Choekyi Yeshe, the five-year-old boy, and thousand-year-old soul, felt her flesh all around him. It massaged him ever downward until he fell down into a pool of warm liquid. He knew what this meant.

It meant that he had arrived in her stomach, and this was where he would transition from the short life of this human existence, and perhaps escape the Samsāra - the cyclicality of all life, matter, and existence - altogether. By giving himself to her, he had demonstrated his growing out of desire for human existence. His only fear was that this fear was too much, and that this represented residual desire.

The pool churned, as he felt the surrounding walls undulate. The liquid tingled on his skin.

The woman must have been an Asura, a demi-god, titan, or anti-god - a soul that had been good, but still had some blemish of desire. He suspected gluttony, though she had been uncommonly thin for such a desire.

The liquid tingled even more, and felt ever warmer, as the soft stomach walls continued to caress and massage him.

* * *

Above him, Karen closed her eyes in order to savor the moment even more. If any single unshrunken human could help her grow, certainly it would have to be this little boy. She felt him inside. Unlike most, however, he did not squirm. Even the volunteers - the people who had given themselves to her voluntarily - wound up starting to writhe at a certain moment when they felt her juices burn their skin, her stomach toss them around, and their minds lose both hope and oxygen. Despite their agony, she always enjoyed that feeling inside of her. It reminded her of her power and their sacrifice to her. Perhaps there had been some real Buddhist spirit in him after all. She was not sure if this pleased her or not. She enjoyed the feeling of power, as well as the physical sensation, of when her swallowees squirmed. At the same time, she also liked the idea of some mystical old soul inside of her belly.

* * *

Choekyi, the boy, also had ambivalence. The tingling and shortness of breath had become uncomfortable. At the same time, he felt that there was something welcome about being inside the stomach, and being the subject of desire, of this great beautiful demi-goddess. Meanwhile, he also began having another awareness - the awareness of the Panchen Lama within him. Many memories - ancient memories - began to return to him.

Along with those memories, there were memories of death and rebirth, and with those memories came the realization that something was different. In the past, each death led directly to a rebirth, but while the feeling of death felt familiar to him, he did not feel the feeling of rebirth either.

Was this the liberation from desire? Had he finally completed the beginning-less cycle of repeated birth? It did not feel as he had anticipated that it would, and, in fact, he wondered if his desire for that end was, in itself, something that meant that he was not ready for that liberation.

What he did feel was that he was not alone. He was not alone because he still felt surrounded by the beautiful asura who had swallowed him. But, in addition to that surrounding feeling of her, he also felt surrounded by them.

Who they were he did not know. They did not feel familiar to him. Some felt anguished, and they made him feel as if he had entered the diyu naraka - the hell realm. Yet, there were also many who felt at peace with their new being - or non-being. The anguished ones felt as if they had been captured, and swallowed alive against their will, while the ones who were at peace felt as if that swallowing alive had been their sincere wish, and they worshiped the one who had swallowed them.

But if this was not the diyu naraka or any of the other named realms of the bhavachakra, then where was he?

* * *

At some deep recess of her near-awareness, Karen felt the curiosity and uncertainty within her. She had never felt this before. While she had certainly imagined the gratitude of the many Tanna volunteers that she had consumed, this was a feeling that was distinct, and it was within her, but not of her. Before she could meditate on this matter, however, her consciousness was prodded back to the world outside of her.

"Please, your divine majesty," the Deputy Secretary said, raising his voice up to her.

"Your throne awaits."

As she had been focusing on the feelings within her, she had been unaware that the great doors of the monastery had opened. Through the great aperture that they had left open, she saw the great hall of the monastery. It was deep, and along the walls leading inside were numerous great statues - statues of the many Buddhist gods. At the far end of the hall, however, stood what Yang Xiadou, the Deputy Secretary, spoke of: a great gold-plated throne. Before the throne lay the remnants of a broken statue.

Karen entered the hall. This was her moment of victory. Instead of a self-made deity of a small island people in the South Pacific, she was now going to be the Goddess of the most numerous people in the world. She would soon be seated as a proper Goddess - no, she would make sure that she was the Goddess.

She looked down at the many kneeling monks. She revelled in this. She truly enjoyed being worshiped. The only thing that still limited her enjoyment of it was that she knew that she was not the self-made Goddess. All of this had been engineered by Yang and his compatriots of the Chinese politburo. They were using her as a way to keep down the Tibetan Buddhists. Many of these were known to be separatists who preferred to follow the Dalai Lama, the exiled religious leader.

As she thought on this, and had a moment of annoyance, she also knocked her head on something. It was a part of the ceiling. As she did so, it was as if everyone else in the hall both gasped and held their breath.

Yang was the first to break the momentary silence.

