First things first; inventory.

Minimal Qi until she manages to properly digest what she’s eaten. True Flame, despite how painful it is, is almost literally already fuel, pure energy with just a few concepts tied to it to make it real. Flesh, especially dense, powerful flesh, like that of the divine beast’s spawn, takes longer, and cultivating it herself takes longer still. She can’t absorb it from the air, and her process of using her body as a sort of natural formation or furnace to grow more from the dregs she has takes time. Less time as she accumulates more, due to exponential growth, but still; time.

In terms of physical needs… it’s strange to consider them again. She’s not quite hungry, but she is thirsty. She’s not sure for how long that’s been the case. Might have been days. She’s not exactly been taking care of herself, even under the best circumstances, and reevaluating after managing to dislodge Zhoulong has given some perspective on that fact.

In terms of damage, she’s passable. Shifting and rearranging the damage around is enough to mitigate it, and her body, even without Qi, is changed. Having more of it to feed on helps, but she’s not powered exclusively by it, and once she gets some sleep, food and water, the process should continue at a good pace, hopefully. Nothing severe internal besides some broken bones.

Sort of a miracle, considering the explosion, actually.

In terms of equipment… she has a tuning fork. It’s on a small chain around her neck, and it’s important. She knows its important. The chain is partially buried under folds of bone and armor, meaning even subconsciously, she tried to protect it. Considering she doesn’t know what it is, that’s probably something Zhoulong tried to isolate. Other than that, she has… well, nothing. Clothes torn in the fight, no spatial ring, no pills, no way to properly use either of them if she had them. In fact, she’s kind of naked right now.

The Flesh doesn’t care, and neither does the Mask, since all the fun bits are currently asexual spiked body armor and partially-revealed musculature, but it’s an interesting thing to note.

So. Inventory complete. She needs to find water and potentially food, and needs to find her allies. The issue with the latter, despite her senses, is that the entire cave system they seem to have fallen into reeks. Every stone or passageway smells of still, clear waters, and almost nothing else. What little peeks through, the hint of sharpened forest or writhing iridescence, are either from the massive techniques that devastated the colosseum and seem to have shattered the dome surrounding it or from the wielders of said techniques themselves, and thus are best avoided either way. The Witch’s scent, on the other hand, pervades everything, like the whole area is a part of her, or like she’s saturated everything with her Qi.

Except that’s not how her Qi smells, is it? Raika remembers when she first met the Witch, the scents she had. The dark waters were there, all around, but at the core of her there had been the scent of something… oddly bright. Reflective, perhaps. Almost like the Qi she wields isn’t actually coming from her.

Something to consider for later.

As she’s been thinking, she’s been moving. Letting her instinct move her as freely as it needs to, offering only vague direction. Her body shifts and accommodates the insecure footing of the debris surprisingly well, and she finds herself… a bit surprised by how much less overwhelming her senses are. Part of it is the disconnect between “Mask” and “Flesh”, but part of it also is that she’s letting her body do as it asks, and finds her nostrils flaring and slitting shut more often, her eyes defaulting to a lesser degree of focus to keep her from needing to examine every minute detail of something. It’s imperfect, an adaptation to an overwhelming amount of input- but it helps, and she feels a bit frustrated that she was so disconnected from how she was feeling that she didn’t consider altering it more literally.

It also helps that she’s not actively trying to look human anymore.

She and her body realign the spikes around her skull, formatting it more sleekly, letting her mouthparts extend into a sort of muzzle. With all the damage she’s taken, she’s mostly kept only a few muscles and bones in place as needed, making her form rather skinny, with more padding and armor around the joints using the damaged tissue. It also helps to protect Taran, which is a good bonus. She reshapes herself to crawl through and about the ruins, her body aching, but not in a bad enough way that she needs to stop.

