It doesn’t take long to find the trail. The beast, whatever it was, wasn’t subtle in its movements. After ruining half the fields, only barely patched together with Raika’s help, it simply walked off to one side. Maybe she’s gotten used to impossible tiger-things that can cut through space and appear where they please, but whatever this creature is, it seems to have a much more overt approach. Its steps are dug into earth and stone in almost equal measure, like both are simple clay, and several trees are bent and cracked where it brushed past them on its way out.

A dozen villagers, most of the men and the village elders, stand at the edge of the planting fields. Li Shu is still tending to the wounded, making sure nothing worsens, and Raika’s keeping Jin with her so none of the villagers overwhelm him. They offered, vehemently, to assist, but in all honesty, barely half of them are in the Qi-Gathering realm, and none very far into it. Besides bursts of strength and other enhancements, they’re barely above mortals, and can’t possibly have any techniques to boot. They’d just hold her back or get themselves killed.

And, distantly, she’s not sure if she’d be entirely safe with the temptation of the fresh dead. The smell of the wounded is still on the back of her tongue, the Flesh still grumbling slightly at the thought of fresh food, still bleeding… still pumping with bits of soul.

She takes some serious relief from finally unraveling her scarf-cloak combo to let loose her left arm. The Blacksteel is… it’s not poisonous, that much she’s sure of, but awareness of it changes the sort of impact it has. When covered, it just has less effect, and there’s no reason to advertise a fancy obsidian-looking prosthetic when she’s trying to keep a low profile. Now, in the wilds, it… fits.

Which is strange, no? Black metal, shaped like obsidian made from steel, all harsh angles and crackling quartz, feeling at home amongst the trees. The further one gets out to the fourth ring, the larger and stranger the wildlife gets, but it still looks vibrant, alive. The trees around are thicker than some buildings, and even still, some of their trunks are bent or cracked in the shape of a massive shape that has pushed against them.

And yet… there’s something about the Death she carries that feels at home here.

The beast was… large. Powerful. The lingering scent in its trail is deep, powerful and intense, and reeks of old, dried dirt. There is something in it like loam, an overwhelming black earth which holds bones and rotting richness. In that dark, dank earth, there are flashes of something moving, not quite lightning, not quite stone, but an impossible fusion of both, leaving lingering notes of vibration and thunder beneath pitch-dark earth after flashing, crawling lights.

As she walks, her senses and sub-brains active, the trail is physically visible. She passes her hand through the air, and though there’s no difference in air density, it still feels like she’s running her hand through the moist ground. There’s a long, straight line of black, ethereal earth ahead of her, scent, taste, touch and sight all working together to give her almost a glowing trail to follow.

Is it on purpose? The trail? She knows spirit beasts can hide it. And more, why did it leave? A spirit beast this large, this strong, it should’ve been able to simply crush the village into a fine paste beneath its hooves. Why did it visit, if it wasn’t hungry? Why did it leave? They couldn’t have harmed it.

She wants to say the question doesn’t matter, but… it feels like it does. Or like it should.

Dink vibrates lightly against her sternum, and she taps it with a claw in turn. “Yeah, yeah. Always so naggy. Making up for lost time, I think. Every third thought you chime in with some fucking input.”

It trembles, a light pulse against her skin.

“Alright, geez. Didn’t mean to scare you. You don’t have to be a kissass or a coward, you know.

An indignant hum.

“Oh hush.”

A tip-tap beat with a miniscule little thrum right after.

“Yeah, yeah. You’ve gotten better about it. All the time I couldn’t hear you must have had an impact, huh?”

A lower, sadder vibration. Then, an instant after, a sharper note, one that actually carries a hint of audible music to it.

“...Me too, but. Me too.

“You ready if we have to fight this thing?”

A louder thrum, again making a slightly-audible note, this time more strident.

“Good. Let’s go.”

