The Face in the Mirror
So I have become a woman?
"Great Heavenly Demon... in the end, you did not abandon us, did you?"
The words that boy had spoken before his eyes closed for the last time. Even now, their faces would not leave him—rage, grief, and longing, all of it pressed into a single look.
He bolted upright. Cold sweat soaked him from throat to heel.
"Where... is this?"
Countless swords ought to have already cut his breath short.
"In the end... those fools failed to kill me?"
He had been ready to die. More than ready. If he was to die by their hands—yes, if that was what they willed—then death was no more than his due. And yet he had not died. He was alive.
"But... there is no chance they failed to kill me."
Why, then, was he drawing breath? Because he had seized enlightenment in the instant before the end? To have stepped past the Life-Death Realm into whatever lay beyond it, and to return from death on the strength of that, would not have been so strange. A realm climbed by dying. But the logic would not hold. Enlightenment won because he had died. Then why was he alive now, and breathing?
Pain speared through his skull.
"Kh... ugh...!"
Pain? No. This was something else.
"Hah... hah..."
The Heavenly Demon braced on nothing but will and refused it. And then, at last, he faced the thing itself. His own body.
"This... how..."
Shock stole the rest. Was this truly what waited beyond the Life-Death Realm? He could feel nothing of what he ought to have felt. If anything, turbid qi sat packed inside him, thick and foul.
"Have I broken?"
Broken. That was the only word for it. Everything—outside and in, all of it.
"So this is the price, is it... To claw one's way back from death, must one pay as dearly as this?"
He had poured out all he was, and lived again. Explained that way, every piece fit. The hands, pale and soft and swollen. The belly spilling over itself. Thighs fit to split their own skin. Breasts, jutting where no breasts should be? And his sex—gone?
"...Gone?"
His hand had found the place. He was certain of it. There was nothing. Nothing under his fingers at all.
"...Have I lost my sex?"
Rebirth of Bone and Flesh. Yes. That had to be it. He had been resurrected, and so this body had been assembled again into the worst vessel imaginable.
"Even if I have been made a eunuch... well. So be it."
He hauled the heavy body around and took in the room. What sort of chamber was this? What sorcery hung over it, to make it so lavish, and to fill it with a scent so fine?
"Sweet, and fresh. A fragrance like this is dangerous, more often than not."
A woman both noble and beautiful gives off a scent worthy of her, and the old warning still held: beware a beautiful woman. Even so, it did not seem to be a poisoned incense.
"Oh. So that is a mirror."
The Heavenly Demon climbed down from bedding softer than anything he had ever known in the Central Plains. Thinking back, from the year he came of age he could count on one hand the nights he had actually sought sleep in a bed. Once he became a master, he had no need of sleep at all.
The mirror was enormous, and extravagantly made.
"It looks costly."
He had never seen its like, not even among the great merchant companies. Search the world for such a thing and one might find it in the Northern Sea Ice Palace, if anywhere. His body was ruined. He was afraid to look. But who was he? Cult leader of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult. The Heavenly Demon himself. He turned to the glass and met it without flinching.
"Wh... what?"
What stood there was not the Heavenly Demon. It was some other being entirely.
The door banged open while the shock still held him, and someone came through.
"Stubborn little bitch..."
The maid kept it low, and pitched it just loud enough to be heard.
"Miss Lilith. If you're awake, you might have the grace to say so."
The Heavenly Demon gave her nothing. He only stared into the mirror. Who are you? You, inside the glass—who? Don't tell me he had been remade from a man into a woman. Impossible. Turn history inside out and there would still be no tale, anywhere, of a man undergoing Rebirth of Bone and Flesh into a woman. Eccentric arts existed—the Virgin Boy Art among them—but nothing this grotesque. He had never heard of it. He had never seen it.
"...Oh. So now she won't even answer."
The usual Lilith would already have gone rigid at the mere sight of her, stammering, hiccuping, unable to get a word out cleanly. Answers came at once. Eyes never dared to meet. The maid had made her that way some time ago—not with any great show of violence, but psychologically, and with a few indirect touches, until the girl was wrecked. Who would ever imagine a young lady spoken down to by a maid? In the Tiribi household, it was possible.
"...When a person speaks to you, you're meant to answer."
This was a punishment, of a sort. She tipped the hot tea she had carried in and poured it straight over Lilith. She was certain she had.
"Ah—! Ah... ah! Hot! It's—it's hot!"
But why was the scalding tea spilling across her own feet?
"Ah... pardon me."
The Heavenly Demon, come back to himself, set the cup down.
"Ghk... you... you little wretch...!"
She could do nothing but thrash on the floor, her scalded foot screaming. When had the cup been taken? She came to her senses and found it in Lilith's hand. Poured the tea over her, and then had the gall to play innocent?
