Yun Ka is speaking to someone. It’s a bit rude to interrupt, maybe.

But that doesn’t matter.

The man standing across the room from her, glaring at them, is not Feng Gui. Truth be told, he doesn’t even look that much like him; the black hair, dark skin and green eyes are similar, but the facial structure is off, and he doesn’t have much of a beard, nevermind how much older than the elder Feng he looks.

But he smells like the woods. Like leaves with edges so fine that the cut isn’t even felt.

He growls, and for a moment, the world freezes.

It’s like an ocean of Qi.

The scent of it almost makes Raika black out, and if not for her increased durability, it would be enough. It’s more Qi than Taurus, the last person she sensed near this level, and behind the Qi is a scent of something moving. The smell is so strong that for a moment, Raika can see the trees, see the forest growing from where there was stone and wall, see the moving, shifting branches making out the shape of something behind them.

And then she is absolutely frozen as the smiling man, who is not smiling, cuts out every thought in her head at once.

She is kneeling. And Kaena is kneeling. And they are struggling but alive, and Raika can feel blood leaking from her own eyes and ears and nose, and-

“This?” the man asks. “This is what you cavort with? A disgraced whore and… what, a thing of meat and crippled soul?”

Yun Ka shrugs, looking over at the two of them with a note of panic but keeping her face cool and her body still. Raika dimly notices, behind the fact that she can’t think of anything, the fact that her arms are by her side, the dozens of usually-visible mechanical limbs all coiled back into a backpack and the jade cube at her side inert.

“This lowly niece apologizes for any dishonor she may have incurred, master. I am afraid I am simply on track to pursue projects beyond the usual scope which would be accessible.”

The man snorts. Her uncle, perhaps. “Ah, what wonders, then. So be it, so long as your projects are allowed. So be it, so long as nothing perturbs your research. The reputation of your family, or the secret of your disfigurement, no, these are nothing to the face of your personal interests.”

The Qi redoubles, and now even Raika, blind as she usually is to it, can feel something shaking. The sheer presence of it makes the walls crack, and yet, somehow, the scent is concentrated, kept solid, not leaking even an inch past the room’s four walls.

“When I was told of your location, I thought it a blessing. Perhaps this new Division of yours might find a way to improve your lacking self. I had hoped at least that your Jade would be shaped to become a valuable tool.”

“Please, uncle. You disturb heaven and earth with your wrath, and I ask that you not harm my-”

“But NO!” he interrupts. “I discover you have bound yourself to the black sheep of this new venture. To a bovine slave! The disgrace of it!”

Kaena stirs at that, but even with their Qi’s ability to act as a sort of buffer or cushioning against higher cultivation, they can barely move. Raika notices, in the abstract, that Kaena might also be having a hard time breathing.

Man. Talk about bad timing, honestly.

“A tournament is called, and I see your name among them, and I think, perhaps one of our lost daughters is at last come home. Perhaps you are not a shame after all. And yet! I find you alone. I find you in a place where I must act like the new moon in the night and sneak in to see you, lest others see your shame. And then! Of all things! Your freaks interrupt us!”

The man walks over and kicks Kaena.

There is a moment where everything inside Raika goes blank. The smiling thing, the doctor that is not a doctor whose name she should know, has nothing to cut, because her mind is empty.

The rage comes a moment after, and it is like flame.

Kaena hits the wall, their Qi buffering them again, but Raika can see the broken rib, can smell the blood. Yun Ka has stood up at this point, the jade beginning to stir.

And then there is only the rage, and for a moment, Raika is whole.

Someone hurt someone she cares about.

The Mask, the flesh, the screaming, scared thing, and everything in between all agree that this cannot be borne.

“What’s your name?” she croaks.

The figure turns, and stares down at her. His eyes are wide, in shocked outrage at being spoken to. He’s got to be in the Paths, a Soul Warrior perhaps, any more than that would be enough to pulp them with his will alone. Since anything over a Soul Warrior would be instant death, then he isn’t one, because Raika says so.

Yun Ka tries to speak. “This lowly one apologizes again, uncle, I-”

He raises a hand.

The room is silent.

But Raika, inch by inch, raises her head.

Inch by inch, looks up at him.

And eventually, eyes bleeding, flesh screaming, neck straining, looks him in the eye.

Yeah. There it is. The resemblance.

Feng Gui looked at her like that quite a bit when he was beating her ass.

The rage is lit by a new source of kindling, another piece dragged back into frame, and she feels herself think.

The man smiles, and it is a hateful, spiteful, cruel little thing of teeth and lips and arrogant, presumptuous hate.

“You do not deserve to know my name, beast. You are dirt beneath the feet of your betters. That you would stain the hem of even a cripple of our line is sin enough, but you think yourself worthy to look at me?”

