The following morning starts off fairly typical, all things told.

She wakes up before everyone else, as she often does. She prepares breakfast (eggs, scrambled this time, with a medley of fried rice with peas and carrots and cherry tomatoes spread onto small toast-bites), and sets the table, lighting the nearby fire as she does. She makes sure the flame is low, that there’s minimal Qi so that the True Flame turns to normal fire before long, that it begins to warm the cabin properly against the mild chill of winter. She makes sure the plates are covered, her pans and tools are washed and cleaned, and all the ingredients left over placed back into the pantry, neatly where they came from.

And then… she leaves.

She doesn’t bother waking the kid up from his little corner, though he snaps awake nonetheless. At the sound of even quiet movement near him, his eyes snap open, recognizing a potential danger… but besides a quiet nod, she doesn’t acknowledge him. Gives him his space, and the space to choose whether or not he wants to engage or approach. She doesn’t call for the rest of the crew to arrive either: Hao Nera recovered from how frazzled he was pretty quickly, bandit instincts and all that, but Qen Hou remained drained and in pain most of the night, with Li Shu focusing on compiling notes on the encounter and making sure he heals up. They can rest, comfort each other if need be. There’s no need to draw them out, not when she’s leaving so soon.

So she makes breakfast for everyone, takes a small basket of toast and tomatoes with her, and walks out of the cabin down towards the pond.

The sun’s not up yet, but there’s that early pre-dawn glow of writhing serpents along the horizon, tinting it orange as they come closer together. She sits, comfortable but upright, and looks into the reflective water.

Slowly, she takes her tuning fork and taps it against her sternum.

Dink.

The vibration trembles in the air, making the pond water ripple and sending that same wavelength through her own blood.

And she sits there.

And thinks.

Slowly, she divides herself again, pulling apart the mechanisms of who they are together. Mask, Flesh and Want separate, bit by bit, from the more cohesive whole they form until they can each feel the difference from each other. Want is first to break the silence.

“Do you think we could have beaten that beast?”

Mask scoffs, which is answer enough, and the Flesh writhes in agreement, a mix of hormones and heartbeats making a rhythm.

“No,” says the Mask. “It was hard to tell its exact power, but even at the lower end, it was much stronger than us, barring perhaps our new addition to the arsenal. But without control there’s no way to know how useful our “core” would have been.”

“How did it find us?” The Want wonders. “I thought the bamboo perimeter limited our exposure. Could it have tracked our scent? Has it been following us for months, trying to find us?”

The Mask shakes their collective head. “Unlikely. It was probably close, and felt our spar with Qen Hou. Our new ability likely overwhelmed the strength of a nascent dungeon heart, and it’s unlikely that it was able to muffle it enough. The beast seemed able to slip through space, much like the last divine beast we met; for all we know, it could have popped in to say hi from the very edge of the fourth ring, maybe further if it was stronger than whatever enchantments the fortresses have.”

The flesh ripples, a sense of unease and an antsiness to move overtaking the conversation.

“I have to agree,” says the Want. “We have to do… something about it. Right? What if it thinks we’re just keeping our friends around as a snack? Or if-”

“Actually, that leads me to a pretty important point. What are we doing?”

The Flesh eats a piece of toast and cherry tomatoes while the silence sits on the space for a bit.

“We’re getting stronger and we’re healing,” says the Mask, “but for what? My job is to keep us going forward and in working order, Flesh’s job is to tell us what we need and how to use it, and it’s yours to find a direction to go. We were going after revenge for a while, but that’s just not all there is anymore, is it?”

“...no, it isn’t. We’ve got people we want to protect, and the more we learn, the more it seems like something big is coming. Taurus’s plan, all the friction in the Empire’s factions, even the fact that a divine beast somehow attacked a central city of the third ring, it all points to things getting more intense.”

“And the stronger we get, the more involved we’re going to be,” the Mask nods. “Whether we want to be or not, the truth of it is that we’re not actually hidden. We’re still in the third ring, well in range of the Empire’s borders, and if we do make it to the fourth, we need to worry about being strong enough to cross over and fight whatever’s on the other side. So… what’s next? And why?”

Raika sits and meditates for a while.

In the distance, she can hear her allies waking up, eating breakfast, enjoying themselves. Out here in their valley, within their bamboo perimeter, there’s less birdsong, less animal noises, and she enjoys that particular blend of silence and activity. She just sits for a while, next to the reeds of the pond, watching little fish dart to and fro awkwardly, feeling the breeze brushing against the grass and the few trees all around.

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

On occasion, she lightly taps her tuning fork, feeling out the vibration. It becomes a bit of a game, the vibration making the otherwise unnaturally still waters of the pond ripple.

An hour passes like this. Maybe a bit more. Hao Nera emerges first, heading out from the perimeter on some errand, perhaps, and she feels the flow of Qi shift around her as Qen Hou starts to cultivate, Li Shu sitting close by, writing something. Even more faintly, she senses Jin, awkwardly exploring the cabin, and eventually taking a seat near Li Shu, who easily takes the opportunity to start talking about what she’s scribbling down.

The world keeps moving. The sun goes by above.

It’s peaceful.

She takes her pendant off, looking properly at her tuning fork in her hand. The damage Zhoulong did remains, even now, but… there’s a weight to it that still feels distinct. Familiar. It stands for a large portion of her journey, and as she’s recovered, she’s realized it’s been there for her for a long time.

