It’s… dissonant. She hasn’t felt at odds with herselves in a while, but the Mask, the Want, and the Flesh all stand at slightly different angles of the situation. The Mask grumbles and mumbles, leaving its original role behind to explore all the possible permutations of this. It worries and plans, thinking through the most efficient way to get through things, the possible steps they’d need to take to be able to both help these people and keep themselves safe. While it plans in the background, the Want is more central, pushing them towards the newly chosen objective of helping how they can.
The Flesh, meanwhile, is salivating.
There’s no particular shame to it. It’s not part of its makeup: shame comes from a different part of her. And the simple fact of the matter is that people smell good. People with Qi smell better. It’s not much, but many of the villagers have at least a little, at least enough to be a few steps into the Qi Gathering realm. Not all: as with most small villages, mortals make up the majority.
But, a bit distressingly to other parts of her, even without Qi, people smell good. And fear, stress, pain… none of them smell bad. None of them smell wrong. Some things have, in the past, but she’s pretty sure at this point that she could literally eat rotting meat and get some enjoyment out of it.
So. People smell tasty. It makes it a bit distracting as they try and help. She gets a couple of weird looks from how long she lingers once or twice, but once she gets use to the minor temptation she quiets it easily enough.
Her Truth only works on herself, unfortunately, or she might be tempted to start changing flesh left and right to repair the damages. Instead, she has to content herself with using her limited medical knowledge.
Well. Limited by her standards, anyways. She ends up a bit surprised by how completely wrong so many of the wrappings are. She spends the first thirty or so minutes just undoing and re-tying bandages, making sure they’re not cutting off blood flow or not letting any leak out. Once that’s done, she starts triaging, getting people to help her move those more wounded from those less. The moaning rises in pitch for a while, and having to keep her prosthetic arm hidden makes the whole affair a bit more difficult, but by the time they’re done, those with wounds that might recover with careful care and bandaging are pulled set further back from the door, while those with injuries more grievous are kept nearest to where Li Shu will be coming in from, and closest to access to water and fresh bandages.
The village elder she met back in the main tent and some older folk seem to have a bit of medical knowledge, but there’s hesitation in most of them. Hard to tell what’s actually injured enough to need movement, hard to pull up the willpower to actually follow through. She sees some bones reset badly, others more to standard, and someone is stitching shut some of the lesser cuts.
Here, she has a bit more agency. Her senses let her see what’s going on inside the bodies of the wounded easily, and she goes to where each one with internal injuries lies. She resets bones that are connected at an angle, pulls ruined muscle back into a position where it can heal, opens poorly sutured wounds to remove bits of bone trapped in them or improperly closed blood vessels.
There’s always more to do. Always. Even as things improve or get fixed, there are so many she just can’t do anything about, bleeding internally, falling apart inside, some with organs ruptured or pieces of bone decorating their insides where terrible impacts nearly burst them open. She knows enough to know what’s wrong, to physically see it, but she simply doesn’t have the knowledge, finesse, or tools to accurately fix so much of what’s wrong.
She’s not sure how much time passes before Li Shu arrives, but it’s both less and more than she expected.
The scent of gentle yet unknown flowers and sharpened steel floods the room. A dozen villagers flinch, especially some of the wounded, and they all look towards the door in abject fear and surprise.
Li Shu looks like Raika has rarely ever seen her. Her eyes are cold, her stance firm and completely unmoving, every part of her like some sort of bastion. Her gaze flickers across the room, looking at dozens of patients in an instant, and then-
Then the moment breaks. Her Qi floods into the space no longer as a sudden shock, but as a blanket that starts to sink into the bodies of the wounded, easing their heart rates and massaging their blood flow. She immediately kneels next to the closest of the triaged wounded, a man with his guts well and truly splattered out of his body, and a needle, thread, roll of bandages, pliers and a set of scalpels float out of her bag as if it’s no effort at all.
And she gets to work.
