Chapter 185: 249. Exposed

It was always a strange feeling, adding a third party to Yoshika’s gestalt, even temporarily. They didn’t do it often, but whether it was with Heian or Rika, the experience was always a little unnerving. As a triumvirate, Yoshika was very different from her familiar pair. Normally, her conflicting personality traits would resolve into a sort of average, but once Rika entered the mix, that balance was disrupted and some aspects of her personalities would be drowned out by the others.

Eui was quiet and reserved—when she wasn’t at the end of her short temper—but Rika and Jia’s outspoken natures overruled that. Rika’s relaxed demeanor was no match for how ambitious and driven Jia and Eui could be. Perhaps most jarring of all was the way that Jia’s suppressed sexuality was thoroughly unsuppressed by Eui and Rika’s shameless appreciation of the feminine form.

Almost as soon as Rika had joined the triumvirate, Yoshika’s thoughts were practically overwhelmed by thoughts of her romantic prospects—with Eunae’s declaration in particular shining brightly at the forefront of her thoughts. Yoshika tried not to think about it—she’d already accidentally breached Rika and Eunae’s privacy a few times while doing this, and she didn’t want to repeat the mistake.

Instead, she focused on the task at hand. Rika had made huge strides in her simulacra since her breakthrough, and Yoshika made a few adjustments as she recreated the physical embodiment of her soul as a qi construct. The biggest difference between her simulacrum and one of Rika’s clones was the power to channel essence through its own rudimentary facsimile of a dantian. Not enough to cultivate independently, but enough to collect essence and use its own techniques rather than just acting as a conduit for those of the original. Rika had been trying to do the same with her clones, but hadn’t quite managed it yet.

The final piece was a snapshot of Yoshika’s mind—created through an unconventional use of her Absolute Awareness technique—in order to animate it. This was the part that Rika struggled with the most on her own, and even in their triumvirate form, Yoshika couldn’t create a perfect simulation of her own mind. When animated, the simulacrum would draw heavily on its connection to Yoshika in order to replicate her personality. Without that connection, its ability to think and act on its own would be extremely limited.

For the purposes of her demonstration for Murayoshi, she decided to forgo animating the simulacrum in that way. Instead, she borrowed a technique that she’d learned from Yan Yue to project her own mind into the construct and occupy it herself.

It was slightly disorienting to suddenly go from three bodies to just one, especially since the body wasn’t actually familiar to any of her three selves. Still, it felt right. This was her body, crafted specifically to be a representation of her soul. Her long, black and white striped hair was parted by a single horn where Eui’s brand of exile would have been, and her eyes were a mismatched red and gold. It was much the same as Yoshika’s normal spirit form, except that she was much taller than Jia or Eui, and her skin took on Rika’s darker shade of tan.

As she blinked her eyes open to orient herself, she was met with Murayoshi’s scrutinizing gaze uncomfortably close to her face and took a step back.

“Oh! Hello Grandmaster. This is our simulacrum technique—it’s not finished yet, but we’re proud of how much—”

Murayoshi waved a hand in her face to cut her off.

“Quit yappin’ and let me get a good look at ye!”

Yoshika awkwardly stood there as Murayoshi walked in a circle around her, feeling a bit like a piece of artwork being analyzed by a master—which, she supposed she sort of was. Since Jia and Eui were wearing their artifacts, Yoshika was able to use her soul sight to watch as Forge’s ghostly form swirled around her as well, expressing excitement and wonder—a much more comforting feeling than Murayoshi’s cold scrutiny.

Yoshika flushed as the old blacksmith poked and prodded at her. She was willing to tolerate a lot from Murayoshi out of respect for her master, but drew the line when he started tugging on her ears and tail.

“Okay, stop—stop! Do you need to keep touching?! We feel weird enough having you examine our body like that without you getting all handsy.”

Murayoshi snorted, swatting at Forge as she wagged an ethereal finger at him.

“Don’ flatter yerself, girlie. It ent bad. Better’n what I expected from Takeda, but still shoddy. Go on an’ use some ki.”

Yoshika nodded, drawing essence into her makeshift dantian and letting it spread throughout her body. Essences of Force and Mist flowed through her body in Rika’s Hundred Mirror’s technique. What had begun as a combination of the Takeda family’s Unseen Strike and the Awakening Dragon sect’s Valley of Illusory Mists had taken on a life of its own as Rika developed her own personal style.

Idly, Yoshika wondered if she’d be able to make ki clones of her simulacrum, but decided that it wouldn’t be worth the effort to try, especially not with such an incomplete substitute for her meridians.

She took a fighting stance—mostly just out of habit—but Murayoshi just scoffed.

“Forge.”

Yoshika felt an apologetic wave of emotion from the tsukumogami before Forge swept forward and jabbed a finger into Yoshika’s stomach. In an instant, the flow of her ki was disrupted, and her body was wracked by backlash. The simulacrum collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, but Yoshika forced herself to maintain concentration and keep it from dissipating.

In a real body, the loose essence would have become a deviation, but instead it just fled her false meridians and dissipated harmlessly. Once it was gone, Yoshika was able to pick herself up off the ground and brush off the dust.

“Ow. What was that for?”

