Fates Parallel Chapter 303 - Domain (Patreon)

Despite all the excitement that had followed them since their arrival in the Empire, Yoshika and the others soon fell into a routine as they traveled across Qin. While they were on the move, Jia would confer with Ja Yun on their slow progress unraveling the complicated formations that she’d gathered. Ja Yun wasn’t quite as good at breaking ideas down into their fundamentals as Dae had been, but she was brilliant in her own way once she got past her hangups.

Eui, meanwhile, spent most of their time on the road overseeing Narae’s education and occasionally checking up on Luo Mingyu. Both he and Pan Jiaying had slowly started to regain their autonomy, and had even been able to hold conversations and provide useful information for crossing the borders between provinces.

Since they weren’t heavily patrolled, it mostly came down to finding a nearby mortal town and having ‘Tian Lihua’ update their traveling papers. After the disaster with the Everwatching Mists, they had all agreed that it was best to let Rika handle infiltrations on her own.

Occasionally, they had to stop to rest or resupply, but Yoshika didn’t spend that time idly. Aside from taking the time to help with Narae’s training, spending quality time with Jung during her rare waking moments, and sneaking in some meditation, she also took the opportunity to cooperate with her friends on their advancement.

During one such break, several of them gathered together for a long overdue tutorial. Eunae, Rika, Ja Yun, and Narae for a special training session with Yoshika. Narae wiggled her goat ears and fidgeted nervously in the presence of all the adults.

“Big sis, are you sure I’m supposed to be here too? Everyone else is so much stronger than me.”

Yoshika ruffled her little sister's hair and smiled.

“For this, absolutely. In fact, you’ve already got a head start on most of the others. For this lesson, you’re one of the advanced students.”

Narae preened happily.

“Hehe! Uh, what’s the lesson?”

Yoshika spoke with both voices, to address the entire group.

“All of you here have unified your cultivation and at least begun to form domains. In Rika and Narae’s cases, you’ve already taken the next step and are ready to go even further.”

She took a moment to feel their auras in her domain. Rika’s domain had grown—though it still had her competitive spirit at the core, she had developed around that into being a sort of paragon or exemplar. Her domain felt like raw Inspiration.

Narae’s was still small, but her domain had grown in an unusual direction. Her domain was Protection, and Yoshika had no idea what to make of that. Narae cared fiercely for her mother, and she had clearly been worried more than usual for Heian’s wellbeing, but Yoshika didn’t know how she’d arrived at something like that as her domain.

The others were much less distinct, having only formed proto-domains that had yet to solidify into something more concrete. Eunae’s aura almost defied understanding, as though it actively tried to obscure its nature—probably the Kumiho fragment’s doing. Ja Yun’s, on the other hand, was incomprehensible for different reasons entirely—it was so uncertain and tumultuous that any attempt to define it was fruitless.

To Yoshika’s surprise, she felt a fifth aura. At first she’d nearly mistaken it for part of Ja Yun’s, but the faint little aura had a more purposeful formlessness to it. Her eyes were drawn to Muddy, wobbling peacefully in Ja Yun’s lap like a slimy pet cat. She blinked.

“Wait, did Muddy unify its cultivation?”

Ja Yun straightened up in surprise and stared down at the little blob in shock.

“What?! I don’t think so?”

Muddy coalesced into a vaguely humanoid—albeit still tiny and featureless—shape and shook its head. Its aura reached out to touch Ja Yun’s and she furrowed her brows.

“Uh, they say that they haven’t been able to fully access their soul yet, but that their nature requires a deeper understanding of it than normal, which might have led to the more defined aura you sensed.”

“...did it really say all that?”

Ja Yun nodded.

“They’re getting really smart these days. This is news to me, though.”

“Huh. Well, maybe this lesson will be useful for Muddy too—actually, should we still call it that? Or, uh, them?”

Muddy’s aura touched Ja Yun’s again and she shrugged.

“They’re still trying to figure that part out, but don’t mind you calling them whatever you want in the meantime.”

Yoshika nodded.

“Well, anyway, the point of our training today is to work on forming and refining our domains. Since unifying your cultivation, you may have noticed that a large portion of the essence you absorb seems to just vanish.”

Eunae nodded, as the most recent of them to have achieved unification, she was feeling it the most keenly.

“I had, yes. I would have been rather alarmed if you hadn’t already warned me of it back at the academy. It’s simply being absorbed deeper into our soul than we know how to access, right?”

“Exactly. As unified cultivators, we can’t help but develop our domains and soulscapes when we cultivate—it happens naturally. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do about it. Through meditation, we can guide the process and build our soulscapes proactively.”

Ja Yun raised her hand.

“And for those of us that don’t even have domains yet?”

“It’s the same thing, essentially. The soulscape is just an expression of the domain. Normally, developing a domain is one of the first priorities for new xiantian cultivators, but with unified cultivation, we can get a head start on it.”

Yoshika spent most of the remaining session relaying the lessons that Magus Hwang Sung and Do Hye had taught her, with a little bit of her own personal experience. Soon, the girls were all deep in meditation, searching inward to find what defined them so that they could shape it into something coherent.

She had just been about to take a moment to do some soul-searching of her own when Yoshika noticed Muddy waddling over to her. The goopy elemental’s humanoid form was about two feet tall with barely-noticeable indents for facial features and no hands or feet. A solid core of mana floated in the middle of its ‘chest,’ clearly visible through its transparent slime body.