At some point someone tries to intercede, just to set some kind of rug or blanket under the obvious cultivator’s knees so her robes aren’t stained by the dirty floor, but she shoots them a Look that has them scurry back and away. What little words she speaks are reserved for the injured, soft, quiet things, and on occasion her Qi touches on someone nearby, stabilizing them further so she can find some time to get to them.
Whenever she hones in on someone, the Qi becomes a thread or drop of spider silk, moving subtly and gently into their bodies and wounds. Those she hasn’t yet reached, she blankets with an aura, which distinctly slows blood loss, and the sounds of moaning and crying quiet significantly.
It… it’s masterful. Raika knows exactly how much Qi Li Shu has, and almost all of it is being used at once. It’s like she’s in a trance.
Raika steps out from the building a few minutes later, finding Jin standing, anxious as fuck, surrounded by a dozen villagers that aren’t questioning him yet but could not more clearly want to. The two men that she sent with him look more frazzled than he is, sweatier, and they both look pretty shaken, but he meets her eyes straight on.
She gives him a nod, and he smiles wide.
“Good job, kid,” she says. “Wasn’t expecting you back so soon. Good pace.”
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He laughs, and with that little praise, falls back on his ass on the ground. “Sister Li Shu ran the whole way back. We could barely keep up, and I think she was going slow for us.”
Raika lets out an amused huff. “I’m just glad it went well. Nothing bothered you on the way?” She checks the two “guards'' she sent with him, and they both blanch and look away from her. One of them sputters but eventually manages to get his words together enough to say “no, no trouble.”
“Good. Do me a favor and forget where you just went, yeah?”
She doesn’t try to make it too intimidating, but considering how one of them literally flinches she might have put a bit too much weight behind her words.
“Yes ma’am!” and “Yes, honored one!” come out almost at the same time, one of them even going for a bow before she smacks him upside the head for it.
“None of that. I don’t care for it, and we’re much too busy for you to be wasting time. Go find something heavy to lift or some bandages to wash.”
She looks down at Jin, nodding. “As for you, go find someplace to sit. Take my blanket, it’s by the door. Get some rest, kid.”
He gives her an affronted look. “I’m not that tired!” he says indignantly. “I can still help.”
“But you don’t need to right now, so rest enough that you’re more useful later,” she tells him. “I’m going to go help fix the fields. You can watch if you want.”
And she goes off to do exactly that.
The next few hours go by… interestingly. Without using her Engine, or even morphing her body, she still finds herself carrying wood, stones, and dirt at a good four or five times the weight of any of the villagers, and when they pause for rest, she just… keeps going. At first they tried to direct her, but they learned pretty quickly that she either already knew what needed doing or knew things they didn’t even need. Every broken wall, she’s there to shove the earth back into place and put planks into shape around it. Every upturned bit of earth and thrown-around stone, she’s there to overturn. After a few hours, when everyone else has exhausted themselves and the sun has gone past the middle of the afternoon, she’s still working.
She’s there, lifting enough for ten men, when Jin eventually runs over to find her.
“She’s done,” he says, out of breath from what was apparently a dead sprint. “She- she said to-”
Raika just drops the wheelbarrow of planks she’s carrying over her shoulder onto the ground and starts walking to the center of town. Jin comes up behind her, still exhausted, but the amount of running she’s been having him do is clearly having decent results already.
It isn’t hard to find Li Shu. She doesn’t even need to heighten her senses, because there’s a fucking crowd around her, in a broad circle. Outside the schoolhouse, where the smell of blood has faded ever so slightly, Li Shu sits on a chair someone brought out of their home, looking visibly exhausted, and surrounded (at a distance) by just about everyone in town.
She smiles weakly as she sees Raika.
Raika kneels next to her, patting her hand, and Li Shu snorts out a very unladylike little giggle. “Yeah, yeah. I’m tired, not some old grandmother.”
Raika laughs softly. “Pity. You’d make a stunningly hot old grandmother.”