“Uncle Fen Gao, I-”

Before Raika can blink, he is across the room and has broken Yun Ka’s jaw.

He tsks, flicking blood off his hand as she staggers back against the ground, a single, animalistic whimper from the pain all the sound that emerges.

“Still so fucking delicate. All your machines, and your defect still lies clear. Like disciplining a plate of pudding. Just messy.”

He wipes his hand off on his robes, sighing, even as the material seems to drink in the stain and make it vanish.

“Did I not just say that this thing of yours isn’t worthy of knowing my name? That it is not deserving of the gift that it would be to have it in their mind? And you open your mouth anyways. Your father and grandfather may be lenient, but they are not the only ones of Feng blood in our clan, cripple. Their star has fallen since the failure of your birth, and it falls further with every debasement you offer up. Disobedient. Incapable of learning proper etiquette. Always with your little machines, your toys and gears. Even in the greatest advantages of the Empire, in a Division perhaps suited for an abomination like you, you tie yourself to a sinking animal and parade about with things like these that believe they can simply walk into your room as they please.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“It is good you changed your name. You don’t deserve your birth, your blood.”

He sighs, then.

“I suppose it’s all that could be expected. I’ve wasted enough of my time here. When the patriarch hears-”

“Hey.”

He turns around, eyes wide.

She is bent to nearly half height. Her bones creak, and muscles strain. Everything hurts, bleeding freely, her eyes colored crimson, veins bulging with the effort. But Raika stands.

“I don’t like Yun Ka that much. Asks too many questions. But-”

“You dare,” he whispers. The Qi in the room roils, the woods moving without a breeze, the rustling the steps of a multi-legged thing. “You dare speak to-”

“I wasn’t done talking.”

His eyes are like saucers, and she enjoys that for a moment. She enjoys being alive again. Whole.

It’s not healthy, really. In the face of grief, of self-loathing, of an apparent possession of some kind she can’t quite recall, she falls apart, bad. Or she did, this time. Something is wrong. It remains wrong. But here, in the face of something like this, she is whole. She stares at death, at a hateful thing, at something that hurt someone of hers- and her hatred, what remains of her Self, and her mind all stand in a fragile, united structure once more.

“I don’t like Yun Ka that much. But she’s nice. And you broke her jaw.

“And you kicked my friend. Who I care about a lot. Who is trying to help.

“So I’m gonna eat your eyes out of your skull, Feng Gao.”

He just stares at her.

She can barely stay upright, but she does not once break eye contact.

He lets out a breath, long and slow.

“Alright. That’s enough. I think I’m done here.

“I can pay your father his weregild for you. Born crippled and failed, I think that’s more than enough excuse, but this…” he shakes his head sadly, turning to look at Yun Ka. Still, her arms lie deactivated, only her natural-born limbs cradling her face as she bleeds and makes little grunting noises in place of full breaths.

“A disgrace.”

He moves, and Raika does not see him.

But she is moving a half-second before, and it is enough.

His fist goes all the way through her. A year ago, maybe less, it might have shattered everything, turned her to mulch and repainted the wall with her guts. As it stands, it simply punctures through her ribs, through her primary heart, and out through her shoulder blade.

Feng Gao frowns at that. His eyes widen again back to that oh-so-delightful look of surprise when Raika turns to him and grins, all teeth.

Black teeth, made of black steel.

Her head shoots forward, and even as the supernaturally quick cultivator casually raises a hand to block, she bites a chunk out of his forearm.

In an instant, the controlled and contained Qi roars out of the room, the floor and walls cracking under the pressure and the sound from outside going silent at the sheer weight of it. There are probably more than a few mortals nearby staggering or even unconscious from the size of it.

To his credit, he doesn’t yell out. He looks down at the wound in shock, and then again in comprehension as the flesh doesn’t grow back.

He snaps his head back to look at her but he’s a half-second too slow.

Her flesh locks in tight around his fist, her second heart working overtime to keep her body alive even as she pulls him in tighter. Her jaw unhinges, open wide, and for a moment, she nearly drags him into a kiss, End-blessed teeth against face.

If he’d hit her again, he might have ended it there. Instead, he retreats. The wall behind him disintegrates and Raika feels every part of her body whiplash from the force of the movement, the world blurring by in a dizzying mess of blood and debris, and-

And his hand is still stuck.

He goes to rip it out, but before he can she has abandoned bone structure and human form, both arms wrapping around him and dislocating to keep wrapping, her legs mimicking them and sounding like kindling snapping apart as she forces the bones to move faster than they can normally Change.

He snarls at that, and what is left of her face smiles as he struggles and-

The world ends.