Rather than taking human form, it seemed more like the shapeless blob had simply extended five pseudopods in a crude mockery of it. Its waddling gait was far slower than the normal rolling around it did to get around, and Yoshika had to wonder why it even bothered.

“Hello Muddy. Are you getting bigger? It’s a bit hard to tell when you don’t have a defined shape.”

Muddy nodded, coming up to Jia’s seated form and tapping her twice on the knee with an arm.

“If you’re asking to climb up on us like you do with Ja Yun, go ahead.”

The elemental oozed up into her lap, losing all semblance of cohesion for a moment before reforming its humanoid shape, sitting in her lap.

“This is pretty unusual. Other than Jia’s first attempts to talk with you right after you were born, we haven’t been very close. What brought this on?”

Muddy shook its head, then made several gestures with its pseudopods that Yoshika didn’t know how to interpret.

“Hmm. We should ask Ja Yun to teach me whatever sign language you’re using. You’ve clearly developed a lot further than we realized. In the meantime, you can feel free to try talking the elemental way—we could use the practice.”

After a brief pause, Muddy shook its head, but then focused a significant portion of its aura into a pseudopod and held it out to her anyway.

“I’m getting mixed signals, but okay...”

Yoshika mimicked the gesture, and reached out to gently touch the elemental’s hand. The flash of memory wasn’t at all what she expected. Elementals were the opposites of spirits in many ways, but their communication styles were quite similar. While a spirit would hit her with raw emotion and high concepts, elemental communication was rigid and factual.

Muddy had found an intriguing workaround. The scene that it communicated was that of Yoshika’s soulscape—which, from an elemental perspective, was just a horribly confusing jumble of essence that teased at meaning without ever actually providing any. However, the memory was heavily annotated in a way that was difficult for Yoshika to fully comprehend.

While there was no emotional context to the memory, there was instead an impossibly detailed analysis of the emotions that Muddy had experienced during it. Everything from comparisons to the physiological impact that those emotions had on humans—taken from its experience as Iseul while borrowing Ja Yun’s body—to a comprehensive list of irrational compulsions.

Working backwards, Muddy was able to construct an image of Yoshika’s soulscape and navigate it without ever actually experiencing it. The whole memory gave Yoshika a terrible headache, and at the end of it was a refreshingly simple thought—a request.

“You want to see our soulscape again?”

Muddy nodded.

“We’re not sure how to bring you in without a connection to Ja Yun. We could try Melody of the Dreaming Moon, but—”

The elemental shook its head and held up a hand, this time pushing almost its entire aura into the gesture. Yoshika stared at it for a moment, frowning.

“You want to form the connection directly—like when you become Iseul, but with us instead of Ja Yun.”

Muddy shook its head, paused, then nodded. Yoshika regretted not paying more attention to what Ja Yun had been teaching it.

“Sort of? You’ve got something else in mind?”

It nodded.

“Alright, worth a try, we guess.”

Yoshika had plenty of practice sharing her aura with others. In the earliest days of her cultivation, Jia and Eui’s joint meditation had been the precursor to what ultimately became their shared soul, and they’d merged minds with Heian and Rika often enough that it was almost second nature to simply extend a piece of their soul to meet Muddy’s.

It was still a strange experience. Muddy’s mind was completely alien to them, just like Heian’s, but Heian was already part of them, and mostly added feeling rather than thought. Muddy was the opposite, and the thoughts were as overwhelming as shared emotions tended to be.

Muddy was a being of pure thought, and its way of experiencing the world was a lot like using Absolute Awareness at all times, only without the benefit of slowing down subjective time. Yoshika’s respect for Ja Yun immediately climbed a few notches for being able to subject herself to that experience so casually.

Unlike the emotional turmoil of joint spiritual meditation, there was no equilibrium to be reached. Muddy’s overwhelming storm of thought was simply a fact of its existence—a fact of her existence, now that Yoshika shared it. Luckily, her own experience with Absolute Awareness did give her some ability to navigate the confusing state she found herself in.

Muddy’s idea was simple enough. Now that they had established a basic link, there was no need to deepen it further, as it would do to form Iseul with Ja Yun. Instead, Yoshika could just retreat to her soulscape, and Muddy’s consciousness would come along for the ride.

It was more complicated than that in practice, but deeper analysis of the concepts hurt her head to think about, so instead, she just did it. Letting her minds drop away into nothing and retreating deep within her soul, to the place where she was safest.

Yoshika opened her eyes to find herself in the fields outside of the academy. The ‘outskirts’ of her soulscape, in a way. Her mind was clear again, and entirely hers. For a moment, she worried that the plan hadn’t worked, and that Muddy had simply been left behind, the connection severed.

Then she felt it. Muddy coalesced out of thin air in front of her, looking nothing like the formless little blob she was used to.

Its new form was as tall as Yoshika, distinctly feminine, and very well defined. She was still made of transparent slime, but while her form oozed and dripped into itself, she had clearly defined facial features, fingers, and even a sort of hair-like appendage that blended into her body.

She didn’t look like Ja Yun, but her form was clearly inspired by her. They could be sisters, if not for the fact that one was entirely fluid. Yoshika was in awe at the level of detail.

“I-Iseul?! But Ja Yun is...”

Iseul smiled warmly—nothing like the uncanny manic grin Yoshika was used to seeing on her.

“Sure, let’s go with that. I think I do like the name, maybe. I’m not the Iseul you’re thinking of, though—not exactly. I’m not borrowing Ja Yun’s soul—or yours either, for that matter.”

She held her hands out to her sides, leaving viscous trails of slime from her arms to her torso.

“This is all me!”