The Martial Unity

’What…’ Ria muttered inwardly with a disturbed tone of voice. ’What in the world is happening?’

She was being cooed at by her father and mother, along with other family and friends who had visited the hospital. She had no agency in the memories even though she could feel her body.

This was the past.

She could only experience it once more, not live a life different from the one that she had already lived.

However, the memory she had had before waking up just then was being impaled by the faceless human at the center of the manifold. She had taken a gamble to try and kill the creature hastily so that she could save her friends. That was her last concrete memory. The very next moment, she woke up in her own memories.

’Wait… these flashbacks… I guess people really do have flashbacks when they are about to die,’ she realized with a surge of regret and bitterness. ’Still, flashbacks from the day I was born? Isn’t that a bit much? Am I going to go through the entire thing from scratch?’

She hadn’t lived a very long life, only eighteen years, but eighteen years was still a very long time. She didn’t even understand how her death could be so prolonged psychologically, although she had heard that time in the mind flowed orders of magnitude faster than it did in real time.

’I… can’t break out of here,’ she muttered to herself. ’No matter what I try, I’m unable to break out of these memories and return to the real world.’

Her attention shifted back to her parents with a hint of curiosity. Visually, they were the same; they hadn’t aged a day since then. But she could faintly detect the trace of youth in their movements, strangely enough. Their body language and demeanor didn’t have the patience and maturity that she knew them to have in her current impression of them.

Her father was more energetic than he had been. His eyes didn’t have the wisdom that they did now. Even as he cooed and played with her plump cheeks, kissing her incessantly, she felt like he was much younger in spirit despite being nearly a century old even then. He also didn’t have the sense of absolute power beyond mortal reach that he did, for he had yet to break through to the Transcendent Realm back then. She found his younger self to be more personable and understandable, while his older self made her feel safer.

Her mother was even older, but she too didn’t feel very mature. She still had a youthful charm that would go on to be replaced by an older patience.

’I guess I changed them.’

It was hardly a surprise, given that parenthood changed everybody. But it was still fascinating to see just how much they had changed. Yet, she also knew that they weren’t the important part of this memory reliving.

’It’s almost like something is forcing me to introspect.’

She could observe her own actions, her own thoughts and feelings, even from when she was an infant, much to her own surprise. She didn’t even know that those memories existed deep within her, simply buried so far down that she thought they were gone.

Time passed as she grew more accustomed to the sensation of reliving memories. The memories weren’t played back cleanly and perfectly and uniformly. Instead, they were flashes. Some memories were more hazy, other memories were extremely well-defined. Some of them she actively remembered while others were a novelty.

The earliest phases of her life zipped by relatively quickly, even if it was agonizingly long, as far as she was concerned. Yet, she didn’t mind. Her early life was what she considered the ideal part of her life. She simply spent her days living life with her parents, especially her father, who went out of his way to ensure that he could spend time with her at all times.

She could feel him overflowing with love and affection for her, especially as she grew older. She couldn’t help but smile earnestly as he took her around the entire world, teleporting from place to place, showing her new and novel sights unlike anything she had ever seen.

She giggled at the moments in her life where her father would bring her into important government meetings and have her baby self make important policy decisions. She couldn’t help but heave a deep sigh at how far her parents went to ensure that she was born and brought up with love and affection.

The first five years of her life were the most comfortable and blessed that any child would ever have the privilege of experiencing. It wasn’t long before she broke through to the Apprentice Realm as a five-year-old girl, initially driven by a desire to be with her parents.

Her life had changed significantly with her breakthrough to the Apprentice Realm. It had put distance between her and her friends. She couldn’t spend as much time with them anymore. She couldn’t be in as many of the same places as them. Because she was already a Martial Apprentice, she spent more time training, even if very lightly and gently, with her parents, who would have her lightly throw punches and kicks and do light spars.

But that hadn’t been the tipping point in her life where everything changed, strangely enough.

Things had changed when she first discovered her true identity as a princess.

”Do you understand, Ria?”

A ten-year-old Ria stood before her father wearing his complete royal attire, sitting on the throne in the Royal Hall. She wore a stunned expression and a gaping mouth as she stared at her father and the crown that sat atop his head.

”I am the Emperor of the Kandrian Empire,” he told her with a serious, powerful voice. ”And you… are my daughter. That makes you the first princess of the Kandrian Empire and the heir to the throne.”

”I…” she murmured. ”…I am a princess?”

That was the moment that had changed her life.