The train ride only takes about thirty minutes. Even with the spatial dilation effects that they pass through, the smell of them making Raika a bit dizzy as they blur past, the train moves at a tremendous speed, and what was once the horizon nears in record time.
And in that same period, she “dissolves” another six ethereal figures.
They don’t seem like ghosts. They don’t have nearly the potency or… realized physicality that the ghosts and wraiths she’s hunted seemed to have. These seem more like vague imprints than clear images, and don’t have nearly the potency of the things she’s met before.
What helped was realizing that they just smell like… well, like regular death.
Everyone smells like death at least a little. Dead skin cells, dead hairs, dead mites and critters that can crawl where you’re not looking. Most cultivators that are in the Core Formation realm or above tend to lose the scent, their vitality and physical changes overcoming all but the hardiest of minute parasites, but for most people, the smell is constant. If they’ve eaten recently, the scent can be a part of their breathing; not decay, not digestion, each distinct, but simply the fact that something died, transmitted into scent or sight or sensation through her senses. These minute ghost-things don’t smell of Qi, or of powerful concepts… they just smell like regular, old fashioned, everyday death.
But when she starts to pick out the details of them, something becomes clear: they’re death, shaped like people.
That’s it. That’s all.
It’s like saying the scent of meat, shaped like a cut of meat, or the scent of a flower, shaped like the ghost of a strangled vine. The scent of death, omnipresent and casual and usually unimportant, is sometimes shaped… like people. People and things, if Jin’s sight is to be believed, and at this point there’s little doubt of that.
Most of the mist-shadows look, to him, like soldiers, occasionally drifting from one of the living to another. She wonders, idly, if they’re remnants of previous soldiers who came back to haunt the train, or if they’re just… imprints of moments, now gone, whose creator-selves have passed. Whenever she focuses too hard on them, they apparently just vanish, gone entirely, so more likely the latter. Perhaps the attention of someone living is enough to overwhelm them.
Interesting, then, that Jin can see them so clearly and so directly.
She really needs to find the boy a proper manual. There’s plenty of death and ghost-art sects in the world, even if they’re no longer as common, and if anyplace is bound to have methods of growing stronger from death, it’ll be an Imperial war-machine.
By this point, Jin’s gotten a bit more comfortable with them, too. While most of them do seem to have their… head-clouds pointed vaguely at him, the fact that looking back at them hard enough is enough to make them dissipate has done a lot for his fear of them. The train pulls to a stop, the ambiance aboard just a bit lighter, and hundreds of mid-level cultivators armored for war begin to filter their way out of it.
It’s… a bit disturbing, watching how they walk. Most of them, even those with distinct scents and totally different cultivations, don’t seem bothered by each other, standing side by side and even talking to each other. The usual posturing for face and the demands of kowtowing one might find amidst a collection of sect-based cultivators is absent here, even amongst those who are clearly in different parts of their respective realms.
Most of the soldiers are at the bottom of or nearing the Core Formation realm, their Qi in the process of purification and condensing in their dantians, but there’s plenty in the foundational realm. They wear different badges, and definitely seem to be headed in different directions, but all of them stand side by side without difficulty, hundreds of cultivators from all over the rings all walking together.
It would be inspiring if not for the omnipresent smell of anxiety and adrenaline.
As they walk, the volunteers are almost immediately taken from the rest, clear lines forming as soldiers with a white stripe and paler jade on their badges start to subdivide the crowds. Core Formation cultivators go along the massive, arched hallway ahead, Foundational realm cultivators go off to one side, heading up a long set of stairs, and the volunteers are taken to a cleared-out area of smooth stone, concrete and metal pillars, holding up the structures above.
“Line up, line up! Present your merit plaques in front of you and you will be checked and moved to the correct placement! Line up, one and all!”
