The swarm skitters and sings, happily consuming its latest meal. Shi Cho coos at one particularly aggressive ant, watching it bite adorably into the thorax of a centipede and yank with all its strength to tear apart enough chunks to take it back to its friends. The same process is repeated a hundred times a second, a multitude of sharpened pincer-jaws digging through prey and food and matter for resources, every bite folding back into the whole, as hunger leads to a breeding of more biting pincers and crawling limbs.
It’s a comfort, one he has… admittedly indulged in as of late. Some of his latest swarm leaves its food, migrating back up his sleeve toward the artfully concealed hive he carries in his robes, close to his body heat and Qi, and he enjoys in feeling his crawling critters move over him. After the dark, the long tunnels and endless days of perfect dark, of sucking, starving stone, he’s had… an anxiety. Not much of one, but the memory of his hives getting colder, his swarms slowing, each beat of fluttering wings or clicking of mandibles slower than the last…
It had been like watching a part of himself die, even as he himself starved. He’d been forced to send his beetles, hardiest of his insects, out to scout, because any other single bugs would die to the cold almost immediately. And even then, it had been a painful thing, knowing that so many of them wouldn’t return, would die cold, alone, slowly losing function as his connection to them dwindled, as the claustrophobic tunnels all around had leeched from him…
He shudders. Never liked leeches. Some of his brethren in the sect used them, and apparently they could be used for medicinal purposes, but any distaste he had before is multiplied now.
He lost two fingers, in the end, and almost half his swarm. He flexes the prosthetic, feeling the chitin-shell and hydraulics of the creatures replacing them and taking comfort in how they respond quickly and easily. It had taken weeks to regain the movement, but now they feel more comfortable than the ones he was born with, his Qi saturating them entirely. His swarm has grown, too. He lost so much Qi… but that’s the beauty of insectile cultivation, of being bound to a true hive. Incredibly difficult to refine and bind to oneself, but once you did, a fraction of every bite of food, every birth and death of the colony, feeds back into the cultivator.
But the pieces missing still hurt. Some of those bugs had taken months to cultivate, the beetles especially, and the fireflies alone have cost him maybe a year of his cultivation to lose so completely.
Still, needs must, and in the end, they’d survived. In no small part due to his own assistance and strength.
He wonders at that. At his survival. It hadn’t felt like some great opportunity. More a tribulation, if anything. Those who were “found” (read: wandered back to town) after being declared dead or missing in the arena collapse got some of the rewards honored, but only some. A few high-tier Qi stones, which were mostly used to regain his personal reserves and as savings for some future purchase, a medal, and an enchanted sword- not bad, but not exactly focused on his cultivation. Shi Cho is under the distinct impression that they offered some consolation prizes to save face, and were far too busy with other matters to honor a tournament with no real winner and that no one wanted to repeat too soon.
But… it had been worth it. It had, surprisingly, been progress in its own way.
Shi Cho glimpsed the peak of the mountain.
It hadn’t been much of a glimpse. Barely an idea, especially with how alien things had been, down there in the tunnels. In the arena he saw cultivators of higher realms, saw displays of power that stunned him, saw cultivation styles and techniques he’d never even thought of. The one Stone Divers sect cultivator that had wielded his Qi into lodestone golems, or the one that wielded blood that became lightning and back again, the woman who had left strange whirlpools of air where she stepped… they had been enlightening. The frog in the well seeing the sky past the lip.
But down in the tunnels, he’d seen the ocean, far on the horizon.
The ever-shifting mass of Raika, the Undying. Surviving in the darkness of the tunnels, changing before his very eyes to slice through the darkness with claws of pure death and impossible will in the face of terrifying unknowns.
The endless masses of malformed things the witch had sent, all with unique properties, manifested en masse to rival his own swarms and then some.
The possibilities of what could be ring for him now. The realization that the world is much, much vaster and stranger than he realized.
He’d left his details with the Imperials, the ones allied to the abomination. And she had been that, despite all his admiration. They’d split paths, and he’d been rather unconscious at the time of the splitting, but it was still a pleasant surprise that they’d care to take his name and sect. Plenty of folk see his kind of cultivator as abominations, so he’s hardly in a place to judge, but it was still a surprise nonetheless that she’d… died? Left? The details had been vague, and he had been unconscious for a large amount of it. He owed their allies that much, at least.
But he has his suspicions.
For one thing, Beetle 365 is still alive, but hasn’t returned home.
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Any direct Qi connection is long gone, and he’s no Nascent Soul cultivator in the insect paths who could sense any hive-offspring no matter how distantly related or far away. But he would feel if it had died. It’s… instinctual at best, but he holds to the feeling. It’s nice to think of one of his bugs, one of his favorites at that, had made it out from that place.
Perhaps it would find him again, engorged on beast flesh and raw Qi. The sort of fantasy someone much younger than he should indulge in, but a good fantasy nonetheless.
He feeds his swarm a fresh cut of meat and a stray handful of grains, and watches them eat, wondering about what the future might hold and enjoying watching the hungry things he loves eat their fill.