They laugh softly together as she holds Li Shu’s hand, doing her best to give her a bit of support. From the smell of it, Li Shu’s spent maybe a third of her Qi in one go, an amount usually reserved for life or death battles in most cultivation circles. In their little ground-floor dungeon, there’s enough Qi density to help her recover quickly, but it’ll still take days.
“Proud of you,” Raika says, low and quiet.
She huffs, goes to rebut… and instead just sighs and sinks back into her chair.
Raika sighs, seating herself on the ground next to her- and notices the stares from all around.
There’s a good fifty villagers just… standing there, awkwardly. She assumes most of them have seen a cultivator maybe once every few years,generously,, and she really doubts that said cultivators came to offer healing of the sick and wounded. Outside of those still caring for the sick and those who are still in their homes, just about the entire village is either looking at them from a “safe” distance (and avoiding eye contact) or in the village square, their faces a mix of awe, fear, and confusion.
From the center of the crowd, the man Raika identified as some sort of village leader or respected figure steps out. His mutton chop facial hair has almost wilted from the amount of sweat and stress of the last few hours, scrambling to help in the medical building, but he stands tall despite the clear exhaustion. The moment he’s clear of the crowd, standing about ten feet away from Raika, Li Shu, and a very uncomfortable looking Jin, he kowtows as deep as he can, pressing his forehead to the muddied ground.
“Wayun Village thanks you, honored cultivators. We thank you for the lives you have saved, and the generosity you have shown our humble home. Under Imperial law and all honor, I offer up anything I have to thank you.”
Raika says nothing, but cocks an eye at Li Shu. She just sighs, but then firms herself and turns to look at the bowing village leader.
“No thanks are required. An opportunity to further my cultivation and help those who need it arrived before me, just as an opportunity to be healed arrived at your doorstep. Any thanks offered to me are best directed to my… Senior Sister(?) Raika.”
Raika glares at Li Shu as the smaller woman smiles, a shit-eating grin hidden behind a delicate palm as she fakes the “fancy lady” look. The villagers look between the two of them, confusion and trepidation in equal measure, but the leader keeps an impressive composure, turning ever so slightly to kowtow to Raika instead.
“We are honored by your generosity, great cultivator,” he says. “Without your junior sister’s efforts, many lives would have been lost today. Wayun Village owes you mightily, and we apologize from the depths of our hearts for not knowing your status earlier and offering you better accommodations on your visits. If need be, this lowly Tan Ri will gladly offer his life, and grant anything offered under Imperial Law to honor you and apologize.”
Raika gives a long, tired sigh, though she regrets it a bit as she feels him stiffen and break out into a cold sweat. Imperial Law limits a lot of the worst behaviors of cultivators, even at the edge of the third ring, but imposing consequences on lawbreakers does little to aid the victims in the moment. If someone comes in a few months to collect tithes and finds a slaughtered village, without signs of some distinct cultivation style, how many years might it take to find a suspect?
Li Shu’s idea was to be polite, generous. Like a generous cultivator should be. Raika, on the other hand…
“It’s fine,” she says, waving a hand as if brushing away his apology. “It’s not like you asked us for it. No big deal. This one could use the exercise anyways, or she’ll wither away into some old scribe.”
Li Shu wacks her gently upside the head, prompting the village leader to flinch hard. Raika rolls her eyes.
“I’m not an asshole, elder,” she tells him. “This village has been plenty nice. I saw that we could help, and I decided to. It would disrespect me and my choice to say I need some sort of recompense for following my will. Raise your head.”
He does, and for a moment their eyes meet. She can smell the anxiety simmering in his blood, matched gently with the possibility of relief, and she does her best to give him a reassuring look, the Mask tweaking her features to hit the desired effect. She seems to have gotten it right, too, as she feels his lungs unclench and let out a breath he’d been holding.
Almost immediately, though, he slams his head back down into the kowtow, hitting the ground hard enough that she can feel through the air how it’ll bruise his skin.
“Then please, honored cultivator. I ask a boon of you. Please, on behalf of the village of Wayun, I beg you to help us hunt the beast that did this, lest it return and do worse.”