Fates parallel vol 2, p.25
Fates Parallel Vol. 2, page 25
That wasn’t quite their problem, but it was close enough to the truth that Jia wondered if Ienaga had any insights that might help them.
"That’s why we’ve been in closed door training. We’re trying to realign our cultivation so that we can start making progress again."
That actually was true, and it seemed good enough for Ienaga, who nodded.
"That’s probably your best option, aside from breaking down your foundations and starting over. If you insist on pursuing this path then the only other option I can recommend is that you try practicing and meditating the same techniques for a while. I’ll consult with Hwang about finding a martial technique that you can both practice safely."
Eui and Jia bowed and thanked Master Ienaga, who shook her head and sighed.
"You two are a handful—I’ve never had such troublesome students. Alright, go on before I change my mind and force you to restart your cultivation here and now."
"Yes Master!"
The two girls spoke in a chorus and bowed their farewell before hurriedly rushing off. Ienaga wasn’t one to use hyperbole, which meant that she really had been seriously considering making them abandon their paths and start over.
* * *
With only one week left until their trip to the mountain peak, Jia decided to double down on her efforts to learn how to resist Eunae’s gaze. First, she decided she wanted to try to learn objective recall. Even if it was unlikely that she could do it at her level, she felt like being able to see past false perceptions was the key.
In the archive, she picked up as much material on the subject as she could find—most of which was in the form of books, since the technique came from the magic colleges of Goryeo. Unsurprisingly, Dae was already present in his usual spot, and he looked up with a start when Jia dropped her heavy load of books on the table across from him.
"Oh! Miss Lee, nice to see you again. I’m afraid I haven’t made any progress on your predicament as yet."
"That’s fine, Dae. Do you remember the conversation we had way back about eidetic memory and subjective experiences?"
Dae blinked a couple of times in confusion before nodding.
"I believe so. Why do you bring it up?"
"I want to try learning to recall objective experiences. Like what you told me back then. Thinking about a memory and being able to spot things that I missed when I actually experienced it the first time."
Dae grimaced.
"Miss Lee, I told you back then that it was nearly impossible for houtian mages to accomplish. Most of the known methods explicitly require a do...main..."
Dae’s eyes widened as he trailed off, but he shook his head after a moment.
"No no no, even if you have a domain, there’s no way that you have the mental capacity to recall your experiences objectively at the second stage."
Jia frowned—it wasn’t like Dae to be so pessimistic.
"What if it’s just for a little bit? I don’t want to recall everything with perfect objectivity, only certain things."
Dae shook his head.
"It’s not just about how you remember—you have to change the entire way you store your experiences in the first place. It’s far too taxing for a houtian mage to maintain, and you won’t know which experiences you need to recall objectively until you reflect on them."
"What if I do know which ones I want to recall objectively. What if I could anticipate when I was going to need that objectivity? For example—when under a mind-altering illusion."
Dae opened his mouth to argue, and then paused.
"Wait, I hadn’t thought of that. All the books I’ve read on the subject assume maintaining the technique at all times, but if you only needed it for brief moments..."
Dae shoved his pile of books aside and reached across the table for one of Jia’s. He began quickly flipping through it as he mumbled to himself.
"...specialized meditation...enhanced perception...domain...aha!"
Dae spun the book around and pointed at the passage he had found. Jia didn’t bother reading it, since she knew that Dae was going to just explain it anyway.
"The technique is a form of meditation, but instead of drawing in mana it concentrates the domain towards enhancing awareness. Some high level mages maintain this form of meditation in order to dramatically accelerate their thoughts, and the mana expenditure is significant. The divine essence of a xiantian cultivator is orders of magnitude more efficient than mana, so it’s trivial for them, but for a houtian cultivator, you wouldn’t be able to maintain the technique for more than a few minutes without running out of mana."
Jia’s eyes lit up with excitement. Hadn’t she already done that before? Or at least something similar.
"So that means that I can do it for a few minutes at a time?"
Dae nodded eagerly, his tail beginning to wag in excitement.
"In theory, since you have a domain. I suppose most of these texts were written with the assumption that since it required a domain, anyone practicing it would by definition have to be in the xiantian realm. This might actually work!"
Lee Jia began reading through the technique while Dae went through some other texts, taking notes to highlight the relevant information for her. It turned out the technique was quite similar to the introspective meditation she had done before.
It required intense concentration—she’d have to focus her domain into herself and commit every single bit of it to her awareness. Normally, the domain sensed so much information that her mind naturally filtered a lot of it out, like an ongoing noise that you stopped noticing after a while. Now, Lee Jia had to bring every last bit of that noise to the forefront of her mind.
It was also a little bit reminiscent of the combat meditation she’d used to awaken her ki—ironically something she’d rarely actually used in combat, but Ienaga had called it that and it stuck. Meditating so intently on one’s body while actually using it made even the slightest discomforts magnify tenfold. This technique aimed to do that with the mind, rather than the body, condensing her entire experience—body, mind, and soul—into a perfectly preserved memory.
