.
Somehow, I recovered my voice after covering for a few seconds by taking a sip of water. It was fortunate I hadn’t taken a drink before the visitor appeared, because I’m sure I would have done a spit-take.
“Um… your appearance is somewhat… perplexing?”
She grew an angelic smile and nodded. “It is quite understandable, Commander. May I sit?”
I nodded. “Please.”
I’m sure that people with twins can’t know what I was feeling just then. For the rest of us, it just is too surreal to be speaking to someone who is your exact duplicate.
… of course, it was the exact duplicate of the image I had of myself over four thousand years. During that time, it had become deeply ingrained. And my Senhion appearance had mimicked my celestial maiden appearance, only with wings added, so add an additional thousand years to that.
Those wings vanished from her back as she moved across the floor to a nearby chair. She sat and folded her hands in her lap, again smiling at me, this time with an apologetic tint.
“This is, in its own way, as strange for me as it must be for you,” she stated, “But to get it out of the way, I do not contest your identity. You are the real Senhion and I am the fake. Everyone else in this world acknowledges that I am a mere proxy. You and only you are the Commander.”
I nodded lightly. “Thank you. I did have some concerns about your intentions. But if you are a fake, why? Why not wear your own appearance?”
“This is my own appearance, Commander,” she stated simply.
Unsure how to reply to that, I picked up one of the little pastries on a tray beside the water. On other benches, there were also baskets with fruit, bread and wrapped meat buns, but those pastries had been calling to me.
Since she seemed content to wait for my reply, I finally asked, after chewing and swallowing, “Did I perhaps somehow forget birthing a daughter somewhere along the way?”
She gave out a silvery laugh and shook her head. “No, Commander. My origin is far simpler. I am an autonomous proxy that you created before you left us.”
The statement left me gaping at her. I finally managed, “That… how is that even possible?”
With a nod, she agreed with my astonishment. “It would not have been, on Huade. Without regular refreshment from you, I should have depleted my essence after only a few years. But you created me here in this spiritually-rich place, Commander.”
Naturally, memories from that long ago, without the help of an advanced entity like Oranos to help me retrieve them, are quite dim. I still don’t recall how to perform the spirit craft to create proxies and outriders. But, in the clarity of this small world, I can remember using such crafts. I could indeed have left a proxy behind to help sort things out after I left, but…
“Although I don’t remember creating you, I feel very sure I would have told you to seal yourself into a timeless pocket space to await my return, so you would not evaporate.”
Normally, autonomous proxies reunite with their sources. They aren’t meant to be permanently independent, and, although this is difficult to imagine from a mortal perspective, they don’t normally have the feeling that rejoining their source is equivalent to ending themselves. They simply go back to rejoin their whole.
She nodded. “You did indeed tell me exactly that. I even considered doing it at one point. The spirit beasts begged me to stay longer if I could manage.”
“They begged you?”
As I’ve said before, back then they were hardly more than robots. They had sentient spirit beast cores, but limited vocabularies and very limited thoughts as thinking beings.
“Their beloved master had passed away,” she told me, with a fond smile. “I was all they had left of you, I suppose you could say. Although their development was still limited and they had difficulty expressing it back then, they… found a way.”
“Now that you’ve said that, you know I’m dying of curiosity,” I told her. “What did they say to convince you?”
“All they had to do was come to me in their materialized forms,” she explained, her eyes now twinkling. “And remember, their only option at that time was their beast form. No words were needed at all. Tell me, Commander, could you have said ‘no’ to them? Imagine Little Jia, looking up at you with those eyes…”
I couldn’t help it. I began laughing. She was absolutely right. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone all the way past the point of no return for them, but I would have pushed it.
“It was difficult, but everyone helped. Especially Curator. She set up a special simulation world for me. You can find it up on the third floor. Its time is dilated with respect to the small world, so the spiritual energy can be exceptionally dense. I stay inside it most of the time, and everyone comes in to visit me. In addition, I’ve used what limited cultivation I could manage to replace essence and build up some extra, although it has been quite difficult.”
As I considered the explanation, I took another bite of the pastry– it was a bit like a berry tart, although the fruit seemed to be a mixture of dates and honey– then took a sip of water.
“So you haven’t actually persisted for however long it has been in the small world.”
“The actual passage of time in the small world has been roughly twice as long as the greater world,” she filled in for me. “Jia maintains compression at the current level only rarely. Most of the time she maintains a one to one ratio. For my simulation, it has been perhaps a fourth as much time as the small world. So, roughly five thousand subjective years.”
I mulled over it, then wondered, “After five thousand years on your own, you’ve surely come to see yourself as your own person. Do you wish to remain that way?”
She blinked, with her blank expression saying it was not a thought that had occurred to her.
“I… I don’t know,” she answered, losing her confident serenity for the first time in our conversation.
Really? I wanted to ask. You have not developed a sense of your own identity?
Instead, I asked, “I assume they haven’t been calling you ‘Commander’? You might be a keepsake of me, but if they weren’t treating you as a replacement, you must have a name?”
“I’m known as ‘Little Sen’.”
Now I was the one taken aback. I had not expected to hear Oranos’s nickname for me. She nodded, probably reading my thoughts from my expression.
