Six Months Later
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If Raika has to go get snacks for one more goddamn cultivator, she’s going to put nails in their food.
She still needs a cane to walk! And can’t put weight on one leg! And has only one goddamn hand! There’s like a million other uppity youngsters desperate to slob all over whatever knob is placed in front of them for approval from these bastards, they should get one of them to run out in the summer heat for dumplings. The kitchens are halfway across the sect campus, for fuck’s sake; by the time she gets there and back, the food is guaranteed to be cold, soggy, or some mix of both. The point is to keep her away, probably, but still, it’s just bad form, and a damn waste of food.
Still, she’s happy that she can get it back before it goes stale at least. In the time she’s been here, she’s found herself improving again in fits and starts, and her work with Dink, ever a loyal partner, has her able to walk the trip from one side of the sect to the other without needing to stop. It’s still a trek of over an hour, which would take someone with two legs maybe twenty minutes tops, but improvements nonetheless. Paleblossom isn’t that big a city, no matter how much attention that attack called onto it, or the number of imperial soldiers that flooded in not long after. Ergo, it’s sects aren’t exactly huge, sprawling things either. Her sect wasn’t much bigger; The Sect of Hungering Roots wasn’t exactly world-renowned, to say the least. Some sects, some that she’s even visited in her travels, are cities in and of themselves, towering on plateaus hundreds of feet above the ground, the act of climbing up to them a challenge to all.
Still, she hears the sect master of the Purple Flame something-something is on the cusp of the greater mysteries, so who knows. Maybe someday soon it’ll take her days to walk from kitchens to medical hall instead of just over an hour.
Sighing, she unlocks one of the back doors and slips inside, slipping the key back into her sleeve. Like any good medical pavilion, there are plenty of clear and open entryways to the outside, but any place that deals with resources needs a few spots for pure logistical support. In this case, the logistical support comes in the form of soggy dumplings, carried by someone who has no business walking so much and wasting so much food, damnit.
Raika adjusts her scarf, making sure the package she has tied around her neck hasn’t pulled it down too far. The more visible the scars on her face are, the more likely it is that they’ll send her off to deal with some random crap, and she could do without the hassle. They seem more uncomfortable with her physical defects than she expected, though there’s plenty of disgust for her state as someone without Qi as well. Frankly, she thinks it’s their own inadequacies at play; just about every healing technique she’s found in this place, or had explained to her, involves Qi in some way. Now while this isn’t technically idiotic, since literally everything at all possesses Qi, and the chances of not having meridians and still being alive are minuscule, outside of medicinal elixirs made of rare ingredients and suturing, they have almost nothing to heal in a body that can’t use Qi or contribute to the process. Seems like an oversight, honestly.
But the background knowledge? Now that’s been interesting. Considering her existence in this place consists of ferrying books, sterilizing equipment, going for food, and all sorts of other menial and unenviable tasks, she’s had enough mind-numbing work to sneak a few books in here and there. It’s hard to read past all the technical lingo, and she was never the best at her letters, but the pictures alone make the exercise worth it. Who knew a body had quite so many veins?
It’s not all bad, though. Qen Hou kept to his word, at least; things are better here. Better food, better clothing, and an actual room, even if it’s a servant’s quarters. Considering those servant’s quarters are connected to Li Shu’s room, and the fact the silly girl still needs help with the damndest things, it’s a marked improvement over her old alcove and improvised tent. Even without being able to sense it, she also has to admit the quality of Qi is much better here than outside. The smells of everyone’s Qi comes across even stronger here (which had her sneezing for days when she first arrived), and when she has time to focus on the vibrations and flow of her body, she’s noticed a much sharper tingling sensation. She did end up shitting blood from the intensity, once or twice, but that’s just the cost of doing business. She’s pioneering a whole new concept in the pursuit of ascension, here, what’s some potentially lethal internal damage gonna do? Dissuade her? Fat chance.
She unceremoniously dumps the tall box of dumplings at the nearest clean table she can find, a small table meant more for tea than anything, surrounded on all sides by massive, sprawling surfaces of wood, most of them completely covered in ink stains, medical texts being written or read, and more than a few stray scalpels (a lot of the researchers use them to sharpen charcoal for detail-work). You’d think this place was the research division somedays, she marvels.
“Soup’s on, honored cultivators,” she says, voice deep and hoarse but recognizably human. “Enjoy it while it’s wet.”
“Wouldn’t be wet if you didn’t take so long,” grumbles one of the medical students. Shi Qou, probably; he likes to complain. She glares daggers at him and, resting her cane on the table, gestures at her… everything.
“Perhaps if an honored cultivator wished for faster dumplings, he should find the wisdom not to send cripples out in the heat, or perhaps gain the insight needed to make firm the lame and cane-ridden,” she says, voice (by her standards) saccharine sweet. “If an honored cultivator finds these things only just free from their reach, then perhaps they can simply enjoy their dumplings and refrain from disturbing such a lovely afternoon.”
There are some chuckles around the room, and Shi Qou blushes just a bit, rolling his eyes and making his way over to, indeed, enjoy his damn dumplings. More than a few others follow, grabbing one or two buns apiece before migrating back to their papery dens. From the bags under some of their eyes, she is pretty sure they’ve been awake for days on end, something tough enough to wear down even cultivators. Sure, cultivators can use Qi to alleviate fatigue, but mental fatigue still accumulates over time; going without sleep should be done when necessary, and staying awake for weeks on end, by the Core Formation realm, isn’t impossible, but all to study? Well, she admires the dedication, even if seems a bit excessive. Sleep is important too, after all.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
As she walks away, she marvels once again at what they let her get away with. Having no cultivation whatsoever and performing every task assigned, she’s become a non-threat, just barely above a non-entity. It’s done wonders for her wit; before, she had to watch everything she said, lest she be challenged to an honor duel or left out when dividing rewards or supplies to sect disciples. Here, she doesn’t get any meaningful supplies anyways, and who would honor duel a cripple? She does miss the duels, admittedly; an insult so bad your opponent has no choice but to fight you or cry themselves to sleep is one of the best parts of life. Still, it’s nice to be able to joke and poke fun at herself and others without it being a life or death struggle.
