Raika wakes up a few hours before the sun coalesces in the north. For all the stamina that cultivators possess, the number of times that the polyamorous trio went at it saturates the air and likely lasted hours, so she has no doubt they’ll take their time getting up. As for the kid, frankly, she won’t be surprised if he sleeps till noon. She knows full well from her time as a beggar that nothing pushes hunger away quite like sleep, and it’s a good way to conserve energy; add that onto the exhaustion and confusion of the last day, and he’s got plenty of rest to catch up on.

She admits to the fact that yeah, she’s worried. Make peace with one kid, another shows up, this one apparently looked favorably upon by the dead and their End.

…Shit. Thinking of JiaJia so flippantly still hurts. Hard enough to get used to remembering and using the name.

She toys with the nameless named piece of metal around her neck idly as she makes her way from her room to the kitchen. Cooking is easier than introspection. And less boring than meditation.

A snap of Blacksteel claws and the Flame lights, right as she quietly puts a pan atop it.

Seventeen eggs, scrambled. Thirteen slices of bacon, cut thick. Chili oil and sugar into a sauce that she soaks some pork belly in, then a light oil to get it crispy. A combination of carrots, thinly cut broccoli and bok choy mixed into a veggie platter to be shared. Rice, of course. Sesame oil to taste (light. She can taste it in the air). Last but not least, a loaf of bread from the pantry that she toasts lightly in a pan to warm up.

By the time she’s set the first plates out, the sounds of movement and grumbling can be heard from the bedroom area. The kid, still sleeping in the living room, stays unconscious, but as the smell fills the house that may well change. She sets aside a bowl and chopsticks for him just in case.

Hao Nera, predictably, is first out the door. She’s pretty sure he’d wake up from the dead if she waved a piece of bacon near his grave, and he throws his arm wide for a hug. Like every time for the last few months they’ve been here, she just puts a hand up, and he acquiesces, blowing her a kiss instead.

“My love, my heart, my dearest goliath of a woman, what I would have done to have even half as much joy as you bring me up in the mountains,” he whispers as he sits at the table. His belly is rumbling louder than he is: outside of Li Shu, he’s adapted best to her enhanced senses, and tends to be quieter than not when speaking just to her.

“Me and the boys would’ve paid good steel and better ass for such a chef, nevermind the view. How is it that you’re the full package and yet so deliciously not up for grabs?”

“Grab as you please,” she whispers back, “just don’t expect a guarantee on keeping the hand.”

“Ah, but then I get my sexy healer to nurse me back to health, and my sworn protector to defend my honor! An opportunity presents itself to lose oneself in dat ass, only to get to watch my partners jump to my defense.”

She snorts lightly. “Truly, you have reached the height of wisdom. Both whipped and sugar daddy at the same time. Still don’t know what they see in you.”

He smiles wider. “Besides my dashing good looks, gloriously shaped muscles, rugged charm and unbelievably good dick?”

“I truly doubt it’s that good.”

“Ah, but the rest you can’t refute!”

She laughs lightly, taking her own seat at the table as she does. Hao Nera celebrates his victory with a whopping triple-egg topping to his rice and four cuts of bacon right off the bat. She easily doubles that amount, and takes a good third of the pork belly and almost half of the vegetable mix besides.

“I would say I’m still not sure where you put all that,” Hao Nera mumbles through a full mouth, “but considering your assets, I suppose something is needed to fuel such a distinct frame.”

She cocks an eyebrow at him, but smiles as she eats a bite about twice the size of his in half the time. “Sure. Tits and ass are what make me hungry, not the ability to grow thirty arms or turn to a bioforged war construct. An excellent theory.”

“Well, according to you, you have total control over your body’s form and functions. What possible other reason could there be for such a tremendous use of resources?”

She scoffs. “It’s mostly muscle and spare fat reserves. I can reuse them easy enough, I just like the shape.”

“Ah, I see! Your predatory instincts at work! How else to best hunt your prey than the sweetest of honeypots!”

She laughs again, the Want and Mask in alignment as she does. “I am nothing if not willing to use all the resources at my disposal to my advantage. Like storing materials inside tits perfectly proportioned to my height and frame, for one.

“And besides, you’d be amazed at how much a few tweaks and a proper butt can do for balance and leg strength.”

He laughs, though he cringes a bit at it slipping out just a bit louder than their whispered tone so far. The kid doesn’t even stir, and she can hear his heartbeat and breathing still in the steady lull of sleep, so she waves it off, and he nods back. And then, of course, goes back to devouring his breakfast, slathering eggs and some pork belly with a big leaf of bok choy onto a slice of bread.

A few minutes later, Li Shu and Qen Hou both emerge from the room, though in drastically different states. Li Shu is bright-eyed, quiet but holding a few pages of notes and blank paper already, a stick of charcoal in hand and an enchanted quill held beside it for multiple writing options. Qen Hou, meanwhile, walks with a very slight but still discernible limp, and looks for all the world to be trying to hide it so hard he’s accidentally drawing attention to it, even as he sits properly and in a dignified manner for his meal.

