.
During recent experiences, I had not known what to call this condition, but as I awoke this time, the term came to mind.
“Illusory Space.”
My last incarnation knew a concept that was almost the same. “Deep Immersion Virtual Reality”. Or “Deep Dive”. It did not exist in his world, but it existed in his world’s fiction.
Illusory Space actually feels no different than base reality of the same realm. The sensation I was feeling was of being in a higher realm, thus I knew upon waking I was not in the Mortal Realm.
So I suppose an introduction is in order.
For the first one-third of my subjective existence, I was the individual who took the name Senhion upon descending to Huade, when the means to identify with an audible and legible tag first became a necessity.
But that name certainly is no longer fitting. The current ‘me’ in this space is the personality ‘Robert’/’Tiana’, but with the addition of more consciousness than I can possess in the mortal realm.
Suffice it to say, to call myself ‘Tiana’ while in this realm would be a lie, for the same reason ‘Tiana’ can no longer honestly call herself ‘Robert’. Memories, knowledge, experience, all give color, form and weight to thoughts and personality. In the Mortal Realm, my contact to the things of past lives is too poor to be the one that I am now.
This illusory space had the shape of my current location in the mortal realm, an unnaturally soft patch of moonglow grass beside an ornamental pond in the Queen’s ‘apartments’. I lay next to a sleeping couple who had made it quite difficult to fall asleep: the Queen, who first tried to have sex with me, and Amana, who, shall we say, sacrificed her own body in order to protect me.
I won’t deny that Senhion enjoyed such pleasures from time to time. Elder sexual morals sat at about the midpoint between Christian and Fairy. But I don’t think she would have desired such a large audience. Certainly, Tiana would not.
I slipped out from under my cover– a deliciously soft, fluffy blanket with the appearance of quilted moss– and sat up. In the illusory reproduction of the mana fog, this body’s senses didn’t immediately pick out their location, but in a handful of seconds I discovered the HR Manager and the IT lady enjoying a soak in the water.
It was about three steps away, so I stood and waded in to join them.
Bathing celestial maidens are a bewitchingly attractive sight. I admired their beauty to the degree which these ladies deserved, without taking it too far. Their figures were well-turned, and of aesthetically-pleasing proportions, more like my own than like the overly-endowed fairies sleeping nearby.
Although nude, the HR Manager still wore her glasses. She had surely created her current businesswoman image for modern Earthers like Robert rather than for me, but perhaps she enjoyed the cosplay and was holding onto that one element of it. Immortals are not machinery. They have hobbies and affectations like anyone else.
As I settled in, I asked, “No romance literature, today?”
She pressed the spectacles into place and stated, “Wouldn’t that be inappropriate in the bath?”
I smiled. “Mother does paperwork and reads reports in the bath all the time.”
Let me be clear. All my current familial relationships and so forth remained those of Tiana, despite the fact that I now saw her more as my less-well-informed alter-ego. Or perhaps as myself in child form. So Princess Deharè was indeed still ‘Mother’ to me.
They hadn’t been chatting while sampling mortal culture like usual. On previous occasions, they had done so in order to allow me to awaken on my own. This time, they had known I would be very different, and… perhaps they weren’t sure how I would react?
“Quite,” the HR manager agreed. “We’ve decided it would be best to watch you carefully. All of the victims of the tragedy of Huade have yet to recover and ascend, so we have no data on which to make judgments.”
“In all the billions of humanoid worlds, nothing like what your group went through ten thousand years ago has happened before,” the IT Lady explained. “Our only references are non-humanoid events that may not be applicable to humanoid souls. Every new experience for your group defines another first for all of us.”
I nodded. Senhion had memories of calls to the realms above for guidance that had come back with a despair-inducing ‘We don’t know. It’s never happened before.’ I knew they had never seen an event like the Human-Elder war. Naturally, all subsequent events were also new.
Certainly, at some realm above us, somebody knew, but as we know, not all prayers should be answered. We who were called ‘Elders’ by the mortals were mere ants descended from the bottom-most layer of Heaven, so we knew better than those of higher realm than us how true that saying was.
“That is not to say that no one among your group has encountered illusory spaces before now,” the HR Manager added. “A few have even created spaces of their own at the Mortal Realm level. But you have an embryonic core. A soul at your stage would normally dwell within the womb of your mother here in the Fundamental Realm.”
“I see you have awakened to your spiritual memories,” the IT Lady observed.
“Only partially,” I stated. “and I can feel them here far better than in my waking state in the Mortal Realm. My mind can only touch fragments there. I am just a speck of my former self, after all. But I am connected to more now than before Oranos forced me through that experience.”
They both observed me for a bit as if reading my soul. Both were of higher cultivation than my current self, so probably, they were doing exactly that.
“So, my new status probably pre-empts your plan to have me join your organization,” I told her.
She nodded. “Possibly. I don’t know if you can truly still be considered an employee of the planetary supervisors of Huade. After all, you’ve already passed through the wheel of reincarnation several dozen times.”
I nodded. “Perhaps. I would ordinarily have moved on to another role long before now, but I went absent from the job before completing my full term.”