The person checking them over is a Core Formation realm cultivator, someone who seems pretty advanced. His Qi smells… well, it smells distressingly similar to most of the people here, his internal soul flavoring the ideas of sharp edges, violence, and endurance with a scent of apples and pomegranates. He walks past each one of them, only glancing and making a note on the plaques of most of the servants and minor Qi Gathering cultivators who have arrived- but pausing at Li Shu.
“A Foundational realm cultivator with a healer’s badge?” he says. “Impressive. You must have a worthy teacher to have impressed your testing monitor. Fresh medical aid is always welcome on the wall. Thank you for your service.”
Li Shu gives him a smile and a nod, and he passes over Jin’s diminutive form beside Li Shu, wearing the robes of an apprentice and carrying a satchel.
And then he pauses again at Raika.
“Ah. A special physique. Good, we can always use more manpower. We’ll get you properly checked out with analytics.”
Li Shu blinks. “Ah, honored cultivator, I’m afraid that this one is my assistant and guard. I must demand that she remain with me.”
The soldier doesn’t even turn to look at her. “All orders are final, healer. This entire city and fortress are under the authority of the Division of War, and any and all demands must fall within that realm. Your… assistant here will likely be deployed to where she’s most useful, not where you want her to be.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Raika makes a little gesture to Li Shu. This is fine. They only need to stay long enough to find a way to head out into the 4th ring without drawing attention, and splitting up increases their chances of finding something sooner. Besides, Raika is confident that between her lack of Qi and ability to shapeshift and camouflage, she can escape to meet with Li Shu whenever they aren’t supervised.
Li Shu sends a little pulse of Qi, her irritation pretty loud in it, but she accepts. The soldier finishes marking something on his artifact, another glowing slate, and moves on without a word.
The rest of the checks go by quickly. Of the two dozen volunteers, most of them end up headed to “analytics” with Raika, with a few specialized talents heading for other districts. Li Shu is being politely pointed towards the medical wards, while Raika and her fellow not-so-specialized are taken in another direction.
Which… does beg the question of why they aren’t getting examined in the medical area. Not much of a question, but still.
The groups peel off, one after another. The weakest of the mortals are pulled off towards the first hallway they pass, heading down. The next rank, those with a hint of Qi or stronger bodies and modifications, go into a second hallway, this one with doors and stairs going both up and down.
Raika walks on a little further, the soldiers that seemed fine for a large group feeling a bit… tight around her.
“How much further to the… analytics department?”
“One more door,” says the soldier she spoke to earlier. “Down some stairs, past some shielding. Special constitutions are rare, and all our informational capacity is kept well guarded.”
The rest of the walk progresses in silence.
They do make it to that next hallway. Down the next turn, it begins to slope downward, the walls thickening and giving off… a strange sort of impression. She starts to trek down the well-lit ramp towards somewhere down below, and rapidly finds some of her senses cut off. Not entirely, but similar to how it felt in…
Ah. How it felt in the tunnels under Cragend.
The walls here are godflesh. Born from a Heart. She feels her own, new Heart tremble at the revelation, and wonders if they can communicate directly with each other. Maybe not while it’s inside her body. The walls absorb minute amounts of Qi, not nearly as much as in the tunnels of She of Still Waters, but enough to blunt any techniques, stray energies, that sort of thing. Her senses gradually dull the deeper they walk down, but for a while, when she focuses, she can “see” into the material, synesthesia feeding her data from tremors as she walks to show the shapes of arrays grown into the walls themselves.
She’d probably be more impressed by the whole thing if she wasn’t walking into it surrounded by armed soldiers.
“So… this whole thing with analytics, is it-”
She barely dodges the first bullet.
It’s absorbed into the wall almost perfectly, the sound muffled to near nothing, and the soldier wielding it moves fast enough that even her senses get a bit confused.
But she’s fast too.
Pistons and hydraulics meet muscle fibers to make her reactions faster than any human has a right to be, and before the echo of the shot has faded into the sound muffling she has her hand around the soldier’s face and is beginning to squeeze.
