The monks led me through a stone archway, past walls covered in glyphs that seemed to shift under my gaze. They said nothing. Silence itself was the language of the second bowring. I had heard rumors of the first bowring, the one lost to history, but this—Bowring 2: The Spankstar Beet—was something else.
They took me into a chamber lit only by the flickering of oil lamps. At the center stood a great circular object, its surface marked with triple-grooved impressions, each arranged in patterns of five. The monks, their eyes sunken yet strangely luminous, placed their hands upon it.
“The Spankstar Beet,” one of them finally murmured. “This is the key to seeing.”
I was told that the bowring functioned as a resonance device. It did not emit sound in any way that could be heard with the ears, but rather vibrated at a frequency attuned to what the monks called ‘the unwound current.’ They explained that reality, as we know it, is a tightly coiled structure of perceptions, held together by habits of thought, of identity, of linear time itself. The bowring did not destroy these coils—it simply loosened them, allowing one to slip between the layers of existence.
“The five-tripled beat,” another monk whispered, tracing the grooves with his fingers, “is the fundamental rhythm of perception. The threefold oscillation represents movement between the tonal, the nagual, and the threshold between them. Five repetitions ensure stability. Without it, the mind shatters, cast adrift in a sea of perception without anchor.”
They motioned for me to place my hands on the bowring. A deep hum vibrated through my bones. The sensation was not painful, but it felt as though something inside me was being unraveled, like a tightly wound rope finally slipping free. I saw, or rather felt, the five-triple pattern within me: my thoughts moving in sequences of three, stabilizing only after the fifth iteration. The monks had not been speaking metaphorically—the rhythm was real, pulsing beneath every layer of perception.
One of the monks exhaled sharply and stepped back. “You have entered the Spankstar.”
I turned to look at him, but he was no longer solid. His form wavered, like a reflection on the surface of moving water. Or perhaps it was I who was shifting. The bowring pulsed beneath my fingers, and suddenly I understood: this was not a tool of enlightenment, nor of power. It was a mechanism of spanking—a forceful correction to the mind, a cosmic slap that dislodged one from the inertia of their own assumptions. The Spankstar Beet did not show one the truth. It simply stripped away everything that was untrue, leaving only what could stand in the rhythm of five-tripled beats.
The monks watched as I staggered back, my hands slipping from the bowring. I wanted to ask questions, but there were none left to ask. The world outside the chamber seemed suddenly less certain, as though I had been nudged just slightly out of sync with the normal flow of things.
I turned back to the monks, my voice hoarse. “What now?”
One of them smiled. “Now you learn to dance.”