It’s almost time to leave.

One more week and the month is up. One more week, and they leave this place behind.

She’ll… she’ll miss it. The quiet days here. The sounds of her friends, sleeping in the other room. The kitchen that she’s spent so many weeks buying and making things for, that she’s gotten so adept in cooking in. The green, peaceful landscape, so quiet compared to the “normal” world. Even the little cave-hole she grows her smoke-moss and hemp leaf in. She’ll miss the early morning quiet, when she wakes up before everybody else, and the sparring they do when her friends wake up.

She’ll even miss that tiny little village with old lady Nan Su, and the kids who run by, and the sisters who smell of baked bread. The little sounds of people living their lives, day to day. Not the silence and scent of cultivation, or the constant flow of noise that screams from the wilds in all those beautiful patterns, just… people. Cooking, cleaning, fixing the little things that break, singing and playing and caring for each other. The sounds of the kids running about in the schoolhouse, of the teacher’s exasperation and joy at their work. The bathhouses, churning out the smells of soap and herbs and the sounds of conversation.

It’s all so… different.

She was a child when she left her family. Seven years old when the sect found her and identified the purity of her spirit roots, the width of her meridians. Seven years old is not a time for clear memories. What little she remembers of her parents and the little cabin she grew up in wasn’t… worse than Wayun village, but it was smaller, more rural. Closer to a city, without the need for village walls, and with colder winters, with houses much further from each other.

And after that… the Hungering Roots sect. The place where she began. One of the two closest sects, and the one that, in a roundabout way, supports her even now in the guise of Hisheng. There were servant’s quarters, areas to farm Qi-rich plants and a few tamed spirit animals, placed to wash clothes and cook food, but most of them were not for cultivators. On occasion a spirit beast might get unruly and need to be corralled, but with most servants in the Qi-Gathering realm, the spirit herbs could get their required Qi just fine. Not like the Hungering Roots sect had any higher tier herbs of animals, so its disciples, few as they were, focused on cultivation. Rings for sparring, balance and movement challenge areas, meditation rooms and her living quarters were her life. Occasional forays into the wilds or other fights, maybe.

Then, of course, never fucking mind Paleblossom city. Her experience wasn’t exactly focused on the nuances of day to day life there, not beyond survival. Then some months in another sect, as a servant this time, and last but not least, a series of forays into Imperial fucking Palaces and the messiness of Cragend city.

…This may have been the first time she’s rested in a very, very long time. It’s a glimpse at what might have been if she had never become a cultivator. If she’d maybe been married off to some other village, or had learned a skill and traveled to the smaller places of the third ring.

She doesn’t hate it.

But it’s not her.

She’ll miss it, yes. She might seek it out some other day, later in life. She’ll do her best to never forget it. But it’s not her.

There’s still so much she regrets, but becoming a cultivator? Fighting to become powerful again after her loss? That she can only embrace. To be more, to grow and become… it feeds a part of her deeper than almost any other.

And it’s just so fucking cool.

Supreme Body Art: Pressurized Crimson Cut is a joy. One of Li Shu’s theories, one she mentioned was stupidly dangerous and which shouldn’t be done until she was sure it would work. The increased pressure in her blood vessels could easily have burst them and left her wounded and vulnerable in a fight, even with her Truths and their ability to transform her body and heal.

But she pulled it off. Thickened the blood vessels, widened them to withstand the pressure, and with eight hearts beating in sequence, increasing the bloodflow to her limb and the biological cannon she created from it was almost easy. The result, in turn, was phenomenal. A ranged cut, the moving liquid so condensed and so fast it sliced through rock-hard spirit beast flesh like it wasn’t even there. There’s a danger of overutilizing it, leaving herself light-headed and weak from blood loss, and the setup takes a while, but the payoff is incredible. If she can maintain the increased blood pressure constantly, she could shoot out more of the attacks and boost her ability to overclock her systems considerably.

And it’s only one of the techniques that Raika and Li Shu have built together.

The manual for Supreme Body Art holds more theory than practical applications, but if there’s one thing Raika is good at, it’s making something interesting out of things that are only theoretically possible.

