Raika wakes up dead.

She looks around at the fields around her. She’s sitting, cross-legged, in a green valley, flowing between two hills down towards a pond that is not a pond.

She knows that if she looks behind her, there will be a damaged cabin sitting near the top of the hill, and that there’s a forest of bamboo beyond that that her awareness washes through.

Some things aren’t quite so expected.

She feels something new on her head. There’s a sort of vague awareness, alien compared to her usual hyper-awareness of her body and all its sensations, that there’s something at the base of her skull, and to either side of it, a tightness that feels deeply awkward. She raises her hand to touch at the strange changes, finding new scar tissue decorating her scalp and the outline of her skull. Her braids are still there, as sunset-red as ever, but there’s new masses where-

Ah.

Right where the bullets caved in her skull and splattered her grey matter across the walls of the tunnel.

Star-spot bundles of scar tissue across her skull join the criss-crossings of pale cuts across her form, every wound she’s suffered represented in lines of trauma across her skin. Some are faded; there, the marks from her first beast tide, the self-destruction evident in the claw and bite marks nearly as dark as the rest of her skin now. Others remain bright and painful; the scars across her face where her mouth was once torn open, the burn marks from her would-be execution at the hands the Purple-whatever-fire-sect. Above all others, there is a near snow-white set of cuts all across her musculature, bright lines from where Feng Gao vivisected her into bloody mist during the tournament arc.

She looks around herself, using her arms (one whole and scarred, the other metal-black and skeletal) to stand. She feels a bit unsteady, like her balance is off. She almost stumbles as she moves, but she grits her teeth and forces her knees not to tremble, her body to compensate for the strange… weightlessness she’s feeling. She shakes her head, and it makes her mind ring, but she uses the disorientation as a way to force herself not to drift away.

She starts walking, like someone re-learning how. Her weight, her center of balance, it’s all… off. She tries to move, and it’s like there’s a delay, a… disconnect from the flesh. That’s… probably not a good sign.

She looks around, seeing if anything feels different, and finds something unexpected. In the exact middle point between herself and the pond, there are some… saplings?

Kind of. They’re not tree-sized, and they’re not not plants, but they definitely don’t seem like regular flora.

One little cluster of not-trees looks like a forest of meat. Limbs and blood and flesh and organs all grow and tangle into each other, each little sapling highlighting one piece of biology but packed so tightly that they sort of meld together.

With a bit of a gap in between, she sees what looks like a little twig of a tree made entirely out of sharp edges. Like a sword, with another tree made out of metal sort of… melting together into it? The metal tree is much smaller, which makes for a weirdly symbiotic looking binding, and there’s a little offshoot branch of what look like vague armor shapes.

Next to the sharp tree is… well. Well that’s a tree made out of guns. Pistols, to be exact, layered over each other in ways that shouldn’t be possible. As she watches, little branches made of smoke and fire leak from them, and seeds or baby fruit that look like bullets begin to blossom.

There’s other, smaller things there too, like the grass between the saplings hasn’t grown a lot yet but has started to take on weird colors and shapes. Nothing definitive, but its clear that the little garden patch has places for more would-be saplings to grow from out of the ‘grass’.

She walks past the knee and waist-high ‘plants’ on her way down to the pond.

The closer she gets, the easier movement becomes. It isn’t long before she can feel her stride gaining confidence, the two-dimensional seeming landscape given the illusion of depth by how quickly she moves into and through it.

And then she’s there, at the pond.

A beetle crawls from the fronds at the edge and launches itself at her. She’s much too slow to react, much to discombobulated, but it’s not an attack- the little critter flitters about her and nuzzles its mandibles against her like a puppy seeing a friend that just came back from a trip. She pats it lightly, not really sure how to pet a beetle, and it wriggles into her hand and plops its chubby little body into her shoulder.

She kneels by the pond, and almost immediately a wave ripples out to greet her.

Hey, she says, realizing that she’s not breathing air, and that she isn’t speaking words.

Hey, say the waves, copying her. Tendrils of water and blood and musculature and stone grow from out of the pond and wrap around her, circling her waist and shoulders and hugging her tight.

I’m ok, I think. I’m here. What’s happening?

The pond reshapes itself, and through its glistening reflections, she can see out of a dozen angles.

She sees mostly blood.

She sees ruined bodies and broken armor and weapons cast aside in fear. She sees the aftereffects of cultivation techniques, and ghost-sensations of impossible elements and attacks make themselves felt across her flesh.

She sees something that isn’t her, but very much could be and is, moving at impossible speeds with impossible violence through the world.

Her Body, the Body, moves in juddering, awkward movements that are so layered in muscle-fiber twitches and armor that they somehow seem fluid anyways. Bursts of gunfire blast through and into pieces of her joints, of the fibers of her Body, their effects magnified by Qi and… is that Dao? It reminds Raika of the moment where Pai Jin, back in Cragend, reached out and simply reorganized things, placing them in Balance with each other. An idea, magnified into reality and shaping what is into more of itself. The soldiers wield that same power, their comprehension of the blade and the gun magnifying their effects and shaping every interaction into more of itself.

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A bullet’s concept is that of metal, chemistry and flame, all moving in unison to achieve death and destruction through impossible speed. A bullet from a standard-issue Imperial soldier’s handgun can punch through a tree and emerge, distorted, on the other side.

Armed with the Dao of the Gun, those same bullets warp space itself, drag themselves forward, create combustion and penetration and detonation at every point of impact, and shoot through armor harder than steel.

And still, her Body does not die.

But it’s not winning, either.

