Primordial Origins

Chapter 23: Trust

 "On that note." I spoke up. "I have some promises to keep and half truths to dispel myself." Everyone in the room looked at me. "I promised Weiss that I would explain how I knew that all grimm have a mental connection to something once we were in better company." I looked around the room. "Well this is the best company I could ask for, and I made a promise to Qrow as well. Both promises can be fulfilled with one topic of conversation." Yang sat down before leaning into my arm again. "My semblance." The rest of them looked at each other before looking back at me. Ren was the one who spoke up. "Your doppelganger?" I shook my head. "Did I ever explicitly state that the doppelganger was my semblance?" They all seemed to lose themselves in thought thinking back to our times in Beacon when we talked about my doppelganger. Weiss was the first one to snap out of it. "No, you didn't. You would dodge the question and show the clone if you needed to." Her words snapped everyone else out of their thoughts. I nodded. "That's because it isn't. My semblance is." I gripped Yang a little bit tighter and she placed her hand on my leg. I took a deep breath before continuing. "I call it Emperor's Domain and with it I can take the very space within 50 yards of me and warp and change it as I see fit." I demonstrated this by holding out my hand and creating an ice dust crystal with nothing more than the particles in the air around us. I then chucked it up and breathed fire at it, setting it off freezing the flames around it. "As you can see, this is a very powerful ability. Before I joined Beacon I used to tell the people closest to me about it. But they turned from friends and allies into foes who stabbed me in the back as soon as they possibly could, they were scared of me and rightfully so, after all so long as you're in my domain I rule and there is nothing you can do about it. So I stopped telling people. I started to use one of my favorite abilities as a scapegoat for my semblance. The doppelganger." Everyone looked at me stunned. "If that's true." Jaune spoke up. "If what you said is true. Then couldn't you have fought Cinder yourself? Couldn't you have saved Pyrrha?" I sighed. "Jaune there is a lot I could have done that night, especially if I had been in my prime." This time even Yang looked at me confused. "My semblance while amazing does have its limits. That being that in order to warp or change space like I do my mind has to take in incredible amounts of information that nobody could even hope to understand, and process it.

This isn't just what you see everyday but stuff like the molecular structure of everything that comes into my line of sight, exact frequencies of light and sound waves, energy radiating off a creature due to a mental link to something in a far off place, and the energy radiating off a person trying to hide how much power they have. It takes in all of that and more, things that I can't even describe to you. So in order to keep itself in one piece and from overloading, my brain does two things subconsciously. The first is to siphon off my aura. I told you before Yang that my aura isn't projected when i'm unconscious and therefore i'm left vulnerable. Well that's because what you all think of as my aura is more of an aura like substance that I have to actively create with my semblance. My aura, all of it, is being drawn into my brain to keep it safe and therefore cannot be projected or function like normal.

The second thing that my mind does is put up barriers. Fourteen of them to be exact, which keeps the flow of information out of the parts of my brain that I consciously use. If the information flowed into those parts of my brain and I wasn't prepared I would be either retarted, or brain dead. However I can train my mind to bring those barriers down allowing me access to the information that is usually processed in the subconscious parts of my mind and therefore access to higher echelons of spatial manipulation. In my prime I had half of the fourteen down. However by the time I had entered Beacon I hadn't used the information that was contained by those barriers for so long that my brain classified that information as no longer needed, and slowly put all of the barriers back up. For the past few months I have been trying to pull them down again but it's not going as well as I had hoped."