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Fates Parallel Chapter 67 - Shadow
🕑 Added 2021-04-30 21:19:21 +0000 UTCJia and her friends were able to rejoin Hayakawa’s group at the plateau without incident. Apparently the Qin group had elected not to return, but Hayakawa wasn’t particularly bothered by it.
“They can take care of themselves. Besides, with three third stage cultivators in their group, they’re likely safer than we are. Tell me more about this kami you encountered.”
Lee Jia nodded, and relayed her experience with the shadow spirit to Hayakawa. When she was finished, Hayakawa frowned.
“Kami are strange beings, Miss Lee. Even if you don’t understand what sort of compact you’ve entered into, the kami does, and it expects you to hold up your end of the bargain whether you know what that is or not. Are you sure it’s benign?”
“Uh, not really, no. At the very least it didn’t seem particularly hostile, just curious. I don’t know what it wanted from me, but it seemed satisfied to let me leave after I’d cultivated, uh, part of it, I guess.”
Hayakawa stroked her chin thoughtfully.
“Hmm, I’ve heard of kami granting power in exchange for services, but not quite like you’ve described. I wasn’t aware that such a boon meant giving a part of itself, but I suppose our cultures have different understandings about kami.”
Jia nodded and then scratched her cheek.
“I kinda regret not studying up on them more. You’d think I’d be more interested in the nature of spirits being half-spirit myself, but the scholarly stuff is just so boring!”
Hayakawa sighed and shook her head.
“I can’t judge you for that. I’ve been struggling with Goryeon techniques for precisely that reason. Too much theory, and not enough practical application. The calligraphy technique you showed me has been a great help, though.”
“Glad to hear it! Dae hates it—he says his talismans lose some nuance when he writes them that way, but I’d rather have a dozen good talismans than one perfect one.”
“Agreed. So, will you be joining us tomorrow for training, or spend more time exploring the mountain?”
Jia shrugged, glancing back towards her friends standing a polite distance away and chatting amongst themselves.
“I’m not sure. I’ll have to ask the others what they think first.”
Hayakawa crossed her arms and shot Lee Jia a disapproving look.
“You should get more accustomed to making decisions as a leader.”
Lee Jia sighed.
“I’m their friend, not their leader, and even if I was, I’d still want to get their opinions before making a decision.”
Hayakawa inclined her head in acknowledgement.
“There’s some wisdom in that, but I’d argue that a good leader should already be aware of her subordinates’ opinions. What do you think they’d want?”
“They’re not my—ugh, fine. I’m supposed to be listening to people more. Ok, let me think—Dae will want to explore the mountain more, Rika will want to stay and do more sparring, Eunae...will side with Rika but doesn’t have much of a stake in it, and Eui probably prefers staying, but would go along with me if I said I wanted to explore.”
“Hmm, not bad. I think I’d mostly agree with you, though Miss An might be more willful than you realize. If you were to go about it democratically, that gives you the deciding vote anyway, does it not? So why not simply decide?”
Lee Jia sighed and shrugged.
“I don’t know, it just feels wrong. If I have to answer, then I guess we’re probably going to stay for training tomorrow, but as a compromise we’ll explore on the last day before we leave.”
“That sounds entirely reasonable. See, that wasn’t so difficult was it?”
Lee Jia grimaced.
“I still don’t like it, and I’m going to make sure they’re ok with it before actually acting on that decision.”
Hayakawa smiled and patted Lee Jia on the shoulder.
“One step at a time, I suppose. Miss Lee, about the favor you asked of me...”
Hayakawa’s voice became somewhat hushed, and Lee Jia glanced behind herself urgently before putting a finger to her lips.
“The less we talk about it, the better. I hope it won’t be necessary, but I can’t afford a lack of caution right now.”
Hayakawa’s brows furrowed in a concerned expression.
“Miss Lee, I know we’re not—friends, but I’d like to think you could trust me if you were in danger.”
