Epilogue

Arc 1

I look out into the distance in the desolate place my inner world had become. It was now a shattered chaotic land where the four elements clashed and crashed into each other. It was no longer just the four elements either. Bolts of thunder also flashed across the barren void, chunks of water and ice smashed into pockets of fire and floating magma, causing steam explosions. And, occasionally, tendrils of the void would reach up and cause the great clumps of stone to instantly crumble into dust.

‘Aerien, are you still in there?’ My sister’s voice cuts through the darkness and chaos, causing me to look up. I can see no sign of her projection, but I could still hear her voice. Well, it’s the first welcome thing I have felt since the incident that had effectively trapped me in here. Actually, I could leave and wake up in the real world at any time, but, given the circumstances I would never forgive myself if I did.

‘Yes, I’m here.’ I mentally respond to her voice, projecting it out past the walls that encompass this space.

I can sense an emotion of relief being radiated inward from every wall. I can recognize this form of mental communication. This is the first time it has ever been done while I was inside my mental world, but it was far from the first time Gaerien and I had communicated in this way.

‘That’s good, you really got everyone worried you know? Can you tell me what happened?’

‘Well, I would if I knew myself. I will get to the important part first though. My original chakra body was destroyed.’

I was met with silence. I suppose what I had just said must have been as shocking to her to hear it as it was to me to see it. The silence continued for several heavy seconds, but at about the same time I had started to wonder if she was going to be saying anything else at all, she finally spoke up again. ‘How?’ She said.

‘I already told you, I don’t know.’

*sigh* ‘Of course you don’t. Well, I suppose if that’s what happened, then it’s a very good thing we chose the route of making you a second spirit body. Whatever caused this to happen to you, you would be dead right now if your original spirit body was your only one.’

‘I suppose so, that’s not a very pleasant thought.’ I responded, looking down at the still form of the projection of my younger self, still laying limp in my arms. Indeed, if I was in the same state as her right now, we would both have been long since gone. In fact, it was everything I could do right now just to keep her from fading away.

‘how about you explain to me exactly what happened?’ Gaerien says. To this, I go on to explain everything I could remember about what I had seen. About how when I started trying to use magic, I realized I was in a lot of pain at the locations of my chakras. I looked into my inner world to see what was going on, and it had already turned into a swirling mess of the elemental energies. The energies seemed to be trying to go inside the representations of my older and younger spirit bodies. They seemed to have very little trouble entering my recently completed adult chakra system, but they had trouble entering the chakra system that represented my original younger spirit.

I explained how those energies seemed to repeatedly collide with the younger form, until finally it started to break apart. First the sixth chakra located at the third-eye position exploded like shattering glass, and then in a cascade failure scenario all the rest started shattering at an increasing rate until finally the heaven’s chakra shattered last.

‘Well, that’s about what I remember.’ I tell her.

‘Hmm… what happened to your new spirit body?’ She asks.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The new one you created, what was happening to it while your original one was getting beat up by the elemental energies? You said it was absorbing them. Has anything about it changed?’

‘Well, yes. Now that you mention it, it has. It seems like all of the chakras are glowing brighter, they all turned bright white as well. I get the sense the entire system is stronger.’

‘I thought so. It sounds like what happened was a breakthrough in your cultivation. Your new spirit body succeeded in the breakthrough, your old one failed. It was likely because the old one was so unstable still. Your new spirit body had an almost perfectly balanced chakra system since it was newly created and hadn’t had a chance to break down or gain any kind of blockages in the system.’

‘Well, I’ve heard the term chakra blockages before in all the qi-gong stuff I looked into before, but other than that you are using a lot of terms I don’t know. I think you should explain.’

‘Oh, yes, sorry. It is cultivator terminology. A breakthrough means you reached a new stage in your cultivation. It was probably your current spirit trying to match the stage you had reached in your previous life. The unstable nature of your previous chakra system just couldn’t take it.’

‘Well, how did I suddenly get this “breakthrough” as you call it then?’

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‘Well, you said it yourself when you told me about your meditation. It works at its best when you are in training, and it ought to work even better in combat. Just before you started screaming and all that, you were fighting that guy who broke in.’

‘I was screaming?’

‘Oh yes, like you were being murdered. It actually scared me to hear you screaming like that quite a bit.’

‘Well, it really hurt, I guess that makes sense.’

‘I assume you must have been fighting on a rather high level in order to beat that guy the way you did. You can move better than I can, but not THAT much better, and yet you did something there I’m sure I never could. You are an infant with the mobility of a young toddler, and yet you beat a grown adult who was probably an active hunter, and you did it with purely physical skills.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I still have no idea how you did that. Just what did you do anyway?’

‘Well, it’s something we call the timing of heaven. It sounds both more and less impressive than it actually is. I basically give control of my body over to my subconscious, and let my movements be guided by my sensory information without my conscious mind getting in the way of a single movement. It allows my steps and timing to both become absolutely precisely what I am aware they need to be. The only thing I have to do is realize what needs to happen and my body makes it happen.’

‘Even with that explanation, I don’t think I could even have realized what needed to happen.’

