Cultivating Spirits in the North Atlantic

The sun was setting over the ocean as Marta and Ernesto set foot on the island of St. Michael’s. The wind had picked up and they were getting cold, but they decided to make camp on the beach anyway.

They unloaded their backpacks and sat around a fire with some rope in their hands. They tied the rope together and threw one end into the ocean. When they didn't see it hit bottom, they threw the other end into the ocean. It met the first rope at a spot about fifty feet from shore, where they began fashioning a buoyancy device for their raft, which had been broken during their storm-tossed voyage across the Atlantic.

They were on St. Michael's searching for something that would change their lives forever: Spirit Cultivation.

It was a rumored practice that allowed people to communicate with spirits and gods in order to gain supernatural powers or become more like them. Ernesto had heard rumors about Spirit Cultivation from his grandfather when he was young, but he didn't think it was real until he saw it in action ten years ago. That day, his grandfather hung himself in his basement while Ernesto was sleeping upstairs, but when Ernesto went to check on him after waking up, his grandfather told him not to worry because he was just going out for a walk. He said he'd be back soon, and then closed the door behind him before walking into thin air.

Ernesto's grandfather wasn't much of a religious man, so this was strange behavior even for him, but he took it as a sign of what could be possible with Spirit Cultivation if you practiced hard enough. He started reading everything he could find on the subject, but there wasn't much available online at the time and most of what he did find was pseudoscience nonsense written by charlatans who just wanted money from desperate people who believed in magic instead of hard work and perseverance. But there were some books written by people who seemed sincere in their beliefs about Spirit Cultivation, like Nicholas Merkle's "Spiritualism: The True Path", Czarina Felina-Lublakova's "Wayfarer's Guide to Spirituality", and Joan Magers' "Secret Teachings of the Druid". Most of these books talked about how spirituality used to be common among ancient civilizations that lived near water and how it was important now more than ever to learn from those civilizations' historical examples in order to live better lives today.

Ernesto had accepted an opportunity to go on an adventure across North America hunting down different places that had been mentioned in those books as being important to Spirit Cultivation practice. So here they were: on St. Michael's Island off Nova Scotia looking for hidden knowledge that might change their lives forever while helping them achieve a lifelong goal of Ernesto's: living forever long enough to see humanity thrive far into the future despite all our mistakes along the way; helping us overcome ourselves so we could reach our full potential as sentient beings; so we could solve all of our problems no matter how great or small; so we could one day leave this planet and explore more of our universe; so we could finally know what lies beyond death itself - because once we do... well... then we will truly be free!