Eunae’s second demonstration went as smoothly as the first, but it was no less fascinating. Instead of scrawling a complicated formula across the entire surface of the soul, Eunae’s Soulfire claws reduced themselves to a needle-fine point and penetrated deep into the chaotic mass of Ja Yun’s soul.

It was difficult for Yoshika to see what Eunae was doing, but judging from the sweat on her brow it required an intense focus and greater exertion than appearances would suggest. The entire thing only took a minute or so before Eunae withdrew her power and wiped her forehead.

“Finished. Ja Yun, what is your favorite color?”

Ja Yun grimaced.

“Blue—Eunae, that’s not trivial! It’s going to mess with all my clothing choices!”

“Going from green to blue isn’t so bad, and I can fix it after I’ve had some time to recover. In any case, Yoshika, as you can see I’ve made great strides in direct and most importantly fine control over how my power works.”

Yoshika nodded.

“We’re impressed. Do you think it’s enough to make the repairs to our soul?”

Eunae bit her lip and shook her head slowly.

“Not yet. Or rather, I think I probably could do it, in theory, but the risk of error is too high. I need more practice. You said you had an artificial soul framework like Li Meili’s right?”

“Yeah, we were hoping to make some adjustments to hers. Li Meili has a lot more than just our neuroses holding her back, and we owe it to her to fix the mess we made when we created her.”

“Well, as long as you don’t expect me to experiment on her directly, I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

Yoshika smiled.

“Of course! We do have a few questions first, though.”

“Ask anything.”

“First—we’ve been dying to know, what was up with that ‘Yes mistress’ thing? We assume it has something to do with how you used your power without making eye contact, which is otherwise our next question.”

Ja Yun blushed deep red and Eunae sighed.

“It does, yes. Our souls are naturally guarded against intrusion—otherwise any blast of essence would have the potential to horribly disrupt a cultivator. Techniques that influence the mind and soul need a way to bypass that. By default, my gaze uses eye-contact.”

“Kind of like how Melody of the Dreaming Moon uses sound.”

Eunae wobbled her head a bit in that indecisive way of hers.

“Yes and no. To be more specific, Melody of the Dreaming Moon uses music, not just sound. The song must move the listener. Rather than piercing our eardrums all those years ago, we might have countered Yue’s song by simply closing our hearts to the beauty of the song.”

Yoshika frowned.

“That’s a lot easier said than done. Besides, she doesn’t always need the music anymore.”

“Because she has a domain, yes. Suppressing another cultivator’s domain or aura is another way of exposing their soul, but it’s unreliable for my technique. I would compare it to trying to perform delicate surgery on a patient that is tied down but still actively struggling.”

“That sounds like it could still be used to do a lot of damage.”

Eunae frowned darkly.

“Perhaps, but if I wanted to kill someone there are far more efficient ways to do it. That’s something else I can’t stress enough—this is difficult, Yoshika. Not just in terms of focus or effort, but the power as well. It’s not like using my gaze, I have to cultivate this Soulfire myself.”

Yoshika stroked her chins thoughtfully.

“That sounds a lot like our Steps of the Stalker technique. We can cultivate Shadow essence slowly over time, but actually using it takes a lot out of us. Erasing our presence drains us fast, and actually spirit walking is almost impossible without Heian’s help and even then it leaves us totally empty.”

She recalled the last time they had used spirit walking extensively. It had been to pull all of their friends into a realm of shadow, halfway between the physical and spiritual realms. That was only possible due to the mutated Shadowfire essence that Heian had gained after merging with some of Eunae’s Soulfire, and it had left the poor spirit utterly drained for over a month. She was still recovering.

Eunae nodded in agreement.

“That’s exactly right. I think that when I use my gaze, the spirit fragment within me uses herself—a part of my own soul—to fuel the technique. I shudder to imagine what would happen if I overused or completely expended it in that manner.”