She takes her upper robe and shirt off, leaving just her chest wrappings and pants, and starts to transform. She’s gotten better at it, especially with Li Shu’s manual of theoretics and biological advice, so the transition is smoother. Tendons lengthen, joints disconnect and reattach with barely any transformation needed, muscles unravel from complicated knots to have more space to move and exert force.

She grows from seven feet tall to almost twelve, her arms and legs extending and bulging forth, new patterns of muscle and latticed bone manifesting. Her face lengthens, extends, until the Mask is more literal, a human face overtop of an elongated, denser skull to protect against whiplash and impacts, even as her frame bends flesh out of her chest and back into her thighs and arms.

It’s not a “true” transformation, not as she’d qualify it; its her own current body, the pieces already created, rather than something she needs to use her Truths and power to manifest and transmute. She already has the pieces, and it’s now a functioning bio-mechanical system to shift to this form, like when a human body switches gears, activating and deactivating organs and muscle groups for fight or flight. It’s more than enough to multiply the already inhuman levels of power and biomechanical function she has in her ‘human’ form.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

She starts running, and the world begins to blur.

It’s nice to be able to run, to have the space to really move. Running in the domain of their newborn Heart, or Dungeon or whatever it is, is nice too, but there’s only so many steps before she hits the bamboo perimeter. The trees, dozens of feet wide, turn into quarter-second flashes of color as she runs, and it takes everything in her new mental architecture to take in and process the details coming to her at this speed. Without her newest sub-brain, she’d have rammed headfirst into a tree, or have had to limit her speed entirely: with it, she can see and react faster than ever, and all it takes is a minute shift to move around obstacles.

The trail of the spirit beast gets denser, fresher as she runs. There’s a sense of pressure to it, like she’s getting deeper beneath that rich darkness, even as the scent of it gets more vibrant, alive, more full of flashing electricity.

She travels miles upon miles in minutes, until she finds a clearing.

It enters her sensory range seconds before she arrives at it, a space where trees have been cleared, where stone overturns earth… and where something vast is seated.

She cracks the meters-thick trunk of a tree at the edge of the clearing, anchoring herself into it and staring out at the beast in the clearing.

It does look vaguely like a boar.

Too many tusks, though.

It looks like a mound, like a literal hillside, its fur pitch black, unbroken save for blazing white scars on its flesh. Some shaped like claws, stars, long cuts, even bite marks, and while they are bright, the tusks are dull, bony things. They come out of its mouth like a kaleidoscope, dozens on dozens of tusks spawning out of what was once a mouth and now looks like an armored, sharpened hill of blades, many of them cracked and growing through older tusks. There are bits of rotting meat, vegetable matter and dirt caked between them, making them look less like some impossible trick of physics and more like a malformed tumor of bone and points. She can’t even see its eyes from how wide open its mouth has been forced, from how many angles the tusks cover its skull.

Still, it snorts, exhaling a breath that whistles strangely through the tusks, and paws a hoof black as night against the dirt, digging a line through it.

The hoof taps, twice.

A scent hits her right after. Not just its scent, not just Qi, but a density of hormones, sweat, drooling… and a grunt.

“Hello to you too,” she says, her voice unnaturally melodic and deep in this form.

The beast… sits there.

It doesn’t get up. Doesn’t flare its Qi. It just sort of waddles in place, shifting the ground around it, its body language a strange mix of content and disgruntled.

When it doesn’t move for a few more minutes, an occasional huff from its breathing the only changes… she unlatches her claws from the tree she’s hooked to, dropping to the ground. She lands with a thud, denting the ground beneath her.

“Not trying to fight?” she asks.

The beast snorts, then huffs, kicking a back leg a bit.

It smells… beyond the Qi aspect, it smells of sweat and musk, but there’s nuances to it. She’s surprised by just how many minute changes there are in the scent as she sits, as the boar-thing turns to face her and shifts back and forth slightly.

“Ok. Good… good giant spirit boar, I guess.”

It grunts.

Awkward silence reigns for a moment or two. The boar lets out another grunt, like it’s annoyed by something.

