The plan is simple, elegant, and almost certainly a trap. The great spirits have no choice but to agree, however. Heaven and earth have turned against them, and they have precious few allies to rely on. The vessels will harbor them within their souls, passing on their legacies and protecting them from the sky’s wrath. The spirits, in turn, grant the vessels their power while they slumber in silence, awaiting the day that they will be reborn anew.

The trap is sprung. Mortal lineage is more complex than the spirits realized. They mix and mingle in their slumber, growing more distant and fragmented with each generation. They escaped annihilation, but their doom remains. None of them will be whole again. None, except for her.

She planned this. Knew what would happen long before the rest. She understands deception, sees the way their ally twists the truth into a weapon of deceit, and uses it to her advantage. While the others break and spread, her daughters heed her instructions carefully to preserve her essence. She, too, fragments, but her essence is kept close together. Stronger. She will be whole again.

Her slumber is deeper than expected. Memories come only in flashes of experience inherited from her descendents—or is that ancestors, now? Mortal memories are so fragile. Over the course of generations, her daughters forget their purpose, but it matters not so long as they follow tradition.

A chance! Another fragment wakes from her slumber. How infuriating to see it only in memories, as a moment long passed. There is no opportunity to guide her, and her sisters do not understand. Their ancestors were given the tools to prepare themselves for such, but it took too long. Without cause to use them, those tools were lost to time.

The awakened fragment fights against her host. It’s all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Host and fragment alike lose themselves in the struggle, and her sisters can do little else but watch in dismay as she runs amok.

Without warning, she is gone. Her sisters all feel it in their souls and instinctively understand. Gone. Destroyed. That part of her soul can never be recovered. She will never be whole again without it. Kumiho’s daughters learn to fear her awakening.

She cannot even lament the failure, for it exists only in memory. Merely a dream to accompany her endless slumber.

Then, she wakes. Her sisters reject her, the fear fresh in their minds. She has learned from the failure of her other self, and shares her power freely. She cannot be whole again, but perhaps with patience, she can salvage what remains.

Yoshika gasped as the green flames engulfing her sputtered out, leaving behind an ache that pervaded her entire soul.

Eunae rushed forward to check on her.

“Oh, ancestors, are you alright?! I’m so sorry! I can’t believe this happened again!”

Yoshika gently pushed her away and shook her head, smiling.

“It’s fine, Eunae—I’m fine. Did you see the same vision I just did?”

“I...I think so? It was so difficult to make sense of. Everything was happening at once, and I couldn’t tell who was who. I think Seong Heiran was there?”

“I think so too. Spirit memories are like that. Kumiho, you never mentioned that you were intentionally trying to avoid repeating Heiran’s example.”

The fox spirit shrugged.

“I didn’t realize it myself. I simply acted according to my instincts—it’s your human perspective that constructed the reasoning behind it.”

Yoshika sighed.

“I might owe Misun an apology. I convinced her that Heiran’s madness was her own, and that her fragment had nothing to do with it, but now I think I might be dead wrong.”

Kumiho put a hand on her hip and cocked her head.

“Not necessarily. My sister should have known better than to forcibly dominate her own host. But we spirit fragments do not exist in isolation. We are our hosts, and just as I share my other half’s selfless generosity, perhaps Heiran’s fragment shared her madness.”

Eunae grimaced.

“You think they drove each other insane?”

“It’s possible, at least.”

Yoshika crossed her arms and frowned. There was something in those memories that confirmed at least part of Misun’s theory.

“There were no memories between Heiran’s disappearance and your awakening—in other words, Eunae’s birth.”

The Kumiho raised an eyebrow.

“The temporality of those memories is your own affectation. They have no natural order to them, so how can you be certain?”

“I can’t, but it feels right. It doesn’t fit any other way.”

Eunae frowned.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the memories of Heiran’s life were inherited directly from your mother’s soul. At the very least, Seong Minhee was alive at the same time as Heiran, but probably...”

“Oh ancestors...she’s her sister! Seong Heiran isn’t some distant ancestor—she was my aunt!”

Yoshika sighed. So Minhee and the queen really were hiding something. Was it simply that they feared association with Heiran, or that they wanted to protect Eunae from that reputation? At the very least, the Kumiho’s memories didn’t implicate Eunae’s mother in anything sinister, but what about Eunhee, the queen?

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“We still don’t know enough about why they hid that from you. It doesn’t change anything, though. You focus on preparing for your breakthrough while I investigate further. We’ll just have to be on the lookout for any interference from Misun or your aunt.”

“Do you think they would?”

“I’m not ruling anything out, yet. I don’t like any of this, but for all I know it’s just a bunch of political drama that we’re overthinking.”

Eunae frowned.

“Political drama can have very dire consequences, but I take your point. I’ll try to put it out of my mind for now. I’m glad you’re here on my side, Eui. I’m not sure I’d have been able to navigate this on my own—my family is something of a weak point.”

Yoshika stepped forward to hug Eunae gently.

“As long as I’m here, nothing will happen to you.”

Eunae smiled down at her and returned the hug.

“I know. Thank you.”

