Chapter 182 182: Book of Fuxi
"Coo, coo, coo!" The little Fenghuang Down birds huddled deeper into Irene's arms at the feral gleam in Little Senti's eyes.
Something was off. The aura, the face, the figure — all identical to their original owner, right down to the last detail. They could even feel the familiar warmth of Fenghuang Down radiating from her. And yet.
Was it a soul swap? No, that didn't track either — even a soul swap couldn't replicate an aura this perfectly. The little birds' tiny heads simply couldn't make sense of what was happening.
"There we go." Little Senti gave a satisfied nod at the suitably intimidated birds, then reached out and gave one of the plump little things a good squish. "Be good now, stay out of trouble. I honestly have no idea how I managed to fatten you all up this much back then."
Little Senti surveyed the flock of Fenghuang Down surrounding her, half-thinking she might recruit one of the sturdier-looking ones as a little underling — but looking around, they were all basically round little chickens. Not one of them looked like it could throw a punch.
Irene smiled at Little Senti's pondering, then called out through her mindscape: [Master, it's your turn to make an entrance.]
[Are you certain this is fine?] Fu Hua's voice rose up from within Irene's mind. [We could wait a little longer — let her discover the inconsistencies on her own.]
[I really don't mind being without a body.]
It was just her soul drifting loose, after all. She could gather the feathers scattered across the mountain and still fight perfectly well — a soul-form wasn't so helpless that it couldn't move through the world.
And watching things unfold from the sidelines all this way, she had seen it clearly enough: Little Senti truly had been swept up and carried away by Fu Hua's memories. Her thoughts right now were basically Fu Hua's thoughts. Defeat the Honkai. Drive it back. Protect humanity. And she had inherited almost all of Fu Hua's martial arts on top of the Herrscher's Authority — naturally, devastatingly powerful.
The Herrscher of Sentience's one weakness had always been the fragility of her physical form when stripped of her psychic defenses. At least, that was how the Thirteen Flame-Chasers had done it back then — once they'd destroyed her mental projection and pinpointed her physical location, neutralizing her body had been almost trivially easy.
If they told her the truth outright, things would be fine if she accepted it — but if she snapped, the fallout would be considerable. So letting her live as Fu Hua for now wasn't without its merits.
Fu Hua didn't have to object. To resolve one Herrscher problem for civilization at the cost of nothing more than her own identity — that was a trade almost too favorable to refuse.
Beside her, Nuwa gave Fu Hua's back a gentle pat. "You can't keep this up forever, you know. She's not stupid — she's just had your memories knock her off-balance for the moment."
Fu Hua might seem slow on the surface, but anyone who had studied the Taixuan Sword for that long, and then gone on to create the Taixuan Sword Qi from scratch, was demonstrably not a fool.
Little Senti would figure out that something was wrong soon enough. What they needed to do wasn't conceal the truth, but gently guide her — help her understand her own identity, while also helping her make peace with the situation she now found herself in.
"You should have a say in your own life." Fuxi looked at Fu Hua steadily. "That is your life. Surely you're not just going to give it up like this?"
Irene chimed in as well: [It's not like we're asking you to walk straight into a minefield and announce that she's not Fu Hua. All we need to do is let the inconsistencies pile up — one by one — until Little Senti figures it out herself.]
[Then I'll follow your—...]
Fu Hua's words cut off mid-sentence as Irene drew her out of the mindscape. Golden feathers drifted down behind Irene on a breath of wind, and Fu Hua's silhouette gradually took shape within the shower of light.
The moment she fully appeared, every single Fenghuang Down bird's gaze snapped over to her. The same aura. The same face. The same figure — an exact match. And that outfit — disturbingly familiar.
And arriving like this, emerging from within Irene in a cascade of feathers... did that mean she was the true owner after all?
"Hm?" Little Senti stared at the figure who had just materialized behind Irene, frowning — then ventured, with some caution, "Fenghuang Down feathers? Something I left here before?"
"Not quite." Irene shook her head, still smiling as she looked at Little Senti. "I borrowed these from Kiana. They activated on their own, so I thought they were probably a contingency Master prepared before the battle at Schicksal."
"Ah — right, that does ring a bell." Little Senti listened, then looked over at Fu Hua standing there amid the golden light, and began instinctively rummaging through her memories of that time.
In those memories: Otto had been pointing a gun at her. Knowing what was coming — knowing she was about to be killed — she had, as a last resort, used... Fenghuang Down's Zeroth Rated Power?