“Me too, bud. Came out here to see what’s going on with you, where you went. Don’t suppose you’re smart enough to tell me why this whole thing happened, are you?”

It grunts, wriggles one hoof, gnashes a tusk, changes its scent ever so slightly-

And something in her brain clicks.

It can’t speak. No mouth to transmit through, just tusks, mashing bits and pieces of food against each other. But… especially in her new submind, she recognizes intentional change. Like watching a dog’s movements for nervousness versus joy. Instinct and pattern recognition interlock, and when it grunts this time, she hears it.

It’s speaking. Just not with words.

Her sub-processor kicks in, translating as she listens, her new neural architecture offering more yet again.

Hungry, the beast says. Bored.

“...Ok. You can understand me?”

…Most.

“Same.

“...Why are you here?”

It grunts, shifting its hooves and emitting a wave of scent patterns. Travel, it says. Many. Here now.

As it speaks, she’s refining her understanding of it, processing more and more patterns to find the ones that actually fit. Slowly, she starts to add little movements and shifts of body language as she speaks, mirroring the creature.

“I met one, I think. Big. Tiger. Wormy-crawlies on its face.”

The boar huffs, an impossibly loud noise that makes the leaves at the edges of the clearing flutter. Tasty-face. Big angry. Thinks is stronger than me. Is wrong.

“...Sure. If you’re so strong, why didn’t you kill that whole village? You should be strong enough to turn them to pulp, not just hurt a few.”

Another huff, harsher this time. Many of us. Leader say hide. We hide. Say kill, we kill. Didn’t smell. Too weak.

“...you were tracking Qi. You… must be from somewhere pretty strong, then.”

The boar puffs itself up, its impossibly-angled “face” raised up higher. Past wall. Past big human nests. Out in wilds. But boss says come here, so I come here.

“...And your boss told you to stay hidden. Guided you into the third ring. Why?”

The boar seems to think for a second, then snorts. She doesn’t need to translate it directly to see that it really doesn’t know or care what the answer to that question might be.

Smelled you, though, it says. Sniff-snorted you. Tasty.

She snorts back at it. “And here I was, thinking I was being sneaky.”

Was sneaky. First, no smell. Then, smell. Strong. Bright. Hidden before. Is good den you have. Good for hiding.

Her den?

The bamboo perimeter. The dungeon-Heart. It took an [IGNITION] and a manifested Domain in tandem last time before anything found them. Another defense, then? They’d assumed it was camouflaging itself at least a bit, as not even she could sense it from too far away, but the idea it was completely blocking their Qi from escaping… it opens up a lot of possibilities. Besides anonymity, their defense was nonexistent; now, they have actual camouflage, it would seem.

Or they do until they leave it.

You beast? The Boar asks, sniffing the air and making more of that strange whistling noise through the forest of tusks. Beast… or human?

She hesitates. The tone shifted, there. More aggression-scent, a hint of lactic acid beginning to appear in its scent as muscles activate under the surface.

“I’m… I am Me.”

It is True, and the beast seems to relax for a second.

Is good, it says. Not beast. Not people. Boss say not to eat people. Stay hiding. Not eat beasts. Beasts are pack now.

But you not either? Is good. Smell tasty.

The clearing bends as the beast gets to its feet, and the scent of black soil and crawling lightning begins to flood the air.

“...the last few times a spirit beast tried to eat me, it didn’t go well for them. Left a lot of bodies still uneaten in the north, and a big, colorful fucking beastie trapped forever last time. You sure you want to do this?”

The Boar seems to genuinely pause and think. She can almost hear the wheels spinning, the thoughts churning in whatever passes for its skull. She takes the opportunity to start rearranging pieces again, getting things in order, sharpening her Blacksteel.

It doesn’t take long to come to a conclusion.

To live is to eat, it says. I am Hungry. You smell of food. If I cannot eat my food, then I cannot live. So yes. Am sure.

Want to run? I am slow, but I will catch.

She genuinely laughs at that. “Nah. I don’t think I will.

“I’m pretty hungry too.”

They both move.