Fates Parallel Chapter 48 - Betrayal

Yan Yue had been upset to learn about Lee Jia’s plan to train her spiritual resistance with Eunae.

“You’re going to ask her to use that power on you on purpose!? If it meant that much to you, I could give you some tips on how to resist my technique, but under no circumstances am I going to be alone in a room with that monster!”

Very upset. Lee Jia sighed and rubbed at her face in frustration. This argument had been going on for some time.

“Miss Yue, we already join them for tea every week. It would be odd for us to just suddenly stop, now.”

“Tell her you’re busy with training, you’re working on a breakthrough or something. This is not a request, Jia. Cancel it!”

“You can’t just order us around! We’re not your personal minions, Yue!”

Yan Yue scoffed and shook her head.

“You don’t understand how this works at all, Jia. Against my better judgement, and out of desperation, I involved you in my plans. That means you now represent a huge risk. I refuse to risk everything on some insane plan to allow the princess of an enemy nation to control your mind!”

As Yan Yue’s tone grew heated, Jia could feel Eui tensing up—it felt as though the situation could erupt into violence at any moment. Eui’s voice was a snarl as she protested.

“No, only you’re allowed to do that, right?”

Jia winced, that definitely felt like the wrong thing to say. Yue narrowed her eyes and spoke in a cold monotone.

“If that’s what I have to do to keep you idiots from ruining everything, then I will. What was I thinking? No matter how desperate my situation was, I should never have entrusted my future to beasts.”

Jia felt the sting of the pejorative like a dagger—it wasn’t the first time she’d been called that, but it hurt more from someone she had been starting to warm up to. The flare of Eui’s anger was much more dramatic, and she acted immediately.

The throwing knife passed harmlessly through Yan Yue’s form with a familiar shimmer and Lee Jia’s eyes widened in surprise. She hadn’t even noticed it, this time.

“When did you—!?”

Yan Yue shook her head and regarded Jia with a cruel smile.

“I told you that you’re too trusting. My technique works better against those who open themselves to it, like you have. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all the trust you’ve given me—it makes my life so much easier when people just give me what I want. However, if you make yourself a threat to my future, then unlike that coward Hayakawa, I have no qualms simply taking what I need.”

Lee Jia extended her domain and tightened her focus. She could sense her body moving on its own, but without being able to properly sense the area around her, she had no way to guess what was happening.

“What are you doing!? Yan Yue, stop this! It’s not too late for us to talk this through—I thought you trusted us!”

“Oh, please! I’m not like you, Jia. I told you my secret as a calculated risk—which I now realize was a mistake borne of desperation. The damage has been done, however, and now I can only do what I must to control it. I had hoped to gain you as a pawn, but a puppet will have to suffice, for now.”

Lee Jia sensed her body—climbing into bed? The illusion around her faded into a black void and only Jia and Eui remained within it. Yan Yue’s voice echoed from every direction at once.

“I’ll have you sleep for now. It would have been better if I could wait until after you reached an agreement with Hayakawa, but most of the pieces are already in place. Rest well, girls—I’m going to have need of you tomorrow.”

Jia felt her consciousness beginning to fade even as Yan Yue was speaking. She tried desperately to resist, to stay awake no matter what, but to no avail. She heard Eui’s voice just before she succumbed.

“I am definitely going to kill her.”

---

Yan Yue’s hands were trembling as she shut the bedroom door. She’d done it, now. There was no going back from a betrayal like that. Lee Jia had been a useful asset, and in another life perhaps she could have even been a good friend, but Yan Yue couldn’t afford such feelings—not now. Besides, no matter how agreeable Lee Jia might have been, An Eui was far too wild to control.

Still, the situation had become horribly messy. She knew she had acted rashly, but Lee Jia clearly didn’t understand just how dangerous Seong Eunae really was. Yan Yue sat down on one of the pathetic couches that furnished the hovel she was currently staying in and bit her thumbnail as she tried to plan her next moves.

Completing the negotiations with Hayakawa was the most important part. She would need Lee Jia for that, and her ability to puppet those under her thrall was limited. Yan Yue had spent enough time around Jia that she thought she might be able to do a passable impression, and it didn’t seem like she was particularly close to Hayakawa in the first place.

Her greatest concern was the unusual ability to partially break loose from her control that Lee Jia had exhibited before. Yan Yue could make sure she didn’t have any talismans, but it was impossible to take the ring without either killing her or convincing her to hand it over willingly. If she could still access it, then it might be entirely impossible to totally disarm her.

Yan Yue wondered if it had been a mistake to act so early. Lee Jia hadn’t been that difficult to manipulate, she had just chosen a terrible thing to stubbornly refuse to shift on. Not that Yan Yue could blame her—it was probably exactly this kind of situation that she had been hoping to avoid by training with Seong.

Yue would have to just test her. The meeting with that Sun girl should work well as a test—they were recent acquaintances, so Yue wouldn’t have to worry nearly so much about imitating Jia accurately. She’d pay close attention to Jia’s attempts to struggle and make sure she cut off any avenue of escape before the crucial moments.

