.
In the air before us, a faintly visible surface with ripples in motion, like water, hung midair, spreading out into the distance and passing below us. slightly to one side, a few hundred paces ahead, a waterfall of the same clear substance fell from an indeterminate point above in a thin stream into the surface, proving to be the source of the ripples.
In the beauty of the blue sky above, puffy clouds floated here and there, not terribly large or numerous, only sufficient to prevent the sky from being monotone. That part, if not for the thin waterfall emitting from nowhere, would be a normal view. The part that was abnormal was how the blue sky continued downward, past the rippled surface. If one looked straight down, one discovered that the clouds below had the same appearance as the clouds above.
More importantly, there was no land below our feet. The blue was endless in all directions.
Ahead, a great platter-like floor floated in the air above the clear ‘water’, paved with terra-cotta tiles. A long bridge with no visible means of support stretched from it toward a small island like a low-rising hill perched on top of a chunk of bedrock in the shape of a martini glass with no stem or base, in fact, no means of support at all. The clear ‘water’ lapped its shore at the rim of the ‘martini glass’, but did very little to obscure the view of the bedrock beneath or the fact that it stood on air.
Several marble buildings, with colonnades vaguely reminiscent of Greek temples, stood on the hillsides. At the summit stood a striking edifice with a rose-colored low-rising conical roof of tile, but a perimeter made of Stonehenge-sized standing stones.
Similar islands lay scattered upon the surface of the ‘water’. The others were covered in grass and trees.
“What…” Dilorè struggled, following with, “How…”
While I looked around, a tinge of unbridled happiness leaked into my soul. I also felt the dense spiritual energy raising the quality of my awareness rapidly. Unlike Taihimel’s small world, this one was not an annex of the universe of Huade, but of a universe which, like Fan Li’s world, had among the highest spiritual energy levels in the Mortal Realm.
That energy was half my reason for being here.
As my mind adjusted, I would get more and more of my knowledge of my previous lives back, and access to their wisdom. Not just Senhion and Fan Li, but Sirth, Kwelabi, Daq R’mion… I had climbed the spiritual ladder through those lives, so those five all had known much higher spiritual levels than this relatively low grade Huade or the nearly bottom-of-the-barrel spiritual energy desert called Earth. They all had experience that might be of use.
But up ahead, in one of the temple-like buildings on that island, was my other reason. That building would train these three, and in future visits, train the others. The floor in front of me had been a place for outdoor matches between Servants, to demonstrate the results of their training. The great building on the summit had been their indoor arena. But that one hall, on the slope between them, was where they had done that training.
I gently pushed the throttle forward and tried to lower the nose, to point the craft toward the terra-cotta floor. It was working, but I wasn’t sure what would happen when I got there. I worked gingerly, worried about building up too much momentum.
Coming out of her stupor, Dilorè asked an excellent question.
“Do you understand how to land this craft?”
While flying, I had been able to think in terms of an airplane, but I wasn’t sure how to land in an aircraft that didn’t convert forward motion into lift. Sirth would be suppressing the lift stones here.
“Uh…”
She smirked, then pointed at one of the two controls she had told me not to touch, previously. It was a lever on the pedestal similar to the turn signal on a car.
“You’re already doing the correct things, but pressing down on that lever will decrease the lift slightly and cause us to sink. It won’t let you sink fast enough to bounce, so don’t worry. Once you put us down…”
She pointed at the large knob in the middle of the steering wheel. “Turn that knob counterclockwise to decrease lift power down to zero. When we take off, we’ll turn it clockwise until the lift equals our weight again.”
The higher spiritual energy assisted in my learning process. I adapted very quickly to the landing procedure, very different from handling an airplane at low speed, and soon had the craft halted, five paces above the tile floor. I leveled it, took a deep breath, then pressed down on the lever. The craft indeed began sinking like a really slow elevator. Curious, I let off. The spring-loaded lever came back up, and the lift increase just enough to stop the craft’s fall, then settled it back into a hover.
“It’s a pretty smart tool,” Dilorè noted, noticing my experiment. I pressed the lever once again and soon the craft settled on the skids. I jolted everyone a bit, but I managed it without breaking anything and quickly decreased the lift to zero while feeling immense relief.
I wondered for a bit if this was how a helicopter worked. I had a feeling it wasn’t.
Dilorè had recovered– perhaps her fairy neurons were benefitting a bit sooner from the high spiritual energy– but Chiara and Ryuu were both still tongue-tied as we got out of the craft. Naturally, the presence of the great terra-cotta floor gave the sense of solid ground that was lacking when viewed from the air, but they could still see the lack of a horizon. If one looked into the distance, where the ripples of the ‘water’ grew too small to see, turning the surface invisible, one could see the blue sky and fluffy white clouds continuing downward.
As we walked away from the craft, Chiara finally asked, “What is this place?”
“Subcommander Taihimel of the Tenth Legion had that small world where you and Princess Amelia took refuge,” I noted. “This one is mine.”
“Small world?” Dilorè demanded, then pointed out into infinity. “It’s huge!”
