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I stared down at the barbie-sized pixie lying spread-eagle on my bosom with confusion. Thanks to the design of Fan Li’s Imperial Court dress, the area that would have been exposed by a low Orestanian neckline was covered in cloth, but she was rubbing her cheek on my bare skin above where the garment ended.
“Kiki? How did you get in here?”
Even though this was the simulation network, I had no doubt it was Kiki, not some random pixie reproduction that happened to look like her. She had exactly Kiki’s mana signature and aura.
“Huh? Kiki fly to picture, go in!”
It sounded like she knew how to operate the network on her own. Did she know how to enter Sky Ocean as well?
“I mean… Well, why are you here?”
“Mama say come!” she declared. “Kiki come, quick quick!”
“She’s a frequent visitor to our small world, Commander,” Kanon explained, before she turned to face the divine woman sitting across the blanket from me and gave a deep Dorian bow.
“Greetings, Great Senior,” she stated in somber tones. “Welcome once again to our humble world.”
“I have set a place for you,” the ancient Immortal noted, and sure enough, an additional cushion and cup were now in place to my right. Kanon nodded meekly and took her seat next to me, on the opposite side from where Durandal was quietly nibbling on one of the delicacies from the spread laid out on the blanket.
“You have a name of your own now,” the woman observed.
“My… principal named me ‘Kanon’, Great Senior,” she admitted humbly.
The Immortal turned her attention back to me. “But ‘Principal’ is not the term you told her to call you.”
“Please forgive me, Mother,” I requested with a slight blush and a nod. “Although I did not seek your permission first, I told Kanon to consider herself my little sister.”
“Yes,” she nodded as her serene smile lit her face again. She told Kanon, “And in the deepest part of your heart, I can see the concept of ‘Mother’ in your view of me. It would be heartless for me to deny that concept, would it not?”
She took a sip of tea, then added, “My daughter.”
Kanon’s eyes appeared a little moist. She bowed her head. “I have told my principal that I should return to her properly, since my task is complete. I am her proxy, after all. We cannot do it yet, but once she has grown her vessel more, I shall.”
I sighed. She still hadn’t given up on that.
“For ten thousand years, you had your colleagues call you Little Sen in denial of yourself,” the Immortal observed. “Have you not earned the right to your own existence?”
“Ten thousand years is no different than a few days to you, Great Senior. What rights can I claim in your presence?”
“Ten thousand years is a hundred fifty lifetimes for the Mortals of this world, child. Yet they would claim the right to their own existence without question.”
“I don’t even have a physical body, Great Senior!”
She brushed it away with a flick of the hand. “A triviality. In this place where you live, you don’t need one. You will acquire an immortal form once you ascend. Actually,”
She tipped her head while looking at me. “Once you recover enough to ascend, you can turn your current nonmortal body over to your sister. You don’t need to ascend bodily, after all. Your Immortal body is still safely stored in my cave inside the Forest of Seven Immortal Phoenixes. Do you remember when we lived there?”
Naturally, I was drawing a complete blank. My memories of the first thousand years of Senhion’s life in the Immortal Realms are as vague as my memories of Robert Stewart’s life as a three-year-old.
She arched her eyebrows, with a slight look of disappointment. “I suppose not. Well, it will come back to you eventually.”
But I grew confused. “I thought Oranos and his team were storing our Immortal bodies?”
“At my insistence, they rented the space from me,” she stated. “I wasn’t about to let my daughter’s treasures be stored anywhere else.”
I glanced down and pursed my lips. Kiki had been happily laying on my bosom all this time. She had, by this time, turned around to face forward, sitting with her arms behind her head while leaning back on my chest. I’m not buxom enough to be a secure seat for her, but she was probably keeping herself there with her flight powers.
Looking back up at the divine presence sipping tea across the blanket from me, I noted, “Kiki called you ‘Mama’.”
It was a statement and a question. Because I wasn’t sure how to phrase it any more distinctly, I left it at that and trusted the Immortal to put the rest together from her observation of my thoughts. I should be a completely open book to her, after all.
“Mama is Mama!” Kiki declared insistently.
The Immortal gave her an enigmatic smile. “It was quite a surprise when I met this little one for the first time. She first appeared when I came to assist Kanon and your little pet in their improvements of the training system.”
I felt a little triumphant twinge upon learning that I had guessed right. The system I had returned to had been mysteriously so much better than the one we originally built. I had suspected this Immortal had lent Little Jia a hand with it.
“But why does she call you Mama?” I wondered.
“Mama is Mama, Big Sis!”
Kiki sounded slightly exasperated at me.
The Immortal hesitated, then looked troubled. “It must be a trauma that you have blocked from your memories. I wonder if your little sister remembers.”
I glanced over at Kanon, but she pointed at Kiki.
“Huh?” the pixie wondered. “Remember?”
It seemed Kiki didn’t know what the Immortal was referencing.
I looked back to Kanon. She noted. “I was not present for it, but I know what happened. Should I explain?”
Our Mother nodded benignly, so Kanon proceeded.
“At the end, when you began losing your fight against the Affliction much faster than expected… you suddenly decided your son wasn’t old enough to be on his own, yet. It was too late to try the normal cure, so, even though it had such a small chance of success, you decided to go through with the… partition procedure.”
I froze a little, a chill running down my spine. ‘Partition’ meant the procedure in which they would tear the Elder in two and attempt to heal both halves, in opposite fashion. One half would produce a magical being, and one would produce a monster, and neither half had a strong chance of survival. But if the usual procedure had zero chance…
As she continued, Kanon’s voice indicated she had the same sick feeling in her stomach as I had.