Yoshika pursed her lips. That put the Soulfire essence that she had stolen from Eunae’s spirit fragment into new context. She no longer had any of it left, but if she did, she’d have offered to return it.

“We’ve gotten off track, how does this relate to Ja Yun calling you ‘mistress’? We thought you hated that.”

Eunae huffed.

“I do. Let me explain—when I use my gaze, the power of my Soulfire is greatly enhanced, but I have next to no control. It follows my ‘will’ in only the vaguest sense of the word. Our initial experiments involved trying to rein that power in, but that didn’t yield any more control. In fact, it made the effects of my gaze even less predictable, since I was forcibly stopping it from doing whatever it was trying to do.”

She turned and gestured towards Ja Yun, who averted her eyes and flattened her ears in embarrassment.

“It was Ja Yun who came up with the idea. I already learned how to take hold of the reins, so to speak, and guide them towards my own ends. It was how I repaired Pan Jiaying’s soul when we nearly—well, you know. So then, why let my fickle inner fox spirit have any say at all? Why not just draw the power out myself and take full control?”

Rika patted Ja Yun on the back and beamed.

“Our girl’s pretty clever when she puts her mind to it.”

Yun shook her head.

“It wasn’t that clever! Besides, it turned out there were a dozen reasons why that was easier said than done.”

Eunae nodded.

“Not the least of which is the fact that even after I finally managed to figure out how to draw the Soulfire out from within myself, I couldn’t seem to touch anyone’s soul with it. As though some invisible force was stopping me.”

Ja Yun shrugged.

“It wasn’t really invisible at all—just the same rules that apply everywhere else. The body and aura protect the soul from outside essence. Without the eye contact, there was no way in. So...I created one.”

Now both Ja Yun and Eunae were blushing, and though Yoshika was beginning to understand, Rika gave them each a sympathetic smile before turning to Jia’s body specifically.

“Yun is really into the idea of someone else controlling her. You know, sexually? So if she fantasizes real hard about it right as Eunae is trying to poke around in her soul, it gives her an opening—same as eye contact or music.”

Ja Yun gave Rika a mortified look while Eunae just buried her face in her hands—her veil not being enough to cover her embarrassment. Yoshika sighed.

“I...probably could have gotten the picture without such a vivid explanation.”

Rika snorted.

“Look, we’re all grownups here, and this is way too important to leave anything to assumptions or euphemism. Yun, you have nothing to be embarrassed about.”

Yoshika schooled her expressions and nodded.

“You’re right. We’re sorry for being immature about it. There’s one thing that doesn’t add up, though—our Melody of the Dreaming Moon doesn’t work the same way Yue’s does. We can only bring people close to us into the illusion.”

Ja Yun cleared her throat and raised a hand meekly, her cheeks still glowing slightly.

“A-actually, I think I can answer that. I think that on a technical level, Yue’s technique traps the victim’s awareness within their own soul, giving Yue the ability to shape their dream as she likes and take over their body. Yours does the opposite—you bring people’s awareness into your soul, which means you have to be the one giving them an opening.”

Yoshika nodded. Her domain of Unity formed tangible bonds with the people she cared about most. Those bonds gave her friends and family a place in her soulscape—apparently literally.

“What about raw projections of the soul, like Rika’s simulacra? Burning them with soulfire hurts her, and we remember Grandmaster Murayoshi demonstrating how much our own version of the technique exposed us.”

Rika smiled sardonically.

“Yeah—you guessed right. I’ve been working on fixing it, but anyone savvy enough could use my copies as a backdoor to my soul.”

Ja Yun shook her head.

“It’s not that easy. Your domain still protects your copies from crude assaults, but it is a vulnerability.”

Yoshika scratched her chins.

“Could we fix that using what we learned from creating Li Meili? Her physical body was formed from wood and dirt, but we only needed to make it once. After we reintegrated her, we were able to reform her—body and all—from nothing.”

Rika grinned proudly and threw an arm around Ja Yun’s shoulders.

