Chapter 399 What are You?
Shoutout to Harjas_Sidhu and Bruh_Vista for beta-reading and providing extensive feedback for this chapter!
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A/N: I had to choose my words carefully while writing this chapter. The message expressed in a sentence or paragraph can changed based on the words used within. If while reading this text, you feel hurt or offended, raise this point in my Discord server and we can have a healthy discussion there. Maybe the way it was perceived by you wasn't how I intended to write it. If that is the case then I can grow as a person and writer and fix my error.
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Shuri learned that she could never forget when she turned five. She could recite the entire annals of Sol Clan's History by heart without missing a single word or date. She never advertised this fact, though, her mother didn't let her. When she turned ten, she started to remember things before she was five. The spotty details started to grow clearer and make more sense. It was scary because, with these memories, she was forced to relive the emotions as they were experienced at that time. A child's emotions are stronger than an adult's because there aren't psychological coping mechanisms to limit excess.
When she turned eleven, she remembered her very first memory.
She could feel herself being squeezed through a very tight hole. Her head was undergoing a type of compression and decompression. She couldn't see anything, and she couldn't breathe either. Yet her sense of hearing was working on overdrive.
But following a swift ejection, where the pressure suddenly changed all around her, Shuri could feel her senses activating one after the other. The first thing was her sense of hearing.
"Congratulations, Your Highness, it's a healthy Prince!"
"Y-Yor!"
Then came her sense of smell and taste. A raw and acrid metallic odour assaulted her nascent sense of smell, and a viscous liquid nearly choked her. Then came her touch, as she felt herself getting moved rapidly before a cold object wrapped around her neck and a heavy ball landed on her chest. She then felt her body changing, it was painful, but she could only scream inaudibly.
Finally, her sight opened up, and all she saw was red. Blood, blood everywhere. A gentle hand dabbed her face and cleared the blood away.
"We cannot let anyone know that it was a boy, Yor!" A woman's voice, her mother, expressed in a panic.
"They won't know. I have taken the precautions as you said. The pendant around his neck carries a powerful enchantment that will mask the child's gender. As long as he remains below the Core Formation realm, he will appear outwardly as a female," a man answered. "But I don't understand, isn't it a good thing? Mistress will have support since she has birthed a Prince."
"No!" the woman snapped back with faint acidity in her voice. "To be born a boy here is treacherous. Those vultures outside will descend upon us and rip us to shreds. I have no backing, no power. He will be dead before you know it. No! He has to survive. Let the scavengers fight against each other for scraps. Let them tear each other limb from limb. Let all of this go to hell until nothing but a ruin remains. That is my dream, Yor! And this child will help me achieve it."
There was a faintly rabid fanaticism in her voice, which only grew as the days passed as per Shuri's recollections.
"That is a heavy burden to place on a child," Yor reasoned.
"It is his duty!" Her mother argued back. "I raised the spawn of that lecherous degenerate for nine months. I hated every second of it. I wished to kill myself every day I saw my reflection. It was disgusting! But I endured. Killing myself was the easy way out- No, revenge is what I want. The man took everything from me, it is only right that his son does the same to him."
Each woman who entered the Inner Courtyard was tattooed with a ritual that forbade any sort of invasive inspection of the womb. It was the decree of the second Emperor, as his reign saw the most number of miscarriages in the entire Empire's history. Even the birthing chambers were shielded away with magic, to avoid infanticide.
"Now! Call in the crowd. Let's satisfy their curiosity," her mother declared before laying down on the birthing mattress. She started to breathe heavily until her face warped with fake yet convincingly real horror. Just as Yor opened the doors to the chamber, she shrieked loudly.
"What happened?!" Her father rushed in, with his red hair streaking behind him majestically. "What is all this?"
"T-The midwife-" her mother started with a fearful stutter.
"The woman wished to harm the Princess," Yor, or Eunuch Bang, answered. "This servant was vigilant and took action as soon as he detected the threat."
"Did you say Princess?" Her father repeated with disappointment.
"Yes, Your Majesty!"
"Hmm," the Emperor evoked before turning and leaving just as quickly as he came.
And thus, Shuri entered the world with a purpose. He was supposed to be the instrument of his mother's revenge against his father. To achieve the said purpose, he had to live as a she to avoid becoming a valuable target. Shuri had to live a duplicitous life from birth. The duplicity ran so deep that for someone who never forgets it became their new reality - it became Shuri's reality. Internally, she started to identify as how she appeared externally - a girl.
This spawned a conflict inside Shuri. She was a boy through birth - biologically. However, she did not feel comfort in knowing that fact. At night, when she didn't have to wear the pendant that turned her into a female, she still kept it on. She tried it once, but it felt sickening and induced so much anxiety that she couldn't sleep at all.