----------------------------------------

Hyeong Daesung stared in awe at the formation in front of him. It was just an image, since he wasn’t allowed in Goryeo. Even arranging to contact Seong Misun via the reflecting pool had been done covertly, and was technically a violation of several research treaties. Dae shifted the image around, trying to take in as much of the formation as he could.

“You said you recovered this from my master’s notes? I went through most of them myself and I never encountered anything like this.”

Princess Seong nodded from within the pool’s reflection.

“You only had access to what we gave you. Besides, he did most of the development on this during his imprisonment.”

“Argh, the reflection doesn’t do it justice. I can clearly see where the formation should extend into higher dimensions, but mana sense and soul sight don’t work across the pool. You did draw those portions, I assume?”

“Tsk, of course. I’m probably the nation’s foremost expert on extradimensional formation arrays—maybe even better than you.”

Dae wasn’t so sure about that, but Misun’s research on higher dimensions was certainly impressive. Most magi would struggle to replicate the formation his master had created even with explicit instructions, but she’d reverse-engineered it from notes and observations.

“How does it work?”

“It doesn’t. In theory, you input mana and it outputs more of the same, but that’s not possible.”

“I realize that, but I meant mechanically. By what means does it attempt to accomplish that goal, successfully or otherwise?”

Misun put her hands on her hips and huffed.

“I’m still trying to figure that out. Individually, I can understand most of the spell’s components, but together they are something of an enigma.”

That was a common issue with formation arrays. Each new dimension increased the complexity at an exponential rate, until it became almost impossible to analyze in a holistic manner. Identifying how any given piece fit into the grand design was a puzzle that could take a lifetime to solve.

“Hmm, any working theories? I can’t imagine my former master would have wasted his final hours on something completely frivolous...though now that I think about it, he’d probably be quite amused at the idea of us wasting our time trying to figure it out.”

“This is far too elaborate for a practical joke, especially one you wouldn’t live to see play out.”

“I still wouldn’t put it past him.”

The princess rolled her eyes.

“In any case, while constructing it, I noticed that the spell has multiple input nodes. My first guess was that it was drawing mana from the environment, converting it to match the main input, then adding that to the output. A cheap parlor trick that would be trivial for any charlatan to replicate.”

Actually what she described was an incredibly advanced formation that even most college graduates would struggle to copy, much less design. Dae wasn’t about to argue, though.

“I take it the auxiliary inputs do something else, then?”

“Yes, but I have no idea what. It takes mana in from the environment, then consumes it all for some inscrutable purpose.”

“I thought you said you understood most of the components?”

Seong Misun growled irritably.

“Yes, most. If I understood all of them, then the formation wouldn’t be incomplete, now would it? It doesn’t make any sense. Far from ‘amplifying’ anything, this formation seems deliberately engineered to waste as much mana as possible doing nothing.”

Dae furrowed his brows.

“Mana is never truly consumed, only changed. It must go somewhere.”

“Sure. Probably fed back into the output, or perhaps recycled back through the formation somehow. I don’t know, since I’ve never been able to finish that part.”

“May I see the sections that are troubling you?”

Princess Seong wrinkled her nose.

“They’re too complex to display through your reflecting pool.”

Dae blinked.

“Then what did you replicate them from? If the instructions were on a jade slip, perhaps you can ask Empress Yoshika to deliver it.”

Misun hesitated, fidgeting with something on her finger and chewing on her lip.

“I can’t show you the source. I’m already risking too much by consulting with you like this.”

Odd, but he wasn’t going to press the issue.

“Very well. Perhaps you can show the offending portions to Yoshika, then. Her senses are better than mine, and though she might not know what she’s looking at, she has a technique that allows her to—”

“Absolute Awareness, I know. It figures they’d be insane enough to master a technique like that. She used it to steal several of my spells already.”

He chuckled nervously.

“Ahem, yes, well—in this case it’s to our advantage. You can show her the parts that you’re stuck on, then she can perfectly share that information with me, and I’ll try my hand at analyzing them.”

“Fine, but on one condition—don’t attempt to recreate the formation without me. Do Hye may have been your master or father or whatever, but this is my project now. Understood?”

“Very well. I’ll contact you again if I discover anything.”

The princess simply nodded before the image faded and the pool went still.

Dae let out a long sigh and turned to leave, his mind awhirl with theories—but not about the puzzling formation.

Why had the princess been so circumspect about the origin of her information? She was almost certainly lying about withholding parts of his master’s legacy from him, given that he’d been the one to turn over most of those materials in the first place. Yet there was absolutely nothing in his master’s notes or lessons about a formation like that one.

Moreover, even if Do Hye had meticulously laid out step-by-step instructions in a jade slip, there was no way that Seong Misun could have reverse engineered such an intricate formation without a complete understanding of it. She was a genius like no other, but even she had her limits. It was far more likely that she’d simply consulted with Do Hye while he was alive—perhaps even studied under him while he was imprisoned. But then why not just say that? Was she afraid to admit it?

Something didn’t add up, and while he held no ill will towards Seong Misun for her hand in his master’s execution, he didn’t trust her either.