§
1000:1 compression is the limit for which Curator can maintain a wide ‘world’– out to continental size, say– at Huadean spiritual density. The simulation which Ceria and Oberon entered is an example of that, being a replica of all ten million square miles of the Southern Continent during the last millennium before the Elder-Demon war.
But Curator can decrease the area of the sim in order to increase the density while still maintaining that level of compression, and she, in fact, did so for the trio of male Incarnations. The density in this venue is a couple hundred times more dense than Huade or the Southern Continent sim.
This is still not the level of Kanon’s recreation of the ‘Garden Pavilion’, formed from a dynamic painting I created as Senhion, which depicts a place from my Immortal childhood, or the Lotus Pavilion she and Curator created for me from another of my ancient paintings so Kanon could return her refuge to its original condition. Those simulations come close to the Fundamental Realm. But it roughly matches the density of Sky Ocean itself.
It’s probably obvious that I succeeded in ‘reuniting’ (Fan Li’s word for it) Lydia and Tiana partly because of this environment. Our integration was different than expanding my mind to become ‘Little Sen’. Thus, unlike simple mind expansion, I could see a chance to continue it once I left the simulation. Certainly if I as just Tiana were not currently in Narses and Huade’s environment but rather in Sky Ocean as well, I could certainly do it. The wild card was whether I could continue once I was simultaneously Tiana in two different, highly divergent environments, without the protection of the difference in time compression insulating one location from the other.
I had excellent access to my memory of other lifetimes in this environment. Unlike before, though, the condition of adding the living personalities of Tiana, Robert and Lydia together seemed to be enough to open a new door for me.
I inherited the ability to look back on my life as Tiana through my body but they remain real memories, and, for now until my daughter recovers them in Immortality, they belong solely to me. I also identify the memories of my life as Robert as my own, and feel equal ownership over the memories of my life as Lydia.
Strangely, the combination of personas seems to be enough to give me the ability, perhaps with less clarity, but with equal personal identification, to look back over the life of Fan Li and the others as ‘mine’.
Although I lived most of my life as Fan Li in modest surroundings, I spent my last two centuries as a living mummy sitting in lotus position in a nook within a shrine in a grove on the Imperial Palace grounds, surviving solely on my spiritual powers. Meanwhile, my adoptive son, Qian Long, as a consequence of his divine blood and the training I gave him, remained on the throne as Dragon Emperor, his mere existence a continued threat to the greed and intrigue of short-lived court officials.
Those wicked men naturally saw me rather than his dragon blood and his wisdom as the origin of his power and longevity, and therefore the source of their vexation. Three times his enemies successfully bribed the palace guards to allow assassins to pass and twice they succeeded in raising a force to overpower them. All five times, I had to defend myself as an inert, living corpse.
The assassins and raiders faced, rather than weak clerics tending my shrine, a force of strapping, virile warriors clad as monks and lithe, lethal beauties casting off their nun disguises. Each one of them could wield the combat strength of a cultivator or the fighting techniques of a fairy, because each one of them was myself. The [Blood Effigy] technique I use as Tiana has its beginnings in the paper effigies I used back then to defend my immobile body.
Usually, my effigies went through the motions of caring for the shrine, scarcely more a part of my awareness than the act of breathing, but during attacks, they became an army of myself. With my main body at the center, acting as captain, they each independently used the full strength of my will, spirit, and qi.
It’s precisely Fan Li’s memory of the mechanics of this that gives me confidence that I can eventually become ‘Tiana’ in multiple places, moving independently while all being me. I do not yet have the advanced cultivation of Fan Li, and thus I still have far to go, but she refuses to take the lead and do it for me. She believes that I, representing the most recent Incarnation, must acquire her as a part of myself, never the other way around, to prevent a dangerous spiritual deviation.
Even with her memories, I do not have her mind, and therefore, I do not have her understanding. But I do perceive how seriously she takes this threat.
<The dead must never reign over the living. The living must remain paramount. This law stands among the highest of the Mortal Realm.>
…So says Fan Li.
I do not have her understanding, but I do understand one part. Lydia, as a less spiritually developed awareness, surrendered her mind to me in order to ‘become’ me. Fan Li would be unable to do that. Her mind would overcome mine, with negative results that she understands and I can only vaguely fear and avoid.
Starting from the early morning hours, the ‘male myselfs’ spent over a year ‘inside’ this sim. In fact, they were approaching four hundred Huadean days at this point. In other words, nine and a half hours in outside world terms. In other words, they came while I (as Lydia only) was sleeping in the predawn hour beside Grandmother’s pool, long before my son’s arrival and the rest of the events of the day. For the health of my babies, Lydia must now sleep quite a lot more than I normally would, so, at that time, I slumbered in a pile of immortal beast poshie and pixie cats together with Tiana’s mortal sister, who was using me as a hug pillow, possibly for warmth due to our mutual lack of attire.
I really need to get her to stop doing that. My expanding tummy is making it difficult to sleep comfortably as it is.
So, how did they do it without me knowing? It seems that Fan Li brought them into the Tea House, her inner world, in which she has a similar time compression ability, in order to teach them the [Blood Presence] ability, and they went directly from there to the Art Gallery without waking me. Ever since then, their memories piled up too rapidly for me to absorb, so their activities remained outside my awareness, with Fan Li hiding the whole thing from me the way only she can do.
As for why they did it…
§
The meaning of our collaboration has evolved from the beginning until now, largely because of the rapid changes in the outside world.
