At walking speed, they’re still half a day’s travel from the gatehouse and the labyrinthine city-trenches behind it. Nighttime comes early in the woods, even as the beginnings of springtime have started to make themselves known. This close to the east-west median line, the seasons are mild, unlike the burning summers of the south or the forever-cold of the north, where the winters are just enough not to kill down duskward and the summers are just warm enough to create black ice and trickles of water dawnward. As they break camp, one of the final touches of winter make themselves known in the form of a polite, mild dusting of snow, soon to melt in the new day.
Li Shu is first to bed, her anxiety still bothering her in spite of their conversation. Raika can sense her messing with her Craft before bed, likely using the opportunity to practice and experiment to relax herself. It feels… strange. The scent of her Qi has shifted, but not into something entirely new, not like She Who Stills The Waters (long ass name). There’s still the taste of white flowers, scentless but somehow present, and the sting of sharp scalpels and needle-thread- but the handles on the scalpels, and the needles that the thread travels through, smell distinctly organic now. Like… not like bone. Not quite like chitin, either.
Keratin.
Li Shu told her about it. One of the most versatile materials in the biological kingdom apparently, with a variety of possible uses and manifestations. Human bodies use it for nails and hair, mostly, but Li Shu has plans for modifying that quickly. The sense of what used to be her nails, but are now shaped into two-dozen hovering needles, floating through the air, comes clear through to Raika’s nose and sense of touch, the synesthesia blending the two. They feel almost like… like little pieces of a core? Floating outside her body. Like someone mixed a meridian and a core into one thing, but outside the body, connected to each other and to Li Shu by a web, but also strangely independent? All the same thing in all different places.
It’s dizzying to watch sometimes.
Jin, for all his own unique cultivation needs, is easier to look at. The shard of Blacksteel she gave him is very nearly gone, whittled down to a sliver and losing much of its luster, but that’s for the best, really. The sense of hungering, predatory death has faded, no longer in danger of overwhelming the dark, quiet room of smoke and strange voices that he usually emits. There’s a sense of hunger that does fit there, though, a comfortable counter, like the voices in the dark have found a hunger they can relate to. It’s funny, though- the End in the material feels off, slightly at odds with his other qualities, even as the concept of death fits right in.
The boy cultivates diligently, though she can smell the lactic acids built up in his body. Microtremors and hints of fatigue make themselves known to her senses, the way he touches the air and breathes making the colors of exhaustion glow faintly on him. Nothing so bad that she’ll need to order him to bed, but enough that she knows he should most certainly get some rest sooner than later.
The sun graces the horizon as their two tents finish getting pitched, and Raika tends to the fire. She’ll sense any creatures long before they get close, and the kid still needs some heat if he’s going to sit out in the fucking snow and cultivate.
And fuck it. A master should lead by example above all.
She takes a seat across from him.
They both sit in the lotus position across from each other. Jin looks up at her, but she just gives him a nod, and he gets back to it. He’ll need to be put to bed before he catches a cold out in the chill, but she’s keeping an eye on his body temperature and heart rate, and if her apprentice wants to show his dedication, who is she to refuse him?
Though her own meditation isn’t quite as performative as it used to be.
She still can’t cultivate. She still can’t really find herself in that in-between space of consciousness and sleep where one’s meridians might lie, calling to one’s awareness that they might better make use of them and grow.
But when she opens her eyes, she is elsewhere.
She looks at the cabin.
It looks mostly the same as before. Wood carved into logs and hammered into place, the fittings and gaps locking into each other to form a working structure. She can still see the massive crack in the roof from when Li Shu’s Sacrifice put enough pressure on it to see it break. The arrays on its front doors and windows, wrapped into the wood, to keep out pests and lock out lesser intruders, still intact. It even still stands on the same hillside as before, the rolling green hills of their valley stretching out past her line of sight, though she can still sense the swaying of the bamboo perimeter far, far off around her.
Further out than last time.
There is one big difference, though.
There are no shadows here.