The Want makes itself known again.

“I think we need more,” she says.

The Flesh ripples, a mix of anticipation and unease. The Mask says nothing.

“Need… maybe isn’t the right word. I think we could find someplace like this, somewhere. Reinforce the perimeter with runes and formations, spend the next few years cultivating and living safely. Find a way to bring Maen there, if she wants, and just… spend a century hiding. Cultivators do it all the time, you know? And we’d be safer. We’d have room to grow, and we’d be avoiding all the mess of the world.

“But we don’t… we don’t Want that. It’s not that it feels like giving up, but it’s just… it’s not who we are. Who we Want to be. I don’t want to hide. I want to be able to do more, explore more, be more. I want to get stranger and more powerful and find out what new things we can do. There’s so much joy in just… running! We couldn’t even walk right for over a year! And we’re stronger and faster than ever, but it just makes me think of how much more there is to experience, how much further we can go. I want to experience all that we can, and see what new, impossible thing we become that no one’s ever heard of before. We want to keep growing. The world is so, so big. I want to see the fifth ring, I want to climb up the side of the first and punch somebody, I want to crawl through the sky and fuck the sun, I want to eat the damn moons! I don’t know! I still want to make the Feng family pay for all they’ve done to us, I still want to find Taurus and… fucking take him apart for enslaving us, almost breaking us entirely. There’s just so much, and we see none of it if we go and hide.

“And if we do any of that, they’re going to keep coming for us.

“The beasts. The Empire. Other Witches, or things we don’t even know about yet. The scientists or the military or the nobles who want to make slaves and tools out of all of us. We’ll do something new and glorious and meaningful, and they’ll come try to take us apart or devour us whole.

“I want to be free. Free to hunt and kill if we want, free to fight if we want, free to explore and to keep our people safe and to become something even more impossible, because we crawled back from nothing, from something worse than death, from powerlessness, and I don’t want to stop going the other way. I don’t ever want us to have to hide ever again.”

For a while, the only sound is the wind through the grass, the strange heartbeats of impossible fish in the pond, and the distant sounds of the people she cares about being who they are.

“Ok,” says the Mask.

Fuck yes, says the Flesh.

And then, one by one, they rejoin the whole. Each of her minds, her “personalities”, distinct and functional, and each one a part of a larger self that exists as they align, a system of many and one.

Raika doesn’t hesitate to start changing things now.

Something has clicked, with that choice. It… aligns with her, in a way so little has in the last two years. That hunger, not just to survive but to keep growing, to get stronger, to be powerful and free… it reminds her of the cold of Paleblossom city. Of the dark of its alleys and the pain of surviving in them. Maybe she’s never been truly powerful, or truly free, but that Want? That need for it, fueling her? Yes, that feels familiar.

So she stops hesitating, and she chooses her path forward.

Three different “neuro-centers” begin to form, adding to her neural architecture. Each is kept separate, kept distinct, but she pushes more Qi and resources down towards her sensory sub-mind, already formed, and lets the Flesh do what it feels instinctively right to do to connect to it further. She takes her Blacksteel limb and redistributes it, leaving it like an exo-skeletal shell around a fleshy interior as the material is moved back into deposits and reservoirs through her body, ready to be deployed, grown, or weaponized in more varied ways.

She feels the shimmering embers in her “core” begin to sputter, to flare, as if in response purely to her mindset, and she begins to build a second, denser wall of blacksteel around it, containing it further and potentially letting her ignite it more often.

Except… it’s not a Core, still. And putting the quotation marks around it is starting to get a little old. A core indicates a refuge of the soul, an accumulation of all that one is. There’s similarities here, sure, but that’s just not what this thing is. It’s not a shell, or a centerpiece of her soul; it’s fuel. It’s power.

It’s an Engine.

As if recognizing its name, that new part of her hums, growls, churns with impossible eldritch flame that is entirely hers. She feels it begin to stir, even as she encloses it further into other support mechanisms, and it, in turn, begins to fill that space. Her fire grows at the center of the engine, at the center of her thaumaturgic reactor, and the Blacksteel and the material some of it has been transmuted to fold into mechanisms to hold it in place.

She keeps it quiet. No need to go exploding at the first sign of self-fulfillment… but it’s not just embers anymore, detonating or nearly dying. She can feel, as she closes a new Blacksteel containment shell around it, that deep inside the bronze-colored metal in her true engine’s heart, the flame burns steadily.

And certainly not least among her changes, she looks down at the small, minute little thing trembling in her hand.

A tuning fork can’t move on its own. It can’t make its own sounds, only magnify the frequencies built into it. This tuning fork, that once was malformed and dull and could only make simple sounds, but is not a shining example of its kind, should not be moving.

And yet, in her hand, she feels a pulse of excitement. A trembling note of anticipation. A vibrating, echoing frequency of recognition.

She raises it, slowly and respectfully, and taps it, just once, against her forehead.

It rings out with a pure sound so loud that the pond’s ripples become waves, that the grass bends and dances in its tune, that the blood and metal and flesh and bone and soul inside of Raika’s impossible self thrum in harmony.

And in that one impossible, world-spanning note, that single moment of impossible vibration, there is only one sound that comes through absolutely crystal clear.

Dink.

Raika lets out a breath she did not know she had been holding, and presses the still-trembling instrument against her forehead.

“Hey buddy,” she whispers. “Good to see you again.”