.
The wine glass dropped from my hand, but a flick of Gaia’s finger stopped its fall. Her fingertip gently lowered, and it settled safely on the floor.
The shock I had felt at those words had not been my own. It had come from a certain fifteen-year-old in the back of my mind. From that fact, I knew that it was time for me to make my exit and let her return. I bowed deeply to the goddess Gaia.
“Senior, this small one apologizes for being rude. This small one deeply appreciates that my later incarnation allowed me to enjoy this time, but she needs to act for herself from this moment forward.”
“Your words are unnecessary, sage from another world,” Gaia answered. “You, too, are our junior wife, so you have no need to apologize.”
I took a deep breath, and gave my command to the simulation system. My figure blurred into that of a teenage Elder with her wings fully grown, wearing a simple raiment of Water.
“It seems you are now Tiana,” Gaia observed.
Sitting up, I answered, “That does feel like my name now, although in a spiritual environment like this, I’m a bit different than Tiana on Huade, Senior. My old memories are clearer. Not as clear as when I take on the personalities of my old incarnations, but it changes my thinking and my knowledge a lot.”
She tipped her head. “But your incarnation Fan Li spoke as if you were very separate.”
“The lives of Tiana and Robert together only add up to forty years, Senior. That woman lived nearly one and a half millennia. Forty years leaves ample room for other memories to change me, even when they are a bit dim. Taking on Fan Li’s personality with the small vessel I have now buries all others under the sheer weight of her life, so she is mostly herself.”
“Hm,” she judged. “Then, even though you claim to not be Senhion, if you are influenced by all your incarnations including Senhion, then I shall call you Little Sen. That shall be your name in this environment until you are willing to call yourself Senhion once again.”
Something about that declaration, despite how coldly she pronounced it, warmed my heart. She had probably picked out of my mind the fact that I had made Kanon take a name of her own because I did not want to share the pet name my seniors had given me.
“Very well,” I said with a slight bow of the head. “I shall accept Senior’s judgment.”
“However, you are secretly thinking that you are not our junior wife until you regain Senhion’s mind, which is an error I must correct,” she stated. “For now, you are simply our junior wife Little Sen. But regardless of who you are, you seem to have several questions for me.”
I decided not to ask the foremost of those questions, which was precisely what the concept of ‘marriage’ and ‘family’ actually meant to these immortals. I knew enough to understand that they weren’t simply humoring the mortal myths that had joined Oranos, Eurybia and Gaia together in matrimony. An actual union of some sort clearly bound together these three and possibly others, and it clearly meant something very important to them. But I suspected it involved nuances that I wasn’t evolved enough to comprehend. I only had to accept that, back when I was still Senhion, I had become, inexplicably, somehow a real part of that family.
I thought I saw the corner of Gaia’s lips quirk slightly in reaction to that thought as I turned to the first subject I was willing to give voice to.
“Why wasn’t I told about this before now?”
“There was no need,” she stated flatly.
“But…”
“I shall remind you, as perhaps your memory is dim,” she interrupted with a sharp tone. “Immortals don’t interfere in Mortal Realm matters lightly.”
It was a harsh rebuke of things she would not permit me to complain about. So, I took a different tack.
“You said that Mr. Kowa isn’t the real hero, and I am. That puts me in a pretty difficult position.”
“I never said he wasn’t a real hero, though?” she rebutted with a raised eyebrow. “Your Huadean mother’s spell functioned flawlessly, as expected of one of only three living ninth-level mages on the planet. She summoned a suitable human and the spell properly gave him superhuman advantages. He is without a doubt a hero.”
The ‘ninth-level mage’ part was some pretty earth-shaking news right there, but I didn’t pursue it.
“But he didn’t ‘receive the heroic destiny’,” I said, returning the words she had given Fan Li. “I received it instead.”
“Correct. However, that was neither his fault, nor your mother’s error. He arrived too early to receive the destiny in question. Such was the miscalculation in this attempt.”
I frowned. “But the events in Oseri suggest that the demon king was about to revive. Wasn’t he almost too late?”
“As you already recognized, the hero would have been powerless against the demon god, and would be unable to prevent his next demon king incarnation from rising.”
“Demon god… you mean Astaroth?”
“That’s the name they gave him at the dawn of the Ancient Fairy age, so it’s as good as any. Astaroth will create an incarnation eventually. The action taken by Erebos did nothing to prevent it. At best it only delayed it. Of course, Erebos knows that. The only thing he accomplished was a slight delay, and the protection of those mortal souls on their return to Samsara.”
“If Erebos hadn’t acted, what would have happened with the demon king?”
“Precisely the thing that will happen anyway, once the demons gather sufficient spiritual energy for him. He will be born to a human slave, somewhere in the Demon Plains. As with all prior incarnations, his birth will kill his mother, and his youth will be bloody and chaotic. And at some point, perhaps ten to twenty years later, he will lead an army out of the Plains to force the Demon Lords to submit to his control, so he can again try to subjugate the mortal world.”
“But the Archdemons are already subjugating the mortal world! They’ve taken over the Regaritan Empire, and now they’re trying to invade the East!”
Gaia gave me a dour look, as if I were saying something horribly foolish but…
“I’m sorry, Senior. I don’t understand what part of what I am saying is incorrect.”
“The Regari tore their empire apart themselves, Little Sen. A third war of succession in as many generations was simply too much for the nation to withstand.”
“But Archdemons normally don’t work together,” I objected. “Yet they are taking over the empire.”
“Naturally, when the nation adjacent to demon lands falls into chaos, the demons invade and take as much as they can over. And the Demon Lords are capable, to a certain extent, of prioritizing gains of mortal territory over their rivalries among themselves, as long as they see a quick profit in it. They don’t need a Demon King to force them to work together when the advantages are obvious. They can never accept a short-term loss for the sake of a long distance goal, but they will always go after the best short term profit.”
