mountain sorcerer

...inseparable, and their meeting happened after so many years and so unexpectedly for both of them. In order to "wake up," to activate, to begin processes of spiritual transformation, one option may be to remain in a state of constant and prolonged stress, when many pain points are activated in an intense mode over several days. This has a sobering effect. The brain starts working differently. Previously inactive areas of the unconscious begin to manifest, areas that were previously unused due to lack of demand. And you become a mixture of something new, you gain wholeness at the level of consciousness, energy, and body. Your mind is honed for survival in the best possible way, and your consciousness and body are more united than ever.

MASTER OF RUNE CRAFT = Day 25 =

Spent the whole day making blanks for amulets and a rune set. For some reason I thought this would all be faster. The workday smoothly turned into night, and night imperceptibly turned into morning...

MOUNTAIN OF THE SORCERER = Day 26 =

The adventures continue. In the evening I headed out to Novorossiysk again on BlaBlaCar. The trip took two hours.

Today I was heading to Cape Myskhako. There lies the Mountain of the Sorcerer – another unusual place I planned to visit. The driver didn't go into the city, he needed to go further, and I had to walk several kilometers on foot. It was already dark. The sleepless night was taking its toll, I was very drowsy. Passing by a pharmacy, my body told me to go in and buy some glucose. Those are those dragees usually sold right at the register. I felt it as an inner urge. I grabbed a couple of packs and gradually ate them as I walked. I felt a bit better. By the time I reached Cape Myskhako, it was already 10:00 PM. Still, I shouldn't have left the tent and sleeping bag in Belorechensk – they would have come in handy now. My "light packing" had gone too far. Before me was the Mountain of the Sorcerer. Locals call it that because, for some time now, it's been used to predict the weather. That is, if it's raining on the mountain, it means it will soon rain in Novorossiysk too. Hence the name – the "Sorcerer" mountain, predicting the weather. I pondered whether to go up the mountain now or wait until morning. If I wait until morning, where to spend the night? Not clear. Rain interrupted my thoughts. I waited it out on the porch of an apartment building that was closest to me at the time. It was already midnight when I finally decided to go to the mountain. I reached the main turnoff, where the path to the mountain begins, by one in the morning. I was brutally sleepy. So much so that I was swaying from side to side. Sometimes I felt like I could fall asleep while walking. I needed to somehow solve this problem, because there was still a long way to go, and if I didn't get at least a couple hours of sleep somewhere, in a couple of hours I'd find myself waking up somewhere in the middle of the road. It was reckless to leave the sleeping bag in Belorechensk…

I stepped aside from the main road, which was dirt but wide. It had two lanes, and I settled right between them. There wasn't much grass, but there was a small depression, so I wasn't visible from the road. Can't attract attention. I carefully lay down right on the ground, putting my seat pad under my lower back. I readied a knife and a pepper spray can just in case. And I wound my mechanical alarm clock for 4:00 AM. As I fell asleep, I heard a Kamaz truck driving past me… In those 2.5 hours, I managed to put my body to sleep, but my consciousness barely slept. Only toward the end did I manage to completely switch off for a while. I woke up to the alarm. Got up. My head was spinning. Hallucinations. All sorts of things flickered before my eyes. Everything was tripling… I climb up to the mountain. Along the way I found grapes. Endless fields of grapes, neatly planted trees. I picked one bunch, ate it. Not yet ripe, it needed another couple of months. It puckered my mouth. I realized it was unripe after eating half the bunch. That's what happens when you mess with sleep. )) Luckily, it all went without incident.

Very dark. No sunlight, no moonlight. The road was barely visible. In all my travels, I've never used a flashlight. For some reason, without it I navigate the dark better. Something like skin vision kicks in, when space is perceived not so much by the eyes as by feeling. I didn't manage to reach the very top. A couple hundred meters remained to the summit. I turned back because there were clear signs to do so. For example, as soon as I asked myself whether I even needed to climb up there, I immediately saw a road sign with a "no entry" brick. Even though it wasn't a prohibitory sign, by inner feeling I took it as a ban on passage, as if right now and today the forest wasn't welcoming me.

At first I doubted whether I had interpreted the sign correctly, but the doubts vanished when I directly and out loud asked the forest – "was it all in vain, climbing up and walking all night for nothing?" The forest immediately answered me through the birds. I heard a sharp cawing, similar to a crow's. Only it wasn't a crow. Moreover, I had asked a similar question before even entering the mountains, though its meaning was somewhat different and it was asked not out loud but to myself, but the answer was the same. Another interesting sign for me was the strange behavior of the rain. As soon as I went deeper into the mountains, the rain started. As soon as I stopped, it stopped. I also noticed the behavior of the midges – they buzzed annoyingly the whole way but never bit me. I don't know why. Maybe they forgot how to bite. )) Or maybe it's a non-biting breed. In the end, I made it almost to the very summit, where there was already morning fog. The space before me was literally swirling. It beckoned, I desperately wanted to go a little further. Too bad I had to turn back.

If this were an ordinary place, I probably wouldn't have reacted to all these signals, I'd just have been as careful as possible, but I wasn't going to mess around with this place. That it has unusual energy became clear to me right after I entered the forest. The first signs – it was strongly radiating. The energetic saturation, the fullness of the place, its concentration. It felt downright alive, sentient. The reason the forest didn't let me go further was most likely my fatigue. In hikes to places of power, such a state is undesirable. Places punish you for it – at minimum, you can twist your ankle on level ground or have other minor troubles. At the top of the mountain I found a berry that looked like honeysuckle. I was about to eat it just like the grapes – without thinking – but something stopped me at that moment. I sent a photo to VKontakte, and knowledgeable people said it wasn't honeysuckle at all, but common wolfberry.

You can drive up this mountain in an SUV, right to the very summit. The navigator thinks otherwise, but there's a road here. I think in dry weather you could even drive up in a regular car, but this mountain is unpredictable when it comes to weather, as is the whole south of our country. I'm leaving this mountain for later, for a more thorough examination, and one day I'll return here again…