All that remains are the woods.

The trees are vast and dark, and down in their roots, the world is black and moist and wrong. It is better, though, beneath the roots that rot and eat and take apart the soil, because the leaves rustle, and shimmer-

And look down at her. They move in a wind that does not exist, and as they do she sees them take on the form of something winged, and vast, and with too many limbs and not enough faces.

There is enough of her left to tell it to go fuck itself and take a bite from the closest trunk.

And then the thing that is the world descends, and she is made into meat.

Raika lands in pieces across the arena. The dome holds for a moment, its incantations and formulae made to hold up against nearly any impact from the fights within it, but it is not designed for her. Her blood sizzles as it lands against the runes, letting off crimson smoke and bubbling like acid, and her Qi, what little of it she’s kept in herself, blossoms into golden Flame that eats away at all that it touches. For those few seconds before it deactivates, the arena is half-crimson, painted over in so much viscera and blood and loose bits of flesh that the fighters beneath it look up and cannot see the sun past all the red.

Raika, currently, has the upper half of her head, and maybe a full half-second of life left.

Looking up at Feng Gao, she sees… it is not a world, or a creature, but perhaps a bit of both. Behind him where he hovers, looking down in a mix of disgust and rage, she sees that same forest, those same trees… and peeking out from over his shoulder comes a single branch, thick with greenery, shaped, if one squints, like a long, taloned hand.

It is not real. It is the only thing that is real. It is inside him, and it is him, but she sees it move and it is almost like it wears him also, like a puppet and puppetmaster both wrapped around each other. It is beautiful.

As far as first times seeing a Soul go, this one is pretty memorable.

Her blood wafts into the air like steam, and then the dome deactivates, and all her bits and pieces fall, and-

And for a moment, she is in contact with some.

Her neck regrows fastest, a single lung following behind even as she wills her first Truth, strained but now in its element, to circulate her blood in place of her heart. By the time she hits the ground, she’s gone from maybe three fistfulls of flesh to most of her shoulders and head, and in place of skin she grows scales, keratin and bone and overlapping spikes and-

The two cultivators fall to their knees, their battle interrupted. One wears the robes of the Stone Divers sect, surrounded by crystalline, glowing shapes that seem to emerge from him like shadows, and the other glows like a small sun, emitting a radioactive haze. In an instant, both cancel their techniques, and she feels Feng Gao’s weight once again crush everything in a radius.

It compresses her exposed lung, forces her blood to stillness with its weight. It uses no Dao, no Truth, no power she can feel beyond the quantity it is expressed in, but it demands her stillness as he descends towards her, wary but not cowed.

That’s fine. She grows down instead.

What’s left of her head turns to a nearly spherical thing, like a porcupine made of stone, every edge made of spikes and pointed out, and she pulls in air greedily as flames and caustic blood eat into the ground around her. She pushes a thread of it down, moves it with force, makes it dig into the earth, and it gives her enough room to form a few more muscles, enough for two insectile legs.

She is missing so much. Too much. She’s getting lightheaded, especially as her blood picks up impurities as she forces it to circulate. She moves pieces of herself through the gaps she’s creating, through the blood, sending out what few resources she has to try to reconnect other parts.

There is a part of her, quiet and joyful and in pain, that feels whole at last. This is right. This is where she should be. The razor’s edge between earned self-destruction and transcendent rebellion. It’s-

Dink could help.

The thought comes unbidden, unfamiliar. It doesn’t feel like hers. It comes from just outside, just to her left…

And then it is gone. This time, though, she feels the cut. She reels back what is Severed, follows that feeling of strange newness of the thought, and recalls it.

Dink. Where is it? Where did she put it? A developing, nascent item with a soul, and she… forgot about it?

Doesn’t matter. Not the time.

She spasms, spikes extending, bone sheltering new flesh within in a disjointed mess, growing and spasming forth and-

And Feng Gao is there. And the forest is there. And he extends a domain barely a foot around her.

And the threads of blood and flesh that scurry out from beneath her, through the cracks in the terrain, latch to a piece of meat with enough substance and Qi in it to Change it.

A spiked limb, more like a crab’s claw than a human arm, emerges out, rail-thin and boney, and stabs Feng Gao in the calf.

It’s not much. He doesn’t even bother to dodge.

Then the claw pulls back, and the blacksteel tooth she gave it through her blood pulls back with it and rips open the flesh it pulls through.

He staggers, gasps, and before he can strike three more limbs have emerged, each barbed with more of her void-black fangs. Each one strikes at him, slow and clumsy, but even now his arm is only regrowing slowly, and he dodges, over-careful.

It’s enough.

Raika starts to pull herself back together.