Yoshika sat in a circle with Rika, joining hands as they had during their experiment with the Melody of the Dreaming Moon. She’d never attempted joint meditation with more than two people before, so they had done a lot of preparation in order to ensure that things would go as smoothly as possible. First, they had agreed that since Rika’s personality would likely be somewhat overwhelmed by Yoshika’s, they would simply continue to refer to themselves as Yoshika while joined—much as she did with Heian. Second, to prevent the connection from destabilizing too quickly, they spent an hour on meditation beforehand just to empty their minds—a trick that Yan Yue had taught them to prepare for Yoshika’s third-stage breakthrough.

Finally, they agreed ahead of time to create a circuit of ki, starting with Eui, then going around the circle through Jia to Rika, and finally back to Eui. This would prevent Rika from being hurt by Jia or Eui’s more volatile affinities. Jia’s Lightning affinity and Eui’s Destruction affinity could each be dangerous, though they were well accustomed to keeping their elements in check by now. The biggest concern was that once those affinities combined into Yoshika’s more docile Warmth, by sheer frustrating coincidence, adding Rika’s Force affinity would bring the overall balance of elements back to a combination of Fire, Air, and Yin—in other words, back to Destruction. Though it was possible that the overabundance of Fire essence would be enough to overpower the other primary elements—it was the one element all three of them shared an affinity for—they nevertheless proceeded with caution.

Once the prescribed hour had passed, Yoshika began the process. Slowly, carefully, a circuit began to form. They had to stop and retry a few times as Rika was startled by the sudden volatility of her normally stable essence, but soon a full circuit was complete and Yoshika could sense Rika’s body as if it were her own. But it wasn’t her own—not yet. There was still a crucial step to complete.

As one, Yoshika and Rika withdrew their domains inward, allowing the essence in their souls to mix and mingle beyond simply what was kept within their bodies. Gradually, as their essence flowed between one another, the line between Rika’s domain and Yoshika’s grew fuzzier and fuzzier, until at last they became one.

She gasped at the sudden sensation of becoming another person—something she had only experienced once before, the very first time Yoshika had come into being all those years ago. Despite what she had decided before, she knew that she wasn’t Yoshika—at least not just Yoshika. The inclusion of Rika’s thoughts, memories, and feelings made her a much more different person than she expected. Still, it was a hassle to name herself, so she would continue on as ‘Yoshika’ for now.

Already she could feel a headache mounting, and she had to take a moment to reconcile her thoughts—Rika and Yoshika were not nearly so easily compatible as Jia and Eui had been. To ground herself, she recalled the conversation that had led up to their meditation in the first place. Despite joking about it, she hadn’t literally left Ja Yun tied up back at the embassy, though that did give her a few intriguing ideas for later. A small part of her was embarrassed at the thought, but it was drowned out by the rest. As she was now, Yoshika was perfectly comfortable in her sexuality, and wasn’t afraid to admit that Ja Yun was cute, fun to tease, and a very good match.

Idly, thoughts of Eunae came to the surface, unbidden. But Yoshika didn’t consider it a betrayal—for one, Eunae had rejected Rika, but for the most part she just wasn’t particularly interested in her current form. That led to an interesting realization—while some parts of her personality had been drowned out by the gestalt, it wasn’t neatly split up into Jia, Eui, and Rika. Rather, parts of each were drowned out by the parts that aligned most with the others. As if every thought was chosen by an instant and silent committee of her three aspects.

As intriguing as the lessons she was learning about herself were, now that she’d found common ground between her three aspects, Yoshika felt sufficiently grounded to get to the actual point of this exercise—advancing Rika’s techniques. In specific, Rika had been hoping to gain insight on a way to split her thoughts between her doppelgangers, and Yoshika already had some ideas about just that.