“Thank you, Raika,” he says with a nod. “The food is, as always, appreciated.”

“No worries. I figured you’d all be pretty sore, so I decided to go heavy on the meat today.”

Qen Hou blushes slightly, but to his credit not nearly as badly as he might have when they first arrived. Li Shu, predictably, is nibbling on some pork belly and the vegetable mix, flipping through papers as she controls her writing tools to scribble furiously. The breakfast, for the most part, goes quietly. The kid manages to sleep through the entirety of the breakfast, despite the small and quiet noises that such a meal undertakes. He even sleeps through the process of setting things away, though Raika lights a small fire in their firepit and keeps a little basket of meat, food and vegetables for when he eventually wakes.

Raika, despite eating so much more, finishes and wraps things up fairly quickly, picking up one of her manuals and leaving the trio to finish cleaning up as she heads out into the crisp wintry air. This far south there’s no snow, the lingering heat of an eternity of sunsets baked into the closest horizon, but the air is still sharp, and the wind demands a heavier robe for most.

Raika shrugs her robe off her shoulders, leaving only her chest bindings and necklace on her upper body, and sits in the lotus position, facing the pond down the valley. The rolling hills to either side are still green, and visible at the edge of their surroundings is the circle of bamboo shoots that mark a sort of perimeter around them. Slowly, breath by breath, Raika aligns all the pieces of herself into order, and begins to organize them.

The Mask is temporarily lessened, the need for social interaction and practical data overridden by the instinctual needs and deeper understandings. The Want, what she calls the deeper parts of her, the parts that reflect emotion, desires and beliefs, melds a bit closer with the Flesh as both come to the forefront, as each individual element of the world around them comes into clear focus, and is discarded in turn. The Flesh’s instincts watch for danger as needed, but the central focus falls into the rushing of blood, the beating of her hearts, and the quiet burning of her newly-created “core”.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

She takes the time she needs. The Flesh takes her time adjusting, reducing the sensitivity, relaxing skin and blood and nerves, while the Want takes her time examining what is desired, what is achieved, and what is still missing.

It’s no cultivation fugue state, but meditation isn’t purely some magical art. Slowly, Raika purifies her minds, until thought and feeling are aligned, and all she can feel is the cold of the air, the pumping of blood, and the crackling of nerves and fires within her.

Then, she starts to focus on her latest goal.

Her eyes are unfocused, neither Want nor Mask looking through them, but the data is still filtered in through Flesh. Slowly, she opens the book in front of her, flipping nearly to the back.

Supreme Body Art has almost sixty pages, one of the thicker manuals she’s seen that isn’t a medical text. It holds dozens of potential examples and improvements, all determined by clear understanding of deeper biomechanics than any of Raika currently possesses. She’s learned more, and especially under the influence of the strange, multi-hued flame she generated the night before, she felt more, but there’s limits to what can be learned quickly. For all the knowledge of what a liver does, and how to optimize it, her own “liver” equivalent is still a mystery organ, as are most of what she possesses, and, if her stomach and lungs are any indication, likely has some Qi related properties none of her or Li Shu understand yet.

So for current changes, Raika’s Want looks for two criteria. The first: what is needed, directly and currently. The second: what can be achieved.

The fight against Feng Gao might have gone a bit differently with more Blacksteel, but it would be a stopgap at best. In the end, he was faster, he was stronger, his reactions more efficient, and, fundamentally, he ignored more rules. He could do more, and could somehow process all that he was doing.

Something Raika has gotten more comfortable with understanding is that, fundamentally, cultivation doesn’t obey the laws of biology. Or physics, but she knows even less about that than she does medical science. With the sensitivity the Flesh has, Raika is aware that her eyes jiggle when she runs fast enough and blurs her vision, that muscles are supposed to tear at certain angles and uses of force, that bones simply cannot stand up to a certain amount of impact without breaking. Sure, Feng Gao was in the Warrior realm, but there’s signs of similar rule-breaking in Li Shu, Hao Nera and Qen Hou, and when she ate of cultivator flesh from the fallen in the dungeon beneath Cragend, their flesh had been barely above her own baseline so long ago.

In short, cultivator’s aren’t actually improving their bodies on a basic level, not one that follows the rules. The Mask is certain they could, if they learned how or had a focus to it, but more likely, the sheer concentration, purity, and intent of the Qi inside one’s Dantians and meridians is what actually influences the way that a cultivator interacts with things like impact, heat, aging, and more. The nuances might be lost, but just like how having soul organs can create a “cultivation fugue state” for meditation, it stands to reason it could be a bridge between the physical nature of a cultivator’s body and the elevated nature of their weight on reality.

All theory, all unproven as far as she knows, but under examination, it seems to hold up. Which begs the question; how does Raika, who has no soul organs and can’t directly use or “digest” Qi to align it to her own weight on reality, match their growth?

Answer: with lots of extra steps.

The bone latticing, muscle density manipulation, even, in the end, the way that Qi saturation has caused changes in the “weight” of her specific biological pieces have all been good steps in that direction, but some things weren’t so intentional.

