Fates Parallel Chapter 247 - Chat

It was late into the night by the time the party finally started to wind down. The soldiers who’d joined in for the gambling excused themselves to get back to their duties, the Kasai couple returned to their quarters to celebrate the news of Hanako’s pregnancy more privately, Minami Yuuko and Fujino Eiji also left together—which raised a few eyebrows—and Narae had fallen asleep in Jung’s lap with Heian curled up next to her in cat form. Jia’s big sister herself had also fallen asleep, her cheeks flushed red—the only person actually affected by all the alcohol. Jia made a note to check on her in the morning to make sure she was okay.

That just left Jia, Eui, Ja Yun, Rika, and Eunae to clean up. Despite Eui’s ribbing earlier in the evening, they actually did have Muddy dutifully cleaning up the various spills and other detritus left behind by the revelry—and Jia couldn’t help but notice that the elemental had grown a bit over the course of the party.

It had been an impromptu event—nobody had expected that they’d be reunited with so many of their former classmates—but they really had needed it. Much of the heavy atmosphere that had been looming since the events of the Goryeon coup had been lifted, and the girls were able to just sit and enjoy each other’s company without feeling awkward for the first time in weeks. For the most part, anyway—awkward was something of a default state of being for Ja Yun.

Jia hated to ruin it, but there was no better time to talk to her friends about some of the things that had been weighing on her.

“Hey guys, I know things are going to get pretty busy starting tomorrow, so do you mind if we discuss a few things before we leave for Qin?”

Eunae gave Jia a reproving frown.

“Jia, you’re supposed to be relaxing tonight. I said we’d talk later, didn’t I?”

“I know, but it’s later now and I don’t know if we’re going to have another chance once things start getting hectic again. I—we saw some things earlier that I don’t really know how to explain.”

Eui gave Jia’s hand an encouraging squeeze and nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, actually this is something we really do need to talk about, as fellow half-spirits.”

Rika gave her a questioning look and Eui waved it off.

“Whatever, you count. Honorary half-spirit.”

“Eui, I’m honored, but I work directly under one of Yamato’s heads of state. If this is a sensitive topic...”

Eui shook her head.

“Nah, you’re one of us. I trust you. Besides, we’re not even sure this is a political thing—though we do have to ask.”

Jia nodded slowly, turning to Eunae as she took over speaking.

“I don’t really know how to ask this except straightforwardly—Eunae, does your family know more about the origin of half-spirits than they let on?”

Ja Yun’s eyes went as wide as saucers, and she whipped her head around to face Eunae who was entirely unperturbed by the question.

“I would be surprised if they didn’t, but they haven’t seen fit to educate me on such matters. My sister might know more, but I doubt she’ll be forthcoming about it. What prompted this?”

“Well, Heian showed us a vision earlier. Her history we think, but it was really hard to parse. It put a lot of things together for us—how our inner spirits often talk about becoming ‘complete’ and the futility of it, how spirits spawned from other spirits consider themselves to be ‘fragments’ of a greater whole, and the way your sister reacted to hearing about the Kumiho fragment in you. I’m not entirely sure how it all fits together, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s important somehow. I want to understand the nature of spirits for Heian’s sake, and learning cultivation has given me a lot of questions about what it means to be half-spirit as well.”

Eunae stroked her chin thoughtfully.

“Could you describe the vision?”

Jia hesitated.

“I’m not sure I can, actually. It’s like a dream—the more I try to think about it the more uncertain I am. Was that actually what happened, or am I just filling in details with my imagination? Heian’s experiences are...weird to remember.”

“Just the broad strokes, then?”

With a nod, Jia tried to describe the feelings that Heian had conveyed. Everything was recalled through the lens of emotion—the betrayal, the fear of discovery during flight, the desperation to survive and carry on one’s legacy, the trepidation about giving up everything in the hopes of becoming something greater. By the end of it, everyone was looking as confused as Jia felt.

Rika propped her chin up on one hand as she broke the silence.

“I’ve got no clue what to make of all that. It does sound like that’s how half-spirits came to be, but what does that mean? Does it really matter?”

Jia shrugged.

“I don’t know. It feels like it does. Our ancestors—human and spirit alike—wanted something from each other. Did they get it, or are the spirit fragments within us still striving to recover their end of the bargain?”

Ja Yun pulled her legs up to her chest and heaved a sigh.

“All I know is that this is not a conversation I would have ever expected to be a part of. This is all way too heavy for me.”

Eui snorted.

“How do you think we feel? Jia was a street orphan and I was an exile four years ago. If you’d told me then that I'd one day be discussing secrets about the origin of my race with literal royalty in a foreign military outpost on a detour from our mission to save the world from malicious gods, I’d have spit in your face.”

Ja Yun lowered her face.

“Yeah, good point. I guess I’m just still not used to it.”

Rika put an arm around Ja Yun and gave her a gentle squeeze.

“None of us are. This is as confusing and scary for the rest of us as it is for you.”

Eunae cleared her throat.

“Well for now, I don’t think there’s anything we can do about this information. Perhaps something to bear in mind while meditating on our inner spirits—something I suspect I’m going to need to do quite soon. Though, that reminds me—Yun, Jia tells me that Muddy is going through an identity crisis? What can you tell us about that?”

Ja Yun stiffened.

