A serrated whip of Blacksteel death cuts through three cultivators in a single movement, the fourth just barely saved by their armor. A pillar of chitinous coral and bone pulps him a moment later, the Qi from his core exploding out of him wetly alongside his organs, and the sound he makes is enough to make the last member of the squad flinch.

He moves no more once a sword sharper than any mundane steel, sharp enough to cut air and Qi itself, turns him from a single thing into three.

The Dao of the Blade is a smaller Dao. Infinities within infinities, small infinities and large ones, and that of the Blade is cutting with metal, with a sword, with a manufactured tool.

But it sings. It whispers and tells tales as it Divides the world, and tells her of the Cut.

If she still had a functioning brain, that might be a concern. Every cut feeds more and deeper comprehension, every swing of Dao digging further into itself and feeding her the truth of what is, if only she looks close enough. As it is, she, Soul and Body, have bigger things to worry about.

She’s dying. Again.

Six arms, all of them busy fighting back. The fusillade of gunfire has ended, the sword-strikes now held only for self defense, and the trees in her inner world have in turn ceased growing. Whatever advantage her ability to somehow consume Dao might have given her, its been lost as the Imperials adjust. Now, rather than outright elimination, they instead slow her down, delaying her and throwing up barriers over and over as array formations come into being and sapper-troops dig trenches and manipulate the ground beneath her.

Out of her back, her body extends out and further, like a tree made of meat, its branches digging violently into the walls of the hangar. She’s still trapped here, the massive space limiting her movement and the efforts of the soldiers ensuring she never has solid footing to launch from, but the pillar-tail allows her to maintain some degree of mobility anyways, hyper-dense muscle lifting and violently jerking her to and fro to avoid some attacks.

And she is being forced to avoid them now.

The gunshots fired now bear minimal Qi, and are launched out of specialized rifles powered by one’s internal cultivation but not comprehension. Without Dao, they should be far, far weaker, and they are- but not in the way she expected. Without Dao, their effects are miniscule, but without any special enchantments or comprehension, there’s simply less for her to absorb with each hit, less advantage to gain or resources to recover, making each shot cost more to take. The same goes for sword strikes- the few that still use Dao against her do so only to block attacks, never to harm her in turn, leaving that purely for the arrays and gunfire, charged with Qi alone. I Am What I Eat, for how powerful it is, has a rapidly relevant issue: it can be used against her. If she’s constantly “eating” raw metal, there’s a line where it begins to slow her movements and poison her flesh.

The ground turns liquid beneath her feet, and a dozen eyes swivel to her right. There, the squadron of sappers. There’s a few others throughout the space, but only one squadron consisting of them entirely. It’s difficult to get proper footing on water- but not impossible.

Heightened muscle fibers, biological gears and pistons, and tendons like industrial-grade wire flex in a single violent spasm, and she hits the ground hard enough to make use of surface tension.

The air crackles as it breaks under her velocity, and she is among them.

Her claws close around the one in front, his cultivation a bit higher than the others. There’s a moment where the smell of crisp vanilla and bloody callouses fills one of her airways, his Qi rising into a practiced array of masterful quality. The honed edges of her claws are held back for almost a full second.

In that time, her whip has severed the torso of a gunner across the chamber, her Blade has split one of the other sappers in half, and her pillar-shield has blocked another three strikes.

Rewiring her nervous system for spontaneous reaction is just barely enough for her to keep up, an inability to process data traditionally or keep track of all she’s receiving limiting her- but its long enough that no one manages to stop her claws from cutting through the array, severing the glowing shield of repulsion and dividing the lead sapper into seven.

This is working.

Her roots dig into and battle the Heart of the fortress behind her, stealing its food and soldiers at once. Her Reactor shrieks endlessly, a sublime mass of constant energy forcing her body to Change at every instant. Her inner world writhes and grows with every piece of flesh she ingests, every cultivation and Qi-rich substance she takes in.