With a thought, Yoshika began to construct an essence clone. Normally she’d be more cautious and thoughtful in her approach, but she was feeling particularly bold at the moment. Rika’s process was quite simplistic—using her own soul as a model, she crafted a sort of metaphysical duplicate of herself, then infused it with Force-elemental ki in order to give it form and substance. The most natural form it could take was her own, which it would without any additional work—but she could also adjust its form, shaping it as she would an illusion from her Valley of Illusory Mists technique.

It was a clever way of combining her signature techniques into a single style, capitalizing on her unified cultivation—if she did say so herself—but it was too rudimentary. It didn’t make the most out of the fusion of body, mind, and soul. Her copies had reasonable facsimiles of body and soul, but no minds, and though they could be used as proxies for Rika to cast spells, it wasn’t really the same as the copy casting a spell itself.

As she worked on the new clone, her mind wandered a bit—puzzling out a solution to the problem. She now had so much extra mental bandwidth that it was actually challenging to focus on one thing at a time. Jianmo’s illusory double seemed like a good case study for Rika’s technique. She had claimed that it was actually quite easy to copy the memories and personality of a person—though the utility of a peak xiantian cultivator’s definition of ‘easy’ was up for debate. Still, it was an intriguing thought. Could Yoshika make a copy of her own mind?

Probably not, she decided—that was way too complicated. However, she didn’t need a perfect copy, just a close approximation. The body and soul of her copies were already far from perfect, so there was no need to get so picky about the mind. Good enough was good enough. While she was at it, Yoshika also considered ways that she could improve the other parts of the clones. The pseudo-soul was basically just a blob of essence with a shell of ki around it to keep it in form, but Yoshika could do better than that.

She’d once had to reform Jia’s meridians from scratch in order to put the soul back into her lifeless body—not the most pleasant memory, but an invaluable learning experience, in retrospect. At the time, it had been an emergency, and she’d had help from her spirit halves—she’d never expected to do anything like it again. She went through the process carefully, crafting each pathway carefully as she faithfully replicated a facsimile of her own soul.

As she worked, Yoshika noticed a presence within her domain perking up and taking notice—Heian watching with interest as she crafted an artificial body. She supposed it made a certain amount of sense that the spirit would be interested, since gaining a body was one of her long-term goals. Heian had already been present when Yoshika restored Jia to life, though—what was different about what she was doing now?

Soon, she had a complete body-and-soul simulacrum to work with—all it needed was a mind. But how to give it one? Well, Yoshika only had the one mental technique to work with, as powerful as it was, and so she started with that, accelerating her thoughts dramatically with Absolute Awareness. As she did, several things immediately snapped into perspective.

As was always the case with Absolute Awareness, every single sensation began to burn itself indelibly into her mind—a side effect of the technique that was actually the reason she’d learned it in the first place originally. Back then it had been as a way to unpack what happened to her mind under the influence of Eunae’s indomitable gaze, but now she mostly just used it as a way to take mental snapshots of important moments. Those sensations—that Absolute Awareness—extended to her new clone as well, which was fully manifested in the courtyard next to her.

This fourth body that she’d created for herself looked quite a bit like Yoshika’s spirit form, with a few differences that no doubt came from Rika’s influence. She was a head taller—though still shorter than Rika herself—and had a lithe, athletic build rather than either the petite form of Jia or Eui, or Rika’s amazonian physique. The rest of the details—horn, hair, clothes, eyes—were much the same, except that she had a dusky skin tone that fell somewhere between her usual pale complexion and Rika’s deep tan.

Her appearance had evidently also startled everyone around her. Time appeared to have slowed down to a complete halt, but Yoshika could see her mother with a shocked expression on her face, and the tea tray that she’d been clearing away frozen in midair as it fell from her hands. Narae was looking up at her with stars in her eyes, while Hayakawa simply wore a curious frown. Hmm, she probably should have told them about her spirit form. She’d been trying to ease her parents into the world of cultivation to avoid giving her the same shock as Jung, but that plan had now backfired on her spectacularly. Oh well, that was something she’d just have to deal with when she was finished.