“Huh? O-oh, right, yeah. It’s more like I’m going through an identity crisis on Muddy’s behalf, actually?”

Rika jostled her with an elbow gently.

“What Yun means to say is that she’s not sure how Muddy feels about it because as far as we can tell, Muddy doesn’t have feelings.”

“R-right...”

“Except that she’s wrong.”

Ja Yun gave Rika a look of confusion.

“What?”

Rika nodded her chin towards the goopy blob in question as it slimed its way over to them—apparently having finished its task of cleaning the floors.

“Think about it, Yun—you keep saying Muddy has no emotions and that it can’t really understand us, but when we wanted it to clean the floors it seemed to catch on pretty quick. And clearly it has preferences about things—we just made a whole game of it before Jia came in and ruined it.”

Jia crossed her arms and pouted.

“Nobody said anything about changing the elemental makeup of the material!”

“That’s because it’s not supposed to be a thing people can do, you weirdo! I swear, every time I look away you’ve developed some impossible new technique.”

Eunae sighed.

“We’re getting off track. You’re saying the elemental does have emotions?”

Rika shrugged.

“Well, maybe. It might not be capable of accessing them yet. The big elementals definitely did, though. They had weird ways of showing it, but they clearly care about things in their own fucked up way. Xiantian beasts and elementals are supposed to gain souls, right?”

Jia frowned. That was a subject she’d done a lot of thinking on, but it wasn’t one she was confident in articulating on her own. Yoshika spoke with both voices in order to broadcast that she’d merged.

“We have a theory about that, actually.”

As usual, speaking with both voices at once commanded everyone’s attention, and Yoshika went on with just Jia’s voice.

“Xiantian beasts don’t become fiends right away. We’ve fought a few of them ourselves, and Master Ienaga killed a bunch of them just this morning. Xiantian beasts are supposed to awaken as fiends eventually, but what causes it?

“It’s too bad we don’t have Do Hye here to confirm it, because he probably actually knows the answer, but we think that the bridge between body, mind, and soul isn’t something that forms naturally. It has to be cultivated. Do you remember the Fire Elemental we met in Jianmo’s cave? We’d bet that it had only recently reached that stage. It was so much weaker than even the Magma elemental we fought in Goryeo. It hadn’t formed that bridge yet.”

Ja Yun furrowed her brows as she allowed Muddy to ooze its way up her arm and lifted it into her lap.

“What are you implying?”

“We think that maybe for xiantian cultivators, some of that bridging occurs naturally as a result of accessing divine essence, but without conscious effort, the results are dulled. That’s why the elementals are so emotionally stunted.

“Humans are born with their body, mind, and soul already in harmony, then we cultivate to specialize in one direction or another, but beasts, elementals, and spirits aren’t so lucky. They are the opposite—they start out specialized and need to develop their other aspects from scratch.”

Eunae stroked her chin.

“That’s an interesting theory, Yoshika, but it doesn’t explain how or why our Muddy would have any kind of emotional development at all.”

“Oh!”

Ja Yun’s sudden outburst caught everyone by surprise, and she blushed under the attention it earned her.

“A-actually, it just might. When we became Iseul, I was trying to guide it towards bridging its mind and soul. The problem is, the technique Yoshika taught me connects the mind and soul through the body and Muddy uh...doesn’t have one? So it ended up following my mental instructions a bit too literally and used my body to connect to my soul. But is it possible that somewhere along the way it actually did open up a bit of a bridge to its own soul?”

Rika tilted her head, regarding the little blob curiously.

“That’s a good question. Why don’t you ask?”

Ja Yun huffed.

“You know it’s not that easy. I’ve been practicing talking to Muddy for weeks and it’s still really confusing.”

Rika shrugged.

“You’re never going to have a better mental image of what you want from it than right now. I say no time like the present. It’s your decision to make, but I think this is a good time to see if Muddy really can understand us and if it’s capable of making its own decisions.”

Ja Yun glanced nervously between Yoshika and Eunae with a pleading look, and they gave her nods of encouragement. She swallowed hard and gazed down at the impassive transparent blob in her lap.

“Alright, I’ll try.”

She closed her eyes, and Yoshika watched in fascination as Ja Yun’s aura merged with Muddy’s in a manner reminiscent of the joint meditation that she had started with so many years ago. As with her own technique, it was something that required cooperation from both parties—Ja Yun was only able to establish the connection because Muddy responded to it in kind. To Yoshika, that seemed like a good sign.

After a minute of tense silence, Muddy’s form began to waver, its wobbling reflected by Ja Yun’s aura fluctuating wildly. Yoshika hadn’t been able to witness it with her domain the first time due to the barrier that she’d been trapped in, but as Muddy’s form crawled up her arms and draped itself over her like a cloak, she realized exactly what she was seeing. She cursed herself for not witnessing it with her soul sight—there was a lot she could have learned.

Ja Yun’s body slumped forward, and Rika caught her just in time for Ja Yun’s body to shoot up straight, eyes wide and manic, and scream.

“AAAAAAA! Sorry! Sorry, that caught me off guard even though I knew it was going to happen. Rika, could you please let go? Yun’s feelings about your hand on her chest are extremely distracting right now.”

Rika backed off, blushing, and Yoshika put her heads in her hands. Apparently Iseul had decided to make a return.