The space around her, in particular, is of note. She walks close to one of the cliff walls, and the shape of the cavern is vaguely… well, canyon-shaped. She doesn’t see much light above, indicating either that they fell through the ground into a deeper part of the Crag, or that the debris is blocking the Crag’s growth up above from letting in light. As she walks, she starts finding things beyond the arena, buildings and structures that seem less ornate, more conventional.

And then, of course, she starts finding the bodies.

Not as many as she expected, not if the Crag broke deeper into the city from the battle, but the Arena was sort of on the edge of it anyways. Most of the bodies have either very basic robes or simple merchant’s outfits, but there are a few outfits and bodies of sect servants and lesser cultivators among the ruin.

The Flesh points out that she does need fuel, and they aren’t using it anymore. The Mask points out they’re in a hurry, and that having man-flesh on their breath won’t leave a good impression. She leaves the bodies where they lie, and walks down deeper.

The collapse of the arena acts as a sort of hill, the civilian viewing area beneath it and some buildings around it making up much of the debris surrounding that, and its only when she’s past it that she starts to smell something new.

She sniffs, snuffling against the ground, and picks up scent trails. Dozens. Harder to tell, what with the overwhelming Qi of this place and the blood and debris tainting the air behind her, but it seems like a lot of the wisps of other scents she’d felt had come to congregate here. There’s a scent from where one of the beast tamer’s creatures scent-marked the terrain, leaving a clear trail of at least one cultivator. Some insect carcasses indicate the bug-wielder survived as well, and several other signs point to some of the survivors- a more confident tread for the Stone Divers and Unearthly Depths sect groups, all clustered together, while ax-marks indicate the survival of the massive warrior-cultivator, who seems to have gathered together a group.

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

How long has she been unconscious? Did her meditation really take that long?

The groups split up. She tries, as hard as she can, to pick out the scents of Yun Ka, Jun Vral and Kaena, but finds it difficult to discern them, what little scent there is even now being actively washed away by the presence in the air. She growls, the Mask using her true voice for a bit to allow the expression of frustration.

And the sound of her voice ripples.

She senses the shift in air pressure, the slight warbling of sound as it travels, like she’s in some sort of thick jelly or deep underwater. Immediately, the Qi around her shifts, the scent of it changing to become sharper, clearer-

She is moving. Instinct guides her, her mind looking for possible hiding spots but her instincts pushing her away from anyplace where the ripples seem to gather, where the world seems to shift, and-

Eyes begin to open.

She squirms back in the rubble, shifting her weight millimeter by millimeter so that the dust and rubble shifts. Her armor, already off-white and covered in ash and debris, flexes and bends over her like camouflage.

“Oh little Wolfie…” croons a voice from the dark. “I know you’re here, little Wolf. I can’t imagine anyone else having Truespeak down here. I heard your little growl, Wolfie. So good to hear you being so… free with yourself.

“I wasn’t even looking, I swear! I’ve been ever so busy. All sorts of things in motion, now my hand has been so forced. Couldn’t have those two kids fucking up the whole city, now could I? And here I thought you’d gotten caught in up. What a disappointment that was, and what a joy to see you out and about. I thought I felt a ripple, a few hours back, but boy that growl of yours. Shivers up the old spines.”

The eyes swirl around, oozing through thickened shadows and strange Qi as they look over the ruins that have fallen from above. They focus and hone in on several of the corpses scattered about, looking over them carefully as if checking them for something.

“And look at you, so very respectful. I thought I saw things going another way when you absolutely drank through those cigarettes I gave you, but here you are, showing restraint. All these fresh goods, and not a bite to speak of. What an odd little duck you are, Wolf. So consistently tearing me apart between disappointment and hopeful interest. It would be a pity if your cousins surpass you too easily. But… ah, I’ve said too much. Crawl along, little Wolf. Come deeper into the dark. Your friends are waiting, and not all of my newest guests are quite so polite as you and I.”