I frowned, then asked, “So, whoever managed to create that false oracle…”
“It’s not ‘whoever’, Little Sen. There is only one god on the other side of this struggle.”
“Astaroth?”
“I can’t imagine anyone else weilding the power of an immortal in order to sabotage a heroic destiny.”
I nodded. “Then, Astaroth created the false oracle, trying to sabotage the heroic destiny that would arise from him trying to revive as Demon King, right?”
“Correct,” she nodded.
“What would he have accomplished?”
“Only one hero can receive a destiny. Had Ryuu somehow received it, he would have kept it for years, until he was in a declining state, or even already frustrated and embittered, before his target appeared. Of course, to cripple him even more, Astaroth already tried to capture Ryuu’s fated maiden, probably in order to lure him in and take him captive. Fortunately, your own heroic destiny seems to have led you to save her, not once, but twice.”
I blinked a couple times, because I was completely lost.
“You don’t understand?”
“Not in the slightest. What ‘fated maiden’?”
She sighed. “I need to have a strict talk with my daughter about sharing information. She had an excellent opportunity to fully explain it to you, only recently.”
“Your daughter?”
“Tenre, of course,” she said blandly.
“Ten…” I blinked. Then asked, “You slept with my son?”
Her eyebrows arched and she looked like she might laugh. That’s a very rare look, for Gaia.
“I’ve had two daughters by him, dear. Tenre is the older. Back then, we were trying to expand the fairy population, and we were still hoping that an Elder baby would appear, so Eurybia and I brought fairy men into this wonderful small world of yours in order to bear them children. As you already know, your grandmother Lâra was one of Eurybia’s daughters. Oranos also dallied with a few fairy maidens in your abode.”
I was at a total loss for how to respond. I honestly didn’t know how to feel, hearing that they had used my Sky Ocean as a place to get frisky with Mortal World residents.
I decided to put it aside and think about it later.
“So what does Tenre have to do with this?”
“She created the Hero Summoning Spell. But it is more accurate to say, she repurposed the Demonic Warrior Summoning Spell that Astaroth created. By repurposing it, she stole his interuniversal channel.”
“Senior… please pretend I don’t know about any of this and you have to explain in detail.”
Her lips actually did turn up slightly at that. “Very well. During the Ancient Fairy Age, Astaroth’s incarnation chanced upon an interuniversal channel from a lower world containing human beings. That world was Earth. He created a demonic spell that summoned a suitable being and used the transference as a medium to insert a demonic spirit into him to control him, and to equip him with strength and growth magic beyond the natural means of this world. The result would be a nearly unbeatable Demonic Warrior. He would grow to become stronger than an Archdemon or even the Demon Lord, but he would be enslaved to the Demon Lord.”
Gaia took a sip of her plum wine, reminding me that it was present. I decided to give it a try. The aftertaste from Fan Li’s sip was still in my mouth, but somehow, I still felt like this was my first taste. It was nice.
Gaia continued, “Tenre stole the spell, but it required occasional employment in order to maintain control over the interuniversal channel. So, she modified the spell to strip it of the demonic spirit controlling the warrior. The result was the Hero Summoning Spell.”
“The Hero Summoning Spell is demonic magic?” I retorted in astonishment.
“It was formerly demonic magic,” Gaia clarified. “Tenre replaced all the demonic elements with holy magic.”
I blinked. “I thought Holy Magic was unknown in this world?”
“Mostly, yes. We suppressed knowledge of Holy Magic, except the magic that comes naturally to mortal healers, when the demons discovered they could possess priests by hijacking their holy spells.”
My eyes opened wide. “They can do that?”
“Only the demonic race of Huade can do it, fortunately. The demonic magic of Huade and the demonic race of Huade seem to be unique.”
I blinked. “Fan Li battled demons on Huajie, though.”
“They might be called demons, but they used the same magic as other creatures, I am certain.”
“Well, they used qi techniques and aura techniques, but yes.”
“You misunderstood me. It is the specific demonic mana, and those specific creatures called demons on this world who generate that mana, which are unique. Ordinary evil spirits and the creatures they corrupt or possess can be found in any universe.”
I thought a bit, then asked, “So, what should Tenre have told me about the ‘fated maiden’?”
“The original spell sacrificed a mortal girl in this world in order to activate the gate. Tenre was unable to completely remove that part.
“Sacrificed a girl?” I echoed, horrified. My mother couldn’t have…
“Tenre was able to revise it partially. The sacrifice yielded spiritual energy untainted with demonic mana from which they could form the key to the channel. A non-demonic mage could supply that energy herself, so nobody needed to die. But the shape of the spell still required the caster to bind a girl to the hero’s fate, so… every summoned hero must be tied by fate to a priestess, princess or other key national figure of the summoning nation. Your mother used your Princess Amelia for the role. The princess knew what she was being asked to do.”
“Well, if the role was just to participate in the spell…”
“She’s the hero’s fated maiden,” Gaia corrected me. “In other words, she is his fiancée.”
My eyes grew. “Does she know this?”
“She does. She prayed about it quite a lot before accepting the role. What she and the hero may not yet understand is that the demons could cause him quite a lot of trouble if they captured her, as they have twice attempted to do already. Your mother may not understand it either, so you should tell her to consult Tenre for the details as soon as you can.”
“Even if Mr. Kowa doesn’t have the heroic destiny?”
“They likely don’t know that their gambit failed. And he can still eventually receive that destiny, when the time comes, depending on your actions. With your training, you’re on the right path to make him the real hero, anyway. He only needs to surpass the ravages of aging.”
I took another sip of wine as I struggled to fit this new knowledge into my plans. I had a lot of things to figure out.
