Fates Parallel Chapter 353 - Extension

Meili was nervous as they arrived at the Purewater Spring. It was technically her first time being there, even though Jia and Eui had been staying at the peak for weeks. That thought only served to hammer in the problem that they were ostensibly here to solve—Meili wasn’t really Yoshika, just a designated representative at best.

Despite her excitement, she still had her doubts about whether Yoshika’s new plan would solve anything.

Jia and Eui met them at the entrance to the plateau, the Yoshika avatar smoothly stepping to the side as she switched to her original bodies. Meili felt a pang of envy at the sight, but swiftly cast it aside as Jia greeted them.

“Welcome to our self-imposed prison—though I guess we’ll be leaving it after this.”

Jiaying glanced around curiously, taking in their surroundings. There were scorch marks and small craters scattered around the plateau, and an obvious seam in the earth where the stone had been filled back in after some kind of fissure. The only untouched area was the spring itself, the placid waters of the pool doing nothing to betray the roaring waterfall that fed from it.

“It’s a bit sparse, isn’t it? Where do you even sleep?”

Eui shrugged, and Meili knew the answer before she said it.

“We don’t. It’s been...probably more than a month since the last time we bothered. We just rest in the spring if we need to. It’s got natural curative properties and an enormous amount of essence.”

Jiaying blinked, but took that information mostly in stride.

“Oh...is it a hot spring?”

“No—it’s actually freezing cold, but our bodies aren’t really affected by temperature anymore.”

“O-oh...”

Meili patted her friend on the back.

“Don’t worry, Jiaying, with your unified cultivation you’ll be just as resilient soon!”

“Right...”

She didn’t sound too enthusiastic, but Jia was already moving the conversation forward.

“Okay, let’s get started! The formation area kind of got blown to smithereens during Eunae’s tribulation and we haven’t had a chance to fix it yet, but we should be fine—I don’t need to draw any.”

Yoshika led them into the middle of the open area, where the scorch marks were blackest and invited them to sit in a circle. The empty avatar quietly joined in as well as Eui began explaining.

“Okay, first—and we maybe should have led with this—this process is going to require us to reintegrate Li Meili first.”

Jiaying froze, then stomped a foot in indignant rage.

“Are you kidding?! Why even waste our time with all of this then? Meili loses the connection to her memories if you do that!”

Meili cleared her throat.

“Jiaying, I appreciate the backup, but I can speak for myself. I take it, Yoshika, that you forgot to mention it because you’ve either thought of a way around that problem, or you think that it’s a worthy tradeoff.”

Jia nodded, but Eui resumed speaking. Splitting up her body language was a habit that Yoshika didn’t even know she had, but a sure sign that their minds were linked—Meili only started noticing it when she saw it from the outside.

“I’m not really certain how this is going to work, but I don’t think that will be an issue.”

Jiaying scoffed.

“You don’t think?”

Meili bit her lip—she knew what Yoshika was talking about. This wasn’t a specific plan that they’d been plotting out in advance—that wasn’t really how they operated. It was an issue that had been on their mind for a while, and after seeing and experiencing things that brought them inspiration, they had a feeling about what to do.

It was hard to explain to Jiaying, but Meili felt it too. They were going off of intuition, but it felt right.

“I trust them, Jiaying. It’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

Jiaying gave her a worried look, but backed down.

“If you’re sure... I just—I don’t want to lose you.”

Meili hugged her.

“I’ll be fine—I promise.”

Jiaying blushed, but awkwardly returned the hug. Eui cleared her throat.

“I hate to break up such an adorable act, but we are in a bit of a hurry here.”

The girls broke apart, blushing furiously.

“R-right, let’s get started, then.”

Yoshika, Meili, and the empty avatar sat in a circle with their hands joined while Jiaying watched anxiously from the side. They started with a familiar process—Yoshika shared a bit of herself with Meili and for a moment, it felt as though she’d never been apart from them. It was a powerful, comforting feeling—almost addictive.

Meili hadn’t needed this sort of ‘emotional substrate’ for a while, but she missed that feeling of euphoria—the confidence that she was who she was supposed to be.