She’s got plenty of those to keep her hands full as is.
She Dinks quietly as she walks. She keeps the rhythm constant, providing a meditative background to anyone listening (and they’re all cultivators, so everybody is listening, all the fucking time), alternating between her lower back, sternum, and forehead, making sure to feel out the aches each impact riles up. Despite new techniques, Dink remains an invaluable tool of casual body alteration and meditation. The sensation of the impact traveling through her is, at this point, familiar and comforting, an old, annoying friend keeping pace with her as she walks, in time with her heartbeat and the aches of her body.
And, most notably, the parts that no longer ache.
It’s been slow going, but Li Shu really did make her a pet project. The girl seems genuinely convinced that she can somehow repair at least Raika’s body, if not her meridians and dantian, and adorably enough, she’s making headway. There’s simply no channels for Qi to move through and connect to her biology, and thus the act of medicinal Qi manipulation, a process used to generate specific patterns of Qi movements to connect to damaged portions of a body in a specific way, are less than useless on her. There’s no place to make the patterns, and no way for the body to absorb, integrate, or direct any Qi placed in it, and seeing as there is now only foreign Qi to her body, it universally rejects any Qi of a high enough density. In short; to heal Raika the classical cultivator way, one would have to either use a powerful Dao, an embodied and empowered concept itself, or, somehow, perfectly recreate all of the hundreds of millions of effects that the dispersed Qi placed in the meridians would normally accomplish, simultaneously, all while avoiding causing Qi rejection and perfectly placing and sensing each damaged point, again, as above with Qi amounts. Not exactly easy.
Which, Raika and Li Shu both agree, is a fucking copout.
Li Shu actually has healed some of the damage, though. She’s using a minor technique, one she found in a more obscure text useful for plants. Using medicinal Qi and meridians is basically using a “blueprint” of an ideal self and using Qi to convince reality of its truth, just like a slower version of using Qi to enforce on reality that “yes, there is a fireball that tastes like mint here”. Without that “ontological blueprint”, Qi healing wouldn’t do much, and since some plants usually don’t have meridians but can heal from most anything, a novel technique was invented; by re-damaging the damaged area, then stimulating them with small puffs of ambient Qi that the plants feed on, one can re-start the healing process in the hopes of doing it better the second time. It’s not an infinitely applicable thing, and it’s much more suited to plants than people.
Still, Li Shu is a prodigy without peer and definitely the best medical genius around, so Raika thinks she’s onto something. Enough, at least, that she’s been willing to volunteer to go under the knife more than once.
It’s not every day you get a chance to get a pretty lady in your insides; it would be foolish not to treasure the opportunity.
As it is, scar tissue doesn’t seem to re-heal as desired, and only minimal ambient Qi can be used, but her knee has almost twice the mobility it used to have, and Raika kept a lot of the bone chips and poorly grown tendons as dried ingredients she wears in a little bottle. Still can’t put much weight on the damn thing, but it at least bends to almost half as far as it used to. Makes it much easier to lie down or sit as needed.
For this alone, she’d owe Li Shu, never mind the new accommodations. Then again, she is basically letting herself be used as a medical dummy, no matter how obsessively Li Shu checks her notes, or promises to be gentle, or takes only the tiniest risks, or confers with Raika before every little thing.
If this is what being a medical marvel means, well… Raika’s had romances less emotionally endearing. And the girl really is adorable.
Oh, she knows nothing will come of it. Even if she didn’t have a face half-missing and a body all mangled up, she still wouldn’t be able to match Li Shu in anything but conversation. Her crippling goes well beyond her body. That being said, while she is genuinely blessed to have Li Shu still see her as a person, even without her cultivation, and not just a dog or a medical curiosity, there’s the fact that her body is also crippled aplenty. From twisted spine, to missing pieces of her face, to her more recent collection of burns and criss-crossing white patterns of razor blade scars, she’s well past the point of rugged. And all that’s before you even factor in the entire missing arm, or the fact her legs are half misshapen and useless. She was never “girly”, never wanted to be, but who out there is genuinely free of any desire to be attractive, to be looked at and not have someone look away?
Li Shu, despite everything, tends to look away when Raika’s scarf is lowered.
It might be getting to her more than she’s letting herself think.
Ding, agrees the tiny metallic traitor. “You a sycophant or a critic, ya little shit?” she asks. Dink, it goes, very noticeably not saying anything this time, like the wuss it is.
Still, it’s good to have a partner, someone to help. She’s yet to find a good opportunity to leave the compound, seeing as walking back to town down all those ramps and stairs of the plateau would take her well over a day and longer than she can be away from her tasks, and she misses JiaJia. Yeah, he’s an idiot and a little shit, but damn if she doesn’t miss him. She wonders at how his cultivation is coming along, and if his red light family is treating him any better.
But she intends to keep her promise. She will be back to see him again, and she will be stronger when she does it.
So it is that when she enters her room to the sight of the younger woman looking terrified, anxious near the verge of tears, and standing in front of a design drawn in chalk that is half medical diagram and half Qi formation, she can’t help but smile.
“Greetings, Honored gorgeous one,” she says with a bow, drawling as she speaks. “What do you think of the radical, horrifying misuse of healing pavilion materials? Coming along well?”