"Hm… thirsty, and my back's a little stiff… I guess that's about it."
"A human should've ended up with a severe headache. What you describe — along with the speed at which you absorbed the knowledge through direct transmission — is characteristic of… a spirit. Who are you, Chan?"
"Up until this moment, I sincerely believed I was human."
The owl's question completely threw me off balance.
He had a point. The brain could process information. Large amounts of information. With enough training and habit, even very large amounts. But it was still supposed to get tired from it! Besides, yesterday's lecture from the master of the library and all my attempts to process it afterward had genuinely exhausted me. So why was today completely different?
All right, let's step away from material reality for a second and assume "It's magic, Harry."
The spirit had transferred information magically and now claimed that, judging by the speed and quality of the "reception," he'd effectively transmitted it to another spirit rather than a human. On top of that, I remembered my life from my previous world. Those memories definitely couldn't be tied to my current biological brain in any conventional sense, and yet I still possessed them.
Which meant some sort of "spiritual memory" was accessible to me, and Tong had simply uploaded the information there.
That was all well and good, but how had that happened?
After all, I remembered Chan's life too, as though it were my own.
And upon realizing that last, I burst out laughing.
"Ha-ha… heh… Avatar, a fusion of spirit and human… and Wan and Chan even sound alike… heh-heh."
"What are you talking about?" the Librarian asked, confused.
"You see, Wan Shi Tong, I remember how I lived before and how I died… but I also remember how I lived as Chan. And at some point… mmm… I remembered my previous life. I thought I'd simply recalled a past incarnation or something along those lines, but if you were able to transfer knowledge to me — and I, in turn, was able to absorb it through spiritual means…"
""You are a spirit fused with a human," Wan Shi Tong concluded. "But such unions are usually temporary. There must be something else involved to truly forge two beings into one."
"What I don't know, I don't know."
Though I had a suspicion the truth was actually far simpler.
Wan, a bender, hadn't been able to withstand the power of an ancient Great Spirit. But Chan, also a bender, could probably contain a "newborn" spirit born from an ordinary human for as long as necessary. Then came diffusion — or something like it — until the two of us became one.
Because of greater experience and, oddly enough, stronger willpower — though maybe that wasn't so strange after all, since expecting great feats of will from a spoiled kid was optimistic — I ended up as the dominant personality, merely inheriting some of the recipient's habits and inclinations along the way.
Well, the theory was no worse than any other.
Granted, it still didn't explain how I'd become a spirit in the first place, but whatever. Nobody really knew what happened after death anyway. The real question was: how the hell had I ended up here specifically?
Why this world and not Bleach or Naruto, whose plots I remembered far better? Hell, even damned Harry Potter had left a deeper imprint on my mind than some cartoon I'd half-watched years ago.
Still, no point dwelling on that now.
A far more immediate concern was what the owl intended to do with this information and whether I needed to make myself scarce immediately. Which I cautiously asked him about — albeit in a somewhat more diplomatic terms.
"An interesting case." The owl rotated his head again. "But it changes nothing. I will give you the knowledge you seek, and you will give me what interests me. The only difference is that now I understand where your knowledge comes from — and that there is more than one world."
"Hm… You will also be able to transfer knowledge to me the same way I transferred it to you. I will show you how. Everything else remains unchanged."
"Good," I said, because I'd honestly started worrying he might decide to dissect me.
Honestly, I shouldn't have voiced my thoughts out loud. I should've kept them to myself. But what was done was done. Let's blame it on shock and the fact that I still hadn't fully recovered from Tong's "spiritual archive."
"The next section. Waterbending. Southern Style."
The spirit reached toward me with his wings again.
"Wait. Why do I need bending I can't even use?" I mean, extra knowledge never hurt, but I'd much rather focus on Fire and Energy.
"You asked for knowledge and understanding of bending. One cannot truly understand the whole while knowing only a fragment of it."
And then a wing smacked me across the face, sending me straight into (Ponyland) another round of visions.
The following weeks promised to be extremely eventful.
***
Three weeks later.
"Well then, I suppose this is goodbye. Farewell, Tong, and thank you for the knowledge."
"You are quite an interesting… human. And the world you showed me is both horrifying and magnificent. But I do not say 'farewell.' Only 'until we meet again.' You still possess much knowledge, and I intend to obtain it from you."
(End of Chapter)
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