Over the weekend, while incarnation Yuriko was busy having fun setting hearts ablaze and dousing passions with cold water, her true body was cooling her heels in Junktown. She spent a couple of days in debauchery with Gwendith, Heron, or sometimes, both at the same time. After she sated her lusts, and after both of her lovers were happy and wrung out, she spent her time in meditation or training.

Connecting the Fifth Phase of Severing Shard to the other Four Phases took nothing but time. All she had to do was adjust the beginning and end of the resonating stances so she could transition between them smoothly, applying the adjustment to each of the thirteen stances per phase.

The first stances, the opening movements from neutral to readying to fight, were the easiest to modify, but it still took her several hours to do it. But as she moved on to the next stances, she found out that allowing the resonance to transfer and convert from one element to another was the most difficult part. It involved using a strand of consciousness per transition to hold everything down until she completed the process.

She was making new connections between the stances, and the original ones were quite resistant. It wasn’t as easy as just doing it physically. She had to keep in mind how her Animus circulated within her body and her weapons while doing so. Simultaneously, she immersed her mind with the Ennoia of Radiant Flying Swords as she distilled the Swords part from the Flying and Radiant parts.

It was harder than she first expected since all three aspects of the Ennoia were intertwined tightly. It took a while, and even as she tried it, idle thoughts often sent her mind wandering off tangent.

Perhaps the very first thing she needed to ascertain was what exactly was an Ennoia?

There were many words used by different cultures, though she only really remembered Bresia. Truth, they called it, but in some of Damien’s memories, she might have heard him, or someone close to him, calling it that.

Even Damien’s knowledge felt contradictory, and, well, she had a guess why it was so. She grew up in the Shattered Realm, the Chaos Sea, and there was a fundamental difference in the make-up of reality there compared to here. She only had to look in the dreamscape to know. Here, there was no dreamscape unless she Willed it so. Here, the layers of reality weren’t smushed together with the Primordial Chaos Realm. And there were three distinct layers that separated the Material from Primordial Chaos.

In the Shattered Realm, Primordial Chaos was reachable just by going deep enough into the Sea. The realms of Thought, Ideals, and Desire were in the way.

Add to the fact that her experience with her two Ennoias was radically different, so she couldn’t be sure what exactly Ennoias were. Her Ennoia of Radiance just existed.

As she meditated, her thoughts went back to her earliest brush with it. She was sure it happened when she first craved exposing herself to the Radiant Sun, and that was after she first went through body forging, which she learned to do using her Facet and from the Golden Silhouette.

From there, Radiance just seeped into her life and she eventually formed the Ennoia. And unlike Radiant Flying Swords, there was nothing for her to meditate on, nothing for her to delve, explore, or ponder. It just is.

With the Ennoia of the Radiant Flying Swords, she felt as if she connected with something outside of herself. A greater thing that held everything to do with flying swords combined with her Radiant energy. Which was odd, if she thought about it. Surely, swords could not have existed outside of beings that were capable of forging and using it, right? Who used flying swords anyway? Only those who can mentally control them? Otherwise they would be thrown swords, right? And swords weren’t meant to be ranged weapons too.

The world was vaster than she realised, and she supposed the source of the knowledge the Ennoias gave her… well, it might have been transmitted through the Realm of Ideals. Maybe. She wasn’t sure at all and she had no more proof of anything other than her instincts. But, maybe if she pondered the mysteries of her Ennoia of Radiant Flying Swords while she projected her mind and Anima into that realm, it would be easier to get things done.

Perhaps it wasn’t only the Realm of Ideals. Perhaps Ennoias are birthed and supported by all the Realms too. Her mind went around in circles for the better part of the day, but that was only a few strands. The rest of her focused on her task.

The next day was Sunsday in Astoria and her incarnation body didn’t have anything better to do other than train. She moved to Greyham Park early morning, walked off the jogging path and picked up a relatively straight fallen branch. She seeped her Anima into it and gently tried to straighten it out.

The branch turned to ash.

She found another branch and just whittled it down into the shape of a sword, then she began going through the sword dances. She went through every single stance in the Five Phases, pausing and adjusting when she felt a hiccup in the smoothness of the flow. Her incarnation body was not identical to her true body. It was smaller, a bit less dense and lighter, but her default Anima density was three times as much as normal.

She was also inside a world where the density of Chaos and the Elemental energies was far below normal. It wasn’t quite as bad as Irvalla, and for that matter, she wondered what happened to that plane after she released the shards contained in Chaos Crystals. She had felt the ambient Chaos rise there, but it was about a tenth less than what she could feel here in Astoria.

That little Ambient Chaos wouldn’t be enough to allow everyone to create an Animus Core, even if she’d taught what she could at that time. Perhaps the technique they called Occult Resonance would have progressed to match the other methods of Anima strengthening…

Right now, with a different body type, Yuriko’s true and incarnation bodies were cross-referencing, adapting, and improving the Five Phases at a prodigious pace. At one point, her true body did one stance, while her incarnation did a different one then they switched and connected the stances. The difference in the resonance flow helped her pinpoint where the rough spots were. The difference in the density of ambient energies between Dragon Fall City and Astoria also highlighted the weaknesses of the connections.

