"I had accounted for something as such when I had made that statement, I can see the dissonance it created in your being. But if you wish to truly stare into the skies above, I shall grant you but a glimpse, and see how that works out." The woman would wave her hand and Kane would find himself somewhere else, somewhere familiar yet strange, watching a faceless thing do something.
In a "place" both indescribable and familiar, Kane finds himself watching over a distant scene. An indistinct yet clearly human figure is hunched over a plain cauldron, stirring the unseen contents with the rod at a languid pace. After a silent moment, the figure stops stirring as it reaches over to its side, grasping at the void as Kane's perspective shifts.
He finds himself walking along a raised dirt path, flanked by barren and still paddies that seem to stretch outwards forever. His bare feet kick up and accumulate the loose, dusty silt from the path as he walks, a closed basket held over his right shoulder. His clothes are ragged and old, his skin tanned and mottled by the sun, his hands and feet well-calloused from work. A few silent minutes pass before a small series of huts come into view, though there is nobody visible from the outside. A few larger structures with mud-brick walls emit a thin column of smoke from their far ends, one of which Kane enters from a side-door. Putting the basket down and opening the paper blinds on the side-window, light slowly fills the room, revealing walls covered in shelves holding dozens of different herbs, plants, and even animal parts, though many are visibly rotten or entirely desiccated, and a wide ceramic cauldron in the room's center.
As if a true actor in this scene, Kane opens the top of the straw basket he brought and slowly takes out its contents, alternatively placing them onto a bench or onto a spot on one of the shelves that ring the room. Once the basket is empty, he momentarily looks around the room before walking to various shelves and picking up some of their contents. Cradling them in his arms, he stands over the cauldron before dumping the ingredients in and walking away, quickly returning with a pail of water which he dumps into the ceramic vessel. Walking away again, he returns this time with an oversized wooden spoon, looking more like a small oar, and the color of the room slowly changes as a fire picks up on the tinder placed underneath the cauldron. Kane wordlessly attends to the vessel, primarily stirring though occasionally walking away to fetch more water or ingredients, and the contents slowly attain a color not dissimilar to human blood, beginning to boil. Kane's stirring intensifies as he sees this, and the concoction bubbles with increasing violence as a froth slowly forms before being evaporated by the heat. With no chimney in this room, the smoke and steam slowly float out of the sides of the door Kane entered from and the singular window, though he notes that he is slowly becoming lightheaded despite his anticipation.
Suddenly, several sets of hurried footsteps approach the door from outside, and as Kane moves to tell the incomers to wait a moment, he absentmindedly kicks the cauldron, severely burning his foot and tipping the vessel. As a variety of figures appear outside of the door and it opens, the contents of the cauldron suddenly explode with a deep rumble, showering the room with boiling liquid and ceramic and wood fragments, primarily directed at the door. From within the explosion, a hand reaches out and grasps Kane, who finds himself in a different place. A place that is neither light nor dark, a void, where he is held in the hand of a faceless, indistinct human figure. In a fluid motion, neither sluggish nor hurried, he is moved and thrown into the cauldron attended by human figure.
For a moment, even the faint and difficult to parse surroundings he previously witnessed disappear, leaving Kane in total darkness and silence, almost like floating in an abyss of water. However, after a time, he notices that his hands have disappeared. The process does not cause him any pain, and he doesn't appear to be bleeding, though he is concerned by the fact that he isn't startled by this change. Focusing momentarily, he realizes that he can still feel his hands, though he cannot tell where they have gone, or if they are still in one piece. Over time, his feet, arms, legs, and torso undergo the same process. While he finds this rather concerning, there is also a part of his mind that tells him that this natural, that this is right. His head finally dissipates under the process, and his vision shifts wildly. Colors that humans don't have words for flash by in a fractal mosaic before appearing to gain focus, changing to detailed views of innumerable scenes. A farm bar crying in the midst of a burning wreck, the boy traversing a jungle, the boy suffering the perils of nature, the boy being found by a faceless man in radiant robes, the boy meditating in a cave, the boy following the faceless man, the boy being mocked by groups of similar faceless people, the boy standing over a bubbling cauldron and stirring, the boy covered in soot and standing in front of a burnt patch of floor, the boy traveling with the faceless people, and the boy being mocked again, even physically assaulted and stolen from. That scene seems to appear in every single mosaic fragment, repeated over and over again as if to mock the viewer. Yet, in that same fragment, the boy has a wide smirk on his face. The next scene is of a faceless person holding their throat while crawling on the ground, the next a faceless woman doubled over with black veins pulsing across her entire body, the next a faceless person holding a sword and facing a tree while sweating profusely. Kane feels a great deal of satisfaction at the sight of these scenes.
However, the following scenes become more varied and do not elicit the same response. The boy is talking to the radiant figure from much earlier, the boy and the figure becoming angry and appear to be shouting at each other, the boy appearing severely injured in the middle of a desert of dust. Many more scenes play out, some eliciting the same satisfaction as before. A scene of the radiant figure, his face now clearly visible, violently ejecting a black mass from his mouth, hunched over on the ground in obvious pain, with the boy watching over from a few meters in front of the figure. It goes on and on, on and on, Kane's point of view spiraling in an unclear direction at greater and greater speeds, the fractal mosaic splitting and growing more aggressively. Eventually, however, the motion reaches a point that the scenes blur together into an incoherent mess, but as it progresses even further, it takes on a soft, golden color. Suddenly, Kane realizes that there is nothing but that golden color around him, slowly wafting through the "air" like fog. He looks downwards, seeing the golden color grow more present and intense, seeming to approach a point he cannot see. He follows the color down, with a motion almost like swimming. After an unknown length of time, he sees the color seems to be moving towards a golden orb, lazily spinning and absorbing the color in the void with indistinct white markings on its surface. Looking around, he sees innumerable other Kanes, all suddenly stopping their descend to look around as well, but their movements are not identical. As Kane moves towards and eventually into this orb, all of the other Kanes seeming to merge into one, a similar golden light gradually emanates from his navel, eventually becoming equal to and even surpassing that given off by the orb. Words suddenly ring out in Kane's voice, though he did not speak.
"What do we cultivate if not ourselves."
With a sudden flash, Kane finds himself back in the cave with the woman, sitting in the lotus position. As he regains his bearings, a metallic groaning sounds from within his body, before a high-pitched shattering noise rings out, violent enough to shake his own bones yet causing no harm.
