Six hours into the final day.

Li Shu has, at long last, catalyzed the first step on the path. She said it was called the “Crafting of Self”: effectively the second of five or so steps, similar and entirely different to the realms of cultivation. The first step, “Apprenticeship”, is effectively what Li Shu’s already doing, building up her knowledge and practicing theory and herbalism, making this an effective and dramatic graduation. A true wielder of the Craft, at long last.

And something new, too. There may well have been Witches in the past that managed to keep or re-acquire their cultivation somehow, but if any of them did exist, the journals of She Who Stills The Waters haven’t mentioned them. It’s supposed to be a sacrifice… and yet here she is. Bridging the gap between two states of being- a being that absorbs and touches Qi through a Sacrifice, and a being that absorbs and touches Qi through their Self. Both at once. Both in one.

Raika couldn’t be prouder.

Even if she did completely fuck up the cabin.

Which is fine! It’s fine. Entirely ok. They’re leaving anyways, and Li Shu and the ritual were much more important, obviously… but she is a little sad about the cabin. That’s all.

And once things finally stabilized, Li Shu collapsed into sleep. Raika left her cuddled up on her bed one last time, though she keeps her senses honed in that direction constantly, keeping an eye out for any hint that her Qi will suddenly vanish or deviate. She left Jin to watch over her. Despite everything, the cabin is still secured, the arrays they built into it still a better defense than anywhere else at the moment.

And she’s pretty sure he’ll need it.

She reaches down to the grass beneath her feet, patting the valley gently. “Sorry, bud. I’m gonna have to get loud for a bit, yeah?”

A little shiver passes through the grass around her as the land responds.

Dink vibrates a little more uncertainly, as if asking if she’s sure.

She huffs. “Yeah, bud. I’m sure. It’s about time we had a talk with the guy, don’t you think?”

An appreciative hum.

“Yeah, me too. Still, I think this’ll probably piss him off a bunch, which will be nice.”

Agreement, shaped like a tinkling noise.

“Alright. Let’s do this.”

Taurus made it pretty fucking clear that he’s been keeping an eye on her, even interfering with the Hungry Roots sect “on her behalf”. He’s got some way to track where she’s going, and it’s not the tag she removed, it’s not political insight, it’s not a spy organization, it’s something that he has, specifically. What’s a good political animal without a method of illicit surveillance, after all?

He’s got an eye on her.

And she’s gotten a lot stronger than since they last met.

What better time for a conversation?

Standing at the very center of the valley, a good mile away from the cabin and another mile away from the pond, with a one more each past that to reach the bamboo perimeter, Raika breathes. In, and out. In, and out.

In… and in… and in.

Until her lungs feel full. Until her body feels tensed, awake, tightened, enough spare oxygen in the tanks that she could theoretically fight for an hour before needing to take another breath.

It will hopefully be enough.

She’s eaten well, though nothing with much Qi to speak of lately. She’s got plenty of oxygen in reserve, three hearts already beating and more waiting in the wings, and her blood pressure is high enough that Supreme Body Art: Pressurized Crimson Cut is close at hand even without conscious control.

She is ready.

She will not be controlled again.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

With a thought, she activates her Reactor.

An obsidian star of hungry death sparks against ever-changing life and becomes an impossible, all-consuming, all-changing point of [IGNITION].

The world bends away from her. It’s like the weight of her, the sheer amount of presence she has, is suddenly magnified, the world bending out from a sudden mass on its surface.

It doesn’t hurt, having it active. It should, by all rights, but there’s really very little pain. It’s more like a feeling of butterflies in her stomach, or the sudden shock of a massive hit of adrenaline, and it sends thrills racing through every part of her. It makes her truth, that she can Change, feel more solid, more real as it races through her body, impossible fuel looking for any and every outlet.

And she fights to contain it.