“Frankly, because your soul was already so badly damaged, the regular procedure would have failed for certain. Your soul would have crumbled apart while they were still sorting out which biology type to aim for. Only the ripping in two and forcefully healing both in opposite ways stood a chance of the soul ending up successfully secured in one.”
“I have no memory of this…”
She nodded. “The greater part of your soul remained attached to the monstrous half, where it survived for a few hours before dying. You became conscious only for a short time, long enough to bid Oberon farewell.”
“The… greater part of my soul?”
“One very strong fragment of the remainder became attached to the magical half rather than evaporating. It wasn’t large enough to support an adult mind, and the surviving magical tissue was only enough to form… her.”
“I believe Oranos became involved,” the Immortal added. “Probably in desperation to save you. But it became clear that the true soul of Senhion had gone to Samsara and this child was a separate individual.”
Kanon smiled at the little creature on my bosom, who was just nodding occasionally. It seemed she already knew all of it.
“Once she reformed properly, she came to have a slightly different aura, after all. She’s clearly a different individual. Unlike me.”
It seems that Kanon cannot access the Immortal record of my life in the Fundamental Realm, prior to my descent into the Mortal Realm. I see that as proof that the Sea of Knowledge recognizes her as a separate individual. But she has exactly the same aura as I have, something even identical twins shouldn’t have. It’s like having exactly identical fingerprints. Which I suspected she was taking as proof that she wasn’t a distinct person from me.
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose, wondering how to get her past that issue.
“They are different,” the Immortal declared, interrupting my thoughts.
Both of us looked up at her in confusion.
“Your auras are different enough for me to see. I can see how you two might not be able to distinguish between yourselves. They are indeed extremely similar, after all. But they are not perfectly identical.”
Kanon had a strange expression, with her eyebrows bunched up a bit and her nose wrinkled. Was that confusion? Bewilderment? I don’t know how to read my own face.
Well, it’s not quite mine. Slightly higher cheekbones, smaller nose, thinner eyebrows. Just like her slightly smaller height and slightly larger bust. She’s a copy of Senhion, not Tiana.
I looked back down at Kiki. She was looking up at me with a puzzled stare. I had never noticed before how similar her face was to my old face, as well.
“Big Sis?” she asked me.
I don’t know what was perplexing her. Perhaps she could also tell us apart and didn’t understand why we couldn’t. But I had a different question for her.
“Did you realize that you and I were… related, back when we met that first time?”
“Big Sis is Big Sis!” Kiki declared.
It was an affirmative.
I giggled, remembering her teasing me, as a monster that might eat her. Although it had been obvious she wasn’t actually scared of me. So she knew who I was, even back then…
I wondered if Oberon already knows who Kiki is. He calls her ‘Auntie’, after all.
“That answers your question about how she got in here, too,” Kanon noted. “She received almost no intellect at all from you, but she has all the knowledge from her life as Senhion. Like me, she remembers little from the Immortal Realm. Simply childish memories of our parents and childhood experiences. But she retains all of your knowledge and wisdom from those days. And the portal recognizes her as a part of you, so she can go in and out as she pleases.”
“The fact that she was only a small fragment… Is that why she’s still a pixie?” I wondered. “But that doesn’t make sense. Even an ordinary pixie that lived this long would have cultivated to fairydom by now!”
“Not yet, not yet!” Kiki declared, waving her arms wildly.
Kanon sighed. “She seems to lack something, but I don’t know what it is. She’s practically capable of ascending at this stage.”
“She lacks interest,” the Immortal stated. “She’s perfectly happy to remain as she is forever. Which is fine. It’s a personal choice, after all.”
Kiki didn’t show any sign of caring, but I found it odd. Did she truly prefer millennium after millennium of the same things over and over, forever and unchanging?
“You have acquired too much of a Mortal perspective, Child. Many Immortals in the Fundamental Realm are the same as her,” our hostess noted as she refilled her tea cup. “They neither cultivate nor search for revelations. Their eternal life is all they ever sought to achieve in the first place, and they have already found it. Your little sister has simply found hers here in the Mortal Realm.”
“But she can’t live here forever,” I objected. “Even pixie bodies will wear out eventually, won’t they? The divine law…”
“All things in the Mortal Realm must perish,” the Immortal agreed. “But someday, Kiki will be unable to remain in the Mortal Realm, anyway. As Kanon noted, she has almost reached Ascendance now. She retained a fragment of Senhion’s remaining spiritual vessel, and it has been growing naturally for ten thousand years.”
I sipped tea and frowned. That vessel would have been chock-full of dangerous knowledge. It was like a child with a handgun.
“But let’s talk about why you called me here in the first place, Child,” the Immortal suggested, changing topics. “I came to help you with a different matter, after all. Shall we call your daughter here, or do you wish to discuss it with me before she arrives?”
My brow wrinkled up as I muttered, “My daughter…”
“Yes, she’s still your mother in your heart, but it would be confusing to have two ‘Mother’s in the conversation. Or perhaps you can call me Immortal Mother while addressing her as Fairy Mother. Will that work?”
“Can we establish first whether it’s truly best for her to become my daughter?”
She looked at me. I could see in her eyes that she was reading deep into my mind. With a sigh, she nodded. “Very well, Child. That’s where we will begin.”
