Maen runs across the rooftops of a beautiful place, smothered in the scents of industry. The city is gorgeous at night to her eyes, which are open and clear, her pupils enlarged to the point that the darkness looks perfectly clear, and as she runs, its not hard to follow the directions she was given.

Kaena seemed distracted when they spoke, but they provided the information when Maen asked. Raika… hasn’t been at her best since the tournament started, but the reaction she had to the two cultivators after her last fight went well beyond that. And since seeing the two of them, most of what she’s done has been… sit. A letter in front of her, and that metal case she got from a fucking witch closed off to the side. Perfectly still. Like a doll.

It’s kind of creepy, honestly. There’s meditation, and meditating before resonant artifacts or important ideals is a well-recorded style, but…

She hasn’t blinked in a while. People usually meditate in privacy, with their eyes closed.

Six hours of that is more than enough to convince Maen to give her some space.

So she runs, towards the inn that Kaena gave her directions to.

It feels… different, now that the blood has been digested, the Qi in it used up. She’s still faster, her wrist still aches from where the blade emerged, but the transformations… regressed? Dual cultivation is a struggle, but the benefits are mostly worth it: orthodox cultivation lets her circulate her power and draw in Qi from the ambient, and bestial cultivation lets her drain some of that Qi into her stomach to digest it. It’s slow, but broader, and Raika’s blood-

Fuck. Raika’s blood was like an explosion, like a volcanic blaze in her gut. So potent that its qualities bled into her, so full of energy that she could drag her body well past its limits. She’s not as fast as she was during the fight, but she can tell she’s faster, and while she’s fairly sure her body has reabsorbed the blade, a steady diet probably wouldn’t take long to make it (and more) a permanent addition.

And then, after the fight, Raika had asked her to stay hidden. After beating a real cultivator, someone trained in combat properly, with just speed and adrenaline. She’d seemed distracted, her face in that weirdly artificial look no one else seems to notice, but it’s hard to know what she was distracted by. It had hurt, but not too bad.

The awkwardness afterwards had been worse. And the near-silence over the last few days, worse yet.

And then she’d just… reacted. Maen watched her, enjoyed seeing her partner seem comfortable and ‘real’ in her fight with that Shao Kan flesh-cultivator, and while she’d been worried when she bit out the cultivator’s shoulder, there was relief when she didn’t go for the kill. But then, Raika’s head had snapped up, off to the side, still dripping fresh blood down her chin, and she’d looked out in the stands- and moved.

And then they’d spoken, and it was the most artificial look Maen had seen on her yet.

Kaena didn’t even need to ask. They’d told her the names of the two: a Li Shu and a Qen Hou, both cultivators from the Purple Flame Burning Lotus Sect.

Her sect. Raika’s, for a little while.

Li Shu’s name, she recognizes easily. The demonic healer, as the rumor mill called her, who had unleashed a beast onto the sect. Qen Hou took her longer to place, but as far as outer disciples went he was always a reasonable one, growing fairly quickly but respectful.

Li Shu especially was important to Raika, Maen knows that much, but she’s never heard her talk about them openly before, not even in bed. As far as Maen knows, since that fateful night, when Taurus came to collect them after their escape, Raika hasn’t mentioned them once. So why now? Why here? And what did they say?

It doesn’t take long for Maen to land across the street from the inn they’re staying at, the Golden Feather. It’s fancy, pretty high quality. Maen isn’t being watched nearly as closely as the rest of the Division, but that’s no reason to have rumors about a shadowed felinoid stalking the streets, so she sticks to the rooftops.

She’s a cultivator now. Going on well over a year, and boosted by her blood and the blood of one far more potent. It’s not that hard to jump over the street and stop on the third floor of the building, climbing up over the slanted roof to one of the windows.

She knocks at it, polite and quiet.

She hears a shuffling sound inside the room, but not much else.

Then a louder shuffling, and the muffled sound of someone sounding annoyed.

The window is thrown open, and a total stranger is standing there.

Bearded, muscled, tall, and covered in scars, with calloused hands but long fingers. It’s someone she’s never seen before, and considering how bedecked he is in thick furs and casual robes, she’s fairly certain she’d remember.

“Um.”

“Yeah, can I help you?” he asks.

“I’m sorry, I- I was told I’d find Li Shu or Qen Hou here? I didn’t realize the room was taken.”

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“Why?” he asks, eyes narrowing. “Whatd’ya want with them?”

“Oh! Uh. Just to talk. I’m- I mean, I know who they are. Back from the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect. I don’t think they know me, I was just a servant, but-”

“Ok? And?”

She frowns. “Are you always this rude when you speak to someone?”

He smiles. “I am when I find them knocking on my window in the middle of the night, member of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect. Frankly, I find it wildly out of my character to even be so generous as I have been. Got a name?”

“Alright, well I’m not a member of the sect. Anymore, I mean. I left. Same day as someone they know?”

She hears someone whisper in the room behind the rugged stranger, and her ears perk up, to which he winces.

“Do you know Raika?” she hears a higher voice ask from somewhere in the room.

Maen sighs. “Yes. I’m- we’re together.”

“Hao Nera, you can-”

The burly stranger rolls his eyes before walking back into the room, waving her in. “Come on then. Not like these idiots listen to me anyways when I tell them not to say anything!”