"I beg forgiveness, your worshipfulness," he said. "The masons had been given your measurements. They will be punished for their mistake."

One of the party officials in attendance seemed to object, and he spoke to Yang in Chinese. He seemed to both argue plead with the Deputy Secretary. Karen, however, thought she knew the reason for the discrepancy, and it was not the fault of the masons or the architect.

"You are all forgiven, and there will be no punishments," Karen declared.

"If you take my measurements again, I believe you will find that they have changed."

Yang was as puzzled by this as any of the party officials, not to mention the monks.

"I am greater because of the greatness of the Panchen Lama," she said.

"He is now one with me," she added, rubbing her belly.

It was true, she could feel it. Absorbing the holy boy had given her power, and that power had made her grow. That meant that the boy had expired and was in the process of being digested.

*But why can I still feel his presence?* she wondered, as she continued to sense the emotions of curiosity and uncertainty from the boy-god-meal.

It was a question she would have to put off. She had more immediate matters to attend to.

She approached the throne, careful not to bump her head again, and turned herself around to face the throngs of monks and communist party officials, who all gazed up at her.

She sat down in the throne.

This was power, she felt. She was being worshiped, and had been promised a gigantic population to swallow. The 'presence' she felt inside her was not unlike the warm feeling you get from whiskey on an empty stomach, except this was - she supposed - the spiritual variety. She closed her eyes and basked in the feeling of being drunk on power.

The people, monks and bureaucrats all, kneeled silently, awaiting her pleasure.

She opened her eyes and looked down on the people. With a slight smirk, she put her sandaled foot forward. A team of monks rushed forward and unclasped the sandal's buckles. Once her sandal was taken off and away, she put her second foot forward and the process was repeated. A gigantic velvet pillow was brought to her and she rested both her feet in its comfortable plushness.

She smiled contentedly and nodded. This began the supplication ritual. The bureaucrats showed by example what the monks needed to do. They thronged around her feet and kissed them a number of times, before stepping back and allowing someone else to do the same. Once the bureaucrats were done, the monks also joined in.

The mass of foot-kissing continued. Karen was delighted, and she basked in the worship. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, cherishing the moment. She still felt the soul within her. It felt comfortable, and it felt a 'togetherness'. It was hard for her to understand what this was. Was she imagining it? She tried to reach out her spirit into her stomach to see if she could touch it?

That was when the hubbub at her feet began to change. There was some different commotion.

She opened her eyes, and saw one of the monks being dragged back from her feet by a couple of the bureaucrats. There was shouting in Chinese and Tibetan.

"Stop!" she said in English, and everyone halted.

There was a moment in which nothing happened, before the Deputy stepped forward.

"Forgive us, your worshipfulness," he said, "this monk got carried away."

The man shouted something, which she could not understand.

"He just wishes to follow the Panchen Lama, and has forgotten his place," the Deputy told her.

"Bring him to me," Karen said.

"He has forgotten his place," the Deputy repeated, "and should not be rewarded."

"Stick him with the serum and bring him to me," Karen responded, contradicting Deputy Yang's objection.

There was a moment of tension as their powers struggled. The Deputy relented, and the monk was treated with the serum and brought back before her feet. The monk began to shrink.

She picked him up and held him in the palm of her hand. He knelt and prayed, as he shrank down to the point where he looked to be about two inches tall to her perspective.

"Come, follow your master," Karen told him, and opened her mouth.

The monk crawled into her mouth. She mused about how much she loved it when they not only just surrendered to her, but took pro-active action to become her food. It was one thing to be a goddess who could command people's sacrifice; it was an even higher level of satisfaction to be willfully worshiped.

Her only pang of doubt was if this monk was giving himself to her, or following the Panchen Lama. She tried to put it out of her mind. The Panchen Lama was no longer separable from her. He had become part of her, and therefore if the monk was loyal to the Lama, he was loyal to her. Still, the fact that she had to rationalize this to herself annoyed her slightly.

She swallowed, hard, in order to take out the annoyance of her doubt on the monk.

Meanwhile, Yang was a bit annoyed. This was not part of the plan. People needed to know their place. People knowing their places, from top to bottom, was what kept society orderly and stable. As a member of the party highest elite, he knew that he also had to obey the strict rules of behavior. Surely the same was true of goddesses. Perhaps having a Goddess of Western origins had its downsides. Regrettably, Karen, was the only known giantess that could fulfil the role. He really wished that she had been Chinese, and would therefore have obeyed the implicit script.

Karen, meanwhile, knew that Yang was frustrated. After the pleasure of swallowing someone who wanted to be swallowed, it was the second reason she had gobbled up the monk. She also wanted the Deputy to know that it was she who was in charge; not that little party bureaucrat with a kink.

After all, She was the Goddess.