“We’re way ahead of you! Yun showed me how you did that, and I’ve already started working on giving my copies physicality.”

“Working on it?”

“We’re not all peerless geniuses who can create a person from whole cloth over the course of a few days, Yoshika. Yes—working on it. My simulacra don’t have Meili’s artificial soul framework to do all the heavy lifting, and joining them to homunculi is hard.”

Eunae cleared her throat for attention.

“Ahem, speaking of which—Yoshika, you said you had an extra one that we could practice on?”

“Eh, sort of. It’s Jianmo’s avatar—or what’s left of it. We had to take it apart in order to learn how to recreate it, and we promised him we’d put it back together afterwards.”

“Except you don’t know how, do you?”

Yoshika sighed.

“No, we don’t. He probably knew we wouldn’t be able to—he can be sneaky like that. We’re hoping that you can, and that in the process we’ll learn something that we can use to help Li Meili.”

“I see. Well, let’s take a look, shall we?”

Since Jianmo’s avatar wasn’t a physical object, Yoshika had to bring her friends into her soulscape to show them what was left of it. While their physical bodies meditated in a circle, their spirits sat around a table in an image of Yoshika’s old dormitory, from the Grand Academy of Spiritual, Martial, and Arcane Arts where they had all met.

It was the inner sanctum of her soul—the place where she felt most at home even after all these years.

On the table between them was the framework of Jianmo’s avatar—a complex structure of divine essence capable of ‘growing’ an artificial soul around it. Even after creating her own avatar using what she’d learned from it, Yoshika struggled to understand the principles behind it.

The artificial soul would project its own aura, hosting the memories of its creator and mimicking their personality. Jianmo’s didn’t have a body, but the artificial soul could be fused with a body as Li Meili’s had in order to allow it to think and act fully independently of the creator.

Jianmo insisted that it wasn’t the same as creating a person, but Yoshika disagreed, and Li Meili’s existence reinforced her opinion. Li Meili had her own thoughts and feelings—her own wants and needs that were independent of Yoshika. If not for her reliance on emotional substrate and her total inability to grow, Li Meili could just leave and live out her own life.

Which meant that this copy of Jianmo was also a person—or had been, before Yoshika had let him convince her to vivisect him. She hoped that she’d be able to right that wrong now, but Eunae’s frown was making her nervous.

“Yoshika...I’m not sure there’s anything left to salvage here.”

Yoshika winced. She’d been afraid of that.

“What do you mean? I was careful not to destroy anything.”

“It just—how do I explain this? It doesn’t feel like a soul to me, or rather it does but not in a way that I can make sense of.”

“You’re going to need to elaborate a bit more on that.”

Eunae sighed.

“When I use my gaze, all I have to do is command the victim and my inner spirit does the rest. When using my power directly I have to do everything myself. How do I know which part of the soul changes what? There’s no map or instructions, and every soul is unique. As you saw before, even a simple change can be quite intricate, so how do I figure it out?”

“I’m guessing you’re about to tell me?”

She shook her head.

“No. Because I don’t actually know the answer. I just...know. Perhaps I am drawing from some instinct provided by my spiritual ancestor, but I just innately understand what I need to do to accomplish my goals.”

Yoshika furrowed her brows.

“I see. And you don’t get that with this?”

“It feels...incomplete. I can see how the pieces fit together, but some are missing and I don’t know how to account for that.”

“Well, the avatar was originally split into two images, but we used one to fuel a sacred art when we fought the Magma elemental back in the palace of Goryeo. Maybe those are the missing pieces? Jianmo mentioned that he’d been stripped to the bare essentials.”

Eunae nodded.

“That could be it. I can attempt to restore this as much as possible, but I’m not sure whatever we end up with will be recognizable.”

Yoshika bit her lip. Just how many mistakes had she made in her relentless pursuit to preserve Jung’s life?

“I made a promise. Can we at least try?”

Eunae sat back and sighed.

“I’ll do my best. Get comfortable, though—this might take some time.”