Normally, that was where they would end it after meditating that way for a while. This time, however, they pushed the bond further, bringing Meili back into the fold entirely. She had a brief moment of disorientation as her thoughts and memories reconciled themselves.

It was easier than she expected. If anything, her relaxing days spending time with family and overseeing Jiaying and Narae’s training were a welcome contrast to the hectic rush of political intrigue, backhanded deals, assassination attempts, and traumatic kidnappings.

It was both more and less stressful. As Meili, she hadn’t realized how much Yoshika had been through lately, and as Yoshika, she’d desperately needed the reprieve.

Now she was just herself. She took a moment to meditate and let her feelings settle. Her thoughts wandered to Jiaying. They’d grown quite close lately, and her feelings for Pan Jiaying were far too strong to just compartmentalize and write off as base attraction.

That was going to make things complicated. There was no way that she could isolate those feelings to just her Meili identity—not if this was going to have any chance at succeeding. She needed to share everything, or there was no point. That might strain her relationship with Jiaying, especially since she was already so hesitant.

Why did she have to resemble Jia in the most frustrating ways possible?

Yoshika stilled her mind. There was no sense fretting about it now—she’d simply have to deal with her problems as they arrived.

When she was satisfied that all of her aspects were in perfect harmony, Yoshika turned her attention to her avatars. Yoshika and Meili. It was tempting to give the spirit-form avatar a better name, but that would have defeated the purpose, so she’d just have to deal with the minor confusion for a bit.

Meili was her first avatar, with a body made mostly of wood, earth, and water—her ki doing most of the heavy lifting to fuse those elements together into living flesh. The Yoshika avatar was made the same way, with only superficial physical differences.

Where they diverged was how their bodies were connected to their meridians. They both had the same framework of divine essence housing artificial replacements for their souls, but in the case of Li Meili, a small piece of Yoshika’s soul had been used as a seed to grow an artificial soul capable of independent action.

The other avatar had only a basic mental snapshot—an echo of Yoshika’s mind that could draw on her subconscious in order to act semi-autonomously. It was more like a puppet that Yoshika could control without actually paying attention to it—though she also had the option of placing her entire awareness into it using Yue’s projection technique.

The Yoshika avatar had been useful during her isolation on the peak, but she no longer needed it for that purpose. Meili, on the other hand, was stuck in a vessel far too limited for what she needed to be. It was time for that to change.

Soul resonance was a concept that Yoshika had precious little understanding of. She knew it was the basis on which soul jade tablets were created, and that it was what had allowed Jianmo to ‘communicate’ through Heian’s progenitor spirit.

The basic idea was that souls—and essence in general—didn’t really function under the same set of rules as physical objects. Ideas like distance and time didn’t really apply, and any analogues to them were mostly abstractions that helped young cultivators understand.

Yoshika had observed just what that meant for herself on numerous occasions. When she lost track of time during meditation, part of that was because she was releasing herself from physical concerns and operating purely in a world of essence. When she had walked though the world of spirits—and to a lesser degree, the world of shadows—distance had meant very little. A short walk from that academy had dumped her in the middle of the untamed wilderness, utterly lost.

To a degree, it was also visible in the way mana flowed through the world. ‘Mana’ was what mages called the loose essence that floated freely through the world and formed the auras of living beings. It permeated everything, but tended to concentrate in certain areas with unpredictable ebbs and flows.

It didn’t move quite like water or air. Dae had described it as a ‘field’ but when he’d tried to elaborate, Yoshika quickly lost interest—theory was never her strong suit. Cultivators of all disciplines attracted mana to themselves naturally, and spiritual artists without the ability to directly sense mana could use that fact to their advantage—finding areas where it was more concentrated.

What all of this had to do with Yoshika was an idea that she hadn’t tested—one she’d been very scared of testing, even if she was all but certain it was correct. Elder Qin Zhao had alluded to it once, in his frustratingly cryptic way of ‘teaching.’ The idea was simple—the connection between Yoshika’s aspects was unbreakable.

Even back when Yue had seemingly broken the bond between Jia and Eui, Yoshika now believed she’d been mistaken. The bond had been damaged, undoubtedly—frayed in a way that she hadn’t known how to deal with. But if it had truly been broken, Yoshika doubted she’d ever have been able to truly repair it.