Perhaps ‘rapid’ is a strange term to use, when events are crawling at a time dilation equivalent to the outside world traveling at 99.99995 percent of the speed of light relative to us. My head hurts even to consider a world hurtling through space at such a preposterous velocity, but the fact is that I am misapplying the science of my life as Daq R’mion to a regime where it does not apply, namely to the lack of coupling between Huade’s spacetime frame and this ‘place’. I do know better. Perhaps it is the ‘common sense’ that my wife worked so hard to teach me that is getting in my way.
But it is no coincidence that the day Fan Li chose to recruit Kwelabi, Rugau and myself was also the day in which many events began happening in Tiana’s life outside this ‘place’. Seeing a potential for Tiana’s many concerns to overwhelm her, the ancient scholar elected to make this the day to act upon her plans.
I cannot perceive any fault in her reasoning.
Fan Li’s first postulate states that the enemy should be aware of ‘small worlds’ like Sky Ocean. Other Elders in the ancient past built ‘small worlds’ of their own. Lacking the assistance of engineering at Immortal Mother’s level, these are not as extraordinary as Sky Ocean, being bubbles of space annexed to Huade’s universe rather than a similar, much higher spiritual density universe. But they exist as refuges outside his reach.
Fan Li’s second postulate states that the enemy surely has spies observing Tiana and her Servants, given that the enemy remembers the Elder Age and knows his ancient foes, and therefore has a good understanding of the Elder-Servant mechanism, its strengths and its weaknesses. Therefore, he should be aware of her Servants’ movements, and notice when they disappear.
Fan Li’s third postulate states that the party sent ‘yesterday’ to Oseri is surely detectable by the enemy, and he remains interested in his formation there, and therefore they could potentially be about to set off a trap.
This ‘small world’ of Sky Ocean and Tiana’s choice to now hide her Servants here thus becomes a concern, at a time of peak risk. Her Servants are certainly her most vulnerable vital spots, and once her enemy recognizes that they are missing from the outer world even during important events, he will surely begin suspecting the existence of Sky Ocean, hidden from his view for ten thousand years.
But the scholar’s main concern is the duchess herself. She must not endanger her unborn children, but she has citizens she must protect, and concerns regarding her Servants and those precious to her. She has strengthened her living body enough for a temporary return to the outer world and has realized that she could do so for a useful period of time at this point, potentially for hours. Her [Blood Effigy] technique is impressive, but it cannot equal her living body in combat strength. The potential for her to again sally forth to fight in her true body when she must not do so is too great.
Of course, Fan Li’s purpose in gathering us here has, so to speak, evolved as the situation has changed outside, but her original purpose remains.
Before we moved, we knew Tiana’s plans to bring her Servants to Sky Ocean, and to send her son and Ceria into the simulation system. She spent the entire night after she ‘fell asleep’ with her Servants using [Blood Presence] to arrange things with Curator, to visit Oberon and more-or-less order him to come to Sky Ocean, and to arrange for her cousin to transport her Servants to her small world in the morning.
It was once she completed her preparations and dropped the blood magic spell, during the actual nap she took before rousing her Servants to brief them on her plans, that Fan Li blocked her perception and brought the three of us into the Tea House. Using her own version of time compression, the scholar taught us how to use Tiana’s [Blood Presence] technique and sent us forth.
The first task Fan Li set for us was to prepare to escort Tiana should she sally forth as we fear. The enemy may be lying in wait for her the moment she emerges, and we must be prepared to fly interference somehow using [Blood Effigies] of our own.
A tall order, considering none of us have the ability to fly, other than as immaterial effigies. We might find means to fight in that form, but better for us to learn how to temporarily use, and fight in, the body of one of the women, all of whom, by one means or another, have the means to do so.
As one can well imagine, the three of us, whose own forms are so strongly ingrained in our personas, would have difficulty suddenly using such an unfamiliar vessel. I would have none of my internal systems, and especially, would lack my battle computer. As a monk, Rugau is a finely-honed fighting machine, but martial arts surely tie one’s own body to one’s own mind more tightly than anything else. As for Kwelabi… imagine a four-armed, nearly-three-meter-tall creature with the torso of a giant ape suddenly attempting to operate the body of little Lhan.
If on the ground, of course, we can be ourselves, but Tiana is unlikely to keep her feet on the ground during a fight. And the possibility of the real owners of the female forms that can fly being not otherwise occupied is becoming more and more remote. We must be ready for her defense to fall to us.
The second task Fan Li set for us was to apply our disparate thought processes to the labor of engineering a means for us to defend her, her Servants, her husband and everyone else important to her while we are in the [Blood Effigies] of our own bodies, to potentially prevent her from going forth in her own body in the first place.
I and Rugau both might as well be humans from Huade. My eyes might give some pause, but Fan Li feels we can pass them off as magic prosthetics. Kwelabi can pretend to be the species known as a ‘Troglodyte’, which few have seen and thus most do not know should not have four arms. All of us are therefore potential assets for Her Grace, our present day Incarnation.
Our third task was to reach beyond these things and consider the broader picture. We do not age, so we can spend centuries here, if necessary, slowly absorbing the events of the outside world and analyzing them. Lydia/Tiana now knows all of what we have considered up until now, and thus Tiana on Huade will instantly know it as well, once she leaves the simulation.
The stress on Lydia, as the current operator of Tiana’s body, sets a time limit for her, but not for us, who can stay in here for weeks or months of Huade’s time if necessary. We will do precisely so, for now, while she visits once a day to stay up-to-date with our progress.
And of course, we will modify our training and plans to suit, as the context on Huade changes. Our time compression and the thinking time it affords us may very well end up Tiana’s best weapon against her enemy.