The eyes, glistening wet orbs of human jelly with endless pools at their center, mold back into the shadows. Sometimes they seem to fall into their own pupils, or have said pupils expand around their whole, while others simply seem to blink shut with disturbing wetness.

It is only when they are all gone, and when the ripples in the Qi around her have stopped, and when another ten minutes have passed that Raika emerges from camouflage and ruins, shaking herself slightly to let the dust off.

So. A bit more proof that her “true voice” is… literal. The hints go back to the oath she gave the kid, that everything offered would be freely given… but confirmation is never a bad thing. Something to be careful about. Especially seeing that, apparently, the Witch uses the entire depths of the space around her as some sort of Domain, or at least web. It’s… hard to tell how. Her skills are genuinely different from cultivation in a foundational way, even though she clearly uses Qi, and recognizable types of Qi. From what she’s heard of actual demonic practices, they don’t feel like Qi at all, so it’s not that, but… it’s not Truth, and it’s not Dao, not really. There’s hints of Dao, especially when the shadows ripple, and there’s hints of Truth when the eyes appear, but neither feels entirely normal.

But, priorities come first. She’s still weak, still starved- and Taran remains curled up, unconscious against her torso, the strange metal tuning fork she’s held onto trapped between them. And the Witch implied there was some tension, maybe even conflict, between the parties that fell down here. That threatens her friends, and her chances of finding them.

That does change the equation a little.

Raika walks over to one of the corpses.

It’s a corpse. There is no spark of life in it, no lingering hint of sentience or vitality like with the weapons of the corpse-smith. It is just… dead meat, which once held a person. In this particular case, a person with a good physique, wearing upper-class merchant’s robes, though not so upper class as to have jewels and gilding along his sleeves.

It’s not fair. A part of her, one that is busy and deeper down, reflects on that, that this isn’t fair. He, and all the other bodies here, didn’t ask to die. They didn’t ask to get caught up in some… some useless conflict, that means nothing, that revolves around the hunger and pride and arrogance of those with power. Maybe the witch intervening did save the city some damage; but for the people here, that doesn’t matter. They’re dead.

In her core, Raika wishes to honor them. To tell them that it’s unfair, to acknowledge that pain, to see it rectified and kept from happening again- but such thoughts are not the priority now. They are feelings, angry ones mostly, but they do not guide her actions nearly as much now, in this time of division and healing.

The Mask decides that, with the fact her allies are in credible danger, priorities have shifted, and finding fuel is now more urgent. Besides; where there is Qi in abundance, there are spirit beasts, and surely the bodies will not be long preserved anyways.

The Flesh decides that it is hungry, and does not care all that much where its next meal comes from.

She holds back, though. Only three bites, all in places that burial robes can cover.

Each bite is… it’s like eating a cooked steak, done right, for the first time. For all that her senses elevate the act of eating in general, sometimes to uncomfortable places, that bite of flesh holds the same thing that every bite she’s taken in combat has had: satisfaction. It is not just flavor, but the freshness of the kill, the lack of decay or ruin in the material, the properly tuned mechanisms broken down to her taste… her Flesh experiences it all, and knows it to be right.

Maybe it’s the left-over Qi in the flesh. Maybe it’s the fact it’s still raw, full of useful, convenient pieces to mimic and break down. Maybe it’s the fact the kill is fresh.

The Mask makes a note to test, later, if rarer ingredients with Qi or more complex dishes evoke a similar experience, once they are out. In the meantime, she stops at three more bodies, and from each, takes another two bites.

They all taste different. They all taste divine. She shivers, and the Flesh wonders just how good it would be to eat the whole thing- bones and all.

The Mask decides that it’s a waste of time, and the core between them all pulls back at the thought, to which the Flesh seems to almost huff. Just a thought, it seems to transmit.

And she walks off, deeper into the dark, following the trails of footprints, as her body unravels new fuel and feeds it back into her, crackling lightly and stretching new tissue where once there was ruin.