According to the books—which had a very Goryeon viewpoint—all disciplines would inevitably access the parts of the self that they didn’t directly cultivate, expressed through the development of a domain. The domain wasn’t a well-understood concept, academically. Each person’s was a little bit different, and understanding one’s domain was a crucial aspect of cultivating in the xiantian realm.
Jia wasn’t sure what that meant for her, but she supposed that her unified cultivation had resulted in the early development of a domain—forming the domain through the connection between her three aspects, rather than the other way around.
Lee Jia set aside the books and freed her mind from distraction. Luckily there was quite a bit of overlap between this technique and some of the meditation techniques that she had been practicing and refining over the course of months. She focused her domain inwards and meditated on the flow of energy through her body, mind, and soul.
With each breath, essence would be absorbed through her domain—even without actively cultivating, this was automatic. She still wasn’t sure what her domain did with the mana, but it used quite a lot of it. What was left then traveled down to her heart, where some of it was captured in the flow of her bodily ki and transformed by her affinity into Lightning elemental energy. Finally, the remainder entered her dantian and gathered into the tiny swirling ball of ‘liquid’ qi within.
After that, there was nothing left of the essence that she had taken in, only a few infinitesimal motes of corruption that were rejected and expelled through her exhalation. Jia focused intently upon maintaining her state of self-awareness while allowing herself to once-again perceive the world around her.
Immediately, she realized why the first step of meditation was to release oneself from worldly awareness. The sensory overload was completely overwhelming—it was like the physical pain of combat meditation and the emotional flood from joint qi meditation both at the same time, while also bearing a stress headache from thinking too much. Actually, that headache was rapidly getting much worse as she tried to maintain her focus.
Lee Jia tried to take in her surroundings, but it was nearly impossible. She saw Dae—heard him saying something—but she didn’t have the focus to make out what he was actually saying, or interpret his expression. There was just too much at once. Every rustle of movement, every scent in the air, the taste of her own saliva on her tongue, the buzz of some insect, the very thoughts in her head—every last experience was screaming for her absolute attention.
She tried to maintain focus as long as she could, but the pain just kept mounting until it hurt more than anything she’d ever experienced. After that point, it soon drowned out every other experience and completely shattered her focus. At some point, her vision had gone completely white, but she hadn’t lost consciousness.
When she returned to her senses, she was breathing heavily, and there was an odd, coppery taste in her mouth—blood. She reached up to the wetness on her upper lip and her hand came away sticky with fresh blood. She tried to swallow, but there was more blood in her mouth than she realized and she began to hack and cough as she choked on it.
"Miss Lee! Are you alright, what happened!?"
Dae fussed over her as Lee Jia finished her coughing fit and wiped her nose and mouth off with a sleeve.
"Ew. I’m fine, Dae. Uh...probably. I think I just got overwhelmed. You were right—that technique is definitely not meant for low level cultivators."
"Did—did it work?"
Jia shook her head.
"I don’t think so, I just remember—"
Jia opens her eyes, her vision is swimming and she’s unable to focus, but her senses are sharp and her domain misses nothing. Dae has an alarmed expression and asks her what’s happening, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her blood pressure is rising at a dangerous rate, and the smaller vessels are starting to burst. In a forgotten corner of the archive, a flying insect is struggling in a spider’s web—
"Oh my ancestors, everything! I remember everything! Dae, it worked!"
Jia went over the memory carefully in her mind. Despite having been unable to think about anything other than the pain, she was still able to perfectly recall every last sensation she had experienced for a period of—
"Thirty-six seconds?"
Dae raised an eyebrow in confusion.
"I’m sorry, what?"
"Uh, I guess it’s not just what I see and feel. My mind was working in overdrive that whole time. I was able to maintain that state for exactly thirty-six seconds—well, thirty-six and a little more than a half. I know that because apparently, I kept track."
"Oh! Huh, that’s rather impressive since all you seemed to be doing was screaming, bleeding, and drooling."
Jia blushed and slapped Dae on the shoulder.
"You could have left out that last part!"
She knew it was true, though. The difference between the subjective experience and the objective memory was jarring, to say the least. Lee Jia frowned and crossed her arms.
"Well, I don’t know if this is going to work for what I wanted, but it’s a start. I’ll just have to keep practicing."
Dae’s eyes widened in surprise.
"You’re still going to use it? After—that?"
Jia shrugged and smiled wryly at Dae.
"That was just a first attempt. It could have gone better, but it was still pretty successful. Maybe I’ll get better at it with practice! It can’t hurt to try."
Dae glanced pointedly at the unsettling amount of blood that covered the front of her uniform, her sleeve, and the table in front of her. Jia blushed and turned away.
"It can’t hurt much! Okay!?"
25. Effort
Thirty six and a half seconds—a little more than a half. It was a weirdly specific number, but Lee Jia had absolute confidence in it. At first, she thought it was just how long she’d been able to maintain the technique, but the number was more significant than that. That was as much time as she could recall objectively—the limit of her mental capacity. She might be able to maintain the technique for a longer or shorter time depending on the situation, but the amount of information she retained would remain the same.
