Altura

The mood was somber as I sat across from my mother in one of the treehouses. I knew that if I did not have this conversation now, I would never have it and end up regretting it.

“So, what do you want to talk so much about?” my mother asked, her tone sharp and accusatory.

“I think it is time we had a talk about you not respecting my boundaries. I specifically told you not to call the Elder of Healing and yet you did it anyway. And you called the Rotere guards without even informing me. Why did you think that all of this was ok?” I asked, my tone grave and serious.

“Oh come on! The Medical Association is absolutely useless! Herbs! Argus asked me what herbs were! Do you really expect me to trust him to do anything after that?” my mother countered, belligerent.

“Yes. Failure, mother, is how a person grows. Argus might have not known enough, but he was more than satisfactory. By having him train under the Elder of Healing you implied that you, and by extension I do not trust him and his association. The same association that saved my life and the lives of many others in the war. Do you know how alienating that would be?” I answered.

“And what can they do if they are alienated? The strong rule, Altura, I do not know what memories you gained from your last life, but this is how things go here.” my mother said.

Uh oh. I needed an escape plan. Right now. But I did not have an escape plan. Not one that could help me escape from a Spirit Tree. Well, at least she wasn’t angry at me yet. Did she say last life? Yes, she did. Ok, calm down Altura, don’t break whatever theory she has in her mind, you don’t even know if it isn’t true.

“No need to act surprised, I knew about them since I saw you, it was obvious. Now, would you let me heal you, so we can awaken your bloodline completely and get this over with?” my mother continued.

“No, Mother, I think we need to have-” I began to say before I was interrupted by my mother’s eyes lighting up.

“No, I think you need to learn a lesson in power. I have it and you don’t. And that is all that matters.” she said as I felt my mind collapse around me. Suddenly we were both in my spirit realm. A place I instinctively knew she was not supposed to be in.

I controlled the surrounding space, somehow knowing that the longer she was here, the weaker I would become. I pushed at her presence, rejecting her with the all the force I could muster. And it worked. Space folded around her, collapsing away from her in an attempt to force her out.

But it didn’t. The force seemed meaningless as she stood right there, not even attacking, resisting me like it was nothing. I put more and more of my will, putting all I could into it, to pull her out at all costs.

“Altura, stop. I am not someone you can just shove out, at this rate you will kill yourself trying to force me out.” my mother said, her voice gentle, yet scathing at the same time. Perhaps she was right, but I would die before I let her into my mind without my permission.

I increased the surrounding suction, feeling her getting sucked in, it was working! And then it stopped. A barrier of Qi came up blocking me, stopping all of my efforts. I knew that was one barrier I could not break, not as I was.

“Perhaps this was ill-advised. But you do know that you will not break through this barrier right?” my mother said, her voice still calm. I was already too far gone to answer her, not that I would even if I could.

“Yes, you do. I suppose you had a point, a commoner cannot truly oppose us, but they can die. And that is quite bad when you have need of them like you seem to.” my mother said as the barrier of Qi collapsed, and she exited the space. A space that was collapsing on itself already. I had just destroyed most of my cultivation. A wave of dizziness overtook me as I fell unconscious, already regretting what I had done. But what choice did I have?

Adreia

Adreia looked at her daughter with puzzlement in her eyes. The art of spirit control, the control over a spirit space, was rare, and prized extraordinarily. And here her daughter was, using it with such adeptness that she could not have been anything but a natural.

The powers had likely found themselves buried or forgotten under the effects of the spirit dysphoria, making her unable to realize she even had them. But once Adreia had entered in they had responded instinctively, making her aware of them.

But no natural could ever hold a candle to a Spirit Tree, a Spirit Tree just understood a spirit space far better than a natural could. As she watched, the space healed itself, the cracks remerging into proper space. A natural could never harm themselves, it was anathema to their power.

A privilege not afforded to others that made them so prized. The challenge to reach Spirit Tree stage was giving proper instruction to the hole to solve a problem it would present. The entire thing would take place in the spirit space and require understanding of Qi, its nature and its interaction with spirit.

A non-natural would and often did harm themselves during this stage, causing them to fail and forever be stuck in the Grand Tree stage due to one wrong instruction. But a natural’s spirit space would heal, it would take decades, but the bottleneck did not exist for them.

But this wound now would just hamper her daughter’s growth, she could not wait decades for it to heal. And thankfully, she didn’t have to. The objects that healed spirit spaces were few and prized, and would only work on naturals and Spirit Trees, but she did have a few on hand.

A Spirit Tree’s spirit space was a natural healing agent, but it would have side effects if it wasn’t processed properly. But processing wasted two-thirds of the core material. Thankfully, the Xombei had helped Altura here.

A trio of Spirit Tree’s had ambushed her just before coming here, and she had not put away her loot yet. Adreia summoned the three spirit spaces from her spirit space. A white air one belonging to one o the southern elder’s, an independent one, likely hired by the Xombei as a mercenary. A yellow-red earth one belonging to one of the Xombei’s own elders, and a pinkish-purple Space element one belonging to a particular Patriarch.

Adreia willed the three of them to clash together and then mashed them, crushing them with her will until they were paste. As she did so, the elemental nature of these spaces crept out, reducing their volume massively. Finally, only a single space’s worth of paste remained.

Using this amount on Altura was truly an excess, but it was a useful excess. The addition would strengthen the spirit space itself, and increase her natural abilities. And besides, she was the one that had caused these injuries in the first place, it was her job to fix them.

The paste poured into the space, healing it and strengthening it. On a visible level, the space was much the same, but on a fundamental level, it was changed by orders of magnitude. The fruits glistened more, the Treeling glowed more, and it was over all just much better.

Now it was time to heal her daughter. Adreia sent her Spirit Qi, a merged form of Qi and the substance that made up the spirit space, into her daughter’s spirit space. The first step was to search for where the dysphoria was. A trickle of Spirit Qi spread out slowly, searching for the wound but not exhausting itself. Qi was spent on acting, Spirit Qi, if used well, was not.

After a few minutes of searching, she found them, three cracks in her daughter’s psyche that had caused a cascade effect. Shockingly, all three were spread out from the brain to the space, existing even in reality, not just in the spirit space.

A deeper analysis revealed what they were. The first was a misunderstanding in the nature of her memories. The persona of her ten-year-old daughter. Already suppressed by an overly tedious regiment that had her throwing tantrums and fighting back, further isolating her and weakening her will to live. The persona had been absorbed by the persona of the much more boisterous and self-assured 17-year-old.

A girl named Varsha Bharatwaj from a world called Earth. Adreia had to admit she had heard of neither of them, but time was a factor here, and she could get all the information she wanted from her daughter later.

The absorption had left the seventeen-year-old thinking that she had replaced the previous persona, making her brain suppress the ten-year-old's feelings to keep up with the theory.

The second was the guilt that stemmed from assuming another’s identity. The dissonance had left her mind reeling and forced her to suppress it.

The third was far more complex. A seventeen-year-old had certain wants and feelings…wants that felt wrong in a ten-year-old’s body. The wants would just fade away if she let it, but the problem seemed to be that Altura had the tendency to just not think about stuff that might cause problems. An avoidance tactic. Solving this one would be hard…but Adreia had a solution that solved all three.

A wise old man had once told her, ‘Stories are the best healing for the spirit, nothing can affect it more…' And Adreia was going to do just that. Taking a deep breath, she began the story Altura needed to hear, the story of how a 17-year-old girl from Earth found herself in this world.