It feels faintly wrong to do so, like part of her recoils from the thought of holding back, but hold it back she does. For every ounce of burning, screaming change that rips through her, she matches it with an ounce of control, just barely keeping it from running wild. Her form shifts, contorts, muscle groups and bone and keratin and matter far stranger and less predictable all seeking to rip free from her will and grow wild-

And she holds it in.

There are a few seconds where the burning, iridescent star at the core of her seems like it might be stopped. Where it seems like she might actually be able to sustain the stalemate, keeping the engine active without needing to be constantly transforming.

And then there’s a miniscule little twitch as some of the Blacksteel is transmuted, making for just the teensiest ripple in the constantly screaming force of the Reactor- and her grasp on it slips.

If not for her cursed skin, she’s fairly certain she’d just explode. It’s not quite Qi, so the [IGNITION] pushes against her outer shell, aching to be set free and slowly warping it- but it doesn’t detonate out freely either, too much of it still part of the lifeblood of reality to simply ignore the curse. In the end, it makes it so it doesn’t irradiate the world around her like it does her insides. She feels something shifting behind one of her eyes, feels her lungs start to branch out inside her-

She grabs the feeling by the throat and chokes it, forcing it back under control. The Mask runs overtime processing every minute change and feeling sent to it by the Flesh, the Want behind them holding the whole together in the ideal that this is hers, this is Hers-

And she manages, just in time, to redirect it from her organs towards her back.

And like a raging tide or a hungry inferno, it explodes out through the only outlet she gives it.

Her spine spasms, cracks down the middle once, twice, and then- they’re not tails, not emerging from her shoulders, her back. They’re bone and flesh, and she spasms in pain and a strange sort of pleasure as skinless spinal cords spiral out- further, further, making almost a hundred feet of bone and neural tissue that rapidly begin to blossom. The updated curse makes it so the Qi and flame remains mostly contained, but there are bursts of them that flare out from the long tendrils, brief bursts of iridescent flame that leave trails of flesh and organic matter behind them.

And she keeps growing.

The spines thicken, surrounding themselves with meat and undifferentiated mass, a wild, mindless chaos of biology that through sheer force of that which fuels it does not die.

And then changes further.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Formations begin to emerge that look like coral, like metals, like gelatins and claws and skin and hands and things she has no name for. She glimpses, in the dozen eyes that have sprouted along her back as the coiling, impossible serpents that grow from her lift the human shell she wears into the air, a cacophony of material. Spiraling fractal patterns of bone, waxen limbs, screaming faces that do not look like hers and yet could be family, all these and more emerge into malformed, twisted bodies as the engine at the core of her runs wild, and feeds Change into a conflagration.

And then she shuts it off.

Rods of Blacksteel plunge into the Reactor, overwhelming the reaction with the idea of ENDING, what little pure parts of it remain in the material. It sputters, flickers- and then dies, the [IGNITION] turned back into silence and blood.

All in all, the whole process took about fifteen seconds.

And now, standing beneath her, there is a man with horns.

She smiles, wide and bloody, and does the work to bring herself back down to the ground. Down to his level.

Some of the mass of the tendrils responds. Not a ton of it. The tighter she controls it, guides it, the easier it is to use as a tool, but left wild, it made a real mess of things. Some of the spines have bits of resin and chitin between vertebrae, some of them stopped having vertebrae just a few feet away from her back, and anywhere that didn’t spontaneously generate nerve endings is simply unresponsive. So much expensive, strange, dead matter, inert and useless save for the occasional twitch.

But oh, the potential of it. Flesh made free.

She is smiling even wider by the time she touches down on the ground, a flex of will severing the additional spinal columns and reshaping the mangled mess it made of her back into something functional.

And then she leans back, cracks her spine, rolls her neck, and lets out a little puff of air.

“Hey there, Senior Researcher. Been a while.”

It’s a little hard to read facial expressions (at least human facial expressions) off someone with a snout, but she doesn’t need to. She can hear the rage flowing through him, screaming at him to rip her head off, crush her to pulp, salt the fucking earth.

