Fates Parallel Chapter 337 - Faith

Checking in with Eunae was mostly just an excuse to spend some time with her friends and give Heian a chance to play with Iseul. While Yoshika enjoyed tea and conversation with Ja Yun, Eunae, and Rika, the kids set up a Go board, of all things, and quietly occupied themselves. Yoshika was a little worried about the mounting frustration she felt from Heian, but was content to leave them to it for now.

Ja Yun chuckled when Yoshika brought it up to her.

“Oh, I’d be frustrated too if I were Heian. I only taught Iseul how to play the game a week ago, but she beats me every single time. I’m surprised she’s still going, to be honest.”

Yoshika smiled.

“I guess she’s inherited some of my stubbornness. I’m not surprised that Iseul is such a quick study, though. How is her emotional development coming along?”

Ja Yun scratched her head, exchanging a meaningful glance with Rika.

“Well, we’re pretty sure she’s figured out how to be bored. But it’s hard to say what that means exactly.”

Rika nodded in agreement.

“It’s difficult to describe. Boredom is more than just a lack of stimulation for Iseul—she’s constantly trying to find new ways to feel things, but the way she does it is a bit...indiscriminate.”

Eunae sipped her tea calmly and shook her head.

“These two are beating around the bush, but essentially Iseul has the impulse control of a toddler combined with the intelligence and creativity of a top scoring academy mage and the moral compass of a lump of stone.”

Ja Yun grimaced.

“She’s not that bad.”

“Yesterday your daughter tried to talk Lee Narae into drinking her. If Jung hadn’t stepped in, she’d probably still be making her way through the poor child’s digestive tract.”

Yoshika blinked—she hadn’t heard about that.

“What? What would that even accomplish?”

Rika shrugged.

“We have no idea. Her reasoning is hard to follow sometimes, but a lot of the time she’s trying to maximize the potential for emotion. Presumably being consumed would invoke all sorts of feelings of fear, disgust, concern for Narae—ironically enough—and helplessness.”

Ja Yun sighed.

“Not to mention getting caught and stopped elicits guilt, shame, and disappointment. She’s stuck in this loop of extreme thrill seeking where she doesn’t really care what she’s feeling, as long as it isn’t boredom.”

Yoshika smiled awkwardly, wondering whether it was even safe to let Iseul and Narae play together anymore.

“Well, do your best to keep her out of trouble, I suppose. Maybe I’ll have a talk with her later.”

“I’d appreciate that—she seems to respect you. Whatever that means in Iseul’s weird little head.”

Yoshika nodded, and the four of them sat in comfortable silence for a few moments while Eunae refilled their cups. When she was finished, Eunae sighed heavily.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any good news for you about fixing your geas. I think I’m getting closer, but it’s a delicate thing and I don’t want to risk any errors.”

Yoshika waved her off.

“It’s fine. We’ve been spending a lot of time in the avatar recently and you haven’t had much opportunity to practice. What about Meili?”

“Li Meili’s issue is even more complex. I’m not sure that there’s any long-term solution for her situation other than somehow perfecting her artificial soul to be no different from a real one.”

Misun’s experiments came to mind, and Yoshika wondered if there was something important to be learned there. Despite the nature of spiritual arts, and all of cultivation itself, precious little was known about the nature of human souls.

Even if there was, she wasn’t about to go around killing people just to learn about their souls, so that was a dead end.

“Well then I guess we’ll just have to—ngh!”

Yoshika was cut off mid-sentence by a sudden shock that ran through her entire body—no, deeper than that, her soul. She clutched fruitlessly at her chest and struggled to breath and the mind-numbing pain wracked her soul. It was as bad as the time Jia and Eui’s souls had been forcibly torn apart by Yan Yue’s careless use of her Melody.

Idly, she noticed that she wasn’t the only one. Ja Yun had also collapsed—Rika and Eunae both fretting over her to see what was wrong—and Heian was having her own unusual reaction, her human and cat forms twisting and distorting as she lost concentration on maintaining her manifestations.

Yoshika closed her eyes and tried to meditate. She knew this pain. She’d felt it before when powerful spirits tried to talk to her. It was beyond anything she’d felt, though. When Heian’s progenitor or Murayoshi’s Forge had spoken to her, they were trying to be gentle. Whatever this was held nothing back.