Her current body holds pneumatic and spring-loaded muscle groups and systems, her bones latticed and hyper-dense, her organs enhanced step by step. She’s about three hundred extra bones away from the standard human skeletal system, and her blood vessels and nervous system are optimized into new patterns with less possibility of damaging overlap or bleeding out. Beneath her skin, millimeter-wide plates of keratin, chitin, bone and woven fibers make for an incredibly flexible damage-reactive armor, and carefully arranged plates of hyper-dense fat serve as cushioning in any area that needs it, between her organs, joints, and as storage for extra energy. She has three hearts in her humanoid shape, with the capacity to easily make more, and each moves her blood in perfect synchronicity through hyperflexible joints and tendons.

It’s taken her almost a year and a half to get to this point.

It’s not enough.

It’s just the start.

Her body, as is, might match an Imperial bioweapon. Maybe. She’s never actually met one, and is mostly going off the things that the flesh-based cultivator had said back during the tournament fight, but it feels right. In Supreme Body Art: Gigant form, she’d likely eclipse more than a few, though that might be arrogance. But Pressurized Crimson Cut highlights exactly what she can do that no one else can; she can modify herself on the fly, and do so in ways that normal biology cannot. She might not be able to alter physics around her body like a cultivator can, but biology and chemistry are her bitches.

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Some of the ideas in the manual are improvements. Upgrades. Incremental ideas to improve weight distribution, ability to exert force, ability to handle temperature differences. There’ll be time for those later, outside of this place.

What Raika focuses on instead are a few pages, clearly ripped out of some other journal, that stand right in the middle of the manual.

Pressurized Blood: Potential applications of high-tension liquid in offense and resource generation.

Gigantification: rules of mass and scale manipulation with the effects of gravity and weight on bloodflow and oxygen intake.

Insectile Functionality: alternate forms of exoskeletal frames and exertions of force.

Biological Projectiles: Ranged applications of biological aggression.

Neurological Manipulation: How do multi-limbed organisms use their brains?

Camouflage: how chromatophores work (compiled ideas)

The first two she’s already doing well on, as clearly evidenced by the techniques she’s developed. The effects that reality has on larger-than-life organisms are well documented, especially due to how many beastbloods exist in the Empire, and high-pressure blood is not too uncommon an ailment. The other ones though? More… theoretical. Li Shu’s done some study on insect bodies, and Raika gave her most of the useful notes on that, considering how she can so accurately map out the flesh she eats. But biological projectiles are rare in nature, and that goes double for brain studies on how multiple limbs work. Neither Raika nor Li Shu know how an insect’s brain controls multiple limbs, or if they consciously do so at all. And on the subject of camouflage, it’s basically all conjecture and notes on possibly altering her facial structures and skin color.

So, while they’re still safe and secluded in their little stretch of land, she’s gonna try some fuck-shit.

Though Li Shu still made her promise not to try the soul-sacrifice version of the Craft’s entry ritual. Which is weirdly boring of her, but… if she considers it that bad of an idea, chances are it’s a bad idea. Raika’s willing to hold off for now.

Qen Hou and Hao Nera are practicing in their own way. Hao Nera’s currently working on remaining visible while practicing his weird stealth technique; usually, his technique makes him impossible to notice entirely, but he’s trying to switch the activation conditions. Rather than entirely erasing his presence, he’s trying to make it so he can still be seen, heard, even touched, but that the mind will simply decide that he’s not important, no matter what he does or says. It’s a weird application of an even weirder technique, but apparently he got the idea from some session of “triple cultivation” of theirs, so at the very least she finds it a very funny (and slightly hot?) possibility.

Qen Hou is assisting by throwing fire at anything he sees that feels relevant, which is leading to some very loud cursing on Hao Nera’s part. Ever since his first Domain manifestation, Qen Hou’s been even more motivated than before, committing himself wholesale to rebuilding the energy used by his partially-formed Core. He’s only managed to manifest it once more since then, but it was something. He told them that it felt like everything he could see and feel with his Qi senses was fighting him, trying to remain itself, and he needed to burn through Qi and hone his willpower to manifest even a partially formed version of his Domain. What he can still create is impressive, though.