She vaguely recalled that Fenghuang Down's Zeroth Rated Power was the transfer of one's own consciousness. Wait... if my consciousness was transferred into Fenghuang Down at that moment, then that means—
Little Senti's gaze locked onto Fu Hua. If she was the will that had been transferred... then who was she herself? No — that wasn't right. The transfer must not have completed. It had to be that the transfer never finished. Fu Hua was her, she was Fu Hua.
Watching the rapid shifts flickering across Little Senti's eyes, Irene gave a small, quiet nod. She was certainly not going to do what had happened in the original timeline — where Little Senti hadn't even done anything particularly wrong, just wanted to hear two people call her Fu Hua once. She'd been conscientiously grinding through encounters the whole way, not causing a drop of trouble, and then Kiana and Fu Hua had just poked and prodded from every angle until Little Senti completely lost her temper.
She was absolutely not going to copy those two. But leaving the deception in place forever wasn't right either — not for Master.
That was Master's life. Master's body. It wouldn't be right to just let Little Senti take it over like that — and honestly, it wasn't fair to Little Senti herself.
She deserved a life of her own too.
And on a more practical note — as long as Little Senti refused to accept her identity as the Herrscher of Sentience, she would keep relying solely on Fenghuang Down as a vessel to channel her Authority. Her true combat power would remain shackled, and she'd keep fighting entirely through Fu Hua's techniques and instincts, because Fu Hua's memories were the ones running the show.
After all, Fu Hua herself had never relied much on Fenghuang Down — using the feather-fan came naturally from muscle memory, but actually deploying it in real combat was something Fu Hua rarely did.
And that meant Little Senti, with Fu Hua's memories imprinted on her, barely touched her own Authority at all. A far cry from the Little Senti who, after fully embracing who she was, had gone absolutely wild with it.
What needed to happen now was to actively nudge Little Senti into examining the inconsistencies in her identity. With all of Fu Hua's memories absorbed into her, she had more than enough to understand what those inconsistencies actually meant.
Once enough of them accumulated, the realization would come to Little Senti naturally — on its own.
But before any of that, of course, they'd need to smooth down Little Senti's ruffled feathers first.
"All right then, come here." Little Senti beckoned with one hand, and the feathers surrounding Fu Hua drifted out from Irene's body and settled into her outstretched palm.
"Look at the state of you — how did you get so tattered?" Little Senti looked down at the battered, incomplete feather resting in her hand and immediately began mending it with Honkai energy. "Must have been because Otto moved too fast — didn't get the full consciousness transfer through in time."
Golden light bloomed in Little Senti's hands. The damaged feather was swiftly restored under her touch, whole and brilliant again, radiating a warm, radiant glow. Beside her, Fu Hua felt her own condition improve noticeably.
Even that long sleep inside Kiana's mind, with Sirin tending to her, hadn't produced a recovery this fast. But then, the Herrscher of Sentience was who she was.
Fenghuang Down had been crafted from the Herrscher of Sentience's own Core, after all. A perfect match for the job.
"Though I have to give Otto some credit — it's been a very, very long time since I've felt this light." Little Senti murmured, watching the now-complete feather in her hands, giving a small satisfied nod.
"There. That should do it. Here, Irene — catch."
Irene caught the repaired feather, looking at Little Senti with a hint of puzzlement. "Won't Master keep it for yourself?"
"Hmph, I told you to hold onto it, so hold onto it — don't make such a fuss." Little Senti waved a hand with exaggerated magnanimity. "Your Master here has plenty more where that came from. No need to recycle."
"Keep it. It's... part of who I was, however you look at it. I'm sure it'll come in handy." Little Senti's eyes flickered for just a moment, but she pressed the feather into Irene's hands all the same.
"Then thank you, Master." Irene gave Little Senti a warm smile, then turned and connected to Fu Hua through the private mental channel.
[See, I told you. A Little Senti who has all your memories — there's no way she wouldn't have noticed the inconsistencies. She's just been lying to herself.]
[Mm.] Fu Hua nodded quietly. Throughout the process of Little Senti mending her, she had felt the genuine warmth and goodwill radiating from within. [If we can settle this without coming to blows, that's the best outcome by far.]
[Oh — Irene, while you're at it, go look inside the shrine for me. There should be a box somewhere in there with Honkai energy in it. Shouldn't be too hard to find.]
Now that her condition had stabilized, Fu Hua looked back at the shrine behind her and remembered — she had left something important inside. She couldn't quite recall what it was anymore, but she was certain it mattered.