Everything seems illuminated, clear, and even without light, her synesthesia could allow her to literally see the place through echolocation and scent, but its disorienting to have light but not have a source. Its as if someone painted a portrait of the exact moment that each individual piece was best illuminated, and then stitched them together into a canvas, and if she were operating on sight alone, the entire space would seem strangely flat and without depth.
She’s not sure how there is light here, or where it’s coming from. But it’s not coming some the sun. There is no sun in here.
She looks up again, checking to confirm what all her other senses have already told her.
There is no sky here.
There is a space above, but it is not blue, or the white of clouds, or even some vague, alien light glowing down upon everything.
There is only nothing.
Its far enough above that even her senses, which can extend more than a mile in every direction at this point, and even further and more vaguely further out if she concentrates, can’t give her much information. On occasion she’s glimpsed what may or may not have been something wriggling, far, far away, but its always a vague impression. It’s not black, or pure white, or true void above her head, it’s just… there’s nothing there.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
And occasionally she notices things pressing in on the nothing.
Turning, she starts to walk towards the pond.
It’s like walking in a dream. Distance seems to shift and shudder, as if it’s only present when it’s recognized. The walls of the valley to either side, which block line of sight out to the bamboo that she can feel all around, feel like mountains, even though when she looks, they’re barely hills. The slope down to the pond is a depthless spiral down to someplace deep, down into the black… and at others, its a quiet, peaceful stroll, the grass tickling her bare feet.
But only for a moment.
She puts a foot down, and as her weight comes to rest on it, all sensation from the bottom of it disappears. As she lifts it, there is a feeling of separation, her other foot becoming numb at the base of it. No, not numb.
More like there’s no difference between her foot and the ground. Like the grass is as much a part of her skin as her skin.
She walks the mile to the pond in a few steps. It takes her an hour. It takes her seconds.
The pond is not a pond anymore.
It’s still shaped like one if she squints, but only if she squints. Only if she ignores the way its ripples feel on her skin.
And the ripples never stop. Perfectly uniform. Perfectly symmetrical and consistent to the beat of something deep, deep inside of it, down so far, so low, that even her senses can’t detect it, just its movement.
The day they left, the Heart that they planted had called to her. Had offered her itself, on a silver platter, on a pedestal of roots and artificial arteries and stone and water, its complex, multi-layered flesh something new to her. When she planted it beneath their cabin, it had been a tiny little piece of flesh, taken from the inhumanly large chunk of pulsing, beating flesh beneath Cragend. When it had emerged, it was an organ of its own, mimicking but entirely different than a true human heart. Too many valves, too many chambers, and far too spherical- and offered to her.
Like ambrosia, offered on a sacrificial altar.
She hadn’t known what to do with the thing, once it started growing. Once the terrain around them started changing. She’d mostly figured she could leave it be, let it grow down and deep like the one beneath Cragend. For all she knew, Shapefixit was communing with the thing directly.
She hadn’t expected it to offer itself to her.
She hadn’t expected her body to react the way it did.
She touched it, and all of a sudden, she wasn’t touching anything. Her finger was gone. It wasn’t her finger anymore, it was a little bridge of muscle and bone connecting to something new.
And her biology had reacted.
Her arm morphed into a thing of teeth and tongue, reaching and hungering for something she had never tasted, a purity and complexity she hasn’t glimpsed even in her own particles, and rather than retreat, the heart leapt into her.
And brought the land with it.
The bamboo was the most painful part. It didn’t quite fit down her newly-created throat. The dirt and grass was easier.
The trees were a bitch and a half.
The cabin? Well, that wasn’t painful, but mostly because she’d had to get rid of her pain sensors by then.
By the time it was done, she should have been dead a hundred times over. Spatially-altered stomach or not, it’s one thing to eat ten times your body weight and only feel kinda satisfied, another entirely to feel an amount of material a thousand times greater than her being shoved into her body in less than a minute.
The area where the cabin had been looked absolutely terraformed. A circumference of miles of upturned earth and messy debris, bits of grass and tree thrown into the air only to land back on unfamiliar ground.