He smells like absolute gods-damned fury.

She smiles wider, discarding what’s left of her shirt and pulling her pipe from her waistband.

Good.

She sees him there, at eye-level with her, and glimpses a crimson splatter on an alley wall, just behind him.

JiaJia is dead. Gone. There is no spirit here haunting her, no specter inhabiting her memory to try and communicate.

But Taurus killed him.

She lights a spark of True Flame into a bowl of moss, hemp and blood, and breathes in a long, heavy trail of blue smoke.

“Figured we should talk.”

Synesthesia lets her feel on her palms the stutter as his heart rate picks up further.

“You thought. That we should talk.”

The Mask grins, letting wisps of heavy smoke drift through her teeth and down into a scarf. “Yup.”

“And you thought that the best way to do this was to… what? Light a bonfire so bright the entire gods-damned ring sees it?”

She shrugs. “I wanted to be sure you noticed.”

“Oh, I have noticed,” he snarls. Coming from a 7ft man-bull half again as wide as he is tall, it comes close to sounding tectonic. “I have noticed every time you ignite that little invention of yours. And I have made sure that no one else has. But do you think me omnipotent, beast? Do you think I hold a death grip on the entire Oracular Division, which sees all?

“Do you have any idea what this little talk has cost me?”

She sighs, letting out another stream of bluish haze.

“I don’t care.”

He blinks. He actually looks taken aback at that.

“You…”

There is a moment, an unkind one, where she thinks she has died.

She actually doesn’t have time to react fully. Not with the smoke, and not with the control he has. Not a drop of Qi leaks out of his techniques, not an ounce announcing itself before the effect does. Had it been an attack, a physical movement, it would still be nearly fast enough to be missed, but without those components, Taurus manages to slip straight past reaction speed fast enough to dodge fucking raindrops.

There is a mountain on her.

That’s what it feels like. What it must be. The weight of the world, placed without warning on her shoulders, an immediate and absolute mass which can only crush whatever is beneath it. Past the impression of it she can smell winds so clean and sharp they can cut steel, can feel the sensation of lush grass and wild plants as they are stomped underfoot and chewed for cud- but the mountain is here. Now.

Half on instinct, half out of spite, she bites a chunk out of it.

The pressure redoubles, and this time it actually makes her body move, reminds her of the fact she has a body. She isn’t pulp beneath the stone, no matter how much it weighs, which means that-

IT MEANS NOTHING.

The mountain somehow gets heavier again, and now she is on her knees, bones and blood creaking under the force of impossible weight- but she goes no further.

She locks her joints in place, sends Qi and Truth into her body to reinforce what’s there, focus the Flesh to overclock every tendon and muscle group relevant.

Taurus looks down at her from atop the mountain, the valley around her warped and crushed flat in a perfect circle around her- and she refuses to collapse.

“I have been remarkably generous with you,” he rumbles in a voice like the wind down the mountains, the stone beneath the grass. “I have protected you for months. Kept you secret. Kept your loved one safe. I understand your distaste for me, I do, but you don’t get to command me just because you gained the slightest grain of strength.”

The Mask is listening close, tracking everything. Intonation, inflection, the way the mountain shifts subtly under his gaze-

While the Want pushes.

It doesn’t work. Doesn’t do anything.

But she keeps pushing.

“I am in the process of things you do not and have not tried to comprehend. You fell into a hole of your own grief and guilt rather than even hate me properly. You maneuvered me into killing a target I was not ready to kill. And when I left you alone, you brought down half a fucking city.

“They’re still mid-reconstruction in Cragend. Your little tournament drew far too much attention, and would have drawn more if not for me. I told Kaena of the thing infesting you, sent them to help you, let you use my name, my authority, to make your decisions- and then you got a fucking Feng killed. You idiot fucking child, do you have any idea what that’s done?”