Li Shu pointed out something crucial recently: if Raika had kept her human organs, even with Qi saturation, she would be dead. Things she was conscious of, like her heartbeat, might have been maintained, but only when awake and willing it through her Truths, and beyond that there’s plenty she just didn’t know about. According to Li Shu, her muscle density demands a metabolism that her new body can handle, but that normal human organs would simply have failed at, leaving her blood thin and without essential components and her overall system failing. Hell, her brain alone should have structurally collapsed the first time she altered her skull, which she only did after her experience with the beast tide and her first Tribulation. What her current body can’t handle, her Truth can cover, but if she’d kept a human organ set, the minute she fell unconscious or asleep and stopped consciously keeping things running, she’d have died.

So, to circle back: what is needed, and what can be done.

Her strength and speed aren’t dependent on just Qi, they’re dependent on a complete system, and she can’t rely on Qi to carry her through as she wills because her will can’t directly touch Qi. She can improve muscle density, sure, she can even “overclock” her current system to the point where she needs her Truths always running to keep her alive, but they don’t fix the foundation. It would be… it would be like pushing to drink in more Qi right after a change in realm, without strengthening one’s foundation or understanding. She doesn’t yet have the ability to create organs, and if she pushes her body too far, just like when overstimulation kept destroying her sense of self and placement, she’ll just end up trapped in a body that she can’t sustain or keep up with.

So, the Want, in all the wisdom of the Mask’s analysis and the Flesh’s insistence that this is the better direction, has selected the next target for improvement.

Raika is going to alter her brain.

Not much! Nothing with the hormones, with the pieces of memory centers, not even altering the current mass. It’s said that the brain is one of the most adaptable, ever-changing organs in a body, and Li Shu gave her a quick breakdown: back / bottom of the brain for managing background chemicals and systems, middle for memories and subconscious processes, and front for thought, give or take.

Raika’s just… gonna make a new front-brain. No big deal.

She breathes in, low and slow, and feels cold, wintry air, a thousand scents of Qi and living organisms, dirt and water and air entering her lungs.

And she slowly takes just a teeny, tiny, itty bitty little bit of the strange, pulsing, crackling grey thing behind her eyes.

Maybe a quarter of a fingernail, maybe less. The smallest, tiniest piece. But still alive, still connected to her blood, still alive and pulsing and real… and she moves it down into her solar plexus. Makes a second little bubble for it, a bit more flexible than a skull but still mostly bone, right near her newly-created core.

She takes a few moments to review, checking on herself. The Mask and the Want cooperate, picturing things, looking into memories, checking to see if there’s any discernible change… nothing.

And then, in a mix of instinct and focus, she sends just a tiny, itty bitty nothing drop of that core’s Flame towards it.

Worst case scenario, it burns up or enters metastasis, but it’s not connected to her main brain, and it’s still part of her, so her Truths have authority over it. Best case scenario, something phenomenal happens. Either way, no part of her knows enough about how a brain works to build one, and this is probably way more efficient than feeding bits of Qi in that might well destroy it. Considering how the Flame fueled her growth and transformations last time…

The iridescent flame, fluttering in red, purple, gold, blue and green, moves through her. There are barely even embers, and the amount taken from it is more than half despite being barely a spark, but even still as she draws it out from her core she feels her body again. Cell walls ripple at its passing, blood and muscle singing in some indiscernible way… and then it lands on the extracted brain matter.

It’s not the explosive, uncontrollable growth of the previous night, the changes so vast and abrupt they demanded shunting Blacksteel rods down into the core to kill it silent. Still, the change is notable, with the droplet of grey flesh swirling in blood and cerebral fluid. It doubles in size, then doubles again, over the course of a few minutes, leaving it maybe the size of a single knuckle or small pebble, and as it grows, it folds over itself, wrinkles and crevasses already visible as it develops.

But… just a touch, for now. No more. The Core-Flame runs dry, but already Raika has routed the new bubble of brain-flesh into her circulatory system, copying the framework around her skull to not drown the little piece of what might be a mind. Then, she leaves it to rest.

It took dividing herself into three, amidst a psychotic break and an attempted ego-assassination, to finally be able to manage and understand her existence. Before that, it had taken blinding adrenaline and desperate instinct to even operate properly.

Exploring improvements on that front to match the strange patterns of flesh and bone and Flame throughout her seems only proper.

With a sigh, the Flesh lets out the breath she was holding, enough air flowing from her lungs to ripple the grass all around. She picks up the manual and walks back inside, her body heat elevated enough that she’s letting off steam in the cold, wintry air.

As she enters, she sees the kid scarfing down the food she set aside for him, his eyes alert and rather alarmed at her arrival and the straight up fog rolling off her seven-foot frame as she enters.

“You done eating?” she asks.

Looking down at the last few pieces of his food, she snorts at the tension in his expression, like she intends to take it away from him.

“Finish up, kid. I’m going into town today, and I don’t trust Hao Nera or Li Shu not to get you into some kind of mess without me here.”

“...why?” he asks.

She shrugs. “Gotta pay for groceries somehow. Come on. We’re going to market to sell some bones.”