I raised my arms and stretched my body, then smiled privately as I realized while at maximum stretch how unlike my current Mortal Realm personality I was acting. I was making quite a sensual display of this body that I would normally be too embarrassed to show. I suppose I really was, for the length of my stay in this place, a celestial maiden once more.
“Self-confidence suits you better,” the HR Manager critiqued.
For days, my Mortal Realm self had been praying for some contact with these beings. I had been getting frustrated, but I now understood why they hadn’t contacted me. Oranos had put me through such a long vision that the entropic imbalance in my soul had taken days to decay.
“Your husband caused considerable interference,” the IT Lady nodded. “I’m very curious why that woman’s life was important enough to do that.”
“First of all, it was ‘until death do we part’,” I answered in a wry tone. “And it was probably only a whim on his part to take me as a bride, when I decided to let him father a child in me. As far as I’m concerned, I was only his wife for the final nine years of Senhion’s life. This child is betrothed, so kindly don’t make a bigamist out of her.”
“The husband in question is a bigamist anyway?” the HR Lady noted with a slight curl to her lip.
“Is he actually married to those two?” Just because it said so in Ostish mythology didn’t make it so. Immortals rarely marry, as they rarely have any interest in offspring. “Anyhow, Orestania is a patriarchal society. Bigamy is rare, and only legal for men.”
I spooned water over my shoulders with my hand as I went back to the subject. “I imagine he interfered in the fight specifically for the effect that experiencing past lives had on me. Saving her life was just an excuse. I worked for him for four thousand years. I can assure you, every action he takes has at least one ulterior motive.”
“It must have been quite important. The entropic penalty was enormous,” the IT Lady mused.
“Pardon me for sounding egocentric, but I’m confident his goal was jumpstarting my memory, rather than saving her. I have no doubt that he’s been waiting for an opportunity to do so. After all, he’s my only suspect for the individual who manipulated your Hero Relocation Department into placing me in this body in the first place. This is all some project of Oranos’ making. I wonder if the claim that I was needed as a hero was even real.”
The HR Manager pursed her lips, then stated, “We considered that possibility, but the hero demand still appears legitimate. Proving that he manipulated us is difficult, however. The leaders of the planetary supervision team for a world at this level are beings of higher realm than ourselves. We are no more than one realm higher than your origin. You were born in the Fundamental Realm, were you not?”
I nodded. “You mean, in my first incarnation? Yes. About fifteen thousand Huadean years of my subjective existence ago. I was less than a thousand years old when I descended to the Mortal Realm.”
She noted, “Functionaries like we in the Afterlife organization are typically of the First Harmonic Realm. Your Oranos and his compatriots are at least another realm higher than that, if not more.”
I knew that already, of course. I didn’t expect them to have any more information about Oranos’ actions than myself. But I had my four thousand years as Commander of the Third Legion and an underling of the planetary triumvirate that included Oranos. I had high confidence that he was behind my return.
“You also have high confidence in the answer you’ve found to the question you intended to ask us, I see,” the IT Lady noted with a smile.
“Yes,” I nodded. “You need not answer it. You just needed to bring me here so I could notice for myself.”
In the Mortal Realm, I had concluded, with my limited dose of Senhion’s knowledge, that I could not possibly have naturally grown a spiritual core in my limited lifespan to date, even if I added in the life of Robert Stewart. But if a core already existed within me when I arrived, the HR Manager’s people would have known from the beginning that I didn’t originate on Earth.
So I had known for sure that my core was impossible. I wanted to know, had Oranos forcibly created it within me? If so, it would be a dangerous, unstable thing that I needed to rid myself of, or it would eventually damage me.
But I had forgotten Senhion. Even though I hadn’t been conscious of her, she had existed within me all along. And she was, in the end, an immortal. The moment I formed my blood core, I gained an environment in which my spiritual vessel could form. Senhion’s soul, using the memory of her original core, had created a replacement as automatically as breathing. That which should have required a century or two of work to acquire, just popped up on its own, my very own Isekai cheat.
I needed to ask Grandmother whether Oranos had suggested to her to teach me how to create the blood core. It seems she’s a demigoddess, after all. Perhaps she knew what would happen.
“So,” the HR Manager wondered, “Have you resolved your sexuality issues now?”
I tipped my head in confusion. Even with Senhion-level wisdom, I couldn’t parse that mental leap.
She looked genuinely puzzled at my response. “When you first descended, you took on a feminine form. Your current self’s anxiety over your previous incarnation’s gender…”
She cut off, because of course, as soon as I understood her meaning, she saw the answer in my head.
“Exactly,” I confirmed. “Senhion may have occasionally had brief relationships with the opposite gender, but she vastly preferred her own. In addition, more than half of my subsequent lives have been male, and I generally did not marry when I was female.”
She pondered for a moment, then pointed out, “But you have married a few times as a woman.”
I nodded. “I can’t remember all my lives yet, but I think it was usually a social obligation, just like in this life.”
“You’re still considering undoing your engagement, I see.”
“It’s unfair to my fiancé to continue as is. But I must leave the decision to my Mortal Realm self. Her important things are different than mine and she is not yet resolved about it.”
