He was certain he would survive this time. He had died so many times before, but this time it just felt different. Probably because he didn’t want it anymore; he wanted to live eternally as written in some book he’d read. He didn’t want that state of non-existence anymore. There was no memory of those moments, those breaks in the continuum of life. But he remembered everything else. The mechanism by which our brains forget everything that is currently not in use did not function for him. He could remember every single detail of past existences and he was simply tired of repeating himself. There was practically nothing he could do that would’ve been a novelty; he’d tried been good, bad, wise and stupid. He’d tried strict honesty and blatant shamelessness and now there was nothing else to try. He would also consider the option of stopping existing, as he’d read in some other book; to stop the madness of being born and inventing a goal for his current life cycle.
At least if he didn’t die this time he could spare himself the annoyance of childhood and adolescence. There was nothing new for him to learn from that phase; he’d been born in thirty different places and learned more than fifty languages during his different lives. He had realized that the purpose of successful communication was rather in excluding people from linguistic interaction than in creating a common means by which people could express their thoughts. He’d seen dialects evolve into indistinguishable languages for the sake of national identity. He’d been inculcated a great variety of customs that were supposed to help him fit in the society he had been born into. But he’d seldom made use of the social rules learned. He’d realized that conventions were made to be broken by people who were supposed to be above social rules. And he always managed to put himself above the law of man and its intricacies.
But he didn’t like the aches of old age either, so he would try something to break out of the perpetual life cycle. He was thirty three and, from experience, he knew that was the best age to become immortal. The body was fully developed and slightly aged, but the brain, the most important body part, was in its apex. Being immortal also implied recovering full functionality of every organ, so it didn’t matter if he’d injured himself before or if he’d worn down an organ too much; everything would be restored to optimal state. But how to become immortal? That question had haunted him for several lives now, and he’d tried to leap into immortality many times before, just to find himself covered in amniotic fluid once again. But he was positive he would survive this time. It had been predicted in another book. He knew it because he’d written the books himself.
In this book, he’d written the way in which he’d be killed and the reason why. He would pronounce his immortality in public until religious leaders felt threatened by him. To do that, he would perform apparently supernatural acts, like making souls come back from inaction. He knew that all souls go into a lethargic state once its karmic cycle has finished a revolution, so he managed to deceive souls into momentary wakefulness by disrupting their karmic cycle. He’d announced that he was going to resuscitate people. The people who surrounded the dead had heard about his powers, which had been predicted by the manuscripts he himself had written, so they couldn’t accept the deaths of their loved ones when they saw him; they expected them to be alive again. So they were. In such a way, he also healed people who had been injured or were handicapped. He altered their karma by promising them complete redemption from it, which they believed in. This belief was strong enough to dispense them from their karmic load for a lifetime, and thus they were healed. To further convince people, he also did some magic tricks, including levitating, substance transmutation and sleight of hand materialization of objects. He’d honed these skills for several lives and he was the best magician that ever existed, so even magician from that time were deceived by his magic.
But the real miracle he wanted to perform was not to die this time. To do that, he needed to fulfill what he’d laid down in that manuscript. This manuscript had been read by many, who were expecting everything to be fulfilled. But he could not get people to believe that the place and time of the prediction were right, so several times he’d died in vain. Obviously he could not choose where he was born, so he had had to resort to smart maneuvers to make believe he’d been actually born where predicted. But this time he’d actually been born where predicted, which had amazed him at the beginning, but now seemed totally normal to him. He believed his karma was bringing him closer to his desired goal. Also people took him seriously this time. He’d managed to scary many people and gather many followers. He just needed to die an outstanding death, which could remain in the collective memory for long enough to outweigh the expectation of new life after death that is natural to men. His death had to be so horrendous that it would be revived once and again on people’s minds. Only in that way he could be immortal. Because from the moment people forgot about his death, his karmic cycle would reach a full revolution and he’d be reborn.
Thus it happened. And he was never born again but he went back to his body after three days. Their followers did as they were commanded and they helped him out of the grave where his corpse had been laid. Now he wanders freely among mortals, and his wisdom is ever greater. Passions and instincts are appeased in him; he just lives for knowledge. He cannot die or be killed, because the collective mind brings him back to his eternal death and therefore his eternal body; although nobody really knows what this body looks like.