“Over the years, I have tried coming up with a title for them to call me,” she said. “Nothing I tried felt right to me. It was Curator who began calling me ‘Little Sen’ instead. She said she needed to address me as a junior, so she could remember that I was not her master. Everyone else just followed her lead.”
Little Sen grew a slightly bitter smile. “For the record, I don’t actually approve of it.”
I huffed out a short breath. “Well, if you decide to remain separate, we’ll choose a proper name for you.”
She pursed her lips and then tipped her head again. “I don’t really intend to, though. I actually feel rather eager to learn what we’ve been doing, all this time.”
“Um…” I stalled, not sure what to say.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “As you are now, I don’t think I could rejoin you. I think I would not survive the attempt. You need to grow quite a bit more.”
Hearing that brought me relief. I was totally not ready to have her dive into my skull.
“So you will have plenty of time to think about it,” I noted. “So you should do so. If you were able to cultivate and accumulate spirit essence, then it seems to me you have the ability to grow into an immortal on your own, independently of me.
Tipping her head, she wondered, “Shouldn’t I lack the necessary soul?”
I shook my head. “In order to create you, I used a minute spark of my soul as the seed crystal, exactly the same way a mortal baby receives a minute spark from its parents. Yours has likely grown, like any other newborn’s spark grows into a fully-formed soul. A proxy merges with its source when that spark reunites with the original soul. Because your spark was purely from me, unalloyed with another soul, we can flow back together like two drops of water becoming one. But because you have grown and cultivated essence of your own, it’s not something you necessarily have to do.”
She looked downward slightly, with a tiny wrinkle in her forehead and pursed lips while mulling over my words. I had a feeling that I had that same mannerism myself.
Looking back up, she noted, “This is not a wisdom I received from you.”
That wasn’t a surprise. Even as I spoke, I had the feeling I had picked up this particular knowledge as Fan Li. Immortals create proxies and incarnations without paying any attention to the mechanics of the process.
I nodded. “Because I did not know it yet, at the time. I’ve gathered some interesting additional knowledge on my journey since then.”
She fell into a thoughtful silence. Needing a change of subject, I wondered, “And your role here?”
Little Jia was the one I left in charge, not this proxy, after all. My intention would surely have been for the proxy only to help troubleshoot as the spirit beasts learned to get along without me.
She tipped her head in thought, then said, “Emotional support, perhaps? I have helped plan training scenarios and answer questions, but since I did not actually possess essence and mind equal to you, I could only add a fraction of what you could have added. I considered my real role to be to give them confidence in their own decisions.”
I thought about it, then shook my head. “I don’t approve of the name. We’re going to pick a new one for you.”
She heard the declaration without any change of expression, and remained quiet for a time afterward. As she watched me and waited, I honestly couldn’t figure out what was going on inside her mind.
“Do you think they still need that emotional support?” I wondered. It had been an awful long time, and from what she told me, the spirit beasts and Curator would actually be far older than her at this point.
“No,” she replied immediately. “They outgrew the need ages ago. It is simply a habit at this point. The only constructive role of any consequence that I play is to advise them on immortal matters when they ask.”
“Then you need your own name,” I told her. “You’ve earned your own identity at this point.”
“Even if I still think of myself as part of you?”
“I’m not really taking that away from you,” I told her. “I am sure if our mother met you, she would consider you every bit as much her daughter as me. She probably will be quite proud of you for doing so well.”
Naturally, I wasn’t talking about Mother as in Princess Deharè, but about the higher realm being who birthed my original life in Sky Ocean.
She tipped her head. “So, are you going to name me?”
“Oranos named my batch with the nomen On when we first descended. I chose the rest of my name myself. If anything, you are my sister rather than my daughter, so you have a right to the same nomen if you want it, but I think you should choose the rest for yourself.”
I could tell that she was having difficulty with this idea which, somehow, she had never considered as an option before. Maybe it was my differing experience after all those other lives, but to me, it was the obvious that this was the right choice. Even if our souls had precisely the same composition, this ‘Little Sen’ wasn’t a proxy of me anymore, after five thousand years surviving on her own.
After a short pause, she chose to put the issue aside. “Commander, I apologize for derailing your original intentions like this. You had some purpose to call for moderation, did you not?”
I smiled. “So you’re our actual moderator?”
“For the moment,” she replied with a light nod. “We rotate external moderator roles through eighteen individuals and it isn’t actually my turn, but the proper moderator couldn’t say no when I requested it.”
“That’s good enough,” I decided. “I just wanted to discuss the training plan while these guys were still snoozing.”
I had indicated them with a hooked thumb. My doppelgänger glanced at them and nodded.
“Do you intend to remain their instructor or turn them over to us?” she wondered.
Normally, I would not personally manage the training, you see.
“I shall stay with them during this stage. These guys aren’t like the new Servants I would bring in, in the old days. They didn’t graduate from the Academy. They need some personalized instruction in individual rooms to get them up to speed. I only had them experience the introductory stage unprepared in order to put them into the right frame of mind.”
“So you will train each of them, then bring them back and let them try this stage again?”
With a light nod as I confirmed my plan to myself as well, I answered. “That’s my plan. Once I get them through the Dragon Stage, I will leave the rest of their tutorial to you and your colleagues. Now, lend me your four thousand years of experience and help me plan their individualized rooms.”