And even now, she can feel little twitches, moments of connection as nerves begin to reconnect in her skull. She just has to hold out, keep killing. Keep feeding that bottomless thing that she is.

Keep feeding the red until it is sated, and they’re all dead.

Dink trembles against what passes for her collarbones, the Soul and Body experiencing a disconnect. Too much adrenal blindness, too many chemicals and blind instincts pushing her forward. To live is to eat, and anything primal enough can be reduced to two simple instincts- to survive, and to consume.

And it’s never enough.

Dink trembles, frequency beyond hearing bridging a gap between life and the immaterial, trying to bring them as close as it can. She can feel it struggling to do so, putting its all into forcing her disconnected pieces into synchronicity, but it’s tenuous.

But it’s working. She can keep killing. She can survive. She can make it out.

She can do…

Mmmh.

Plans are for a Mind. A Soul is desires and ideals, and a Body is instinct and flesh. She can think of what to do next once its back.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

In the meantime, she really just has to keep killing, no?

Ah. Yes. There are still three more sappers in front of her, and in the time she’s been… “thinking”, they’ve managed to shape sharp spikes of stone and metal out of the hangar, impaling her through every major organ group.

Her claws and Blade tear through the stones, her body absorbing and tossing out the pillars while her whip and Gun-arm keep other attackers at bay. Even with that, bursts of sharpened wind, fires of all colors and forms, bubbles of water that defy space with their depth, all these and more tear chunks from her, sever flesh from bone, burn and melt her reactive armors. She tears through the last of the pillars holding her, an arm made of Blacksteel and bone barrels making craters out of stone flooring, her pillar-club blocking a decent number of attacks and constantly regenerating, and she manages to cut and crush and sever another two infantrymen, and-

Another wave of Qi attacks, just as a massive array manifests. The remaining sappers, the ones that hadn’t taken up her attention, each touch a point on a five-starred seal, and a stream of shadows begin to unnaturally bend towards her. The instant they touch her body, they begin to spiral up her limbs, across her arms, antlers, up the pillar of flesh that is her tail and spine-

She can’t move.

She can’t move.

The sharpness of the Blade, the violence and chemistry of the Gun, the screaming infinities of the Flesh, it’s all frozen, all trapped. Shadows become as solid as chains, and through them, the very concept of Stasis keeps her still. The world bends around the runes and the shadows that grow from them, the array trapping her with a Dao of Stillness and ropes of pitch.

In the next instant, thirteen concentrated techniques, bleeding with Qi, detonate against her.

The armor holds up shockingly well, but not well enough. Those same wind-blades cut through her leg and hip entirely, the limb as tall as two men crashing harshly against remolded concrete, even as a burst of lightning makes a crater of her left shoulder nexus. A tightly packed ball of magma and sound makes of her lower stomach an open hole as a singular amount of spatial distortion collapses what passes for her skull into a space no larger than a fist.

The soldiers are well trained. The Academy, and the fortress cities, do not broach fools or weaklings. Fifty gunshots, shotgun shells of barbed shrapnel, lead and brass, aim for the newly created holes in the onyx-black shell she’s clad in and tear her internals into soup.

And then a fresh wave of Qi techniques unmake even that, until the shadows are binding the stick-thin remains of her frame.

But that’s ok.

She’s not there.

Her Body is not some human thing or organs and flesh. Not really. Her Reactor is still intact, still outputting energy, and Dink is still touching her. That’s all that’s needed, really.

Six Core Formation cultivators wielding massive and arcane firearms burst like overripe fruit.

A Body is just a thing that grows and kills and survives. That’s not human. That can be anything.

Six small spikes of biomatter, rising out of the ground from where Raika’s central ‘trunk’ has grown into the concrete and begun to crack it as it expands. Six small spikes, shot out by biological projectile-muscles, into their bodies.