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Language is a complicated concept. Language, in spite of what it most commonly refers to, has very little to do with words at all. Grammar and linguistics and sentence structure, all parodies of the concept behind language, which has very little do with words at all. The concept is shifted around the idea of words: body language, as only one example. But language, at its core, is the transmission of information, of concepts encoded into symbols of sound, of movement, color or energy.
All this is to say that there are no words in the language used between the beasts in the cavern.
The stone around them is not stone, but fractal, grey-black flesh of a pulsing heart. The air that they breathe, those that still need to, is as much illusion as it is matter, and leaks in precariously through strange airways and stranger portals.
“It is taken from us,” one of the beasts says in the language of smells, of flashing chromatophores and of strange, minute fluctuations of Qi.
“Dead?” Asks another, its voice coming in the trembling of subsonic vibration, of crackling lightning and magnetism.
“Not dead. Taken,” affirms the first.
“Into the deeps. By another heart,” says a third of the beasts, its language clearer than the others for how it ripples through the air, changing the Qi surrounding them all and presenting to them its mind.
“Slave heart?” asks the second, again thrumming through the ground.
“No. Free. Slave to the Liars, but free now. It sings, low and quiet.”
“Another free? Unbound? Safe?”
“Not safe,” thrums the third. “Beneath the broken place, where the hive of golden death dig, dig, dig. Hidden, but not safe.”
The first among them snarls, something deeper than before, with less clear meaning besides displeasure and aggression, undirected. “It is taken from us.”
“But not dead,” rumbles the second. “Taken by a free heart. There is a chance, then, it might return.”
“So long as there is life, there is hope,” says the third in the language of ripples and energy.
The first growls again, but is at least a little mollified. It prowls across the chamber, its many limbs a feature shared by many of its kin, and strange, ethereal colors flicker about its form as it moves, its corner of the cave the three meet turning to strange, whorling patterns that draw the eye and warp the air currents all around it.
“Foolish. Arrogant. Should not be. Was taken from us.”
The second of the beasts hums in agreement, the trembling of the ground itself transmitting a feel of patience, of care, of a sort of implacable strength and firmness. “True. But more foolish to pursue, now, than to wait. The better hunter finds its moment.”
The first of the beasts growls again, the sound pitched well beyond what human ears can hear. “Do not speak to us of hunting. You are no hunter.”
The second beast rumbles, long and low and quiet, and this time there is a hint of humor to the language. “I am better than a hunter.”
Before the first of the three to speak can channel its aggression or dig itself forward into its spectrum of color, the third among them sends out a pulse, vibrating through Qi and intent and consciousness. It calms them both, a showing of both violence and vulnerability, that to enter a fight here would not be to any of their benefits.
The hunter grumbles, but acquiesces.
The thing that rumbles through the earth like a storm through stone makes a sound, a mix of apology and satisfaction. “All will be well.”
“Well for who?” hisses the colorful hunter.
“For those who win. And who find their moment.”
“Will the packs still come? The ambushes of your kind still travel?”
The colorful hunter yowls, low and quiet. “They hunger for more than scraps. Many are young and foolish. They will come to the hunt when called. We will find the highest of them, and take from them their throats and their heartblood. But we will not return with fresh prey between our teeth if your kind do not do as they must.”
“We must,” ripples the third among them, many-winged and flickering with thoughts its own and foreign. “So we shall.”
“The center must fall,” rumbles the tectonic, thundering beast. “These hungers cannot last. More and more are born stunted, even in the far-below.”
“We will not be slaves,” whispers the first, the idea of the sentence ringing out from it in ways that echo silently in the chamber and entrench themselves, already grown long ago into the minds of its equals. “We will not be… cattle.”
That last concept, as it rings through not-quite-shared languages, makes all three of them almost physically recoil. It is a new thought, as these things go. The concept is old, has existed almost as long as the bipeds and their nest-clusters, but the thought of applying it to things like them, like those beside them, brings out a revulsion that strikes at the core of them.
Death is only to be expected. Violence, desired. Ruin and horror and even war, if it must be so, all are known and faced with varying degrees of hunger and hatred. But that word… there is something in it, something that reeks of, at best, what some of the insectile beasts do, crawling their way inside another to parasitize them. There is a disgust there, an acknowledgement of simple existence, true, but a disgust nonetheless. And, deeper than that, a fear. A fear not of the hunted, so often embraced or even experienced. No, a deeper, more viscous, more horrifying fear. A fear of subversion. Of enforced transformation. Of being unmade, and rearranged into a form chosen by another.
The hunter recovers first, its hackles raised, its fluttering spectrum bending and warping perception until it is obscured and unmade beneath a fog of color, such that even the memory of its appearance is hidden from the others.
“We will fight. We are an ambush of hungering things, and we will take apart those that bind the gold and white. We shall hunt their flesh and minds and bodies.”
The tectonic storm expresses amusement, but also agreement. “They shall be unmade. Or we shall. All will be well.”