A human didn’t just magically turn into a demon. The logic was that simple. If Shao had come from Earth, then she would have had a human body like me. Instead, she had a demon body. More than that, she had the demon lord’s bloodline, allowing her to transform into a demon lord. Her body had just suddenly appeared one day in a random town on the border of the Imperial Cloud Meadow. This was far too random to be a coincidence.
“Can you say for certain that you remembered Earth before encountering me?” I asked a question I had been wanting to ask for a while.
She didn’t answer for a bit, but then she started to shake her head. “I… bits and pieces, but… what happened to me?”
“I can only guess.” I shrugged. “Perhaps, you were the daughter of the demon king that Aberis suggested. Something happened, and you lost your memory, appearing in that town. I had always wondered, given what you knew about Earth, you should have had some kind of info to leverage. Knowledge is power, and even a greedy person wouldn’t waste such knowledge just to throw you against monsters and men.”
“My guess is that with your mind an empty slate, you started from scratch. You had some flashes of that life, enough that you were caught off guard by me, but it wasn’t until I began to absorb your lifeforce and give you mine that we finally opened the floodgates. My memories unlocked all of your memories. That was the moment the true Shao was born. Before that, you were just a demon with amnesia who had no past fighting to survive.”
“So… even I am not me.” She said scornfully.
“No, weren’t you listening?” Lydia spoke up, causing the teary-eyed Shao to look over at her friend. “People change. You are Shao. You are my friend. You are Master’s woman, his lover, and his assassin. You’re beautiful, and you’re wonderful, and no matter what, you’re you.”
“Lydia…” She said, biting her lip.
“I love you, Shao,” I whispered in her ear. “All of you. We all do. So, don’t think that you’ve lost anything. You found us, and we’re your family. I’m happy to bring you to Earth. I just want you to be prepared for the possibility that we can’t find your family. Those memories could have been from an Earth only similar to mine. The details you remembered were always blurry. Even things like what decade you lived in are hard for me to say. We don’t even know you’re original name, so finding your family, I’m not confident I can do it.”
“I understand, Master.” She wiped her cheeks and then smiled. “Thank you for being honest. I don’t know who I was, or where I came from, but I know I’m Master’s property. That is something constant. We may change, but I will always be Master’s. That’s good enough for me.”
“That may be good enough for her, but I noticed that you sidestepped the question here.” Elaya cut in, crossing her arms. “Shao’s identity is one thing, but I want to know why you seem to have no interest in returning home. Wasn’t that your original goal?”
I chuckled softly. It looked like I couldn’t pull the wool over their eyes. Well, it was fine if they knew the truth.