Fates parallel vol 2, p.5
Fates Parallel Vol. 2, page 5
"Hah! Magus Hwang doesn’t believe in fate because he can just blame anything he doesn’t understand on me! The poor man has an unfortunate tendency to get very close to making grand discoveries and falling just short—then he gets all upset when I solve the puzzle that he discovered."
Eui shook her head and pointed an accusatory finger at Do Hye.
"None of that convinces us that it wasn’t you spying on us! If anything you’ve just told us that you had every reason to do so!"
"Did I? You’ve already given Magus Hwang permission to study you, and despite his silly rivalry he’ll happily accept my cooperation. Why would I steal what I already have?"
Eui paused, and this time it was Jia’s turn to step in.
"Dae told us that you—"
"Dae! My first apprentice is like a son to me, you know, but what son isn’t a little bit embarrassed by their father, hm? Surely there’s someone else who might have reason to investigate you."
Jia shook her head incredulously.
"Who!? Why in the ancestor’s names would Elder Yan Hao—"
She froze mid-speech as she realized what she had just said. Suddenly, her dimensional ring felt unbearably heavy on her finger. The one she had taken from the late young master Yan Zhihao. She’d been so caught up with Tae In-Su and Sun Jaehwa’s appearance that her focus had shifted entirely onto Do Hye.
She had completely forgotten about the Yan family.
5. Consequences
How had they forgotten about Yan? Lee Jia had been worried about Yan Hao when she first saw him, but after Do Hye’s ostentatious presentation and the appearance of Tae In-Su, it had completely slipped her mind. Now, she was painfully aware of the fact that he was almost certainly related to Yan Zhihao in some way.
Had they come to recover their heirloom artifact? According to Elder Qin, dimensional storage artifacts were rare even among higher level cultivators. It had been a massive boon when she’d first obtained it, but Lee Jia was starting to think it might be more trouble than it was worth.
More troubling was the fact that she had been among the last people to see Yan Zhihao alive, and had been known to hold animosity with him. Lee Jia had multiple witnesses who could confirm that Yan Zhihao had been slain by the demon Jianmo, but if it came down to it, would the Yan family accept that?
The Grand Magus’ chuckling broke Lee Jia from her reverie.
"Haha, you seem to have figured something out, Miss Lee. Can I trust that our business is concluded, then?"
Lee Jia bit her lip in frustration—there was still so much she didn’t know. With great reluctance, she nodded.
"I guess so. My apologies for the accusation, Grand Magus. Is there any way you could help us protect ourselves from such intrusions in the future?"
"Of course there is! Get in line and sign up for my lessons on formations! Within a year, I guarantee you’ll be drawing up privacy formations that could even block out my own domain!"
Lee Jia grimaced. She didn’t need it in a year, she needed it now. Eui smirked up at Grand Magus Do Hye.
"Just formations? What happened to alchemy and enchantment?"
"Tsk, apparently it’s considered poor form to trample the other instructors’ specialties. I am technically subordinate to Magus Hwang at the moment, so I will not officially be offering any public lessons on those topics. You’ll just have to make do with Murayoshi and Yan."
Jia couldn’t help but admire the old man’s audacity, just a little bit. Do Hye laughed as she shook her head and sighed. With a small gesture, the sound of the murmuring crowd returned.
"Well then Miss Lee, I believe we have a deal! I look forward to seeing you in my classes. Don’t forget to uphold your end of the bargain."
Jia and Eui stared, nonplussed as Do Hye summoned a colorful whirlwind and disappeared with a flourish. What deal? What bargain? As Lee Jia looked around, she saw the curious stares from the people in the crowd asking the same questions. Dae met her eyes and let out a long suffering sigh.
"You didn’t make any kind of deal, did you?"
When Lee Jia shook her head, he just smiled ruefully and nodded.
"Yeah, he does that. I’d say you get used to it, but he’ll find ways to make sure you don’t, hehe."
Tae In-Su grumbled sadly from next to Dae.
"What have I gotten myself into?"