There was a desperation to it—the only thing Yoshika could isolate as the overwhelming experience washed through her. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the pain stopped.

She could almost still feel it—a soul deep memory that refused to fade—but she could breathe again, and Ja Yun was sitting back up shakily.

Rika looked between the two of them urgently, looking as though she was about to get into a fight.

“What was that? An attack? I didn’t feel anything. Yoshika, what kind of threat are we looking at?”

Yoshika held a hand to her face and shook her head.

“I...I don’t know. I don’t think it was malicious, just...strong. I wasn’t actually the target, I don’t think—and neither was Ja Yun. We just got caught up in it.”

Ja Yun’s hands were shaking, but she nodded in agreement.

“Th-that...I think it was a soul resonance event.”

Rika raised an eyebrow.

“Like those spiritual tablets that break if the person connected to them dies?”

“Y-yeah, except in reverse. It’s possible in theory, but you’d need a piece of the target’s actual soul and the resonance would need to be unbelievably powerful.”

“Someone’s got a piece of your soul?!”

Yoshika shook her head. Something nagged at the back of her mind, but she felt uneasy at the idea of chasing that thought down.

“Not us, no. Just someone or something similar to us—and nearby.”

Rika’s eyebrows rose incredulously.

“What the hell?! Is that even possible?”

“It just happened, so it has to be. The only common link between me, Ja Yun, and Heian is our common spiritual ancestor.”

All eyes fell on Heian—or where she had been. Her form had dissipated entirely, leaving the poor confused slime alone at the Go table. Looking inward, Yoshika could sense Heian huddled up within the inner sanctum of her soulscape, shaking like a leaf.

She sighed.

“I think it’s time I finally talked to the cat spirit that gave me Heian.”

Eunae cocked her head.

“The panther spirit from Mount Geumji? That’s quite a long way away, and I don’t think I need to remind you that the former academy is swarming with demons.”

Yoshika paused.

“Oh right, I never actually told you guys, did I? When we spirit-walked away from the academy we actually ran into the spirit again and uh...kinda took it with us? The bush it lives in has been sitting in our ring for years.”

Rika burst out laughing.

“Are you kidding me? You’ve been carrying a Kami’s shrine around in your pocket for years and just forgot about it?”

Yoshika blushed and scratched her cheek.

“We didn’t forget, we just...had other things to worry about. It doesn’t seem to mind. But whatever that was just now, I can’t think of anything else that could have possibly been the intended recipient.”

“Yeah, you better not waste any more time, then. Do you mind if we join you? I want to know what was so important that someone felt the need to hurt my friends to do it.”

“Sure. We’re going to need an open space with lots of mana, so come meet us up on the mountain. I’ll ask Lin Xiulan to let you through.”

—-

At the mountain peak, the girls sat in a circle around the newly transplanted flower bush. It was no worse for wear despite the years spent forgotten in Jia’s dimensional ring. Its strange ashen petals and white leaves swayed gently in the wind, but they sensed no reaction from the spirit housed within.

Jia scratched her cheek awkwardly.

“Uh...I was kind of expecting her to come out right away.”

From where she’d been watching off to the side, Lin Xiulan regarded the gathering and smiled.

“Spirits are fickle things. You two really are quite full of surprises—I never imagined you’d be carrying a spirit’s focus around with you.”

What Rika called a ‘shrine’ and Xiulan called a ‘focus’ were the same thing. Spirits themselves usually referred to them as ‘vessels,’ but the word was packed with so much meaning that it wasn’t necessarily mutually exclusive with the other names.

Essentially, it was a place for the spirit to anchor themselves. As Jia’s recent breakthroughs on the nature of souls had shown, spirits were quite vulnerable when floating freely. As such, they tended to settle into vessels like her flower bush or the shrines that the people of Yamato built expressly for the purpose of housing spirits.

They could also anchor themselves to humans. A rare few mages kept spirit familiars as assistants, pets, or companions, Yamato had chanellers and onmyouji who formed special bonds with their kami, and certain sects—like the Bai’s Forest of Labyrinthine Threads—would subdue spirits as bound servants.

Then there were the odd ones out, like the grandmaster blacksmith Murayoshi and his tsukumogami Forge, Heian’s bond with Yoshika, and whatever the sword demon Jianmo was supposed to be.

