Chapter 117 – *spoilers*
Once Nuwa’s belly makes contact with the cradle, her whole body freezes. The inscriptions on the circle brightens and the circle begins to spin.
The exact reason the fetus is not viable is because Nuwa cannot provide enough soul force to charge its soul potential. If Nuwa was fully Soul Tier 2, she would have a difficult pregnancy where she would be as weak as a mortal due to constantly supplying soul force to the womb, but experience an otherwise healthy childbirth, with her powers recovering shortly after. At birth, the baby would be Soul Tier 1 and would reach Soul Tier 2 naturally as the baby grows to adulthood without any effort due to the inborn soul potential that Nuwa had charged it with.
There’s advantages and disadvantages to inheriting one’s power through birth. The baby would have a much harder time breaking through to Soul Tier 3. Not having to put in effort for one’s power makes for a shaky foundation. This dynamic naturally leads to various atrocities among powerhouses in the way they raise their children and, of course, lots of research into producing better offspring artificially.
The circle Nuwa had placed is designed to utilize the chakra structure of the sacrifice and infuse the cradle with fire, earth, water, and air chi daily over the entire period of gestation to house a powerful offspring, but [System] had revamped it with Daons of Order to autonomously gather the required chi. The chakra structure of the sacrifice must be from a nonbender. Azula’s would be too imbalanced towards firebending, unable to channel the other elements as efficiently.
The spiritual body of humans in the Avatar Record is home to many mysteries, particularly the manner in which it functions as a fountain of chi and allows for a deeper connection to the mindscape of the World’s Will. Despite how elegant the ritual circle looks, what it actually does is fashion the spiritual body into a crude chi pumping machine. For the Avatar Record, fire, earth, water, and air are the fundamental elements of nature, so when they are combined in close proximity in this manner, they spontaneously generate life, alongside free-floating soul force.
The fetus, that would normally absorb soul force from the mother, automatically absorbs the free-floating soul force provided by the formation. It also gets all its nutrition, blood, and oxygen from the primordial soup of chi that it floats within.
Another one of the ritual’s functions is to disconnect the mortal shell from the spiritual body. Moments after Nuwa is frozen by being targeted by the circle, she feels her spiritual body twisted in the direction of the circle’s rotation. Nuwa’s chakra systems leak chi uncontrollably as they start to tear due to being simultaneously locked in place and twisted.
Azula sees Nuwa’s body floating frozen with nothing happening externally, but she senses, to her horror, that Nuwa is in terrible pain. She shrugs off all the chi-blocks in her agitation, but holds herself back from going any further. This is Nuwa’s choice; one that she must respect. She clenches her fists and jaw tightly as she leaks blood from both places. It is both a way to hold herself back and to fight emotional pain with physical pain.
Once the circle completes its first rotation, Nuwa’s excruciatingly stretched spiritual body rips apart into 7 pieces, one for each chakra. This also marks her death. Feeling the sudden onset of doom, loss of psychic connection, and hearing the abrupt onset of rain outside, Azula falls to her knees in tears. Nuwa’s body is still there, floating and undamaged, but she knows it’s only a corpse now.
People of the Avatar Record can instinctually tell the difference between a corpse and someone who departed their mortal shell to visit the Spirit Realm. The mortal shell breathes on its own as long as it has a connection to a spiritual body. Even Admiral Zhao, who Nuwa threw into the Fog of Lost Souls, is still breathing.
Azula looks at the unbreathing corpse of her dearest and mourns for the fact that Nuwa will no longer make love to her everyday and that she won’t be able to see her feed Tulen with that cheeky smile on her face as she talks proudly about her ‘boobies’. All the little things and one big thing. To Azula, her home is not any house, any Nation, or even this world. Her home is by Nuwa’s side and that is what she mourns in particular.
A seemingly random downpour passes by the Fire Nation Islands and Earth Continent. Snow falls without clouds in the North and South Poles. Most people are confused by this odd phenomenon, but otherwise shrug and go back to their daily lives. Those who know Nuwa or Stella, on the other hand, feel a seemingly random bout of sorrow, as if the World itself is crying.
Besides Azula, six others feel the most sorrow hearing the rain, Lady Pea, Dan, Aang, Mai, Zuko, and Ty Li. They do not know what is happening, but there has to be a reason for their inexplicable sorrow, so they look for answers. Aang is informed by Raava. Dan, Ty Li, Zuko, and Mai are informed by Iroh. Lady Pea, with her face wet with inexplicable tears, barges into the room hoping that Nuwa can explain what is going on, where she sees what no parent should see.
Her favorite daughter, dead!
Azula quickly states before Lady Pea can misunderstand, “Aunty, she’s not gone forever. She’s just.. moved on. We will still be able to message her soon.”
The damage is done though. Even if Lady Pea understands that Nuwa is alive somewhere out there, not being nearby, not being here to perform her filial piety and take care of her mother in old age, she might as well be gone. Lady Pea’s first reaction is to wail out into the air and run over to Nuwa’s body to beat her like she used to when she swindled her sisters out of their cookies as a six year old.
The circle does not stop Lady Pea from intruding its boundaries. When she comes into contact with the corpse, it rolls limply right off the floating cradle. In a small pool of soup upon the cradle is the barely visible fertilized egg, recreated to the time before Azula had recklessly accelerated its growth. Azula panics and runs into the circle as well. Their baby! She cannot let anything happen to the baby. It’s the reason Nuwa had sacrificed herself!