She was a girl, not a boy. Yet her true body was that of a boy's. Her appearance was all just an illusion.
All of Shuri's sisters, the Princesses, would wear men's clothing and sneak out of the Palace for a fun city trip. But Shuri could never do that. Just the thought of wearing male clothes evoked a heavy sense of discomfort. In fact, even though Shuri appeared as a girl externally, she could feel her male form oozing out from within.
"Why does the enchanted pendant only hide him until he hits the Core Formation realm?" Shuri once heard her mother ask Eunuch Bang.
"It's obvious, Mistress. Once the Young Princess-"
"PRINCE!" Her mother shrieked. "It is just us here, you don't have to hide his identity before me."
"P-Prince," Eunuch Bang corrected. "Once he hits the Core Formation realm, he will no longer need to hide himself. He will be strong enough to contest against most opponents."
"How can you be sure?" Her mother pushed maniacally. "We have to be sure. Shuri cannot die! The plan hinges on it."
"Do not worry, Mistress. I will make sure that she- HE is safe for as long as I am alive," Eunuch Bang assuaged. And he stuck true to his words too.
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The moment Shuri gained consciousness, an odd sensation assaulted her. She didn't "feel" normal. Heck, she never felt "normal". But at this instant, there was something odd, something wrong.
"What-" the sound that left her lips wasn't hers. It was deeper.
"N-No!" She looked down and noticed that she was in a different gown. And there was a distinct bulge by her crotch that usually didn't exist there. "No!"
While muttering anxiously, Shuri hobbled out of her bed and worked her way towards the only mirror in the room. "No... No..."
As she looked into the mirror and gazed at her reflection, her heart dropped. It was the same face she saw in the still yet swirling vortex of mana. Although she still had the same fiery red hair and the azure-blue eyes from before she put on her disguise and dyed her hair, the rest of her face was shaped differently. For all intents and purposes, the form wasn't that of a girl.
"NO!" She yelled in a frenzy. She stumbled back and collapsed onto the chair near the bed. She picked up the wooden cup by the table on the bed-side and tossed it angrily towards the mirror, causing it to shatter into many pieces.
Her hazy mind turned clearer as she remembered something. Her hand floundered around her neck, searching for her pendant. When she didn't find it, she immediately dove into the bed and overturned the pillow and mattress. It wasn't there either. She dipped down and started to look under the bed frame.
"W-Where is it? WHERE IS IT!"
"Are you looking for this?" A voice called out from behind her. Shuri's head jerked back suddenly, and her eyes landed on the extended hand that held the pendant she was looking for. Except, the blood-red gem was no longer intact as a massive crack had formed causing it to split into two pieces.
"W-What did you do?" Shuri expressed in shock. Her shaking hand reached forward and picked the two pieces out of the extended palm. She then tried to piece the two shards together, holding faint hope that somehow they would just become one.
"It broke when you nearly advanced," the person said. Shuri looked up, following the voice, and was shocked to see the Sect Leader looking down at her with a worried frown.
"Nearly?" Shuri repeated, catching the awkwardly placed word in the explanation.
"You were about to advance into the Core Formation realm. But then you didn't," the Sect Leader repeated.
"B-But why?" Shuri begged. "Why didn't I advance?"
Her mind started to put everything together. If she had advanced into the Core Formation realm, she could finally rid herself of this dastardly body and take on the form that she truly desired. After all, that was the primary draw towards advancing.
"To advance and undergo apotheosis, you need to have a certain idea of who you are. An understanding of the sense of self," the Sect Leader explained. "Your will needs to be certain about it, otherwise your body cannot take on that form. I guess your sense of self wasn't strong enough."
"I don't understand!" Shuri exclaimed with a blatantly confused expression.
"You are a child of the Emperor, and biologically a Prince to top it off," the Sect Leader expressed. "Yet you lived a life where you had to keep both those important facts under lock and key. I guess the lies were so deeply embedded you even believed them well enough to be true. But for someone who fails to forget even the most trivial details, their resurfacing was only an eventuality."
Shuri remained forlorn, unable to digest the facts as they were made evident.
"If you yourself are conflicted about who you really are, how can you expect the world to help you become what you are supposed to be?" The Sect Leader concluded. "You believe that you are a designated girl. But your assigned body doesn't agree with your psychology. So no matter how hard you try to affirm your designation as a girl, a tiny voice in the back of your mind keeps calling you a liar. You need to be certain, so certain that no matter what anyone says or does your resolve will remain unshaken. If you believe you are a designated girl, then no one should be able to convince you otherwise, not even yourself!"
"So, what are you?" The Sect Leader asked vigorously.
But the response didn't hit with the same intensity, "I'm... a girl."
It was at that moment that Shuri realised, she didn't even believe herself!
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