It didn’t bring all of itself. She watched the veins and arteries left behind wither and die, leaving most of the deeper soil intact, patches of trees and grass left disturbed but not devastated. But it did fit a lot of fucking dirt down her gullet.
And for some reason, she hadn’t stopped it.
She could have, she felt that much. There was a brand new tract through her right arm and down deep into her fucking stomach, and she knew that her Truth could close it as easily as open it-
But something told her not to. Past the pain. Some newfound thing, built deep, deep inside her, told her of relief.
Swallowing the land, as alien and painful as it was, felt right. Like drinking water after a long run.
Like feeling your lungs expand after holding your breath for too long.
Her newest Heart made itself useful not long after, the space inside her disappearing. She tried to sense it in her stomach like she had the soul of Zhoulong, or like the beast-flesh she’d taken in during the final tournament fight, but it was simply… gone. Nowhere inside her.
She visited their home again in her dreams three nights later.
Now, all it takes is a quick tweak of the chemicals in her brain, a little poke at her perception, and she finds herself back… here.
In here, she still has scars. Her left arm is missing at the elbow, a jagged and black, skeletal limb extending from the end of the flesh, and most of her body has gone from rich mahogany to the pale off-white of poorly healed scar tissue. She looks a bit like she used to, back in Paleblossom, her flesh more poorly-patched wound than functioning body, but it doesn’t feel like that this time. It doesn’t bother her, doesn’t feel like they go as deep beneath the skin, and she’s kept her height and her newer muscles, her teeth long and sharp and her eyes just a bit inhuman.
She is herself and not herself, just like this land is a place and not a place.
She sits, lotus-style, in front of the pond. The ripples speed up slightly, a staccato rhythm that lets her know that it’s aware that she’s here. Beneath the surface, her touch-based sensory abilities and the slight movement of the water tell her of the things swimming in the lake, their shapes strange and unlike any fish or octopus she’s ever met.
Out of the reeds, a beetle a little larger than a fist (and Raika’s fist is a lot bigger than a normal one) flutters out and lands on her knee. It buzzes, its wings overlapping too many angles and the lack of shadow making it look like a children’s painting. One that has been layered on itself a few times too many, and whose movements stutter and shift along angles that shouldn’t be.
It chirps happily at the sight of her, nuzzling its sharp edges against some of the ridges of scar tissue she has.
She smiles, patting it lightly with her fleshier hand, and looks down at the pond.
“We’ve got some free time,” she tells the water and the thing beneath it. “Up for some more work?”
Double-ripple. A yes.
She smiles. As she lays back onto the ground, her body losing sensation as the place she is laying on becomes her body, her mind expands, her senses bright and loud as the need to track her biology and immediate surroundings fades out and the wider web emerges. Her vision, hearing, smell and touch all overlap, taste coming last, and filling out her awareness of the pond and the strange streams that run through it.
The pond is water. Dream-water, true, but water.
The veins that run in and out of it, through the land and out past the nothing, are not.
And as her mind expands, her new Heart rises to meet her, letting her feel the pathways, feel how they want to be guided and how they stagnate, sore like muscles out of place.
Slowly, together, they begin to make patterns. Looping, whirling, labyrinthine pathways, under the dream-earth and out past the nothing, out into something that feels markedly like flesh and blood, muscle and bone and vein and organs.
She remembers back to the very beginning of her transformation. The theories that led her to using Dink to try and circulate blood into a “natural formation”.
What is a formation, but a pattern of properties and movements with Qi in it? An array not bound to sigils and sharp angles, spread out over a much larger space?
Veins of flesh-beyond-flesh stretch out throughout her being from a place she cannot sense directly but can exist within, and begin to make a passable effort to make patterns all their own, across a space that should be the size of a human body but is somehow much, much larger on the inside.
There’s a name for ley-lines, for the rhythms and ways in which Qi moved through the world. There used to be a name for them before the Empire came, before the great terraforming processes and revolutions of technology reshaped the world and the language within it.
They used to be called Dragon Veins.
It feels… weirdly appropriate.