“What in the blessed fuck!” Qen Hou exclaims, his voice literally booming from Qi-powered lungs and the enclosed space.
Raika looks at him and giggles. “Hi Qen Hou,” she says. “Nice to see you! Sorry I’m the one naked and not Li Shu, but I promise there’s a good reason for it.”
He and Li Shu immediately turn scarlet for a second, in what she can only describe as an exercise in mutual adorableness, in spite of Qen Hou’s… Qen Hou-ness. “That’s not what I mean!” he snarls. “What is this diagram? And why are you all carved up? You look like you’re practicing some kind of sacrificial art here. If you hadn’t woken up, I’d be taking Li Shu to the elders for judgment and to see if they could figure out what the hell this is!”
“It’s Li Shu being a genius, obviously,” Raika replies, rolling onto her side and getting up.
Oh. That’s new. She pushes herself up, then back down, then up again. It’s difficult, but not nearly as impossible as it was a moment ago, and it feels like… is her skin moving? Tensing up alongside the muscles, maybe? Is her skin magic now? Oh, that would open up so many avenues (and require so much surgery, ugh…). Qen Hou and Li Shu both seem to take notice as Raika stands, balancing mostly on her left leg but standing fairly tall and firm.
Then, Raika discovers a minor issue; it hurts like fuck. Whatever is doing this, there is a layer of skin or outer flesh at least that is following her will very precisely and trying to help her stand how she wants to. The trouble is, she can’t do that anymore; even straightening her back this much has her spine screaming in pain, and the instinctive effort to unbend her leg all the way has her gasp, loud and sharp.
“Fuck,” she whispers. “Not all better yet.”
“So this is some idiotic attempt to heal yourself, is that it?” Qen Hou asks. “Li Shu, did she put you up to this? You give the cripple too much grace. You don’t need to just do what she asks!”
“I didn’t!” Li Shu says. “If I hadn’t helped design the diagrams she’d be dead by now! Don’t treat me like a child, Qen Hou!”
“So you admit that you designed this diagram to… what, experiment on her? A medical diagram of this complexity has to go through the elders first, there’s no way you got permission to do this, much less in this room!”
“That’s enough,” Raika says. Apparently she puts more than she expected into her voice, because to her surprise, both Qen Hou and Li Shu go quiet, both glaring at each other (with him also glaring at her from where he’s kneeling by Li Shu’s side). She doesn’t keep talking immediately; wiping sweat from her brow, she pins up her hair into a messy sort-of bun with one hand, before moving to grab a robe and finally stop having this conversation in the nude. “I designed the diagram,” Raika eventually says. “Li Shu assisted, but only because I would have done it without her help if she didn’t.”
Qen Hou stands to his full height, stepping slowly and with barely contained rage towards her. “I should have you dragged before the elders,” he growls. “Better, I should just kill you here for dragging her into your mess.”
She smiles, tall enough even while a little hunched to look him straight in the eye. Except… ha, yes, she uses her newfound control of her body to force her posture straight again, enduring the pain, the squirming, creaking agony of her spine being forced to unbend, until she’s looking down on him by a good two inches. She brings her face close enough to his that he can smell the blood on her breath from a throat screamed ragged.
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“Go ahead,” she whispers. “You know I wouldn’t say anything, but you don’t really think the elders won’t make the connection and wonder about the healer-in-training with access to the cripple? And if you want to kill me, go ahead-” (she leans in further, until his face is parallel to hers and she can whisper ever so quietly in his ear) “-but you know she’ll never speak to you again.”
He grabs her by the throat before she can blink, lifting her entirely off the ground, her entire weight on her neck. His arm doesn’t tremble as he does it and no sign of strain enters his eyes; at his level, with her weighing maybe a hundred-and-fifty pounds even after all the sect meals, she must weigh no more than a handful of grapes to him.
Doesn’t mean it’s nearly as easy for her, of course, but she refuses to break eye contact, grabbing his wrist as hard as she can and using it, just a bit, to hold herself up. They stay like that for a while, maybe twenty seconds, Li Shu clenching her fists and looking ready to jump between them but as aware as they are that doing so wouldn’t actually resolve the moment.
Raika smiles. Good girl.
Qen Hou sees the smile, and his hesitation rises, his hand wavering just a bit. She’s right, and he fucking knows it, and he hates it. She just smiles a bit wider.
Finally, he lets her go, and she collapses to the ground, coughing. He just grunts, in either disgust or bravado disguising embarrassment, and she can’t help but laugh through the coughs, drops of red flecking her lips.
“Yet again, Qen Hou,” she croaks, “people pay good money for that sort of thing. I can’t just keep giving out freebies like this.”
“Be silent, worm,” he hisses. “You’ve dragged a prominent healer’s apprentice, who’s caught the eye of the medical pavilion elder, into your degeneracy and madness long enough. You’ll be moved to proper servant’s quarters immediately, and I’ll personally make sure you’re worked hard enough you won’t have time to sleep, much less think of insane dark rituals.”
“Hardly a dark ritual,” she croaks. “Maybe high-concept philosophical equations and some drugs, but a dark ritual? So dramatic.”
He doesn’t even look back at her as he stalks out of the room. Li Shu is a little bit in front of the doorway, and he stops before her, giving her the opportunity to move out of his way. She doesn’t, for a moment, almost looking like she wants to say something… but she backs down. He leaves as soon as she steps away.
Raika doesn’t care. It’s not exactly kind to say, but she doesn’t care about how Li Shu feels in this moment, or about how Qen Hou plans to punish her, or anything else in between, because she can feel something, has felt it ever since she woke up.
Her heartbeat. Every note of it, every single time. It doesn’t fade into the background, or slip into her subconscious; she can hear every thump of the muscle, every pulse of blood through her body visible and present in her mind. And with each beat, with each rush of blood, with every pulse of flesh and trembling vibration it causes, she feels it growing, ever so slightly, over and over; that same tingling sensation from every time she’s given herself a Qi deviation, where the strange energy pulses and trembles and chaotically rumbles through her body without meridians to guide it or properly digest it. She feels that mist of Qi she’s kept picturing vibrating, her heartbeat adding to it again and again until it rings like a musical note, like a lake of fog softly screaming a single orchestral note in unified pain.
It can’t escape. She doesn’t even feel her skin prickle from it, it’s all internal, like a permanent sensation of pins and needles in her liver and her back teeth and her feet all at once and everywhere in between.
Oh yeah. That dark ritual did something all right.
She only notices that Li Shu has been trying to say something, possibly for a while, when a wave of orchid-and-needle scented Qi washes against her, and when she hears the younger woman gasp.
“I can’t sense you,” Li Shu says, quietly. “I can feel that there is Qi, that you’re here, but… I can’t sense inside you anymore. I can’t feel what’s happening. It’s like… like with a cultivator, but…”
Raika looks at her with a grin so feral it would look more at home on a wolf than a human. “Sounds to me like the plan worked,” she says softly, with something that is almost a laugh but is far too breathy and sharp for that.