Village elder Hao Kai has lived a long time for a mortal. He’s outlived friends and family, and feels, in his old age, like he might be just touching on the very edge of the Foundational realm. It’s something worth a bit of praise, even if they’re still in Imperial territory. Wayun village is small, and barely on most census forms most likely. They send a tax of their grain and vegetables once every two years, as the Empire demands, and they pay homage to and honor the Hungering Roots sect and the Crawling Stone sect that they fall into the territory of. They are, for the most part, distant masters. Every few months one of their members will come by on a patrol, but it’s not exactly a healthy work ethic that brings them through, and they usually leave within a night or two at the most. Bar that one time that one of the bastards got a little too “affectionate” with Mai Yora and had to be… discouraged, cultivators don’t cause problems in this town. And those that do usually have a vested interest in that town staying hale and healthy.
The beggar and the healer, whatever their origins may be, don’t fit into that parameter.
Not really good to call her a beggar, though. Not even in his mind. Perish the thought, lest it get him killed.
That beast… it was larger than any other beast he’s ever seen. He remembers when, as a child, that pack of wolves with fur sharp as knives almost tore through the town’s few defenders. He remembers when, a few years later, he had to help crush, one by one, the strange batch of flies that started to burrow into the dirt underwater and dig up the roots of the farms. He remembers that one time he saw that tall, lanky thing his grandmother had called a “giraffe”, its neck so high above the trees he saw it take a bit out of a passing bird, after holding perfectly still for almost three full days.
None of those bore a candle to that thing that came yesterday.
It could have killed them all. It could have walked over the village and left nothing but trampled mud in its wake. If it had been even slightly more bothered, it might have decided to finish off so many of the wounded. All those tusks… he couldn’t even see its eyes.
And the tall woman they’d all assumed was some traveling, lesser beastblood walked out into the woods, alone, and walked back with meat.
Beastblood folk are usually just fine! There’s a dozen different folk in town with a few different types of it. Some have furred ears. One family had feathers in their hair, just a few. His uncle actually had slitted eyes, like a cat, and he heard that his grandmother had goat eyes.
When they saw the beggar, sitting there, bone trinkets in front of her, the town was… worried. Strangers aren’t a problem, really. Strangers big enough that they have to duck under most doorways? Worrying.
But not everyone in town is mortal. A good third, maybe closer to half, are in the Qi-Gathering realm, like he is, and those whose senses were sharp enough took a good look at her… and found nothing. No Qi. No weird after-effects to her passage. Either she was a hidden master good enough at controlling their Qi that they didn’t leak anything, in which case the best course of action was to appease whatever whim she was indulging in… or she was a mortal. Worse- she might even be a cripple, born without soul-organs due to some quirk that left her at the towering height she holds. Add to that the fact that her left arm was always hidden, or perhaps missing entirely, and the consensus settled on her just being a weary traveler… selling very nice bone trinkets.
And then that one cultivator from the Crawling Stone sect made a demand of her. A week later, she returned… and he didn’t.
No big deal. Nothing too worrisome. Most cultivators have at least some honor, after all, and the man in question had just been a passing outer sect disciple, out on patrol as is the sect’s duty. There was every chance that she showed him what he asked for and they went on their way.
But Hao Kai started feeling that unpleasant little tickle of a problem in the back of his throat. Like he did when the sewage line started backing up and people dismissed it as a minor drainage quirk. Or like when his kids told him they’d finished their chores, and most certainly had not.
Little things. Not some huge dread, but still, that sense of quiet worry.
And then the beast wandered past. Took mercy by not annihilating their village. And as they were recovering, there she was, same as every week.
Except this week, she didn’t sit and sell trinkets. She took a… series of extremely uncomfortable and disconcerting looks at the wounded, and took command of the schoolhouse. She moved wounded into patterns of wounds, into severities, and when the boy, that Jin, the village urchin, made his way back with a white-and-red robed cultivator of all things…
And it didn’t stop there. In hours, she did the work of days, maybe weeks, rearranging the landscape and the damaged portions of farmland like it was nothing. Tirelessly, she carried enough for ten men, at least.
Now at this point, Hao Kai was suspicious… but what hidden master would be digging through mud as their personal healer came to tend to some out of the way village? No, more likely that she was the cultivator’s servant, her incredible strength a quirk of genetics or training and servitude to a higher authority her calling. He could easily picture a cultivator wanting a servant strong enough to lift things those in the higher realms might require, and who might be able to defend themselves without ever being a real threat.
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Then she told them to wait. Stay in the village.
And walked out into the woods.
The sounds he heard come from those trees, trees he’s known and walked amongst his entire life…
He’s lived through tough times. There are scars all along his gut from when a bear, just a normal animal, almost tore him open trying to get at their horses. He nearly lost an eye to a creeping, crawling thing from the trees, shaped like branches and thistle-thorns, when he was barely old enough to hunt. He’s had to kill men, those who tried to come into his town to kill and steal during harsh times. Hao Kai is neither a weak man, nor a fearful one.