A spirit’s physical anchor could take many forms, but none of them were the true embodiment that spirits sought. That was something that the heavens themselves denied them, as a direct result of the divine seal on their world interfering with the natural life-cycle of spirits.

Jia sighed—she’d done mountains of research on spirits over the years, but none of it amounted to much.

“I’m not sure that I am, actually. I don’t sense anything—where is she?”

From deep within her soul, Heian’s tiny voice added her own contribution.

“She’s scared. Hurt.”

Jia focused on Heian’s voice. The little cat spirit that she’d adopted as her daughter had originally been a piece of the greater spirit now hiding within the flower bush.

“Heian sweetie, do you want to come out and help? I know you have a connection—maybe she’ll answer you.”

“Mmm...not connected. Not anymore. She’s not me. I can’t be her again. I’ll try though.”

Heian manifested in human form right between Jia and Eui, reaching up to take their hands.

“Help me look.”

Jia understood what Heian meant—as her spirit daughter communicated on a deeper level than just words. As one, Yoshika closed her eyes and joined her mind to Heian’s, reaching out to the tiny presence that she could sense hidden deep within the deceptively weak aura around the flower.

PAIN!

Not the word, or even the concept, it was the anguish itself that the spirit communicated. The raw suffering was palpable enough that it sent Yoshika staggering backwards.

Xiulan and her friends caught her before she could collapse, giving her concerned looks that she waved off.

“We’re fine. It just surprised us.”

Eunae furrowed her brows.

“Don’t push yourself too hard.”

Yoshika focused again, this time reaching out with more purpose. Putting her own feelings behind her essence.

Safety. Comfort. Family.

The response came back as agonized as before, but held back just a fraction.

Pain! Kin. Altered. Help.

The last concept was plaintive. As close to a cry for help as the spirit was capable of.

“She’s hurt, I think. Damaged on a fundamental level. We’re going to try to help.”

Yoshika tried to use her Tranquility of the Verdant Marsh to infuse the spirit with healing essence, but it rejected her immediately.

PAIN! Deep wounds. Insufficient.

“I don’t think our normal healing methods are going to work on it.”

Lin Xiulan frowned.

“I’ve never heard of anything that could injure a spirit. They can be exhausted or depleted, which will lead to death, but not damaged in a conventional sense. Let me take a look.”

Her domain reached out, but the spirit slapped her metaphorical hand aside and she tutted with disapproval.

“It’s not willing to talk to me, apparently. Well then, don’t mind me. I’ll just be here to make sure you don’t put another hole in the mountain. Good luck, girls.”

The grandmistress retreated to a polite distance, and the girls shared nervous glances between themselves. Rika rubbed the back of her head helplessly.

“Well now what?”

Ja Yun stared down, frowning in deep thought.

“Spirits are basically souls. Whatever that resonance event was, it was strong enough to ripple through us just because we share a common ancestor. If Heian’s progenitor was the target, then maybe her soul itself was damaged. If that’s the case, then the only person we know who could fix that is...”

All eyes fell on Eunae, who took a step back, shaking her head in a panic.

“No! There’s no way—this is so much bigger than anything I’ve done before! I’m not even ready to help Yoshika let alone—”

Rika took Eunae’s hands in hers and looked her right in the eyes—or tried to. The veil was still in the way, and even then Eunae averted her face habitually.

“Eunae—look at me—Eunae, you can do this. You’ve been practicing non-stop with every spare moment. I don’t know what happened to Big Heian, but it’s important that we find out, and you might be our only hope.”

Ja Yun nodded, gathering up her courage and taking a step forward.

“I know first-hand just how careful and gentle you are with your powers. I think you’re ready. And—and I think that if you don’t do this now, then you never will. Trust me—it’s far too easy to get stuck thinking you’ll never be good enough.”

The display of faith and trust from Eunae’s loved ones moved Yoshika, and from the depths of her soul all three of her aspects were aligned as she opened her mouths to speak without thinking.

“We’ll help too.”

Eunae turned to her and cocked her head in confusion.

“You—what?”

Yoshika took a deep breath. She’d been afraid for too long—unable to trust her instincts against the nagging fear that they’d been corrupted. It was time for a leap of faith.

“You are not alone, Eunae. We’ll do it together—as one.”