"J-just you wait! I'm telling the head maid every last bit of this!"
Clutching her foot, she fled Lilith's room.
Let her go. The Heavenly Demon sat on the bed and stared blankly outward.
"I... no..."
However complete a remaking of bone and flesh, not a trace of the Heavenly Demon's face remained. This was another person entirely. A being born of a different life. And the woman who had just come looking for him—who was she? A face somehow familiar, and not a welcome one. Stranger still was the bizarre tongue he found himself speaking without meaning to.
The headache returned.
"Krgh...!"
Worse than before. Far worse. Like a scream ringing through the whole of his brain.
"This... this miserable thing..."
Even as the pain threatened to drag his mind under, the Heavenly Demon set his teeth and endured. He had suffered assaults like this more times than he could count. He had no internal energy left to call on. Even so—if it was him, he could hold.
A hallucination, drifting in on the pain. No. His own voice.
"Who is there!"
His head felt as if it would not merely crack, but burst. As if every cell were turning on the brain, stabbing it, attacking. Blood ran where he had bitten his lip too hard.
"I... I will not... fall... to so shallow... a trick..."
The soul still lingering in Lilith's body pleaded with the Heavenly Demon. If she did not, this madman looked ready to endure all the way to the end.
"A request...? You... who are you?"
"Is... that so."
A will that could hardly be called human. How could someone who had only just settled into a body be stronger than the soul of its rightful owner? At this rate she would be burned away entirely—gone, like a soul passing on.
"I... understand."
Only then did the Heavenly Demon accept it. Her soul.
He closed his eyes, and memory rose. A storm broke through his mind, an immense flood of recollection forcing its way in—the memories of the body's true owner. All of Lilith.
Tears spilled from the Heavenly Demon's eyes. No. From Lilith's. Sorrow, and a grief too deep to name.
"Ah... so that is how it was."
This was not the Central Plains. A new world, not the one the Heavenly Demon had lived in. She, too, had been assassinated on the very night he died—and by Andre the maid, the one she had trusted most of all. In the moment before death she had prayed inwardly. Let the world become whatever it would. Only let punishment fall on everyone who had tormented her.
Had someone heard that dying wish? A monster without peer anywhere beneath the sky. The Heavenly Demon had flowed into Lilith's body.
"...Gone."
The soul might have lingered a little longer. But the Heavenly Demon's monstrous will had forced her to spend herself until she was annihilated.
Slowly, the Heavenly Demon opened his eyes. Lilith was gone from this body completely. Only his soul remained, entire.
"Still. I received them well. Your memories."
Lilith Tiribi. Sixth young lady of the Tiribi Ducal House. Her mother had been a commoner, but she caught Duke Briton's eye and became his sixth wife, and Lilith was the child born of that. Discrimination and torment had piled the strain higher and higher until, in the end, she became a pig. Or perhaps a body ruined to this degree had been someone's doing from the start.
A timid nature, and a foolish one besides...
Had Duke Briton's careless, self-indulgent temper simply left everything to rot? Not one person had been glad to receive her. Not even her own mother.
"In a way, it resembles mine. My world."
The Central Plains, where the weak are meat and the strong do the eating.
The Heavenly Demon looked Lilith's body over, slowly. By the measure he knew, six cheok—a little under six feet. Weight, close to two hundred and ninety pounds. The frame was broad. Not born with a martial artist's bones, but not a poor foundation either.
"Can a thing like this be called a woman's body?"
A shock in its own right. She stood taller than he himself ever had, and that alone said enough. The very frame differed from every woman he had seen across the Central Plains—not merely the ordinary difference between the people of the East and the people of the West, but something more. Lilith was simply, strikingly large. Even in this world, she ranked among the tall.
"If her nature had not been so timid, I truly wonder what would have come of it."
Learn the martial arts, and the meaning of physique all but vanishes. But by the measure of ordinary people who have learned none, a fight is nothing but weight class. A body like this, swinging a hand even once, would drop common folk one after another. He could not understand how she had only ever been the one who was struck. Had she raised a hand even once, in sheer fury, the torment would never have gone this far.
"The poisonous qi running through this body is rather unpleasant."
Poison, settled deep. Spread so evenly that it could not have been taken in a single dose. How long had it been fed to her, steady and slow? Poisonous qi of this density—it was a miracle she had died and come back at all. Even now, his insides ached.
"Hm... someone is coming."
Footsteps reached the Heavenly Demon's ears. Listening, he judged they were no martial artists.
"Four...? No... five."
Just as he said, exactly five maids appeared at the door. The head maid's face crumpled at the sight of Lilith.
"Ha? So you really were alive. And here I thought today I'd finally be spared that filthy face of yours."