But he is also absolutely certain that it will be months before he can walk unafraid through those woods again.
Maybe never.
He didn’t know noises could sound like that. Could get that loud, that mind-numbingly violent. Could echo through the trees from so very many miles away as clear as if what made them was right there, at the edge of the woods, drooling between bloody teeth and singing for his death.
And then, silence.
Dead silence. Like all the birds had run away, like all the animals and creatures and spirits that called the forest home had found places to hide. Like all the world was prey, holding its breath.
It lasted hours.
Throughout all of it, not once did the cultivator cease her work. A masterful array of needles and salves were orchestrated against the wounds in the schoolhouse, stitching together torn flesh and injecting substances in a way Hao Kai had never seen before. Almost half the wounded found sleep in moments. Those too far gone passed quietly, without pain, without the suffering or drawn-out suffocation of the herbs they hid for emergencies, and those who had any chance of survival were brought back from the dead. For hours, the only sounds in the whole world were the moaning of the wounded, the sounds of flesh being rewoven, and the quiet, fearful breaths of the village, waiting to either see their loved ones again… or to see what would come back from the woods.
She came back.
Out of the woods. Out of the dark. Out of the familiar-turned-strange from those horrifying sounds that echoed in it, she walked out, holding more mass than any single living thing he’s ever seen carry anything. She was maybe a tenth, maybe half that again the size of the pile of flesh she carried, all of it tied together with something that was not rope, that was far too fleshy and far too strange to be rope, balanced precariously on her shoulder. Piles and piles and piles of diced bricks of meat that had once been a Boar, and atop it, the skeletal remains, the glistening organs and the carefully placed skin that it once wore.
She was near-naked, a feral thing of blood and rags… and her left arm was like obsidian. Black stone, sharp to even look at, and reeking of the moment where the farmer cuts the neck of their next meal.
And she just… gave it to them.
Not all of it, not by a long shot, but almost half. Spirit beast meat so tough he’s not even sure they’ll be able to cut it properly. Maybe they can sell it, or try and roast it to tenderness as it is, but… half their damn granary is overtaken by a literal metric fucking ton of meat. Half of what was left of something so vast and so horrifying that they survived only by the grace of its indifference.
And then she took Jin, the brat with a decent head on his shoulders, and walked into the woods again, back the way she came that morning. The cultivator stayed behind, and she said things, but… he found it very hard to hear her voice. And then she left too, maybe an hour after.
Hao Kai stands now, in a village that will not be forced to starve come next winter or waste half a planting season rebuilding farmland, with those who should by all rights be dead but who are now healed and resting, and stares out into the woods.
He’d felt it himself, when she’d come back. No wounds on her body, not a drop of Qi out of place on her. Like she was as placid and formless as air, as the dirt beneath his feet, as water in a stream. He knows that cultivators are supposed to have crazy impressive divine senses, but he’d always prided himself on being able to feel for danger, and know when the little points of light his mind pictured people’s souls as were close.
From her, he felt nothing. Like she wasn’t even there.
Except… maybe a shift in the air. Like a strange breeze had blown in. Something that made him think of things that grow.
Hao Kai looks around the village. The farms are… ok, for now. With nearly a third of the village wounded or grieving, and the winter months already set in, there’s no need to panic and try and patch things right now. The sun is starting to dip into late afternoon, and the whole town is exhausted from fear, grief, or the sheer amount of work and stress put into helping to fix things.
He thinks it best that he maybe take a few hours to himself and go lie down. It’s been a very long day.
And if that… woman. That impossible, terrifying, impossible hidden master or monster or whatever ever visits his village again? He’s going to do his very, very best to be hospitable, polite, friendly, sincere… and not piss himself out of fear.
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Raika sneezes, which surprises her. She’d honestly assumed she wouldn’t ever need to sneeze again, outside of some sort of intense smoke or spores or something. Maybe someone was talking about her somewhere? She remembers some old rumor about that.
If they are, she hopes it’s Maen. The kid conks out like a fucking light the minute he hits a pillow with his head, but despite her best efforts, Raika really doesn’t need to sleep as much as she used to, and her body has conflicting instincts about it. This would be just fine, if not for the carefully soundproofed (but not soundproofed enough) room across the hall from her, and the very affectionate trio inside that are being very generous with rewarding Li Shu for a job well done right now.
She really misses her girlfriend. Long distance relationships are a bitch.
She sighs and rolls over, partially shutting her ear-canals and covering her head with a pillow… only to have her brain adjust and start translating the minute vibrations in the wood of the building as sensory input.
…Gods and Hells, she needs to get laid.