Tentatively satisfied with her plans, Yan Yue took out a piece of inscribed jade and circulated her qi through it. It lit up with a gentle glow, and Zheng Long’s voice spoke through the stone.

“Yue? Any progress to report?”

“The girls are—cooperating. I should have access to the mountain peak within a week. I don’t think I can get you and Han Yu in—not yet, at least—but I will make my own investigation and report the results to you.”

There was a moment of silence before Zheng Long responded.

“You sound uncertain, is everything alright?”

His voice sounded concerned, and Yan Yue wanted to gag at the obvious show of affection. Belatedly, she realized she’d been speaking in a business-like manner. She cursed her own slip, and turned up the sweet-talk.

“Sorry, darling! It’s been a long day.”

“Any complications?”

Of course there were complications! Nothing but complications!

“Of course not, darling! You know, I’m a body cultivator now.”

“Why!?”

Yue allowed herself a small giggle at Zheng Long’s incredulous voice. It helped sell the illusion, and it made her feel a tiny bit better.

“I underwent the training as part of my cover. My new ‘friends’ are quite diligent in all the disciplines, so I had to follow suit. It was quite easy, really.”

That was a lie—it had been the most grueling experience of her life. Her entire body was sore and she wished she could just sleep, but she couldn’t risk the other two waking before her.

“I see. Well, it might be an inferior discipline, but it’s good to know the enemy at least. Good work, Yue. Keep me posted about any changes. If you want, perhaps we could meet...”

Yan Yue suppressed a gag—anything but that.

“I wish we could, darling, but I have my hands full keeping an eye on our foreign assets. You know I can’t leave them alone.”

Zheng Long let out a sigh.

“Of course. Very well, we’ll speak again later, Yue.”

“Bye, darling!”

The stone’s glow faded and Yan Yue sagged into the couch, letting out a weary sigh. What a disaster this day had been. She felt the exhaustion of her body beginning to catch up to her and sat up straight, slapping her cheeks.

“No! Stay awake.”

It was still a little bit early, but Yan Yue decided to do the next best thing to resting and prepared to meditate. Perhaps she would try unlocking her mana sense—it was bound to be useful in trying to understand whatever it was that Jia had done to affect the real world from within a dreamscape.

---

She is dreaming. She knows this because of the familiar snowy field before her, littered with corpses and bloodstains. A huge moon hangs in the sky, ominous and menacing, and with the strange certainty of dream logic, she knows that it holds her here—as long as it exists, she cannot wake from the dream.

Across the field, she sees the cat—a perfect, pure white silhouette standing out against the bloodstained snow. There are footprints in the snow, left there deliberately for her to follow. She cannot not see the cat’s eyes, yet she feels it’s gaze upon her—challenging. The cat frightens her—she is not yet ready to follow it, and so she turns away.

Facing the other direction, she sees the same battlefield, from the opposite side. Standing now where the cat had been, she sees what she couldn’t before—rats. Hundreds of them feast upon the corpses, with blood staining their black fur. As one, the rats all turn to stare at her, and their beady red eyes send a shiver down her spine.

The rats are as frightening as the cat is—perhaps even more so. There is a dark malevolence behind those eyes—something deep beneath the earth that compels them to an endless hunger. Like the cat, the swarm’s gaze is demanding, challenging, urging. She knows what they want, but she refuses to join in their feast.

Unlike the cat—who’s golden gaze she can feel boring into her back even now—the rats turn away at her first refusal, returning to their feast disinterestedly. Even without words, she understands that their disinterest is borne of a quiet confidence. They do not feel the need to urge her on, as the cat does. Time is on their side, for hunger will always win in the end.

She feels a creeping sense of dread. The dreams are always so terrifying—or are they? She realizes that both are true, for she has seen them from different perspectives. She has been the cat before, and she has been the rat before. This time, with the kind of certainty only possible within a dream, she knows that she is both.

She is the cat, and the rat, and the snowy field, and the dark malevolent force beneath the earth—all of it is her. That doesn’t make it less frightening—in fact, it makes it even more so—but it brings a greater terror to light. She is not the moon.

The cruel orb hovering overhead, casting its pale light across the snowy battlefield, is an intruder—a foreign presence trapping her within her own dream. She wants to fight it—destroy it, somehow—but she doesn't know what to do. She feels the gaze of the cat, a sly glance from the rats. They offer solutions—possibilities—but she isn’t ready.

Suddenly, she feels the moon reaching down for her. She wants to run, but there’s nowhere for her to go. She begins to feel a pull as the pale moonlight envelops her, but something is wrong. The moon doesn’t want her—only part of her.

It pulls her clumsily, tearing at the very fabric of her being. There is no pain, and yet she screams in agony. There is no pain, but how can it not hurt, to have one’s being so roughly torn asunder? Here, in the dreaming world, in the realm of the soul, the emotional pain of her separation is more real than any bodily injury.

The moon, heedless or oblivious to her agony, continued to pull her apart until, at last, something gave way—

Lee Jia woke, screaming. Tears were running down her face, and though she no longer felt that strange phantom agony from the dream, the fresh memory of it left her trembling. Panting for breath, Lee Jia met the green-eyed gaze of Yan Yue, staring at her with a pale face and wide eyes.