She skipped lunch altogether, even if her incarnation body was hungry. Her true body could subsist on Animus, distilled Chaos, or Elemental energies, she found, though that didn’t stop her tummy from growling. It also consumed some of her body’s energy storage, in her true body’s case, the Radiant sources within all her cells. Since those sources replenished Radiance faster than she could consume them, she effectively could never starve. Hmm, maybe she didn’t need to breathe either? An experiment for another time.

Her incarnation body only had a fraction of the body mass that had Radiant sources, though it was increasing by the day. The rest of her body would starve though. But it wasn’t as if she would die from missing a meal. Ah, but Lilibeth had been skinny even before Yuriko took over the body, and the process of body forging took a lot out of her. She’d eat as much as she could hold for dinner. There was an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant for twenty Torries in the park’s shopping centre. Hmmm, though they did require having a companion to enter. She could ask Scarlett or Nora, she supposed.

Her finances were doing well now, and she had more than enough to pay her rent come Watersday. The automatic debit meant she didn’t even have to talk to the landlord, which was good since she was sure the ornery man was out of state.

She could afford to splurge a bit on food. And…her perception focused on her phone as she used her kinesis to manipulate the touchscreen. Funny thing that: learning how to manipulate the phone’s touchscreen took her longer than she expected since it required a finger or a stylus. Since her kinesis was neither, she had to invent a way to interact with it without resorting to Animus constructs. She had to hold just a tiny bit of lightning within her kinetic touch to do it, and she had to tune the lightning so it would interact properly with the sensors.

She checked Madeline’s messages and couldn’t help but smile. The plucky art professor had landed Yuriko, well Lilibeth, a gig as a fashion model for a photoshoot. Ah, but she wrangled another painting model for another session beyond the one this week. It wasn’t too bad, Yuriko supposed, or rather, it was good. She earned something like sixty Torries for four hours’ work at Macy’s yet Madeline paid her a couple of hundred for two hours. The gig wasn’t stable but it covered two-thirds of what she would have earned in a week at the department store. Hopefully, the photoshoot would pay just as well, though she suspected it would be at a lower rate.

Hmm, not that she didn’t like working at Macy’s, though the novelty had already worn off. She could feel her incarnation’s Anima grow a tiny bit denser every day, and her true body’s grew by more than a pace now. By midweek, the Anima that got cut off would be back and she would grow her reach faster. At this rate, it would take just a bit more than two years to hit the limit of Transformation. If she wanted her incarnation body to have the same power, her Anima density must grow to fifty or more dense than normal…though maybe her arithmetic was wrong, ehehe.

As the afternoon turned to evening, she was almost done with connecting the Fifth Phase to the rest, and halfway done with modifying the rest of the Phases to adjust. She wasn’t truly exerting herself since restricting her body would warp the resonance flows. By five o’clock, her incarnation body stopped practise while her true body continued.

She had worked up a light sweat and her tummy had been protesting her abuse an hour ago. Now that she had time to focus was when it complained the loudest. She didn’t have anyone to go with, so she contemplated going to a different place, but just as she returned to the jogging path she encountered Nora and Jenna, both in exercise outfits and both covered in so much sweat that it looked like they nearly drowned.

“Oh, hey!” Yuriko waved to catch their attention.

“Lily…” Nora breathed heavily as she leaned on her knees and bent over.

“Lily…” Jenna said while pretending not to be just as winded.

“I wish to eat at Gourdo’s Unlimited Barbeque, want to join me?”

“Sure!” Nora yelled happily but Jenna sighed and poked Nora’s side.

“Diet?”

“Reward for exercise!”

Yuriko and Jenna exchanged glances and both of them rolled their eyes.

“I’ll call Scarlett,” Yuriko said.

“Sure, that works.”

That was how they found themselves in a cozy grill-your-own meal place and Yuriko packed away nearly five Jin of thinly sliced beef.

“How?” Nora asked, her eyes shining with awe.

“Hungry,” Yuriko replied.

“But, you’re so thin!”

“I run for an hour every morning.”

“Oh.”

“It’s probably her metabolism,” Scarlett scoffed. “You’re too lucky to be alive,” she grumbled.

Yuriko just giggled and polished off another plate. An hour later, she bid her friends goodbye, all while pondering the mysteries of the sword. Her true body was almost done with all of the modifications, and she had an inkling that her incarnation body would be able to touch an Ennoia of the Sword soon.

When she arrived home, by habit, she checked her mailbox by the lobby. Instead of just bills, there was a rather fancy invitation envelope sitting inside. The sigil on the waxed seal sent her heart racing and Lilibeth’s memories surging.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep