It takes another two weeks before Li Shu is finally convinced that everything is as it should be, that they’ve created the optimal circumstances in which this might be enacted. In this time, Raika has done very little besides “appropriate” medical texts and ignore her responsibilities, leaving other servants to take over the cleaning, maintenance and food supply of the medical pavilion. She did not come here to stay, technically, so it doesn’t exactly make her guilty, but she’ll still be happy when this is over and she can better choose what’s next.
Qen Hou comes by, twice, to check in on Li Shu and her cultivation. Quite frankly, she’s more on guard against him than ever; besides the experiment, besides their brief moments of camaraderie, there’s always his ongoing interest in Li Shu. She might not think it so relevant except that, apparently, he’s her sponsor here, and tied to her somehow. She doesn’t even get the impression that he’s in much risk if Li Shu “flunks” as a healer, which means he’s getting something else out of it.
But eventually, Li Shu, having stolen enough hours and sleepless nights to keep things subtle with her instructors and checking Raika’s work on the diagram, finally decides that they’re ready.
So it is that Raika gets to strip nude in front of a pretty lady for the first time in over a year. It’s way more painful than usual.
In the end, the best way for them to get the runes on her is to carve them in, using a small scalpel and tattoo-needle to poke into her flesh until the requisite patterns of blood appear. Then, the diagram is layered onto the floor again, in the center of the room this time, it’s edges surrounded by an anti-Qi diagram hopefully strong enough to keep any and all background Qi from leaking in to the circle or Raika herself, while the carved runes keep any from leaking out past a certain point. The inner diagram has received some revisions as well, detailing the ways in which her body is meant to react, how the droplets of Qi in her flesh are meant to shift and move out, drawn to the surface despite any attempts her blood or flesh or bone might make to cling to it.
Finally, the ritual components. Two pills of Deepened Breath and one of Water Breathing, both eaten hours before to allow for mortal digestion. Blackened Seeds and a black volt berry, to keep electricity twitching through her muscles and her heart beating, pumping blood as needed. Enough Inner Heat bulbs that she feels like a furnace and is genuinely worried she’s running a fever, and small fires at each corner of the diagram to keep her even warmer. Last but not least, Inner Moon mushrooms; just a small, dried stem, not enough to properly trip balls, but enough to, one hopes, “view the inner world and enact one’s touch upon it”.
And then, skyclad, armed only with her constant companion in the form of Ding, she steps into the circle. She slowly, painfully lays herself out flat, a few drops of blood hitting the stone floor in the central ring of the diagram. And then, with a single, final Ding against her chest, what may be a final note from her most stalwart companion, she crosses her arms over her chest, imagines holding that vibration as tightly as she can in her heart, she lets herself drift off as Li Shu closes the diagram.
Ten minutes. Nothing.
Twenty. Still nothing.
Thirty minutes, and she should have felt something by now. Anything. At the very least the damn shroom.
She opens her eyes, and sees only darkness.
No, that’s not right. It’s kind of… pink. A very fleshy sort of color, weirdly flickering, like there’s light right on the other side.
She turns her head, trying to look around, but she can’t feel the movement, even as her eyes move. She does manage to look behind her, and there, again, is that same darkness, though this time the light seems to be coming from behind her, not in front, the much more red expanse here looking significantly stranger.
She tries to move forward, and finds herself doing so, even without feeling her legs move. She can feel herself glide formlessly forward, slipping through and following the pathways of curves of muscle and hallways of white ivory. She finds a strange bubble, like a weird lake of grey, suspended in a sea of red and clear ooze. She wanders about more, finding a wall she can’t pass eventually, and turns again, heading in a new direction. She finds a strange thing that squirms and squirts and seems like it’s trying to talk but keeps choking on that red liquid, going “blup-squelch, blup-squelch”, over and over. She finds long, winding hallways beneath it, like a single, massive snake. She finds twists and points in the ivory walkways and halls where there are jagged edges, cricks and cracks in the material and strange bends that don’t seem right.
Ah. She’s in her body, then. Must be, probably. Maybe. Might just be a weird flesh vision, shrooms are weird. Still, it’s pretty cool. She’s not actually here, of course; an inner Soul can examine and travel through a body like this, but she never even started the Nascent Soul realm, and the shrooms ain’t all that. If she remembers, it’s a projection of things her brain has already noticed, made into a useful hallucination.
She turns to go back the way she came, and comes face to face with someone else in here.
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It does not look like her. It doesn’t even look like she used to look when she was whole. It looks like an empty, hungry thing, a shadow in a world of shadow and glistening meat, and if not for how close she was to it she might not even have seen it.
If not for its proximity, and if not for the single, pure white eye that stares at her.
It is not carved like an eye, it looks more like a cube and a snowflake somehow fused together in shape, but it is in the shadow’s head, and it is looking at her, and it is cold.
Of course it would be here. In her altered state, it makes absolute sense; did she not come closer, face to face, with the power of whatever this thing is than any other power? Did she not see the thing from which it came, the impossible, the god in the sky that was Nothing that was always Nothing and made all Nothing? Did she not wrestle with it, feel its touch on her skin?
Are you hungry, it asks, in a voice that is not a voice.
Yes, Raika replies, in a voice that is a voice but is not.
Do you wish to sup on soft flesh and stone, to fill the empty void until there is nothing left?
She frowns at that. No, she says. The void is not my hunger. It is the void.
She can feel a wave of… well, not frustration. Whatever this thing is, it doesn’t feel like it’s alive, not in a true sense. There’s more a sense of disconnect, like it had a path set out and is trying to find a way to reconnect to it.
Do you wish to be greater than all? It asks, eye gleaming whiter than snow.
Yes, Raika replies.
Do you wish to unmake what your hands can reach?
Raika frowns again. Well that’s just vague, she replies.
It pauses again, giving her the impression of… again, not confusion, but the next closest thing. It feels like it is reading from a page, and not really able to process that she is not following her lines.
Do you wish to embrace the truth? The final truth? The infinite, perfect truth? It finally asks.
What truth is that, she asks.
That all things end. That at the end of it all, past defeat, past time, past death, past meaning and thought, there is a greater end, and it is forever and all and always.
Raika scoffs. Well that’s lame, she sends back.
This time, the eye actually blinks.
It is the truth, the thing sends to her.
Not my truth, she replies, nonplussed.
It moves forward, its presence overwhelming the sense of the meat around her, of the faint heat thrumming through her, of the distant ringing sound of a tuning fork and a tingling sensation that may be agony or may be itchiness, each more notable by their sudden absence.
IT IS THE TRUTH, the wisp of greater majesty proclaims, its words absolute, reverberating in perfect silence.
It is your truth, Raika says, not backing down an inch. It is the truth from which you come, the truth which I glimpsed, but it is not The truth. If something is impossible, it is my privilege to make it possible. If I am told I must die, it is my joy to live as long as I choose, even if that be forever. If I am told that at the end of all things is defeat, the end of all things can suck my perfect ass and beg beneath my gorgeous teeth. Fuck you and the weird rock you rode in on, shadow.
It rears back, that not-confusion and not-anger both rising up in response to an inconsistency, an uncalculated response, a denial, except there can be no denial. It is, this is, reality is, it ends, and this meaningless speck will / must / cannot not understand it’s place beneath Truth and-
Raika snarls, every iota of her consciousness in this timeless moment standing completely together. She is the cripple, and the wide-eyed child, and the warrior, and the madwoman, and she stares at this thing, and she finds a Truth all her own.
I Am Me, she snarls, her thoughts a roar of fire and churning flesh and gnashing sharpness and whirling eyes and hungry mouths and clawing hands and screaming stars and crying oceans, And I Am Mine.
And the wisp is something tiny, something minuscule, barely a fucking opinion, while she, for a brief, eternal instant, is infinite.
She takes its eye, and fashions of it a tooth. It crumbles, forced into shape, screaming as it is torn from the shadow and molded by impossibility. A back molar, to be precise; she’s still missing a few, courtesy of a certain green-eyed someone.
And then Raika is screaming, because she is awake and her skin is on fire and everything hurts and she can feel her gods-damned heartbeat screaming right next to her own voice, and then she is laughing, because she is alive, and all she feels, for a moment, is victory so fucking glorious it makes ambrosia taste like cheap beer, and she can feel, more than ever before, that something is different.
Raika opens her eyes, locking onto two startled sets in the room, and laughs harder than she’s laughed in years.