I laughed. “It’s a lot smaller than hers, actually. Most of what you see is illusion. Look over there.”
I pointed to the left edge of the built-up island ahead of us, at the end of the bridge that marked our current heading. “On the far left tip of the island, there is a little building that is the actual center of this world.”
Specifically, it was a small stone structure that acted as Little Jia’s shrine.
“The real space around us is a flattened sphere somewhat less than a mile in radius horizontally. Everything you see beyond that is just a projection. The real space encompasses this floor, the island ahead of us, the next island beyond, and the two nearest islands to the left.”
“Then most of the place is just empty,” Dilorè noted. “What’s the point?”
“Exercise,” I said. “I have wings, you know.”
“Then what about below us?”
I pointed up. “Up here, I can fly.”
I pointed down. “Down there, I can swim.”
It didn’t look anything like water, but it functioned like water.
She stared at me for a bit, then shrugged. “I see. It just seems like a weird design. Why build it this way?”
The corners of my mouth lifted. I had been waiting for that question.
“I modeled it on the world where I grew up.”
Chiara echoed, “The world where you grew up… as Senhion?”
“Even before I became Senhion,” I said. “Communication works differently in the Celestial Realms. We … have a different way of identifying each other. We have no spoken names. I was a thousand years old before I became Senhion, in the language that Oranos created for our race when I descended to become a Mortal Realm being.”
“So this is what that ‘Celestial Realm’ looks like?” Ryuu wondered. “I guess it does fit how some people imagine Heaven looks like.”
“This place is modeled after one tiny part of the Fundamental Realm, where a certain pair of Human Clade immortals lived and made the rare choice to raise a child from conception,” I answered. “The Fundamental Realm has millions of times more space than the universe that you came from, Mr. Kowa, and millions of different environments.”
“Millions of times…” he repeated, frowning. I don’t know if he knew just how staggeringly large Earth’s universe was, but the information had been available in his time.
I continued, “It is vast and ever-expanding, and has more kinds of environments in it than any human being could ever imagine. I made this place in the image of Sky Ocean, the environment where I was born. In other places, there are continents similar to those of Earth, but with more land area than the surface area of the Sun, floating in oceans that make those continents look like small islands.
“Other regions have vast asteroid belts or regions like the interior of stars, because the Fundamental Realm has reflections of every single environment that ever generated a spiritual presence in the Mortal Realm, to accommodate every sort of mind that might ascend from there.”
The two women had uncertain eyes. Dilorè likely understood the galaxy was made of a grand array of stars equal or greater than Huade’s sun. Scholars on Orestania understood that much. But that didn’t mean she understood just how varied planetary environments could be. Chiara was probably working with a much simpler model, having just the sun at the center and Huade as one of the satellites of the great Blue Moon. The size of our sun is not well-known to non-scholars, and the stars are just dots of light in a vague heavenly firmament to most people. Many were still working with a geocentric world view.
But she was unlikely to be well educated even on Huade’s solar system, so most of my words weren’t reaching her.
I decided to reword it for her benefit. I told them, “There are lands that stretch for millions of miles cut by rivers as wide as the Eastern Sea. There are also places that don’t resemble Huade in any way, like this one.”
“There’s people living here?” Dilorè wondered. “You said you didn’t leave any of your Servants here.”
I looked ahead and saw a girl in her mid teens on the bridge, walking toward us and currently nearing the terra-cotta floor. She had honey-blond hair and wore an outfit similar to the palace maids in Chinese historic films. I had not noticed her until then, so she must have appeared at that spot just before Dilorè spoke.
“That’s true,” I agreed. “I sent all my Servants ahead to the Underground City of C’r in Ilim Below before I left.”
However, I was not confused. This was not a descendant of humans, but one of the permanent residents of this world. And I felt confident, although I had never seen her take on human form before, that I already knew who it was.
It might have been still too far for the mortals to be able to see, but she had a smile on her face. And she was visibly rushing her steps as we drew closer.
“Little Jia,” I named her when we were definitely in range for her to hear me. Those two words must have been the last straw for her.
She broke into a run, calling out, “Commander!”
The voice was not the one I expected, but that was natural, as her body was not my old body. Her new vocal passages had their own, unique shape.
She had maintained this form up until this point, but she now began losing it in her excitement. Changes began taking place throughout her sprint. The first one, within five steps, was the triangular ears that sprouted from her head, followed by the floofy tail that began wagging wildly. Her outfit morphed from silk into something more like velour, then merged into her body as thick fur, and her long hair grew shorter while spreading as fur across her face.
This might have left her looking like Hermione on a bad polyjuice trip, but her face was changing as well, her nose and jaws lengthening as her body grew smaller. She fell onto and began running on all fours at the same time her clothing entirely changed into animal fur.
Finally, now entirely converted into an animal resembling a crossbreed of a Sheltie and a Pomeranian, the form she’d had as the assistant I brought into this space, created specifically as a home for her, fourteen thousand years ago, she launched herself into my arms and began licking my face.