Jia sighed and shook her head.
“I know I’m your subordinate or retainer or whatever now, but until we go back to Yamato and your family recognizes me, it’s unofficial, right?”
Hayakawa nodded once, slowly.
“That’s technically true, but I have considerable sway. I don’t doubt that you and Miss An will be accepted, and until then it’s more of a formality.”
“Then would you be able to offer your clan’s protection, say, from one of the Great Sects of Qin?”
Hayakawa’s face went a bit pale.
“That’s...not something I could promise unilaterally, no.”
Jia smiled and nodded.
“Then that favor will have to do, for now. Like I said, hopefully it won’t come up.”
Hayakawa regarded Lee Jia solemnly for a moment before shaking her head.
“Yan Zhihao has caused you as much trouble in death as he did in life, hasn’t he?”
“More than you know! Maybe I’ll tell you about it one day, as a friend, but for now I’m just glad to have you as an ally.”
Hayakawa’s face hardened, and Lee Jia knew she’d pushed things a bit.
“Very well, Miss Lee. We’ll speak again tomorrow.”
Jia nodded and bid Hayakawa farewell before returning to her own group. As she did, she noted to herself that Hayakawa Kaede seemed to be surprisingly sensitive when it came to the topic of friendship. Her friends all agreed to the plan to dedicate one day each to training and exploring before they went their separate ways to rest for the night.
Jia and Eui shared a relatively empty corner of the plateau—not bothering with tents or bedrolls since they were both accustomed to going without much shelter, and neither really planned to sleep anyway. As the two of them settled in for a night of meditation, Eui grinned sardonically at Jia.
“So, I guess you’ve solved your shadow element problem, huh? No need to wait for an eclipse when you can just wander over to the friendly spirit’s place and cultivate as much as you want.”
Jia poked Eui in the ribs and frowned.
“I somehow doubt it’s going to be as simple as that. I still don’t know whether encountering that spirit was lucky or not, and I’m getting seriously suspicious of coincidences these days. I think my spirit half knew that was going to happen, somehow.”
Eui nodded along and sighed.
“Yeah, and I wonder who else might have known. Considering the shield formation was set up by the Grand Magus himself, it seems a little weird that the presences of powerful spirits and demons would totally slip past him.”
“Maybe. Do you really think Dae’s master set all this up, somehow? For what? Some experiment we don’t know about?”
Eui shrugged.
“Who knows with that guy? Maybe Hyeong has some insight, but I bet he’s as lost as anyone else when it comes to figuring out Do Hye. It’s probably a waste of time to speculate.”
Jia thought that Eui was probably right. Do Hye’s influence had been an invisible factor in her arrival to the academy, but his motives were still something of a mystery. He claimed that it was in order to get better results for his experiments with interdisciplinary cultivation, but he hadn’t actually approached them since—which seemed odd, if that was his reason.
“You’re right, I’m not getting anywhere thinking about it. Let him play his games, I have my own problems to worry about.”
“Like the piece of a random shadow spirit you have swirling around in your soul?”
Jia grimaced.
“Yeah, like that. I guess I’ll try meditating on Steps of the Stalker again tonight...maybe I can figure out how to commune with my inner spirit or whatever.”
Eui shrugged.
“Good luck with that, I guess. By the way, did you notice the way that Minami girl kept looking at you?”
“I did, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it—wait, you don’t think she’s interested do you? Ugh, that’s the last thing I need right now.”
Eui snickered and shook her head.
“Not in that way, no. I’m pretty sure she just wants to fight you. It sounds like Hayakawa wants you to whip those nerds into shape, but I don’t think that’s going to be possible as long as Minami thinks she can take you.”
Jia frowned thoughtfully.
“What am I supposed to do about that?”
Eui grinned.
“Give her what she wants. Tomorrow, during training. She’ll probably be too scared to actually challenge you herself, so you’ll need to either do it yourself or contrive a reason for the two of you to duel.”
