The Dark Mage

Chapter 6: Kitsune Clan Life

     It was another day in the clan as Victor returned to the monastery to pray in solitude spending the first few hours of his day in prayer and meditating on the daily scriptures. And when he was finished, he put on his digitigrade boots Todd gifted him and decided to walk around the city wearing his plain white robe with a red sash around his waist. And around his neck was a black wool necklace with 50 knots and the original iron cross hieromonk Nicholas had given him when he first joined the monastery in the 1200s.

     But when he walked around the city, he was not interested in shouting the Bible at people on the street like the local American Evangelical Protestants, much to the dismay of the local populous. But he was more interested in seeing how the people of his clan were living their lives. So, he would observe them and many different kinds of people: kits with only 1 tail being ignored while their parents stared at their phones, lack of hardly any kits including those in school, advertisements posted everywhere, and generally people completely unaware of what was going on around them. There were no more churches either, and the few that remained like San Saerwen Cathedral, not to be confused with the one in the Elvish kingdom, had become some government official's private estate to show off his own wealth and vanity. And where the churches and monasteries other than his own once were, there had been erected soulless office buildings and shopping malls. And even though it seemed everyone was well off, they ran around as if they were always chasing something, something that could never truly satisfy them.

     Then it seemed everyone spoke the same mantras as if it had been drilled into them since birth. "Ending is better than mending." "More stitches, less riches." "A gram a day is a 10-day holiday." "After all, everyone belongs to everyone else." And then whenever a Kitsune was even mildly troubled with the small, insignificant troubles of life, they would take a small tablet and enter a state of euphoria and forget that their problems ever existed. And even while speaking to some who were more than a century old, they seemed intellectually and emotionally still a toddler, incapable of comprehending anything beyond their immediate visceral desires. They could do all manner of mathematics, read and write, and have a wide knowledge of menial facts, but they were completely incapable of understanding even the basics of Plato's dialogues or anything beyond what they were told to do and think. And then they almost assaulted Victor for simply asking them what they thought about things rather than just repeat what was being advertised or repeated in the Kitsune social sphere, if it could even be called social.

     It was as if looking at a lifeless, concrete, and steal corpse. And even the arts in the galleries and streets seemed as soulless as the algorithms that generated them. For not even music was created by living creatures anymore but through mathematical formulas on a supercomputer that would play everywhere. And even though Victor hated the sound and shallow theology of Evangelical Protestant praise music, even that was better than the soulless synthetic sights and sounds of modern Kitsune "art". Even movies were hardly anything either having been reduced to algorithmically generated scenes of violence and pornography completely devoid of any meaning beyond gratifying the immediate visceral desires.

     And after seeing it all, Victor thought, "What's the point of coming back to the clan to re-enlighten them? How will they even come to choose the way of life when all they know is forever running from their problems and only think with their immediate visceral desires? How will they even understand it and assume I have gone insane for choosing life and not spiritual death?"

     And just about as Victor considered leaving and never coming back to the clan again, some youthful 2-tailed and 3-tailed Kitsunes were following him around all day after burning their euphoria tablets. For they, like Victor, desired a true happiness and sought greater things. And then one of the 3-tailed Kitsunes approach him and stood in his path and asked, "Just who are you and why are you dressed like that?"