Cultivator bodies are notoriously hard to crack… but she is the Body. And the Body knows flesh. And her flesh is richer in Qi than any Core Formation cultivator’s body is without burning their Core. She doesn’t give them that chance. She blossoms from inside them, expanding hyper-violently through the spikes and bursting them like puddles of meat, their cultivation consumed in six simultaneous “bites”, falling deep into a valley with a pond, to be grasped by the Heart hidden within.

And then she uses what’s left of their meat to move.

They fall into a cluster of flesh, absorbed together into one as flesh begets flesh, and their Imperial-standard armor holds up against the instantaneous response just long enough for the Body’s instincts and the Souls sense of self to bond them together.

We Are What We Eat.

Flicker-fast muscles bloom into what are quickly becoming legs and launch her forward, nanoscale armor of Blacksteel and reactive plates multiplying back into being to reinforce her charge. She slams into the stone hard enough to shatter the Core Formation sapper of the closest seal and his part of the array, and near-instantaneously, it is unmade, the bonds of stillness and shadow broken.

Her “new” body is vaporized barely a second after, a volley of gunfire so cultivator-accurate that she’s torn to shreds even with the armor- but that’s fine.

She isn’t there.

She’s the Body.

Dink hums, just once.

The soul smiles, scarred flesh making the action both painful as old wounds and as refreshing as a good stretch.

Pretty impressive, that.

One of the only remaining arms on her “central” form whips out, serrated Blacksteel whipping across the chamber and beginning to kill again as her Reactor screams and pushes eternal, everlasting Change into her. The pulped mass in the shell of her old avatar is forcefully Changed, a thousand-thousand instincts of flesh and instruction manifesting as veins, nerves, bone, keratin, chitin, mucous and more-

And she steps from the broken seal, a head of antlers and a halo of eyes and a maw that opens wide and howls growing from ruin as she does.

At its simplest, the Body is survival and death, wrapped around each other.

A little higher up, it is chemicals and instinct and emotion. It/She makes a sound of impossible, glorious joy as She/It steps forward once more to kill further. Her nervous system is almost back, the dead it has consumed giving examples to work on and other instructions to follow. Soon, her Mind will return, and they can plan for something new.

Her Guns spray death, and she laughs without humor and screams with primal joy.

And then chokes as her lower jaws are severed from her Body.

She steps forward- and her foot is Cut, leaving her to stumble.

She writhes forward anyways, arms swinging instinctively, and-

The Trunk is gone. Her connection to the mass, to the rest of her Body, severed violently in a burst of fire that emits freezing cold and a sensation like combustion.

She barely blocks the next attack, instincts learning quickly and twitching her shield-pillar into the way. A burst of lightning, colored in Gold and Red, strikes the shield and cracks it open like a shell, electricity turning flesh and bone to undifferentiated carbon and climbing almost halfway up her arm before she can finish drinking it dry.

A hundred eyes turn to focus on the far end of the hangar, where four figures stand.

Two she recognizes. The platoon leaders, the ones that led the first few hundred against her, a third of which she’s turned to dead meat. One with dark red hair and a fabulous beard, the other wearing a kimono over his armor that only partially obscures the crystals growing from his flesh.

The other two are new, holding the same badges as their fellows. One whose skin is dark as night with notes of gold stars floating in it, the other sweating blood of some kind, and both smelling delicious.

All of them reek of a purity, a vitality of Qi that dwarfs the others. Core Formation realm opens the door to true individuality, allows for greater techniques and unique manifestations, but she is beyond them now. She is a meat grinder to them, even with their armors and weapons multiplying their force, their organization holding against her ascension.

They might have killed her, given a few more seals, a bit more knowledge, and another hundred lives.

The four before her that the Core Formation cultivators are retreating behind, leaving the sappers to the edges of the room and in cover?

They might kill her given the slightest slip and their own transcendent Souls.

What a day. What a lovely day.

Newly-bloomed jaws open wide like a flower as She/It scream in joy, Body and Soul united in the beauty of surviving inevitable death and a bit of divine violence.

The Mind can sort things out when she’s back. They’re too busy being alive.