Perhaps it was the addition of a third mind’s processing ability, but she was finding Absolute Awareness to be much easier to maintain than usual. That was good news, since what she was about to do would no doubt strain even her newly enhanced mental capacity. Concentrating intently, Yoshika attempted to capture more than just the shallow, surface impressions of her conscious experience with Absolute Awareness. What she wanted wasn’t a snapshot of what she saw and felt, but a total image of her entire self in that exact moment—right down to the inner thoughts.

Focusing for what subjectively felt like hours, Yoshika finally felt her mind starting to buckle under the pressure of what she was subjecting it to and had to stop. The image was much more comprehensive than anything she’d ever made with Absolute Awareness, but it didn’t come anywhere close to what she had been actually trying to accomplish. Nevertheless, she pressed forward, imbuing her newly formed simulacrum with that snapshot as a makeshift mind. Then, she could no longer maintain her focus on Absolute Awareness, and time began to move at its normal pace once again.

Immediately, Yoshika’s bodies all suffered a profuse nosebleed and mind-numbingly painful headaches. All but the simulacrum, which lunged of its own accord for the falling tea-tray, catching it before it could hit the ground and saving the precious ceramics from certain doom at the unforgiving hands of gravity.

“Woah! Careful, mom!”

Yoshika still shared all of the simulacrum’s sensations, even as it moved of its own volition. Her mother stared up at her—she was taller now—with a look of fear and bafflement.

“What—who are you!? What are you doing here?”

Oops—right, she needed to explain. Yoshika could sense the simulacrum drawing on her connection to it in order to answer.

“Uh...right, sorry! We’re Jia and Eui—plus Rika. You’re looking at an illusion—kind of. Our cultivation method includes a technique that lets us merge minds, and we combined that with Rika’s duplicates and illusion skills to make this version of us that combines bodies too! Or something like that anyway—neat, huh?”

An Chunhei blinked twice, slowly.

“I need to sit down.”

As Chunhei took a seat and slowly calmed her breathing, Hayakawa Kaede approached with a concerned frown on her face.

“Yoshika—and Rika? What is this? Please don’t tell me you’ve permanently absorbed my most trusted aide into—whatever this is.”

The simulacrum chuckled.

“No, this isn’t permanent—or it shouldn't be. We’re still meditating, so we don’t actually know for sure.”

Hayakawa raised an eyebrow curiously.

“You...don’t look like you’re meditating.”

Yoshika’s simulacrum just pointed towards the place where Yoshika herself still sat in a circle, her bodies all furrowing their brows in concentration.

“We’re over there. This body is just an illusion, remember? An experiment to try to improve Rika’s technique. Pretty impressive, right?”

Hayakawa nodded.

“It is quite remarkable, yes. But if the experiment is concluded, then why are they still meditating?”

The simulacrum pouted.

“They’re worried that if we stop it will break me. They think they’ve created an entirely new person.”

Yoshika could feel a cold sweat on her bodies, except for the simulacrum which continued to read her mind as it waved over to her with a bright smile.

“It’s okay, me! I’m just a simulation—a memory! You can unmake and remake me as much as you want as long as you still remember me!”

That idea was oddly disturbing, but she knew it was true. The only reason the simulacrum seemed so lifelike now was because it was constantly drawing on its connection to her in order to fill in the extensive blanks. There was no way that the shallow memory that she’d created would be enough to do all that on its own. After just a moment more of hesitation, Yoshika dispelled the simulacrum, returning the essence back to her domain.

Carefully making sure not to leave too much of herself behind in Rika, Yoshika slowly withdrew herself before splitting once more into Jia and Eui. Rika shook her head, reeling a bit from the experience as she wiped her bloody nose.

“Holy shit, that was weird! And it got a little bit creepy towards the end, there. I’m not sure if that’s the direction I want to go with my technique.”

She frowned.

“Kami, I’m not even sure I could replicate what we just did if I tried. But at least I’ve got something to work towards now!”