Three days! Technically two and a half since we started out midway through the first one, but the point stands! Three days before Terra would have a conversation with me.

Not that… not that she was giving me the silent treatment, or anything. Not that she was even hostile or angry or shutting me out. No, the truth is that I was being a bit of an emotion coward and I just couldn’t handle the waves of anxiety, sadness, and general upset-ness that even reminder her of the voice in her head brought forth. So. In effect, she couldn’t have a conversation with me.

Because I just couldn’t handle it.

Hey, I don’t really remember my past and my ‘recent’ past was mostly a whole ‘lotta nuthin. I think I’m doing pretty danged well for myself in the emotional maturity department, given the circumstances. Turns out, I’m sensitive, alright? Nothing wrong with being sensitive to someone’s feelings. Especially when that someone is literally hosting your Pill of a self and waiting for some high realm Cultivator to drop out of the sky at any moment to gobble us both up.

“I just don’t get why you aren’t more worried about it!”

Frankly, Terra, what’s the point of being worried about it? If they come, they come.

“Ugh, if you’re not worried, then you won’t be prepared!”

HEY. That was just downright rude! Implying I wasn’t taking precautions went well beyond being annoyed I didn’t share in her anxieties! I’m not ignoring it, I’m just not fretting about it.

That bought me a few minutes of silence while Terra gathered more of the wood mushrooms, stuffing them here and there and everywhere in her worn and somewhat tattered clothing. None to clean either, though I wouldn’t dare and point that out… again.

“What have you been doing then.” Oh, pfft, now we’re going with the not-a-question-but-it’s-a-question approach? Challenge accepted.

Other than identifying which mystery mushrooms and plants were good for you to eat, you mean? The silence. Oh god the silence was killing me. Fine. Fine! I’ll fill in the blank spaces. I’m not above it! I’ve been doing my best to eliminate any evidence of your Qi or your presence. See where you cut that mushroom? Just watch.

My smug little spherical butt would have wiggled if it was corporeal… and could wiggle… with delight as my grungy host nearly dropped her latest harvest. The smoothly cut stump where she’d harvested one of the mushroom’s fruiting bodies with her ‘everything but stabbing things’ knife grew rougher, more aged in appearance, gouges and jagged edges that looked distinctly like the tooth marks on other mushrooms we’d encountered forming.

This environmental Qi manipulation voodoo was some pretty nifty stuff it turned out. Plus, since I didn’t sleep or grow tired, I had plenty of time to practice. Also Terra sleeping was a good time to experiment because I had hours to hide the mistakes!

Mwahaha! Eh, cough, aherm. Right.

Tracks, where you dug for roots, the blood you left behind when you ‘landed’ on that second to last branch, even the prodigious amount of odors you emanated all along the way. All erased, blended into the environmental Qi to match other patterns in the area.

“Did you just say I smell bad!?”

Must be your imagination…

“FINE. You find me a stream deep enough, I’ll bathe. OK? Until then, just keep those thoughts to yourself.” With that wonderful, joyous receipt of a promise, I almost didn’t mind dealing with another couple of hours of grumbling about how she ‘smelled better than most people’ and how ‘just because pills don’t have body odor’ and so on. By the end of it, Terra had accomplished her daily routine of establishing a small shelter, a modest cookfire, the grilling, and eating, of her various found foods.

Terra was half or more human. Both of her parents were half or part Beast. One armadillo, her mother, the father some kind of hare or jackrabbit. The features revealed themselves in interesting ways. Her facial features were a little altered and her skin from about the navel up was patterned subtly like armadillo scales. The thick, claw-like fingernails were really the most inhuman elements about her torso and attachments. Still, you wouldn’t mistake her for a beautiful woman any day.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Hell, you wouldn’t hardly mistake her for anything other than a partially mutated woman who wasn’t really a looker even before the industrial accident with ever present radioactive or biogenic goo. No. No you wouldn’t. If not for the fact that she was very symmetrical, you wouldn’t hesitate to call her fugly. Instead because of that symmetry, you might find her not entirely impossible to look at. If you knew what was influencing the features in question, you might actually suspect her of being merely homely.

