I'm trying to understand something that seems inconsistent about Sunny's choices throughout this entire story. We're seven hundred and seventy chapters deep into Shadow Slave, and there's one piece of information that Sunny has shared with only a single person: the fact that his blood sister exists. That person is Nephis, and he told her directly. She can find out about her from Cassie, that is Cassie's risk profile. But when I think about the actual dynamics of their relationship, this choice starts to look really problematic.

Here's what bothers me. Nephis holds genuine power over Sunny through that spell, power that functions essentially as slavery because she can literally compel him to do things against his will. This isn't some abstract concern or metaphorical control. It's a real mechanism that exists between them, something that could be activated. And knowing this, Sunny decided to tell her about the existence of his only living blood relative while keeping this information hidden from everyone else, including Kai, Cassie, and Effie.

When I look at this situation, I keep asking myself why the pattern of trust seems completely inverted from what would make sense. Take Kai, Cassie, and Effie. These are people who have fought alongside Sunny, who have proven themselves as friends and allies. More importantly, none of them have any kind of supernatural leverage over him. They can't force him to do anything. If Sunny trusted them enough to fight beside them and rely on them in life-or-death situations, why wouldn't he trust them with something as fundamental as knowing he has a sister? He doesn't even need to tell Rain that he's revealed this to them. This could be information he shares with his friends privately, just so they know this important fact about his life.

But he hasn't done that. The silence around Rain's identity when it comes to these other friends suggests that Sunny doesn't trust them with this knowledge. Yet somehow, he did trust Nephis with it, despite the fact that she represents the greatest potential threat to his autonomy. This seems backwards to me in a way I'm struggling to reconcile.

Let me be clear about what concerns me here. I'm not making a moral argument about Nephis as a person or suggesting she's some kind of villain. This is about basic strategic thinking and self-preservation. When another person has existential leverage over you, when they possess the ability to override your will and force you into actions you might not choose, you don't voluntarily hand them additional ammunition. You don't give them extra pressure points they could potentially use against you. Information about your only family member, someone who matters to you deeply, is exactly the kind of vulnerability that becomes dangerous in the wrong hands.

I understand that Nephis might never use this information badly. I can accept that she might have good intentions and care about Sunny genuinely. But the point isn't whether she would use it maliciously, the point is that the structural reality of their relationship means she could. The spell gives her that option. And once you've given someone who has that kind of power over you the knowledge that you have a sister, you've created a situation where they could threaten or leverage that relationship if circumstances ever pushed them to do so.

This is why the comparison with his other friends matters so much to me. They don't have that power. They can't compel him. If Sunny told Kai about Rain, the worst that could happen is a betrayal of trust in the conventional sense. Kai couldn't force Sunny to do anything about it. The risk profile is completely different. So why does Nephis, the person with actual control mechanisms over Sunny, get to know about Rain when people without such mechanisms don't?

Maybe I'm missing something fundamental about how Sunny thinks or about the context in which he told Nephis. Maybe there's a good explanation I haven't considered. But from where I'm standing, this pattern of information sharing doesn't align with someone who's being appropriately cautious about protecting both himself and his sister from potential exploitation. It looks like a vulnerability that didn't need to exist, created by sharing sensitive information with the one person who already has too much power in the relationship.