Since then, she’d been subjected to all sorts of things that should have been far better at cutting her aspects off from each other than Yue’s technique. Spiritual barriers, oppressive domains, Eui’s near death and bodily reconstruction—just a few days ago Jia’s body was knocked completely unconscious and it barely fazed her.

Her connections, both between herself and her friends, weren’t like physical tethers that linked them together. They were something beyond that—operating in that difficult-to-comprehend realm of the metaphysical.

Jia and Eui’s souls had long since merged entirely into a single entity, and no matter how far apart from each other they were, that would remain so. They still needed their domains in order to directly share their senses, but the greater connection between them went beyond time or space.

The same was true of the bonds with their friends, and when put that way it seemed obvious in hindsight.

Meili’s artificial soul was missing something critical that prevented her from growing or from being able to access the memories before her creation as anything more than clinical knowledge. Yoshika wasn’t certain what that was, but she suspected it had something to do with the divine spark that allowed cultivators to create and manipulate divine essence—something she’d been careful not to experiment with too much.

Ensouling Meili had been something she considered as a far-off solution. Finding a way to fill that gap and help her to cross the threshold into a completely new being of her own.

That wasn’t practical, and it wasn’t what she wanted anyway. Her new solution was much simpler—let Meili become what she always should have been, if Yoshika hadn’t let herself get lost overthinking the ethical implications and moral quandaries that she never had any hope of solving.

Let Meili be Yoshika. Another aspect, no different from Jia or Eui. Let her share the same connection that would span across worlds and identify her unquestionably as one of them. Let her finally be herself.

The thought itself was almost enough. Meili’s soul flared to life and practically shattered the artificial framework that had once defined her ‘disguise.’ An invisible, intangible force resonated through her, and she knew that this was how it was supposed to be.

With a bit more effort, Yoshika extended her soul into the second avatar as well. It still didn’t have a mind of its own, and it would never truly be another aspect, like Meili. Instead, it represented the collective. Yoshika was each or all of them—any or none.

For now, it would serve as an extra body for Meili—a way to keep her roles distinct. She would be Li Meili, and she would be Yoshika. She could always choose to be one, the other, both, or neither—though Yoshika hoped that she’d never feel the need to abandon her identities entirely.

With their ritual complete, Yoshika split her domains, and Meili practically vibrated with excitement when she felt her own domain responding to her will like a phantom limb that had just been restored. She hadn’t even realized how much she missed it.

That wasn’t all. She flexed her fingers—on both bodies—reveling in the feeling. Her cat ears twitched, her tail curled, and she ran her tongue along her teeth to feel the sharp feline fangs she’d missed so much. She was whole again.

And her memories—she almost cried when she remembered An Chunhei’s face—her mother—as something more than just a fact she knew.

Jia grinned at her, and Meili could feel the shared mirth. If she focused, she could even tap into Yoshika’s senses—no, of course she could. She was Yoshika now—or always had been. For now it was less confusing to keep herself somewhat distinct from Jia and Eui.

From the side, Jiaying approached nervously.

“Uh...from all the smiles I’m guessing things worked out.”

Meili couldn’t help it, she swept Jiaying up into a hug from both sides.

“It worked! It’s even better than I imagined! I’m me again, Jiaying!”

“O-oh! Uh, wow? That’s cool. And now there’s two of you?”

Realizing she’d been mirroring, Yoshika backed off and Meili focused on being Meili.

“That...is going to be really hard to explain. For now just think of me as Meili, and her as Yoshika. We’re both me but...different parts of me.”

“Oh. Okay, sure. That makes sense. I’m happy for you!”

Meili hesitated at the weak smile on Jiaying’s face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m glad things worked out the way you wanted.”

With her newly restored domain, Meili’s empathy was back to its full strength, and she could sense that Pan Jiaying was conflicted.

“Are you sure? I thought you’d be happier.”

Jiaying shook her head.

“I think I just need a bit of time to process. Come on, the others are going to be waiting for us, right?”

She hurried on ahead without waiting for a response, leaving Li Meili to exchange worried glances with Jia and Eui. It looked like her relationship with Jiaying was going to be even more complicated than she’d realized.