It manifests like a thunderstorm of flame, like vast, roiling clouds of white and purple fire that emanate from the air, the ground, the very space within Qen Hou’s senses. Within said territory, heat, rather than burning, melts anything it touches. It seems to focus on the aspects of transmutation and infusion from flame, rather than explosive damage or outright heat, and he claims that it still feels only partial. Makes her terrified of how a “real” domain should look, especially considering Qen Hou has only just entered the Nascent Soul realm. Scary fucking talent, that guy. Makes her wonder if he was being held way the hell back by being in a sect.

Li Shu, meanwhile, has spent a lot of her time hanging out in the village, practicing real medicine and making sure those she’s been tending to have taken to her healing. Her telekinesis is leagues better than Qen Hou’s (to his obvious frustration), and she’s been having a great time getting some real practice on her fundamentals again.

They’re all working hard. The fact that they’ll have to leave soon… it inspires a bit of added motivation alongside the light touch of melancholy.

Except for the kid. This “Jin” kid has been having a blast.

Right now she has him focusing on circulating his Qi and getting into the Foundational realm. Using her Blacksteel as a cultivation aid seems to have helped him a lot, and the occasional visit to the village throughout the week with Li Shu have served him well. He’s bright-eyed, alert, and working hard, though she does notice how his eyes sometimes seem to track movement when there’s nothing around. She’s seen him tilt his head at odd angles sometimes, as if listening to some far off whispering… but he doesn’t seem to be changing dramatically. They’re just keeping an eye on him for now.

As he sits on the edge of the pond, an array similar to the Cold Sun ritual that Li Shu set up for him holding her Blacksteel, she watches as the scent of that cold, smoky room thickens bit by bit, day by day.

And he doesn’t pass out at the end of his runs anymore, which is great!

Raika takes a deep, calming breath of fresh air and the relatively quiet landscape, and starts to Change.

Her shoulder blades crack and squelch as new muscle patterns begin to form, mirroring her back muscles and beginning to extend out from them. She grows patches of armor over her body, and then hollows out some of the muscle in non-essential areas to lighten her overall mass, mimicking insectile body patterns. Slowly she grows a foot, then out another, and another, capping out around ten feet tall, less than half the size of her Gigant technique but still towering over even Taurus’ height.

Her secondary limbs grow further, a second set of arms reaching elbows, then out to wrists, and rather than try and alter her neurology to puppet them alongside her main two, Raika just plants two new sub-minds, one for each limb, to react semi-independently of her. She staggers around, unbalanced, and grows out a spiked tail to compensate as she does, trying to deal with the increasing number of things she needs to keep track of. She’ll have to develop her “processor” mind further, or start considering more fundamental changes, but it’s fine for a trial run.

Armor plates and reactive nanoscale flourish, but that’s not what she needs, not currently. Having that exoskeletal exterior is great for defense, but not for trying out more of her “experimental” techniques (because why do things one at a time?). She grows a second layer of nanoscale over the whole mess. It’s… restrictive. Hard to move in.

She casts it aside, reabsorbing the second layer and focusing on the original patterning. Slowly, her armor plates segment into larger patches of “scale” armor, the reactive type she has for the nanoscale. It’s… inefficient. Too many things to control at once, too many added muscle groups to shift the plates…

Eh, it’s fine. She’ll fix that later.

For now, she starts trying to work on pigmentation.

Each scale is technically distinct but physically identical. She knows that added bloodflow can change colors along the red hue… but that’s it. She’s not sure what causes differentiation in skin color other than sunlight, and outside of tracking how much her skin reacts to abstract radiation she can’t quite see, that’s… not super useful.

She’s halfway through reshaping her body again, discarding the armor in favor of more skin-like patches, when there’s an awkward cough from nearby.

Qen Hou is giving her a raised eyebrow look, and she blinks, wondering when he got so close. When they all got closer, actually. Was she that distracted? The Mask should’ve-

No, the Mask was as busy as the rest of her brain. Ugh. Still room to work on that.

Qen Hou coughs again, politely, and points a thumb over his shoulder.

Raika looks up and blinks at seeing Hisheng, a few hours earlier than normal, standing awkwardly to one side and staring, a bit wide-eyed, at the 10 foot, four armed, entirely naked superbeing on their front lawn.

“Ah. Hi.”