Chapter 9. Lost
From the moment Yui learned to speak and walk decently, she became a little inquisitor, following me around like a shadow whenever she had free time. I was more involved in her upbringing than her parents, though she listened to them too—just not with the same enthusiasm she had for me.
Often, in the library, you could find her sitting beside me with a serious expression, trying to understand what was written in the books, recognizing only a few familiar words. Somehow, she even managed to beg for training sessions. With her pleading face, it was hard to refuse, so now we include her in our massage-training sessions, stretching her body.
One goal was achieved by my fifth birthday: I had finished reading a large portion of the city library. The remaining books were copies from the palace library. Toward the end of this period, the regular visitors to the library began to look at me strangely. People here naturally read slower due to the lack of systematic education. I don't know about other cultures, but here, parents teach their children to read and write, and that's enough for a comfortable life. How they do it doesn't matter. In their view, I wasn't reading but simply flipping through pages. I didn't bother to enlighten anyone—as long as they didn't kick me out, it was fine.
The notebooks my father gave me for birthdays had to be used to write down my knowledge for Wan Shi Tong. I remembered him, unfortunately, and now I had to actively sift through my memories to figure out which knowledge might be useful in the magical world and which was still undiscovered. I figured if I wrote it as it was, the great owl wouldn't be too upset. After all, in my previous world, what I wrote actually worked.
My parents already considered me a once-in-a-century genius, especially after the childbirth incident. They started thinking I was blessed by some benevolent spirit. Well, I blessed myself, heh-heh. Because of this, their supervision was very lax. The main rules were to always come to meals on time and stay safe.
A few days before my fifth birthday, my spirit and body fully merged. It happened during sleep, and I still remember every detail vividly. At first, I felt warmth at chest level. Not thinking much of it, I tried to continue sleeping, but then every part of my body was washed over by some energy. Wherever it passed, it felt like my cells were experiencing ecstasy. A blissful moan escaped my lips on its own.
As soon as I came to my senses from the overload of sensations, I rushed downstairs to check my energy. My two sources pulsed in sync with my heartbeat, now unrestrained, pouring out an abundance of magic both into my body and outward. Looking closer, I couldn't find my spirit—not even a trace. It had completely merged with my body, with no visible boundaries or seams.
As Wan Shi Tong wrote in his observations of Chin, who once visited his library in the human world to repay a debt with books, Chin's spirit and body were also so deeply merged that you couldn't tell where one began and the other ended. Wan Shi Tong found this intriguing. Even among humans, and even among Avatars, you could usually find points where the body and spirit met. But Chin was a unified whole, allowing him to travel through the Spirit World in his physical form with all his powers intact. Already possessing power, strength, and wealth in the human world, he had no interest in interacting with the Spirit World. As we know, even the Avatar, when entering the Spirit World, leaves their physical body behind, sending only a projection of themselves to the other plane. It's thought that this is simply the astral body of humans. Later, in the Spirit World, Iroh also didn't appear very material.
Another bonus to being a hybrid.