“I—”

Yan Yue’s voice was cut off by Lee Jia’s claws swiping straight through her face, causing her illusory form to shimmer.

“Jia—”

“Shut up!”

Jia punctuated her statement by punching uselessly through Yue’s image.

“Don’t call me that! What—what the fuck did you just do to me!?”

Yan Yue held up her hands defensively even as Lee Jia continued to swipe fruitlessly at her shimmering form.

“J—Miss Lee, I-I don’t know! I just tried to wake you up and both of you began screaming!”

Lee Jia looked around and saw that they were in her bedroom, with Eui sleeping peacefully on the other side of the room. She shook her head—stupid! She remembered that it was all false and extended her domain instead. Immediately she felt a sense of wrongness, and realized that her domain was not connected to Eui’s.

Her domain was not strong enough to pierce the illusion, but it could at least identify it, and detect presences within her range. She sensed that her own body was lying silently on her bed—or a bed, at least—she could be anywhere. Yan Yue’s presence was exactly where the illusion claimed she was, but Eui was—

There was a void around the place that Eui appeared to be, where Lee Jia’s domain was blocked by the same kind of formation that they had used to stifle her during the kidnapping.

“Where’s Eui!? What did you do to her, you bitch!?”

Yan Yue glanced nervously towards Eui’s sleeping form, then back to Lee Jia.

“S-she’s right there! She’s fine, I promise!”

“Liar! How can I trust anything you say? She’s not here—I can’t sense her!”

“I—when you both started screaming I thought it might have something to do with your strange mental connection, so I used an artifact to isolate the space—the same one I used to cut off your aura, before. It didn’t work, but she stopped screaming once you woke up.”

Lee Jia hugged her arms tightly and shuddered. She felt used, betrayed, violated in a way she couldn’t even begin to describe.

“How am I supposed to believe anything you tell me now, Yan? For all I know you’ve already killed her, and you’re just lying to make me calm down.”

“No! I didn’t do that. I don’t have any intention of killing you—either of you—”

Lee Jia spat, and then leveled Yan Yue with a furious glare.

“Not right now, you mean. Not while we can still be useful puppets!”

Yan Yue grimaced and shook her head.

“I—acted rashly, last night. It was a moment of weakness, and I tried to cover one mistake with another.”

“Then let us go!”

“I can’t! It’s too late for that. You can’t trust me anymore, but I still need you. Perhaps if I had trusted you more—if you understood the full scope of what was at play—but no, it’s too late.”

Lee Jia narrowed her eyes at Yan Yue.

“I warned you about what I would do, and I meant it. I chose to help you because of something extremely important to me, and you abused that trust to betray me. I will fight you to the bitter end, no matter what it takes.”

Yan Yue let out a heavy sigh.

“I hope it doesn’t come to that. At the very least, I didn’t lie to you about my motivations. I have every intention of escaping from the future assigned to me. I refuse to be treated like an object, to be traded around to everyone’s benefit but my own. If you understand that, then you understand that I couldn’t let your reckless behavior put everything at risk!”

“Bullshit! The only thing you care about is more power, and you’ll do anything to get it! It’s not about protecting your interests, it’s about hedging your bets! I’ve seen the way you use the people around you like pawns. The only way I survive this is if you no longer need Zheng Long as a contingency!”

Lee Jia felt a dark sense of vindication as Yan Yue’s face froze for a moment, then went cold as her eyes narrowed.

“What do you mean?”

Lee Jia scoffed.

“If your plan to gain autonomy fails, you can marry Zheng Long. He gets a shot at being sect master, and you avoid being sent off on some arranged marriage—plus he’s pliable. You can manipulate things to your advantage from the shadows, right? I’m not a danger to your plan, I’m a danger to your plan B.”

Yan Yue bit her thumbnail and glared balefully at Lee Jia.

“You are too smart for your own good.”

Lee Jia chuckled mirthlessly. It was a sad reflection of an exchange they’d had before.

“You’re the first person to say so.”

Yan Yue took a deep breath and fixed Jia with a cold glare.

“Then you should be even more motivated to make sure that my plan A succeeds, don’t you think? Your lives are on the line.”

Lee Jia crossed her arms and frowned.

“I still don’t even know if Eui is alive or not. If you want me to think that you have any intention of letting us live—regardless of whether your plan succeeds or not—then prove to me that Eui is still alive, right here and now.”

“Fine! It’s a waste of qi, but if it gets you to cooperate—”

Yan Yue waved a hand, and the void within Lee Jia’s domain suddenly became visible. There, in exactly the same place as the illusion, she could sense Eui’s presence. Her domain reached out to form a connection, but something was wrong. Tears streamed down Lee Jia’s face—it was like trying to reconnect a broken piece of wood, where the ragged edges could no longer line up.

She turned back to Yan Yue, who seemed confused and mortified by Lee Jia’s reaction.

“Yue...what in the ancestors' names did you do to us?”