Irene raised an eyebrow. A box inside the shrine, giving off Honkai energy — could it be the little ancestor? Thinking it through, that seemed like the only real possibility.
But looking at the shrine before her and feeling the Honkai energy that permeated the entire building — not overwhelming, but to Irene it still glowed like a beacon — her Honkai Adaptability was going to be a problem here. In an environment saturated like this, trying to locate one specific Honkai-energy signature of unknown shape and size wasn't going to be simple.
Faster just to ask directly.
"Master, the other Master Fu Hua wants to know if you remember a box with a Honkai energy signature?"
"Hm? A box with Honkai energy." Little Senti blinked, then reflexively thought for a moment — "Hold on, let me think... actually, wait — who's 'the other Master Fu Hua'? Don't tell me you mean this copy of me?"
Irene smiled at Little Senti's misfired indignation. "We have to call her something. Calling her 'the feather' didn't seem very polite — she is my Master too, after all."
"...I suppose you have a point." Little Senti glanced away slightly under Irene's amused gaze, mumbling under her breath, "Fine, 'the other Master Fu Hua' it is... I'm still the real Fu Hua though. Obviously."
Irene's hearing was sharp enough to catch every word of the muttering, but her expression didn't shift a fraction. She simply pressed on: "So, Master — do you remember?"
"Yeah, just come inside — it'll definitely be in there somewhere." Little Senti had already started rummaging through the vast, heavy weight of Fu Hua's memory, and led Irene inside as she searched.
The house was spacious. The moment Irene stepped through the door, her gaze was drawn to a painting hanging directly opposite the entrance — a painting of Nuwa and Fuxi.
[Oh — a portrait of us.] Nuwa looked at the scroll through Irene's eyes. [Odd though — I don't think we ever sat for a painting like this, did we?]
[Obviously not — look at the materials. Anyone can see this wasn't made in our time.] Fuxi rolled her eyes inside Irene's consciousness. They had both died back when civilization was still in its earliest stages. Scrolls of this quality hadn't existed.
Everyone had still been chiseling pictures into rocks. It wasn't that they hadn't considered passing on papermaking techniques — it was simply that handing knowledge to people didn't mean people could use it.
Even the most basic papermaking required a foundation: a certain level of agriculture. Relying on pure foraging to give everyone access to paper meant paper would inevitably be nothing more than a luxury item. Then there was water for pulp, and pigments capable of leaving marks. These were not things that simply appeared because you willed them into existence.
Civilization couldn't be force-fed. Plans were always just plans.
They had discussed all of this back then — but had never quite grasped just how complicated it all was. To them, these things had become second nature long ago.
It simply hadn't been possible to understand what the paper they had casually used every day actually represented — or how you would go about teaching a tribe of people from the ancient world to make it.
They had tried hard. Truly. But it had amounted to nudging civilization forward by only a single step — a far, far cry from the accelerated leap they had planned.
And even that single step had consumed everything they had.
[So what you're saying is — Fu Hua must have commissioned someone to paint this for us, back when she still remembered who we were.]
"Strange — why can't I recall this..." Little Senti, already rummaging in the inner room, hadn't noticed the exchange outside. "The box — the box — what did I put that thing away for again?"
Working from a faint impression deep in Fu Hua's memory, Little Senti climbed up onto the bed and felt around along its edge, until her fingers found a loose, hidden panel. She pried it open — and inside sat a golden filigree box.
The moment she saw it, something stirred in Little Senti — some memory surfacing from Fu Hua's past — and a trace of something like longing passed through her eyes. She reached in and gathered it into her arms, then called out toward the main room: "Hey — come in, I found it."
Fu Hua immediately drifted away from Irene and floated toward the inner room, and Irene, left standing there, gave a mildly helpless shrug before following her in.
"See if this is the one." Little Senti set the box down on the low table, watching Fu Hua drift in. "Good thing I kept it safe all those years. Though from the look of things — she probably can't wake up anymore."
"..." Fu Hua reached out in silence and lifted the lid. The box had no lock, no protective seal of any kind — perhaps, back then, she had still been hoping that given enough time, given enough rest, something inside would open it by itself.
The lid came away.
Inside, a small, round, chubby little doll lay sleeping — curled there like an infant, eyes tightly shut.
The moment she saw it, something deep within Fu Hua's memories finally stirred. Her trembling hand reached out and brushed gently against the doll's cheek.
"Book of Fuxi..."
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