Lee Jia almost felt some sympathy for Tae, who had apparently signed on as Do Hye’s new apprentice. She was starting to realize that Do Hye’s lack of apprentices wasn’t because he was particularly picky about choosing them, but that nobody wanted to deal with the eccentric old man.
"Say, Dae, do you know how to draw a privacy formation that can block a xiantian cultivator’s domain?"
Dae blinked twice before giving Lee Jia a confused and curious look.
"I’m sorry, what?"
* * *
It turned out that Dae did know how to draw the formation they needed, but the materials required were rare and expensive. Jia and Eui had no shortage of mana stones and cores, but rather than cost, it was an issue of availability. Dae didn’t have the materials, and while the market was in town, it was unlikely they’d find them there either. Dae would have to arrange for them to be sent over with the next caravan which could take weeks or months.
"Ugh, I don’t want to have to worry about some weird old dudes creeping on us while we’re sleeping or meditating—oh ancestors, or bathing."
Eui shuddered as she came to the realization and Jia couldn’t help but share the sentiment. The sudden revelation that they had no real privacy was not a comfortable notion. Until they could have the privacy formation drawn, their only private conversations would have to be communicated mentally.
As the girls approached their house, they saw another girl sitting in front of the door with her eyes closed in meditation. Jia heard Eui’s questioning voice in her head.
"Do you know her?"
"No, I’ve never seen her before. I wonder if she’s one of the new students."
The girl was of average height—which was still a head taller than either Jia or Eui—with a willowy figure and a carefully maintained appearance. Her hair was done up in a pair of buns with some gold ornamentation, and the jewelry she wore was fine without being ostentatious. Everything had been carefully selected to work together with the robes she wore—eschewing the academy uniforms in favor of dress robes in the style of Qin, though the colors were the same.
She opened her eyes as Jia and Eui approached, revealing a pair of glittering green orbs to match her black hair. She smiled and stood, offering them a light bow in greeting.
"Miss Lee Jia and Miss An Eui? I’ve been waiting to meet you. My name is Yan Yue, but as it seems that there are quite a few Yans around, it would please me if you simply called me Yue."
Another Yan? Lee Jia was getting thoroughly sick of that name. She returned the bow and chose her words carefully.
"Nice to meet you, Miss Yue. You seem to have us at a bit of a disadvantage, may I ask how you know us?"
Yan Yue giggled, and it had a stange, musical quality that made Lee Jia vaguely uncomfortable. Within her domain, she could sense that the girl’s voice was infused with qi.
"You underestimate your own renown, girls. No need to be so humble, your names are on the lips of almost every disciple I’ve spoken to since arriving here, and they have so many interesting things to say. I just couldn’t stand not to meet you for myself."
Eui scowled, clearly lacking the patience for Qin’s signature circumlocution.
"Could you please get to the point? What do you want from us?"
Yan Yue covered her mouth with a sleeve as she laughed, and again Lee Jia felt that strange, uncomfortable feeling.
"Oh, you’re as hot tempered as they say! Is it really so strange that I would simply want to meet the ones with such an intriguing reputation? A pair of novice mages who were the first to awaken a second, and then a third discipline, who defeated a qi condensing cultivator in a duel on their second week, and who managed to reach the second stage in all three disciplines in less than half a year. Rather incredible isn’t it?"
Lee Jia blushed a little bit, it felt a little awkward having her accomplishments laid out like that. None of that had felt particularly special at the time—in fact, some of those experiences had been terrible—but even she had to admit that it sounded incredible when voiced like that.
"You see? You’re too modest, girls. I simply wanted to meet you because you’re the most interesting ones around. Oh, that and the fact that you were the last ones to see my little brother alive."
Lee Jia felt a small sense of accomplishment at the fact that she managed to avoid looking shocked or nervous at the sudden revelation. Schooling her expression, she instead simply looked a bit sad—an emotion she didn’t have to emulate, as the deaths of Yan Zhihao and his cohort had been weighing on her for months.