There’s nearly a hundred bodies, or pieces of bodies, all across the train hangar, two full squadrons of Imperial soldiers splattered into nonexistence- but there’s at least triple that up and fighting and gradually pushing her back. Raika stares out of a hundred eyes as the Body manages to face down and crush any individual Core Formation level cultivator, her power, unleashed, eclipsing anything they can do- but there are well over two-hundred Core Formation cultivators in front of her, and at least two in the Nascent Soul realm commanding them from behind.

She’s not sure why they’re not fighting her directly. The amount of power a Nascent Soul cultivator wields over a Core Formation cultivator could mean survival for another hundred of the latter as her Body violently roils and grows amongst them. They could at least hold her back, rather than just weaken her, and potentially accelerate a truer death than getting shot in the head apparently achieves.

But they don’t. They hold back, their Qi swirling strangely, connected to the ground and walls all around her and keeping the rank and file organized and functional before them.

Some part of a technique? A way to increase the effectiveness of the infantrymen without risking more closely-guarded assets?

Most likely, they can see, same as she can, that they won’t need to intervene, not really. A few more minutes and the weight of fire, blades, and rushing Qi techniques will be enough to start pushing her back.

At which point, of course, her Body will manage to either adapt to it or continue to lose ground. Considering how messily its limbs branch and spiral out, how violently it draws on the energy of her Reactor, it’s likely going to be the latter, even if it takes a little time.

Is… is there any way I can go back? She asks. Or… am I just dead? Haunting myself?

The pond ripples, the grass moving and the world around her swaying in a thousand little changes… and ultimately says nothing she can understand. Maybe it doesn’t know. Maybe she just can’t properly “talk” with it while she’s like this. Either way, it doesn’t help.

Jin might be able to see her. If she manages to find him, or hold out until he comes here-

But he won’t come here. Not past squadrons of cultivators, not in the little time she has before they start to properly take her Body apart. And considering how she’s inside the strange not-space of her internal world as it is, he might not see anything anyways.

No.

Waiting for someone else isn’t the solution. She’s still here. She’s here.

This is her self, her world, her Body.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

That Body is her. It’s hers, just as she is its.

Growling without sound, she reaches her hands into the reflection on the pond.

The pond ripples, and in that ripple there’s a sudden vibration.

Dink roars out into the world of her Heart, a sudden broken note of perfect clarity thundering through the space.

She grins, eyes wide and hungry. She might not be able to reach back directly, not yet, but there’s someone who can help her bridge the gap.

Raika screams, soundlessly, drawing on her Truths. I Can Change, I Am Me, I Am Mine, We Are What We Eat. The three together reach through her Heart and touch on her closest ally and oldest tool, the Broken Instrument-

And music, vibration and frequency and tuning, reaches back.

And she begins to speak to and with and through an old friend, back to herself.

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An alien thing of metal that is somehow as familiar as flesh begins to sing.

The Body does not understand singing, not really, only the functions from which it might derive. Breath, an intent to mate, perhaps, an interpretation of neurons and patterns. The song it hears now has none of those things, ringing through reforged metal and beautiful frequency, and it feels itself.

She feels herself.

It is not the Body’s job to consider higher concepts, planning, or complex equations and balances. It is the Body’s function to exist, to grow, to play through its own instructions- and to be the tool through which a mind and existence touch each other.

As the Broken Instrument sings, branching the realm between concept and reality, the Body is given the tools it needs to become herself again.

The Soul reaches through their closest ally and tool, and bridges the gap to the flesh, and begins to guide them all back towards true and better [CHANGE].

They don’t need this many limbs. They don’t need this much armor. They need speed, power, and force in equal measures. With the Mind returned, they could-

Ah. But neither the Body nor the Soul know how to rebuild a brain, unmade into meat.

They close their skull, at least, sending energy in smaller streams through to what’s left of their nervous system. It will regrow, or… it won’t, and they’ll find some way around it. Maybe Li Shu will have a good idea on the matter.

Six arms is enough.

The hydra-tail spawning behind her and anchoring in the hangar, stretching all the way back down to the “digestion chamber”- which is useful. The Soul guides the body, and what was once a tail or pillar of flesh becomes a mess of mouths and begins to fight against the fortress itself to tear from it their shared flesh. Two massive legs, humanoid until the clawed, multi-jointed feet at their ends, spawn beneath her “main body”, the avatar of flesh in charge of the slaughtering, and suddenly she is much faster.

Her own Heart thrums, and sends out Qi and intent into the biomechanical designs of her body as she’s reshaped.

The segmented limbs were good. Like tentacles, but faster, whipping around. The end of two limbs, then, can be connected, a long, thin tendril with blades of Blacksteel and chitin stretching between the segmented whip.

Blades are always useful, but too many joints are a waste. Three joints, and at the end of one, a sword, a long blade. The Heart reacts to that, pushing something out from itself, and the Body watches as the biosword begins to gleam with a sharper light, honed into strange shapes.

Claws for one hand, dripping with Flame and blood, long reaper’s edges flicker-dancing bullets out of the air, and for its twin, a shield and hammer both. Transmuted Blacksteel from the core, fused with bone and coral material and stranger carbon deposits, bond into a singular pillar of weight and durability.

And for her last limb, well.

There is another tree in the Garden that the Body can use.

As her pillar-arm blocks a fresh volley of gunfire, the pace picking up as worry over her transformation begins to seep in, she raises an arm made of barrels and mechanisms and, in gold and iridescent flame, begins to fire into the masses.

The Body briefly picks up the sound of one of the Nascent Soul cultivators in the background, speaking into some sort of device.

“Potential Daemonic influences detected. Enabling frontline protocols. Reinforcements needed.”

A crown of horns and eyes catches fire as she roars, joining with the thundering of her guns and the sounds of flesh being pulped and torn and exploded and slashed apart as she advances deeper into the slaughter.

In for a copper, in for a gold.