Her hips down got real furry and a bit less human though. Rather than being just a suggestion of heritage, her knees down was almost fully powerful hare or jackrabbit legs. Her thighs could probably eat power squats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Even reduced to peak of Qi Gathering, her speed at that weird jump-run she did and her leaping distance would make her some kind of athletic legend. Instead it made her an outcast, a target. Just a resource that coincidentally looked human.

Cultivators were really effed up. Guess that whole, less than one Immortal would Ascend every few centuries really brought it home. Particularly since there were easily tens of millions of Cultivators and billions of ‘mortals’ living. At the least. If only one in every few centuries Ascended, then either there were a LOT of un-Ascended Immortals walking around, or your shot at the escalator to Heaven was extremely slim.

That might explain why the ones who succeeded were leaving behind all these Sects full of assholes. Also why a young woman would be considered little more than a cultivation resource.

“The forest is so dark and I feel like it’s still hours before dusk.”

You don’t seem to feel as tired as you did the last few days.

“Hmm. True. It seemed like just moving a few miles, eating, and making some joke of a shelter was enough to wipe me out. I’m not fully recovered, but I don’t think I’m ready to fall asleep.” Terra carefully checked on her little campfire, ensuring there was no risk of a stray ember lighting something. After calming that worry, the lean to was given a once, twice, then thrice over until it too passed muster. Finally she settled herself between the two concerns on a pile of ‘soft’ pine needles.

Then she started dropping into meditation.

I could tell. Not just because I was inside her and had to literally maintain a boundary so I didn’t just tap into her complete thoughts. I could tell because I was a total badass when it came to sitting still and meditating about Qi and shit. I mean, it’s pretty much all I did for like, I dunno, somewhere between twenty and two thousand years.

So when I felt the Qi around her start to drift towards her shitty pseudo-Dantian, I grabbed hold of it with my infinitely more powerful Will and poked my stinky host with a totally polite and not incredibly irritating mental jab.

Then I definitely did not get cursed at loudly for almost ten minutes.

You’re doing this wrong.

“What do you mean? I formed my Meridians before, how is it wrong?”

You can’t just… alright, I’ll acknowledge I’ve never formed Meridians myself, but just hear me out for a second. I’ve got the knowledge of a cultivation method written in my freaking Soul, courtesy of an True Ascendant.

That got girly’s attention alright. Not that she was pleased to be told she was doing it wrong.

“My father and mother both taught me to cultivate. Since I’m a mix, I combined both of their methods.”

Hmm. I see. Sensitive subject then. OK, better to let her decide it was her idea then.

How far were they able to cultivate?

“Father was mid Foundation Establishment before he… Mother was early Foundation Establishment when I last saw her. If she’s still alive, she might have increased by a realm.”

Long time since you saw her last?

“…yeah. About twenty years. I was just six or seven when she was taken away by a local Lord.” To be a Furnace. I didn’t even need to tap into the thoughts or memories going through Terra’s head. It had been on her mind when I’d first taken over her body. If her mother was still alive, it was very unlikely that her cultivation had advanced at all. It was more likely it had regressed. Even more likely that she’d been killed or simply died from the strain of processing out the elemental aspects of Qi for that Lord.

First, we are going to figure out a method that works for you. I’m talking something that will make those Sect assholes drool one moment and then piss their pants later. So awesome that you’ll make that badass shit I did when I was driving your body seem like child’s play. Now to wrap up my poorly thought incentive with a little bow… Then we’re going to go and knock on that Lord’s door and say hi. Alright?

Terra wiped the tears that had started silently falling with a sleeve that was just… oh god I got to learn how to clean things with Qi without destroying them because… can a Pill barf? I think I almost found out.

No, seriously guys, girly uses that sleeve as her napkin and I think it hasn’t been washed in like, years.

“Alright. What should I do differently? Can you just… show me?”

I think that connecting our thoughts might be too dangerous. Hmm. You won’t have a Qi sense until we get you into Foundation Establishment. I had the strong impulse to tap my lips as I thought, which was annoying since I didn’t have any lips. How well can you feel the Qi inside your body? Terra waggled a hand. Well, it was the best place I could think to start. Go ahead and start pulling in Qi, then watch how I guide it.