"I don’t know what you heard, Miss Yue, but we were not just the last ones to see Yan Zhihao. We were there when he died. If not for his sacrifice, we might all have been incinerated by that fire elemental."
The official story was that Yan had died in a last-ditch effort to destroy the fire elemental. The instructors had told them not to speak of the demon Jianmo to other students.
Yan Yue properly laughed, then. Not the demure little giggle from before, but a real, hearty belly laugh.
"Ahahahaha! Oh, that’s a very good story! Everyone loves a noble sacrifice. Too bad the spoiled little shit would never have actually done it. He’d sooner bring everyone down around him than sacrifice himself to save others."
Jia felt a bit stupid. Of course his sister would know Yan Zhihao’s personality. Somehow, she had assumed that they would be a loving family—forgiving or even blind to each other’s faults. Evidently, Yan Zhihao’s unlikability had been universal.
"Besides which, I happen to know for a fact he didn’t die to fire. My family uses a kind of divination artifact, you see—spiritual jade tablets linked to our souls and bound to share the same fate. If little Zhihao had been incinerated, so would his jade tablet. Instead, the tablet was bisected, which means so was poor little Zhihao."
Lee Jia scowled irritably. What kind of magic was that? How was she supposed to know? Yan Yue cocked her head and gave Lee Jia a condescending smile.
"Aw, don’t make that face, you’ll get wrinkles. Don’t worry, I’m not upset that the little moron got himself killed. If anything, I’m glad to be rid of the spoiled brat, but I’m afraid that for my own reasons I need to find out how he actually died and who did it."
Lee Jia cast a sidelong glance at Eui and spoke telepathically.
"Should we tell her?"
"I don’t see why not. She already knows the bullshit story the instructors gave everyone is fake, and if we don’t, she’ll just assume we killed him ourselves."
Lee Jia let out a long suffering sigh and flicked an ear irritably.
"Fine. We were told not to talk about it, but I don’t want you getting the wrong idea. There was some kind of sword demon sealed in the cave where we faced the fire elemental. During the battle the seal was broken and the demon destroyed the elemental and killed Yan Zhihao."
Yan Yue raised an eyebrow incredulously.
"A demon? And it just so happened to kill Zhihao and his companions while leaving all of you alive? Why is that, I wonder?"
Eui scoffed and crossed her arms in a defiant posture.
"His ‘companions’ died to the fire elemental as human shields for Zhihao. And the demon only killed Zhihao because the rest of us had the common fucking sense not to piss it off. Also, it didn’t exactly ‘spare’ us—it trapped us in that cave for almost a week and then left."
Jia nodded to confirm Eui’s story.
"If Eui and I hadn’t broken through we’d probably still be rotting in that cave right alongside Yan Zhihao."
Yan Yue frowned slightly and bit her thumbnail, glancing back and forth between Lee Jia and Eui.
"There’s something odd about you two, but I can’t figure out what it is. Okay, let’s say I believe you—and trust me, Zhihao being unable to avoid offending someone to save his life is very believable—what happened to his body? You didn’t just leave him to rot there, did you?"
Lee Jia grimaced as she recalled the sorry state Yan’s body had been in after they escaped the cavern.
"No, we cremated the body—it seemed like the sensible thing to do."
"I suppose, if you were going to tell everyone he was incinerated by an elemental. What of his possessions?"
Lee Jia shrugged.
"He hadn’t been carrying much. His robe burned with him, and we left his sword as a grave marker. The only things that survived the battle were the beast cores his group had collected during the expedition."
Yan Yue’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, and Lee Jia thought she saw a dangerous glint in them that made her shudder.
"I see, it must have been cumbersome carrying all those mana cores."
"Not really, most of their packs were destroyed by the fire but we just carried them—"
"Jia, don’t!"
"—in, uh...our own packs. We had extra room."
Lee Jia began to sweat a bit nervously, sparing Eui a grateful glance for the mental warning. Yan Yue glanced curiously between them and narrowed her eyes further.
"You’re certain there was nothing else? You’re acting rather oddly."
