramped and uncomfortable in here. My sibling's wrist has been in my face for quite a while now, and I can definitely feel their shoulder with my own arm. Our knees are constantly bumping up against each other as we reflexively kick due to the cramped conditions. Some of it is reflex anyway. The rest is just us having to try to move. It is very uncomfortable being so cramped.

I feel very fortunate in this time that I have become used to the silence, used to nothing happening to stimulate me for what must be months and months of time passing. My sense of time since becoming like this has really changed. I assume I must have spent a lot of my time sleeping or something, because if I try to track back to remember how long I have been like this the best answer I can account for is that it feels like maybe it has been a week's worth of subjective time since I had reincarnated and become a fetus. However, I know that can simply not be the case. My sibling and I are mammals for certain, and there is no mammal that doesn't have a gestation time of at least 3 months if I remember correctly. I am certain with no sense of time and my consciousness fading in and out, it could even be years I have spent in here and I wouldn't know the difference.

In this way, in our subjectively rapid development as my consciousness fades in and out, the time I have to deal with elbows in my face and knees clashing with my sibling seems rather short. Eventually, I feel as though something had ripped and I felt my sibling's torso with my hand for the first time. I knew exactly what had happened, and realizing this I tried to pull my hand back as much as possible. I kept my hands as close to my body as possible so that something didn't go wrong. At this same time, I began to feel the contractions of our mother's uterus trying to force us out. At first, it just squeezed us and pressed us together tighter. We kept getting squeezed, but there was no way out for us yet.

I was beginning to get excited as I knew we were about to get out. We were about to be born. We simply had to wait for the cervix to open far enough that we could fit through it. After we kept getting pushed together like this, there was one point where I noticed I was not getting pressed against my sibling's head and torso anymore. I felt my face press into my sibling's knees.

'Oh, looks like I am going to be the younger twin then.' That was all that I was able to really think in this moment. I have to admit, there actually was something of a slight sense of disappointment, but I was able to become content with it quickly. Soon after this, I could not feel my sibling's feet anymore as another contraction began to push me through an even tighter space than the cramped area I was in before. I felt as though my eyes were going to be squeezed out of my head as I could feel my skull actually deforming in order to make it through such a narrow passage. It was probably impossible for my eyes to pop out though. They wouldn't have anywhere to go. Even if they came out the walls of this tight passage would only push them back in.

I could feel something cold against the top of my head. For the first time, I felt something other than the static warmth inside of my mother's womb. Now I could feel the cold of the outside. With the next contraction, my entire head emerged. Everything was a sea of fuzzy white. I could hear the sound of a baby crying. After this, the rest of my body was expelled from my mother's warm insides, and the cold air assailed every part of my body.

It was an incredibly unpleasant experience. Frankly, I hated it. Logically, I knew it was perfectly natural. On an uncontrollable visceral level though, it was a very traumatic experience for me. To make matters worse, I felt as though I was choking as I began to cough and fluids were expelled from my mouth and nose and then ran down my face. I quickly began crying, and the powerful heaves of my cries caused even more liquid to be forced out of my lungs as I took my first breaths of air in this new life.

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