"Contact, contact! The quarantine has been breached, I repeat, the quarantine has been breached! We need reinforcements! Core Formation realm and sappers required, the fucking thing is tearing through us like-”

A clawed hand separates the jaw and lungs and ribcage from the rest of the body, so whatever metaphor might have been spoken is replaced by a wet gurgle and the sounds of chewing.

And swallowing. Mostly swallowing. When your whole throat is full of teeth, you don’t really need to chew all that much.

The Body sprints up the tunnel on six legs, sometimes four, each limb multi-jointed and arcing with radiant streams of iridescent fire that highlight the dozens of spines and muscle groups spread like a tail behind it. It bakes through the flesh, compensates for the failures of design and of breaking tendons and muscles and bones, replacing them faster than they can be lost. Limbs that could be arms or tentacles or grasping wings stream ahead of it, bearing the brunt of most of the weapons fire and Qi techniques being thrown- if they break, they just get replaced.

The Body feels its Heart reaching out, rearranging plates of kinetic-reactive scales and woven fibers into the way of some of the damage, and that’s fine, but it’s not really needed. It has so much fuel it can grow forever, but… well, it is a little less hungry if it doesn’t lose its pieces so easily.

Someone slices a blade of glowing vermillion aura through a human-ish arm, and the leftover bits of transcendent fuel inside it make it bloom into a lovely thicket. Arms grow from arms grow from arms until a hundred thousand fingers are mashed into paste against impossibly powerful armor and arrays and drown the vermillion sword (and the person holding it) in blood and hands, and the Body eats the whole thing as it keeps climbing.

The tunnel keeps trying to close around it but whenever it does it feels its Heart burrowing out of its skin, touching the tunnel walls and pushing them back. There’s a sense of communication, of nerves and thought and brain matter communing, but the Body hasn’t really bothered with that particular calorie-intensive tool yet, so that’s not its business. It just needs to keep growing. So long as it doesn’t die from it, it can keep moving, because that’s how all bodies are designed originally.

It works perfectly!

Exploding from the cramped tunnel on a sled of broken limbs and ruined joints and torn-apart skin, the Body emerges from the tunnel into the long hangar-hallway that Raika was walked down just a few minutes ago.

It’s changed since then.

Three hundred and sixteen eyes (plus or minus seventy at any given moment, ocular jelly coming into being and being broken or reabsorbed almost as quickly) take in information as a dozen mouths make odd screaming noises as they pull in air.

A wall of death muffles the sound as two hundred guns fire at once.

Imperial rifles are complex machines, each one ornately designed with arrays and jade circuits in them right alongside mechanical components. Winding gears and twisting mechanisms push old bullet cartridges out and replace them with new ones, and arrays scream in synesthetic agony as Qi from two hundred cultivators is pushed into them. The Dao of the Gun ensures that each gun is more of itself: a bullet is meant to kill, so it reaches out with more and more death as its nature is comprehended, and added to the shots are two hundred different flavors of cultivation, all shaped the same but flavored distinctly.

The machine of the Division of War launches a salvo against the Body.

The impossible reactor of life and death, of paracausal materials and impossible energies, clicks a little bit higher as more Blacksteel is fed into its reaction.

A wall of meat becomes reality around the Body.

Chitinous armor, dense leathery flesh, woven biofibers, reactive scales and impact-dampening jelly all overlap, unequally and chaotically, and drink deep of the violence launched upon them, exploding messily into thousands of pieces. Cursed flesh, strained past its original intent, buckles under the amount of energy being injected into it and reacts violently, detonating in flashes of Qi and bursts of the original intent and runic arrays that formed it.

And then the wall of meat explodes a second time as the Body moves through it, uncaring of its losses.

It’s so fucking hungry, and it has so much energy.

The second round of gunfire is launched faster than the Body can cross the distance, and a second bloom of hardened and impossible meat blunts the impact again.

Some of the people in the back say words, and the methodical and precise firing of the first two rounds is replaced by an ongoing roll of thunder. Gunsmoke fills the air and bullets with thousands of auras tear through several tons of meat, digging into the Body beneath before it can advance and bloom again.

For the first time since it started climbing back out of the tunnel, one of the Body’s tools fails.

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That’s ok! That’s how it’s supposed to work! If it stops working, just leave it behind!

Evolution, screaming with impossible velocity and exponential growth, discards the flesh-bloom entirely.

The Heart agrees with and supports the shift in tactics, reinforcing layer after layer of flesh with millimeter-wide scales of hyperdense carbon, keratin, and Blacksteel. Three layers of the armor manifest, multiplying the power of the Qi-resistant surface layer, slowing the exponential growth of new limbs considerably due to added complexity- but that just takes spawning from a quarter-second to half.

A long, impossible serpent of spinal columns and obsidian flesh roars out of a dozen mouths situated across its body, and ten different limbs, clawed, bladed, and overwhelming in weight slam into the ground and slap at the air as gunfire tries to force it back.

As flesh-exploding shots morph into ricochets and surface-level wounds, the Body moves forward again.