“Ugh, sounds complicated. Why do I have to do this, again?”
“Because it’ll make the rest of their group respect you more, and squash the little voice of dissent among them. Trust me, it’ll make things a lot easier later.”
Jia let out a heavy sigh.
“If you say so. I’ll take your word for it—I didn’t really face her during our group spar, any advice you can give me?”
Eui hummed thoughtfully as she considered the question.
“Hmm, she’s good, but she relies heavily on her martial arts base. Her strongest point is definitely speed—I could keep the pressure on, but I only landed hits when she was distracted. Even if I was going all out, I don’t know if I could take her in a straight fight.”
Jia scowled.
“How in the ancestors’ names am I supposed to win, then? You’re better in a straight fight than I am.”
“That’s why you don’t take her in a straight fight. Use your spells, use your aura, use that new stalker technique of yours if it helps. Just don’t let her pressure you into a hitting match, because that’s how she beats you.”
“Alright, I’ll keep that in mind, I guess.”
She nodded, and with the conversation finished, the two of them relaxed and began their meditation. They hadn’t been able to follow their usual routine of practicing the Soft Fist technique together, but Jia always found Eui’s presence comforting while she did any sort of meditation. She could feel her domain vaguely mingling with Eui’s at the very edges, and took it as a sign that whatever damage had been done to their bond was continuing to heal slowly.
Jia once again retracted her domain to focus inward on herself, concentrating on the new abundance of shadow qi flowing through her meridians. It was far more than she’d ever cultivated on her own—more than she ever could have cultivated, without an external source. She had yet to experiment with what the technique could accomplish with so much energy to spend on it, but she decided that it would have to wait for now.
Instead, she focused on the next part of the technique. Intuitively, she understood that once enough shadow qi had been cultivated, she could stretch it beyond just her body—the next step was to integrate it into her own domain. She wasn’t entirely sure what that would really mean—her domain was a representation of who she was, so by integrating the shadow element into it, did that mean she was taking on some aspect of shadow?
It made her a bit nervous, but the technique hadn’t steered her wrong so far, and she had really been feeling the need to truly understand her domain—and thus herself—more deeply. So, she followed her intuition, and guided a strand of shadow qi up through her meridians, past her dantian, past her heart, and finally up through her head and into her domain.
She faltered for a moment, as her domain—unlike the heart or dantian—didn’t seem to immediately take hold of the essence. She wondered how she should guide it from there—how to integrate it into her domain and make it truly a part of herself.
She remembered the way her domain seemed to consume most of the mana she took in. At first, she thought it was being wasted entirely as a result of her poor self-awareness, but when she met her spirit half, she had gotten the impression that it had instead been building that strange inner world that represented her soul.
As she meditated on the thought, it occurred to her that it could be both. Her malformed—soulscape, she decided to call it—was a result of her poor understanding of herself. The cultivation of her domain required her to build on that soulscape, and to develop it into something more concrete as she grew both as a person and as a cultivator. Without a solid vision of what she was trying to build, most of the energy would go to waste.
Now, she had a conscious idea of what she wanted to add to that world—or part of one, at least. She wanted to integrate the shadow element into her domain, and thus into her soulscape, but she first had to figure out what that meant. As with many things in cultivation, she couldn’t depend on study or memorized meanings—her understanding was as much interpretation as it was knowledge.
Jia focused on the shadow element within her, what did it mean to her? What part of herself did it represent? To her, shadow gave the impression of coldness and safety, but why? She tried to think of a time when she had felt both cold and safe—it was a strange combination, but she intuitively knew it must be important to her, somehow.
She remembered a cloudy day, and shivering in the rain as she’d been unable to find proper shelter. At first, she didn’t understand why that memory represented safety, but then she remembered. A group of thugs had found her, and she’d been certain they’d been Boss Lee’s men. They looked right at her—and ignored her entirely. Either they didn’t recognize her, or they didn’t care. She’d been safe, in her obscurity.