"My apologies Miss Yue, this is a difficult topic. I don’t blame you for being suspicious, but though Yan Zhihao and I dueled once, I held no grudge against him. I was genuinely saddened by his death."
Lee Jia bowed apologetically—the effect of which was somewhat dampened by the fact that Eui did not follow her example—and Yan Yue sighed dismissively.
"Very well, then. I suppose our conversation is finished, for now."
"Thank you, Miss Yue. If you’ll excuse us—"
Yan Yue withdrew a fan from her sleeves and opened it as she held an arm out to the side to block Lee Jia from passing her. She wore a condescending smile as she spoke.
"Sorry, I said that our conversation was finished, not that I was letting you go. If it helps any, I believe you—mostly. But I’m afraid the people I answer to won’t be satisfied with just that."
Lee Jia’s guard went up immediately, but Eui’s reaction was faster. A destruction-ki empowered knife flew unerringly towards Yan Yue, but passed through her harmlessly. She giggled as her form shimmered and rippled where the knife had passed through.
"It’s cute that you girls think you have a chance, but I’m not in the habit of telling my opponents that we’re fighting until I’ve already won."
Yan Yue’s voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, and now it was definitely empowered with that unsettling qi that Lee Jia had sensed before. Jia and Eui quickly stood back to back and extended their domain outwards as far as they could in order to find where the real Yan Yue was hiding.
The more Lee Jia focused on her domain, the more wrong everything seemed to feel. Within her domain, Yan Yue seemed as real as any other person—even as her illusory form shimmered and rippled. Conversely, everything else felt fake—from the house behind Yan Yue, to the floor she was standing on, everything seemed to be made of energy imbued with the idea of reality.
Closing her eyes, Lee Jia focused on her domain, ignoring her other senses entirely. What was real, and what was illusion? She was real, Eui was real, Yan Yue was real, the knife that Eui had thrown—illusion, but how?
"Eui, try another knife. I think we’re caught in some kind of illusory technique, and I’m trying to understand it."
"No shit! Alright, you’re better at thinking through stuff like this, I’ll trust you."
Jia watched carefully through her domain as Eui...didn’t move at all. She felt Eui attempting to infuse something with her ki, but the energy just dissipated into the air. Then, the idea of a knife flew harmlessly past Yan Yue—Eui still hadn’t moved.
"Alright, I tried—no luck. What did you see?"
"Eui I think we might be in serious trouble. You didn’t even move, the illusion just tricked you into thinking you did. I think we’re trapped in our own minds."
Jia tested her theory by swiping her hand through Yan Yue’s head, only to find that the real body she sensed within her domain didn’t respond. On closer inspection, she realized that their bodies were moving unbidden—walking somewhere. Yan Yue’s laughter resounded melodically from all around them.
"Ahahaha, it’s always so entertaining watching them struggle. You’re being unusually quiet, though—there’s usually a lot more kicking and screaming. As I thought, there’s definitely something strange about you two."
Lee Jia ignored Yan Yue’s taunting and tried to think of a way out of this. Their minds were compromised and their bodies were disabled, but their opponent was either unable or unwilling to cause them further harm—otherwise they would probably already be dead.
"Eui, do you have any techniques that you can use without moving your body? I’m pretty sure she’s actually close to us and unable to do anything while using whatever technique is ensnaring us."
"Not unless you count ‘emitting a tranquil and relaxing atmosphere’. Tranquility of the Verdant Marsh isn’t really a combat technique."
Jia let out a sigh of frustration. She’d known that, but had hoped that Eui had something else. Jia’s own modified version of the same technique—which Magus Hwang had uncharitably named ‘Corruption of the Fetid Bog’—was coming along very slowly without Elder Qin’s help. She wouldn’t be able to do more than mildly discomfort their captor.
Most of Jia’s progress had been in magic and martial arts, with her spiritual arts lagging behind. Just how far behind was becoming painfully obvious as she found herself completely helpless against Yan Yue’s technique. Without any useful spiritual techniques or the ability to move her body, the only things she had left were the shock spells she had on her, but without the ability to direct them—