Maen frowns but enters through the window, finding a room decorated tastefully in red, gold and light notes of blue, with a small table, a closet, a bathroom… and a single, extra-large bed.

Not her business.

Li Shu and Qen Hou are both there, both looking… tired. Li Shu is fair skinned, a bit tanned from the sun, with long black hair she keeps tied tightly and a slim frame, while Qen Hou looks more fit, olive-skinned with a thick head of brown hair. He looks at her, seating with his chin tilted up, and she sees his eyes flash purple for a brief moment.

“What is it you want with us? Why are you here? Did Raika send you?”

The questions come rapidfire, with Li Shu awkwardly to one side as Qen Hou asks.

“Well, I…” Maen takes a moment. Takes a breath. A year ago, both of these figures would tower over her in authority, and the weight of that is still present to some extent. She centers herself, though, and gives a short, polite bow.

“Apologies, seniors. My name is Maen, of no great family. I once worked as a servant alongside cultivator Raika in the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect, before our… rather incident-filled departure. I’ve been Raika’s partner for a few months now, and she has assisted me greatly in my cultivation. I wish to know what it is that you two spoke to her about that left her so affected one day hence.”

Qen Hou raises an eyebrow, but Li Shu just sighs, sitting onto the bed.

“Frankly, I’m pretty curious myself,” Hao Nera says, leaning casually against the wall. “These two have been tight lipped ever since we got here, and considering what happened right before we got on our way here, they should really tell their friend about it.”

Qen Hou rolls his eyes, but there’s a tiredness to the act, like he doesn’t really mean it or doesn’t quite have the vigor to imbue it with real feeling.

“I just… I asked if she was alright,” Li Shu says. “That’s all. And she… I don’t know. She did something with her face. Shut down somehow.”

“And she said she wasn’t. Alright, that is.” Qen Hou shifts uncomfortably in his seat as he says it, breaking eye contact.

“She doesn’t seem like she’s doing well,” Li Shu says. “Even in her fight, it… looked like she was talking to someone? Some illusion, maybe, but… I worry she may have a heart demon somehow. Or just… not be well, mentally. What’s happened to her?”

“You’re her partner, lil kitty?” Hao Nera says from where he leans, sighing as he gets up and wanders over to a bag on the ground and rifles through it. “Where I come from, partners are all about keeping each other’s heads on properly. Looks to me like your ginormous fuckoff girlfriend could use some of that.”

“I… agree. She isn’t… you’re right. It is in some ways encouraging that she told you she wasn’t well, and scary in others. If she hasn’t reached out to you… then yes, there’s much to say.”

She accepts a piece of jerky from Hao Nera, who tosses it to her as if watching how she’ll catch it. She just holds it, and eventually slumps to the ground, back against the wall.

The smell of the city wafts in, the sounds of constant movement and life ringing through the ever-busy streets. Maen takes a deep breath, and begins to speak.

It’s imperfect, as most things are. There are certainly pieces missing. But she tells them what she knows, and holds back little.

The visit to the Vera’s Hollow, the same small village that the trio went to. The hunt for the corpse-smith. The beast tide, and how Raika volunteered as prey and predator and was left to her own devices. How when she was brought back, she was in a sort of cocoon, and how she could barely walk or be touched afterwards, overwhelmed by new flesh and sensation. She speaks to them about Zhoulong and the other research group, of the inner politics of the Division of Altered Cultivation, and of Raika’s plot to use Taurus to weaken him and then slay him herself, after using the corpse-smith’s notes as proof.

She talks about the better days. Just weeks ago, Raika was… still distant, still off meditating or doing her own style of cultivation, but less haunted for a time. But the longer they stayed stuck, the worse she’d been, skittish, sensitive to even the slightest of sounds or smells, desperate for contact and retreating from it… and then overjoyed at the violence of sparring.

She mentions the visit from the witch, what little she knows of it, and how it pushed Raika further into plots and that machine desire for action. She mentions it was her idea to start the tournament.

And, still holding a piece of jerky, she tells them of the last day.

“Ever since she saw you, she’s been… bad. She got some letter from a woman from… I think it was the Hungering Roots sect? And she’s been staring at it and smoking these gods-awful cigarettes all day. Not moving. Barely breathing, I think, like she’s just staring off someplace. I think… I think something really bad is happening.”

Li Shu by this point, wipes a few stray tears away. They came silently, and seem to be almost as much of frustration as grief, but Maen is surprised to see Qen Hou similarly affected, gritting his teeth hard.

Maen sits there, and for a moment, no one speaks.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, kitty, it gets worse.”

Qen Hou shoots Hao Nera a look, but he puts his hands up in mock surrender. “Come on, you know I’m right senior brother. Tell her why we’re even in this city.”

Qen Hou sighs, clenches his fist, and…

And then he begins to speak.

Li Shu fills in the details, and Hao Nera provides the commentary, but Maen, in the end, learns of their journeys. Leaving the sect, harvesting the vanquished beast tide, and the encounter with the semi-divine spirit beast, the not-tiger that spoke like a dying, wounded man and rippled with colors from out of what should be.

And how it hungers for the person who slew that very same beast tide, around that very same village.

And Maen, having come here to find out what’s gone wrong and how she might be able to help, takes a bite of jerky, and realizes that shit’s a bit fucked.