Lady Pea curls up against Nuwa’s naked body, shaking her, shouting at her, begging her to come back, all in vain. Azula stands protectively between them and the cradle. She holds her mother-in-law’s shoulder, hoping to comfort her. Lady Pea turns around and hugs Azula tightly while crying as they comfort each other in shared grief. Several minutes later, Azula messages Ty Li’s smartphone.
‘Nuwa is still alive, but no longer in this world.’
~ ~ ~
When Aang hears what happened from Raava from his bed in what will be Air Temple Island, he would think it is a joke, if it weren’t for feeling the sorrow of the World that passed by. He curls up and cries as he remembers his mentor/guide/sister/mother figure.
Despite all her perversion, the time they had sex is not what he first thinks about. His first thoughts are of her confident smirk right before she tells them how to beat some people up, her naughty laugh when she peeps on him and Katara getting it on, and the overwhelming sense of safety that the gang feels when she’s around. She was their guardian angel. She was the glue that brought them all together, occasionally in an intimate and fully naked manner.
He takes Appa and starts towards the south pole to live with Katara for a while. There’s no way he can do Avatar duties alone before figuring out what’s going on, gathering back up with the gang, and dealing with the grief. While on top of Appa, he sits cross-legged and enters the Spirit Realm, specifically the Spirit Oasis. This is the gang’s designated meet up spot for emergencies.
Once there, he spots everyone from the gang except Azula, Toph, and Haru. Katara made a breakthrough in her Throat Chakra so she’s here with Sokka too. Even the Peaknights are here. Aang shouts with sadness, “What the fuck happened?!”
Katara comes up to him and holds his hands, “Calm down, love. We don’t have the details yet. The only thing we’ve got is a message from Azula that says Nuwa has left this world. That means she’s still alive and could come back. We are waiting for Azula or someone who has an idea of what’s going on to update us on the circumstances.”
Sighing, Aang sits down among the others, trading hugs and occasionally making dumb jokes to lighten the mood.
Several hours later, Toph teleports in. She was back in Ba Sing Se when Nuwa died. She has opened her Root Chakra long ago, but she never bothered to use the Spirit Realm since she’s never had to and it would be too bothersome if people knew that she could since they would expect to keep in touch through it. Just like getting a cell phone. This time though, it’s necessary. Azula explained what happened to Lady Pea and her, but did not seem to be in the mood for the inevitable pity party after updating the others, so it was up to her.
Needless to say, she is also feeling a hole in her heart from losing her fellow lady of few inhibitions. She glumly says, “Nuwa sacrificed her body to prepare a ritual that ensures the birth of Azula's child. It all came at them unexpectedly upon conception. Azula says Nuwa has the power to reincarnate with her memories, but it will not be in this world. We will not be able to meet her, but we will be able to talk to her through our Smartphones.”
Dan understands this concept the most out of the others, so he exhales a big sigh of relief before helping to explain to the others what they want to know.
~ ~ ~
Lo and Li, from an abandoned cellar within the Outer Ring of Ba Sing Se, sense the sorrow of the World. They turn, shocked, to look at each other and immediately pack up their stuff to make a beeline for the royal palace, where they know Azula is staying. They’ve actually been following Toph around and evaluating her merits lately, but this allows them to accelerate their plans.
Now that Nuwa, the Soul Tier 3 individual who possessed her body, and the protection of fate offered to her by the World’s Will are out of the picture, they are free to meddle again. Jumping on top of roofs like wraiths, they soon leap into a second floor open palace window soundlessly. They fix their clothes and remove their hoods to expose their beautiful faces and head to where they sense the origin of the sorrow.
Strutting casually through the hallway, they don’t even find any guards in the vicinity of the room. Lo opens the door and they both enter. Azula grunts in a raspy voice, assuming that the entrants are from the gang or her Aunt, “Hm? Who is it? I don’t want to be bothered.” As she sits facing the cradle in meditation. Tulen is sleeping in a crib to the side.
Although she promised Heza that she would always keep Tulen safe, there’s times in life when people hit rock bottom and their guard inevitably drops. Lo and Li could have killed Tulen dozens of times over by now, but they don’t. Instead, they show rapt fascination. Sure, they knew that the firstborn child of Nuwa was destined for great things, but Nuwa and Azula have been keeping him close enough that even they had no clue of the draconic nature of the baby.
With some confusion, Azula exits meditation, opens her eyes, and turns around. What she sees makes her pupils shrink in terror. Two identical milfs stand over the crib examining Tulen closely. She never even heard their footsteps. She couldn’t sense the danger until she looked at them, after which she instinctively knew she couldn’t beat them even if she was in peak form without muscle damage.
She trusts in her battle sense and temporarily takes no action. Her parental instincts make her heart beat at overtime to pump her full of adrenaline in only 2 seconds. Feeling slightly more prepared, she twirls her body to face them in a combat stance and asks with deadly seriousness, “Who are you and what do you want with my son?”
Lo looks over with her usual cheerful smile and asks, “You don’t recognize us elderly teachers of yours, princess?”
Azula inhales a sharp breath as things start to click in her mind.
Uncensored title: Death, Grief, and Unwelcome Visitors
(A/N: The plot is back in business, in case you didn’t know already. Kekeke.)