‘Yes, it takes training and repetition. In this case, I knew the guy was going to try to grab me, so I knew I needed to approach him right as he was reaching for me. I had to be in phisical contact with his leg, around the back side of it, in order to force him to bend his knees in order to get his knife in reach so I could grab it off him. After that, I just had to hide it as he picked me up and then push it into his chest using the force of him pulling me toward himself. All I did was brace it against my hip while he plunged the knife into himself with my body acting as a force multiplier.’

‘I did have one problem when Levin tried to grab me,’ I continued, ‘however, I wound up managing to actually use it to my advantage, to even my own surprise. When I threw his hands off, I pretended to stumble and weave around a little. Actually, it wasn’t just pretend, but it seems like my intent was strong enough to keep me on my feet till I reached my target. I guess the chaotic way I was walking prevented him from even trying to reach for me, so it all worked out in the end.’

‘I see.’ Gaerien responded. ‘About all I know about any of that is that it’s not something I could do, but I will assume it’s some pretty high level stuff. How about this, do you have any idea how high level you would have to be to pull it off in terms of the ranks of your cultivation that you told me about before? The whole heaven, earth, man thing.’

‘Well, we don’t really think in those kinds of terms, we would just say you have to have a lot of training in order to do it, but there are some miracles where even a very low level person could pull it off. You just need a very strong will to live and the training to make your body act on its own.’

‘Don’t give me any of that stuff, you just nearly killed an adult as a baby. You know that’s high level stuff, not just anyone could pull it off.’

‘I don’t know what to tell you.’

‘Well, how about you try and think out what someone at each stage should be capable of.’

‘We don’t really think in terms of stages. Well… I guess if you really want to push me to think about it, nobody but the absolute most elite top-level masters had reached the ninjutsu level. I was not there. I was definitely still at the taijutsu level. I also manipulated my opponent with almost every single move I made, that’s at the level of man. So, top level of the lowest tier.’

‘Somewhere between 11 and 15 stages through your cultivation in other words? So, you just went through the strain of suddenly boosting through at least 10 stages all at once. It’s really no wonder your spirit was destroyed. So, I am guessing your younger self probably didn’t make it?’

‘No, she’s still here. She’s just barely clinging to life, but it’s taking everything I have to keep her from fading away.’

‘Oh!? Well, this may interest you then. It is sounding like they are planning to find someone to help you out. Apparently, we’re going to see the faerie queen.’

‘What’s that all about?’

‘Well, it seems like the crazy energy that was going off while your spirit was falling apart was picked up by Falmarin. Or, rather, she’s called Nandin now, she transformed into a nandin, she looks like an adult in her spirit form now.’

‘Falmarin and Nandin huh? Well, I guess we know what word means what in English now. I’m guessing nandin means dryad.’

‘Dryad huh? Well then, Dryad became a dryad because of your energy. So, because of that they all found out about your whole otherworld energy thing. They think the queen will be interested enough by that that she will help you to recover. Only…’

‘Only what?’

‘They say they are going to have to give you to her as the price for it. So, if you can recover on your own then it might be something you are going to want to think about doing quickly.’

‘Honestly, I don’t even know where to start. I have tried a few times to start rebuilding my younger self’s chakras, but every time I start trying to divert my energies her remaining spirit grows weaker.’

‘Well, if you can’t handle it, then I suppose you will have to accept her help.’

‘We will manage this somehow… how is our mother taking this?’

‘Not well.. She has been crying a lot. She has hardly even so much as let you go since you collapsed. I had to crawl into her lap just to talk to you like this.’

… I almost felt as though I was actually stabbed in the heart upon hearing this. I am sure my younger self would be quite happy to hear about our mother suddenly expressing this kind of affection for me. Why did it have to be now though? If what Gaerien told me was correct, I had finally managed to win my mother over right before having to be separated from her.

‘Gaerien, you wouldn’t happen to have a way to help me with this, would you?’

‘I… don’t know. I might be able to help point you in the right direction if I could get in there with you, but…’

‘I really don’t think I could even open the door for you right now.’

‘I suspected as much. Even if I could get in there though, I can’t manipulate your energies. I am afraid my magic wouldn’t be good for much in the way of helping you either. In fact, it would probably do more harm than good since you are a member of a fey race.’

‘So, it’s like that, is it?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Well, the gods of Earth were essentially in open war against Earth’s fey creatures. That’s no surprise.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I suppose accepting the queen’s help is the only way then. Well, thank you for the heads up at least. Maybe I will at the very least be able to negotiate on my own behalf a little better.’

‘How do you plan to negotiate exactly? We don’t know how to speak their language properly!’

‘Hmm… I’m not willing to let our little family be broken up. At the very least I can use the fact that I’m still perceived as a baby to my advantage.’

‘So, are you seriously planning to just cry until they grab us in order to console you?’

‘I will use whatever works, and this is one of the deceptively powerful tools that I have in my current tool box.’

‘You really are shameless aren’t you?’

‘That’s a part of the mind-set in my art, identify your advantages and use whatever works. Honor is worth nothing before your life.’

‘What do you mean before your life? You’re talking about just whether or not we’re together here.’

‘You three are part of my life right now. If you three were taken from me, I may still be alive, but I would have had my entire life taken from me.’

‘Again, you are completely shameless, aren’t you?’

‘Again, I will use whatever works.’