“A body’s more’n just a body. Ye’ve done a decent job on the outside, but yer basically just a doll. Ye got organs in there? Nerves? If I cut ye, d’ye bleed?”

Yoshika rubbed her stomach and frowned.

“Well, no—we didn’t think we needed to copy that much detail. We can still feel sensation through the clone and control ki with the artificial meridians.”

“Control?! Is that what ye call it? Forge ain’t a fighter an’ she took ye down with one finger.”

Yoshika flushed with embarrassment.

“W-we weren’t expecting it! Besides, fighter or not, Forge is a xiantian spirit isn’t she?”

“Don’t matter. Any half-wit could do the same. Yer all exposed. Ain’t one o’ ye a Lightning God practitioner? Ye oughta know this already! The body ent just a fleshy house for the spirit—it’s protection! Armor! Yer a paper tiger, girlie! One big pressure-point just beggin’ to get exploited.”

The smith was right. Yoshika hadn’t considered it that way before, but she’d given her simulacrum a huge weakness by instilling it with its own set of meridians, slapdash though they were. Without a real flesh-and-blood body in the way, the slightest touch offered any assailant direct and unfettered access to her essence. No wonder Forge had disrupted her so easily—all the spirit needed to do was wave a hand through her false dantian to scatter everything she’d built up.

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“So what are we supposed to do about it? Without meridians, it won’t be able to hold a soul—not even our half-formed mental snapshot. We’d be back to square one with Rika’s technique being too hard to control and no closer to giving Heian her own body.”

“Tch. Don’t ask me! It’s yer damn technique—wait, what was that? Mental snapshot?”

Yoshika shrugged dismissively.

“Yeah, when we first created this technique our original goal was to give Rika’s clones a bit more independence, so that she didn’t have to concentrate on controlling all of them at once. To make that work, we made a sort of copy of our mind. It’s not very good, though.”

“Hrm—show me.”

She wasn’t sure why Murayoshi was so interested in that particular part of the technique, but she didn’t see any reason not to entertain the request. With a bit of concentration, Yoshika withdrew herself from the simulacrum and called forth the partial copy of her mind to take her place.

She felt a moment of disorientation as the simulacrum began to move of its own accord. Even while it was acting independently, she could still feel all of its sensations as though they were her own. Though Jia and Eui experienced something like that with each other every day, to Yoshika, this felt different. The closest experience she could liken it to was when Yue had controlled their bodies with her Melody of the Dreaming Moon—not the most pleasant memory.

The simulacrum opened her eyes.

“It’s done. I can move on my own now.”

Murayoshika glanced between her and Yoshika’s real bodies, still sitting in silent meditation.

“Ye don’t seem any different.”

She scratched the back of her head awkwardly.

“Yeah...well, they still have to maintain constant meditation to stay merged like that. I’m not exactly a combat-ready technique—more of a work in progress.”

“Huh. Right then—Forge!”

“Wait don—”

The clone’s protest was cut off as Forge swiped a hand through her head and she collapsed once again. This time, she didn’t rally herself, and Yoshika had to scramble to recollect the essence that was already being scattered into the air. After all the work she’d put into creating it, her mental copy had been destroyed just like that.

Once she’d salvaged as much as she could, Yoshika took manual control of the simulacrum and picked herself up off the ground angrily.

“What was that for?! You didn’t have to kill her just to make a point!”

The blacksmith scoffed.

“Feh! Forge tells me it weren’t much more than a few thoughts an’ memories held together by yer will alone. That ent independent an’ it sure as feck ent a person. Point is, yer barkin’ up the wrong tree.”

Yoshika frowned, taking in what Murayoshi was saying. He wasn’t the most eloquent teacher, but he did usually have a point. In fact, this was probably the most hand-on lesson she’d ever been taught by the man—usually he just gave a few vague instructions then demanded his students ‘figger it out’ themselves.

“You’re saying that we need to work on the physicality of the clone. No matter how perfectly we replicate its meridians, or how well we control it, anyone can disrupt it without a flesh and blood body for protection.”

Murayoshi nodded.

“Ye’ve figgered out how to turn flesh to ki as part o’ yer ascension to the third stage, but if ye wanna go any further down this path, ye’ll need to learn to go the other way.”

“How?”

Yoshika winced, ready for the old Grandmaster to throw something at her, tell her to fuck off and figure it out on her own, or both, but instead his face grew somber and Forge’s phantom of liquid flame wrapped her arms around his shoulders.

“I worked my whole life to answer that. A fiend’s core was the answer I found. Youkai that ascend do it automatically, an’ I figgered out how to hijack that. It were brutal, gruesome, and led to the destruction of two—maybe even three innocent lives, dependin’ on who ye ask. Ye’ve done good work on this girls, but I can’t help ye. Find yer own way.”

Murayoshi turned away and went back to his work, dismissing them in his usual manner. Yoshika withdrew herself from the simulacrum and allowed it to dissipate back into essence within her soul.

She stayed where she was to meditate for a bit, ruminating on what Murayoshi had told her. Despite his claims to the contrary, the old smith had been very insightful, and she took his warnings to heart. He’d shown her the weaknesses that needed to be improved upon, and given her direction. She would find her own path, as he said.