She’d noticed it right away when she tried to practice the memory technique again, and her previous perfect memory was overwritten. It wasn’t like she forgot about it entirely, she could still remember—remembering it. The way Dae described it, recalling an objective experience was a new subjective experience in and of itself. However, once she created a new objective experience, the previous one vanished entirely.
So she could only perfectly remember thirty six and a half seconds at a time, for now. No matter how good she got at the technique, that would not change—it was a limit defined by her cultivation, not her skill. Still, she had other reasons to practice. For example, she still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of keeping her wits through the ungodly headache, and the strain of it gave her wicked nosebleeds. It was quite embarrassing when Eui found her collapsed on the bathroom floor in a pool of her own blood.
"Jia, what the fuck are you doing?"
Jia sat up and wiped her face off shakily with a towel—the nosebleeds made practicing the memory technique a bit messy.
"Training?"
Eui crossed her arms and scowled.
"To what? Bleed to death? Between an aura that makes people want to throw up and the ability to bleed out on command, your cultivation is going in a very strange direction."
Jia chuckled as she rose to her feet and wobbled a bit from the dizziness. She might have overdone it a bit—her ki could sustain her through what would otherwise be traumatic harm, but there was still a limit to how much blood she could afford to lose.
Eui’s expression softened to one of concern when she saw the state that Jia was in.
"Jia, you can’t keep doing this, it’s not healthy—and I don’t just mean in the literal, bleeding to death sense. I don’t understand your obsession. You’re doing all this for what? Thirty seconds of slightly better memory?"
"Thirty six and a half—a bit more than—"
"I don’t care, Jia! That’s not the point."
Jia took a deep breath and collected her thoughts.
"It’s not just slightly better memory. It might be the best chance I have at figuring out how to resist Yue’s moon dreaming—whatever before next week."
"Why next week? Nothing is going to happen, Jia. We’ll go up to the mountain, look around for a demon that’s definitely long gone, then come back empty handed while those Qin idiots wonder what to do next. I thought I was supposed to be the paranoid one!"
"I don’t know, Eui. I just have this awful premonition that it’s not going to go that smoothly. Everything we know about Zheng Long, Han Yu, and Yan Hao, we learned from Yan Yue, and she’s not in nearly as much control of the situation as she pretends to be."
Eui crossed her arms and leaned against the doorframe.
"I still don’t see how this helps. How are you supposed to use this in a fight?"
"Well, it’s supposed to also make me think faster, though that doesn’t do me much good when the only thing I can focus on is maintaining the technique. That’s why I need to practice. Anyway, Eunae’s coming over for training soon, do you mind letting me get cleaned up?"
Before Eui’s confession, Jia probably wouldn’t have bothered asking for privacy, but it felt a bit awkward to shower in front of her now. Eui blushed and turned around before pausing.
"Uh, wait, you’re not going to try using this new technique for your staring contests are you?"
Satisfied that Eui wasn’t looking, Jia began to undress—she had only been wearing some cheap underclothes anyway, to save herself having to wash the blood off.
"That was the plan. Maybe not today, but this week for sure. I need to be as ready as possible for next week’s trip. Don’t worry, I’ll give her ample warning."
Eui began to turn around to protest, but stopped when she heard the sound of water. She instead kept her back turned as she responded.
"That’s not the part I’m worried about, Jia. I just feel like you’re rushing things too much—there’s such a thing as working too hard, you know."
"I know, Eui, I just don’t have time. Too many things happened at once, and I’m not ready for any of it."
"Just—don’t hurt yourself, okay? It would kind of ruin the point if you ended up injuring yourself in the process, right?"
Jia finished rinsing herself off and turned off the water. She dried off with one of the less bloody towels as she responded.
"You’re right—sorry for worrying you, Eui. I’ll try to moderate myself a bit more."
Eui let out a sigh of relief and Jia smiled before throwing a wet towel at her, eliciting an indignant yelp.
"Now get out of here so I can get dressed!"
Eui giggled and vacated the doorframe, promising retaliation as she shut the door behind her to give Jia privacy. Jia sighed as she donned her usual uniform and watched the blood-stained water slowly drain away. Eui was right, she was pushing herself too hard. Why, then, did she feel like it still wasn’t enough? She couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding as she went to put some tea on to receive Eunae.
* * *
Jia’s conversation with Eui reminded her that they really did know precious little about their new adversaries. In particular, Jia had never even seen Yan Hao since the introduction ceremony. Today, she intended to change that.
It wasn’t like it was particularly difficult—unlike Qin Zhao’s invitation-only classes, or Do Hye’s formal registration, Yan Hao ran open lectures and did not turn away any students. All they had to do is pick a time when he was teaching and show up.
It came as a bit of a surprise, then, when she arrived with a small group of friends to discover that they were the only non-Qin students in the class. She had brought Eui, Rika, Dae, and Eunae. Dae was a little bit awkward, joining the group of girls, but it hadn’t taken much convincing to bring him along.