Its lower body is half serpent, half centipede, a massively muscled body splitting into different tail-segments and spawning legs and arms, hands and torsos and faces from them, while the upper body resembles nothing in the natural kingdom. If a tree and a snake and a piece of coral all overlapped at once, wrapped around and emerging from behind a thing that is maybe a face and maybe just humanoid hands covering a mass of so many eyes, then it might be partially accurate.

It bleeds iridescent fire and neon blood and the sound it makes as it breathes could be a roar or a giggle or a scream.

To their credit, the soldiers do not break. They begin to reload, sappers behind them slamming their hands to the ground and beginning to carve runes for arrays and plant flags for formations-

And the Body is among them.

Cultivator bodies are incredibly powerful. While Core Formation is merely the final step of the easiest part of a cultivator’s journey, it’s enough to place any who reach it distinctly past human capacity. They can lift boulders, cast impossible spells and wield arcane abilities, heal from even the worst sorts of wounds with a few days and a bit of luck. To top that, Imperial soldiers wear armors made of high-level materials, enchanted with arrays to ensure they can self-repair and reduce any harm done to those wearing them.

The limbs, segmented like whips and moving faster than the eye can see, or weighing multiple tons of armor and bone, or many-jointed things of impossibly sharp edges and Blacksteel claws, turn about fifty of them into paste in an instant.

The hallway trembles, and the Body rushes forward, its attentions divided as it crushes and impales and slices apart the remains of the squadron and rushes forward. More and more limbs emerge behind it, anchoring its body further, and the limbs that don’t kill fast enough are abandoned, one by one, winnowing down its tools as it winnows the forces against it.

Some of them run and scream, failing to wear armor. Those it simply slithers / steps on, and absorbs the meat they become. Others fight with swords and other weapons, and fail to do more than sever pieces of meat that were useless enough to be sliced off anyways.

The Body is doing as bodies do- it is growing, and finding out what works and what doesn’t.

And it is eating.

Anything with even a hint of Qi is absorbed, tendon-strings of wet flesh shooting out to grab artifacts, weapons and people all equally. With every swallow down impossible throats with too many teeth, it gets a little less hungry.

The Body is doing such a good job.

But the walls are in the way.

It starts tearing through them, following the tremors / sight / scent of whatever source of Qi is closest, and tearing into it immediately.

Only then do the walls truly start fighting back.

They begin to reform around the Body, trapping it and forcing it to break them again and pull back. The rooms its headed to get further and further away, the space between them expanding unnaturally and making it so no matter how fast it moves, there’s a wall formed in the way due to the “distance” it has to travel.

Ok. So it needs to go faster, and it needs new ways to move.

Just as it’s thinking of this, it encounters a source of Qi that is coming to it.

Adrenaline and hunger, pain and fear all mesh together to push the Body to do all the things it is so very good at doing, and all of it only barely ensures that it survives the first hit.

Another squadron of soldiers is before it, and then another, and another. One-hundred and fifty cultivators, fifty of whom are building some sort of complex array at the back of the room, begin to fire upon it, and they don’t use pistols.

Rifles and shotguns and swords and spears all roar into the open air. The Dao is rich in the space, saturating each attack with a depth of comprehension and concept that magnifies them a dozen times over, tearing through the body’s armor and forcing its endless, iridescent reactor to fuel its growth again, only to be cut down even faster. The soldiers focus on joints and thinner chunks of flesh, carving away the connection points between parts of the Body and forcing them apart and away.

This cannot stand.

Survival-anxiety and fear and a need to grow all swirl together, and it feels its Heart moving forward. There’s a sensation a bit like vomiting and a bit like putting a socket-joint into place when you didn’t know it had disconnected, and-

The central maw around the half-cratered skull of eyes that was once a human head opens, and a barrel pokes out.

Blacksteel makes up its surface, flesh and blood, pistons and organic hydraulics make up its interior. A fist-sized, spearheaded chunk of Blacksteel makes the barrel’s contouring, made of transmuted Blacksteel from around its reactor, that strange orange-gold metal, glow softly.

Even as a concentrated hail of bullets and Qi unmake over half of the Body’s central portion, it fires.

Its skull explodes from the impact and the white-gold True Flame used to fire the bullet. Its limbs are mostly severed, its internal organs as much metal and ruin as they are flesh from the gunfire and sword-slashes.

The Dao of the Gun screams as something beyond thought reaches comprehension, and manifest something made for killing.

Half of the first squadron dies in an instant.

The bullet itself only kills ten, moving so fast that it erases torsos and armor in its path, as a bullet is meant to. By the time it hits the ground, digs a trench and shatters into shrapnel, there’s been enough time that minor defensive arrays have lit up the armors of the soldiers all around the impact site.

But the Dao of the Gun does not end when the bullet lands.

Shrapnel of Blacksteel and ballistic death scythes through the nearby bodies like a harvester’s blade through wheat, and death fills the room.

The Body doesn’t know what a smile is, but it would make one if it did. That worked very well. Turns out, It Is What It Eats.

A face that is a gun and a sword and a skull and a halo of eyes and horns and branching antlers and glowing gold-red-purple-silver fire begins to change its Body to match.