She growls, the sound strained even with the reserves in her lungs. She’s having to burn Qi just to regenerate from the attrition bearing down on her, but she refuses to be silent.

“You promised me them,” she snarls.

“FIVE YEARS! I promised you that in five years, I would be dead, and you would be free to cut their throats as you please. A blink of an eye to a cultivator, a moment in the grand scheme of things, and yet now? Here? Not even our third year since having met and you have lit a tinderbox beneath carefully placed wicks, and you dare to act as if I owe you something?”

The Want roils at that, and the Flesh screams, and the Mask points them all exactly where they need to go.

She can’t leverage her Qi against his, can’t alter the world outside her body or fight this quasi-Domain he seems to be emitting-

But she has a few things that are True, and a few things that scream to be made True.

I Can Change

I Am Me, I Am Mine

And so there, beneath the weight of a world, she makes gospel of her Truth.

Supreme Body Art: Specialized Enhancement and Supreme Body Art: Overclocking both roar to life.

Simple enough names. She’s making them both up on the spot, so it only makes sense, but she likes them. They say what they do.

And beneath the mountain, she adapts.

Her blood vessels widen, thickening as she cannibalizes muscle to focus on her piston groups, her lever and gear-locked musculature. For fine control and exponential force, there’s nothing quite like muscle fibers, but for getting a very simple task done… well, gears are the standard for a reason.

As her skin hardens, thickens, grows, Overclocking pushes specific systems and mechanics to their max, heating her up enough to start letting off steam, and Specialized Enhancement turns the entirety of her Qi structure to enhancing bone and chitin, multiplying their presence in her body to form a complex, layered shell. The nanoscale under her skin connects to the new armor plates, millions of individual scales reorganizing to help distribute weight and push the gravity that crushes her out into a wider area of dispersal.

And, for approximately half a second, she forces out a spark of [IGNITION]

Not enough to run wild, not enough to mutate out of control- but enough to further her Change.

Except… the weight remains. Reality tells her that she is beneath a mountain, even as she drags in lungfuls of cold air.

That’s fine.

Blacksteel’s great for cutting your way out of things.

With a sound like shattering obsidian, a thousand-thousand scales of bone and organic matter turn onyx black. A thousand-thousand shards of her prosthetic shatter like shrapnel and multiply, leaving her left arm absent but recoloring every piece of her new armor in metal black as night and twice as hungry.

And she stands.

First one leg. Then the other. Then a third, and fourth, and fifth. Support pillars and architecture expand out of her body, additional limbs and columns making struts to hold her in place and help her rise, new arms helping to push her upright. She stands on clawed hooves made wide to shoulder the weight of the world, spine crackling from the weight of crushing RESPONSIBILITY mass on her back- but there, clad in midnight black and flickering with sparks of golden-white Flame, she makes it.

Taurus meets her eyes, dark pools meeting compound, fractal pupils.

“YOU. OWE. ME.”

The words come out of lungs half crushed, echoing deep inside her as she stares down the bull, taller than he is and clad in bone and obsidian, hungering End.

“FOR. A. DEATH. FOR. A. LEASH. YOU. OWE. ME.”

There is silence for a moment. The sound of the ground straining beneath the Mountain fills the air, leaving room for little else… but she sees it. Sees Taurus’ expression shifts. It turns from rage, from begrudging amazement, from that slight hint of bitter uncertainty… to something a little bit like sadness.

“To be perfectly honest”, he says, “I can’t disagree with you.”

Raika feels herself fade, ever so slightly.

As soon as the words leave his mouth, maybe a third of her sense of self disappears. The Mask cracks, slipping apart, falling away from the front of the whole back into nothingness even as the Flesh howls behind a cage of perfect glass…

And the Want opens a smile as wide as Taurus’s horns, full of more teeth and tongues and flickering flame than any maw need be.

“FOUND. YOU.”