That was who she had once been, but was it her now? Did she want that to be what shadow meant to her? Cowering in the rain and letting her enemies pass her by? She tried to find another memory, something else she could use to define the concept of shadow. This time, the memory she recalled wasn’t hers.
In the memory, she was a hunter of sorts. Stalking her prey, safely out of sight. When night came, and shadows fell upon her prey, so did she. Eui took no risks—she slit the merchant’s throat in his sleep rather than be caught trying to steal his supplies. There was a different kind of coldness, there—a detachment from human morals. The drive to do what she must to survive, no matter the cost.
That had never been Jia—and she didn’t think Eui was still that person anymore—but she realized that it could be. The potential was there, even if she didn’t want to admit it. Is that what she wanted, though? To become a ruthless killer, who put her own interests above all else? Jia didn’t think that was her path either.
She tried approaching it from a different angle—instead of thinking of ways to use shadow, she tried to consider how she could embody the idea of it. If she was the shadow, then what did that mean? That would make her the...source of the cold and the safety? She wasn’t really sure what that meant either.
Jia was starting to get confused, so she took a mental step back and allowed herself to empty her mind, and just think about nothing. As her mind wandered, the concepts seemed to blur together. All of them were shadow, and all of them were her, in a way. She didn’t necessarily have to become any of them to the exclusion of all else. This was, after all, just an aspect of herself, not the entire definition.
Almost at the same time as she accepted that each interpretation was both a part of her and a part of the element, the thread of shadow essence that she had been dutifully holding onto began to be drawn into the center of her domain. Once there, it was pulled into that same strange void that had consumed so much of the mana she cultivated, and her awareness was pulled in along with it.
---
Jia opened her eyes and found herself in that familiar snowy field—her soulscape. She looked around and saw that the place seemed to have more definition than it did before. Had there been shadows in her soulscape before? She couldn’t really remember, and things always felt strange here, anyway.
Case in point—her body was that of a white cat again, and she saw that she stood in the footprints left behind by her spirit half. Perhaps a bit further along than she had been, but it was hard to tell.
She tried walking around, to take in her surroundings, but no matter where she turned or how far she moved, she always seemed to end up back in the same spot, next to the frozen pond, with her paws in the footprints.
“Well, now what?”
Kin.
Jia looked at her reflection in the pond and saw her spirit half staring back at her.
“Hello again. Here to confuse me with more vague single-word concepts?”
Weak.
“Yeah, I know. I felt first hand just how unequipped I am to commune with spirits. I thought that shadow spirit was going to kill me just by trying to talk.”
Kin.
“Yeah, I found your kin, I guess. Are all cat spirits related? Is that racist?”
Self.
“What? I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Oh! I just thought of something! We can communicate the same way I did with the shadow spirit! Blink once for yes and twice for no, okay?”
Her reflection stared back at her, unblinking. Jia narrowed her eyes, and the reflection did not match her.
“Ugh, why are you so uncooperative!?”
Weak. Incomplete. Ugly.
“I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a reason, or if you’re just being mean! Who am I kidding? It’s probably both.”
Her reflection made no attempt to reply, instead licking a paw and beginning to groom itself.
“So now what am I supposed to do? I followed the steps, I found your kin, and it gave me a piece of itself. I half expected to find it here, but instead I’m just stuck with you.”
Self.
“Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard it all before, okay? You seem to be guiding me toward something, but what is it? Can you give me some kind of hint?”
Kin. The image of the spirit in her reflection faded, and in its place Jia saw herself—her human self—with a small black cat curled around her feet. Looking down, she saw a tiny black kitten staring up at her and jumped in surprise.
“Gah! Oh, um, hello? Are you...the piece of the shadow spirit I absorbed?”
The kitten stared up at her, meowed, and then curled up to go to sleep.