Three more gunshots echo in the quiet space, and this time, they don’t miss.
They should, though. She moves just as fast, dodges just as fluidly, and yet-
The Dao of the Bullet guides them unerringly into her flesh.
Most of them don’t make it very deep, but deep enough to bleed her, even through the nanoscale armor. That shouldn’t be. The kinetic plates under her skin are more than dense enough to stop a regular pistol shot from Taran, and-
She throws the soldier she’s holding at the others, overclocking her perception, her muscles pulsing with energy. There’s a half-second where she hesitates, where she wonders if their cover is broken or if using her transformations here will harm Li Shu and Jin. Barely a pause, her logic-brains still focusing on translating sensory data, the unknown slowing her just enough-
“Be Still.”
It sounds like Truespeak. It reeks of a Dao. Similar to the guard captain she met so long ago, who embodied the Dao of Balance.
The Dao of Control freezes her movement for exactly one-quarter second.
Raika can survive a lot of damage.
In spite of this, there’s one type of damage she’s never actually tested herself against.
Six guns, charged with Qi, shaped by six unique cultivations wrapped around one singular yet distinct Dao, fire into her skull at the same time.
The bullets barely make it through her skull. But they do. Charged with lightning and fire and fruity growth and thunder and pounding waves and the very concept of what a bullet is and should do, they crack through bone and find their target.
Bits of multiple overlapping brains land wetly against the godflesh walls, and are absorbed in moments.
Raika has exactly enough time to realize that grey matter is actually rather pink.
The world goes dark.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Fuck, she was a fast one.”
“Forget that. She was tough. Ten shots to take her down. I’ve seen spirits beasts go down to less.”
“Yeah, well, blame having to use these little pistols instead of proper rifles. A weapon should be able to be worn proudly and roar properly when used.”
One of the soldiers knocks the last one upside the head. “Keep talking like that and you’ll be getting a week’s drills on the Dao of the Gun. All guns are powerful and pure in purpose.”
“Yeah, yeah. Still, couldn’t we have waited a little longer? I don’t want to have to drag this whole thing down half the hallway.”
“You know protocol. Report says that she had some degree of enhanced senses, but no idea how much. You ever hear about the time one of the extra-sensory ones got too close to the production chambers? Could hear the shrieking for miles.”
“Whatever. Come on, lets feed her to the damn floor and go.”
As protocol demands, all dozen soldiers stay with the body as it’s brought down by three other cultivators. The weight of the body (and shape of limp flesh) is an impressive damn display, the unawakened mortal somehow still weighing as much as twice what her impressive height would indicate. That’s besides how rich her blood smells, like an alchemical ingredient begging to be made into an elixir.
All in all, the soldier still filling out his data-artifact is satisfied. No Qi to speak of, but tremendous physical properties, and no backing from any sect or institution visible. Every special constitution they can afford goes straight to the fortress city proper, and Fortress City 180, or the Fifth Northeastern Shield as it is often called, is always in need of fresh materials and blueprints.
The hallway finally ends, deep beneath most of even the other institutions of the already half-buried superstructure. The soldiers all emerge into a massive open area, the temperature and humidity skyrocketing immediately.
Beneath them are monsters.
The Godflesh crawls with them, like maggots spawning from a corpse, like bugs unburying themselves from a field. The massive cavern and its multiple “piers” extend out over a yawning mass of flesh as dead bodies are thrown down to be consumed and recycled and new flesh begins its crawl up to the deployment tubes. The vast troughs and tunnels that connect to corpse-processing on the front lines spew out a never-ending, constant stream of bodies, spirit beasts and bioconstructs falling down, down into the messy quagmire below.
“Alright, toss it. We’ve got another batch of volunteers coming in in about thirty minutes, let’s get this done.”
With some grumbling, the three soldiers all move to throw the body overboard, into the squirming mass of flesh and transformation far below.
And then one of them makes a gurgling sound as a hand shoots out and crushes his throat.