The nature of death is for things to end.

The nature of life is for things to be born.

The nature of the living is to consume and, in turn, produce.

Blacksteel. Death, carved into a facsimile of rot, and then consumed when she denied the question it asked of her.

True Flame. A manifestation of fire, cobbled together out of self-flagellation and the combustion of the lifeblood of what Is And Shall Be.

Both transforming. Both consuming. Both ending, and both beginning.

CHANGE.

Raika looks up at the landscape of her Heart at the sun above, and wonders if it was luck, skill, or intent that has turned her into what she is.

Her own intent, surely. It was she that poisoned herself full of Qi, she that consumed the entropic metal, and she that fused them both.

But as she stares at the whirling thing of blinding iridescence, she can’t help but wonder just how much luck has played a part in her transformation. She was never that talented as a cultivator, just determined. Is determination enough to not only overcome, but uncover the very foundations of such an existence?

Perhaps.

If not, what business is it of hers? The determination was still there, and still hers, just as she is.

The inner world of the Heart within her, that which houses her soul, has changed.

What was once flat, dreamlike and two-dimensional, has expanded, turned into someplace so solid it feels almost real. The valley remains, as do the pond and the cabin, but nearly everything else is changed. The bamboo perimeter is reinforced, so thick that it is literally impermeable. This is required, since, behind it, there is chaos.

The sun shining in the air above has added an element of reality, of transmutation, that has deepened and altered the Heart. What was once an unmoored thing, left adrift and subsisting only on her blood and Qi, has been anchored around what was once a reactor, and now is considerably more.

Well. It’s also still a Reactor. It just serves a dual purpose now.

The Heart contains and controls the energies it releases better than she ever knew how to, doing away with the control-rods of Blacksteel to create a larger and more sustained reaction. Their newfound “sun” is a distant, static light, remaining at the point of noon. What was once Blacksteel, Radiant Metal (the name she coined for the transformed orange-ish material it was becoming) and True Flame is now some deeper blend of all three, an orbiting ball of plasma that shines with every color imaginable. Deep in its center, barely visible even to the eyes of one whose soul it resides within, the original Reactor remains, but that, too, has transformed. True Flame so pure and untainted by intent or concept that it has turned white slowly consumes a wheel of Blacksteel, purified to be darker and smoother than before. They orbit each other- the Flame consumes the End, always growing towards the left, while the End regrows from the right as the fire is extinguished.

A perfect circle of ever-shifting monochrome, life, death, and Change in harmony with each other.

Outside of the “internal perimeter” of the bamboo, this could not be further from the truth.

At no point is there enough form for it to truly be classified. Glass turns to stone turns to flesh turns to water turns to grass turns to a million other forms, carrying over properties from each existence seemingly at random. Spiraling patterns of biology that shatter and crackle like crystal, bits of metal and alloys that bloom like plants and wriggle when looked at, a sea of nothing and everything dancing out to the edge of what she perceives as her “outer perimeter”. Out beyond the chaos, she can still sense her own Body, connected through channels of Qi and strange patterns that warp space and distance, marking it as the unofficial end of this… soul world, maybe.

She recognizes patterns in it, though. They mirror, to some extent, the ‘trees’ growing in the inner perimeter.

Gunfire, sword blades, fire and biology all feature strongly amidst the chaos. Like motifs that overwhelm or dance between the other concepts, far more varied and strange.

We Are What We Eat.

She can consume Dao.

Or the Heart can, through her. Either way, consuming it, empowering herself with it… the more that she drinks in something flavored by the rules of the world, the more she shapes herself to them, in a way. Like following a pattern, tracking the seams in the wood to recreate the tree from which the wood was taken.

It’s clearer and clearer now why Shapefixit and her people call the dungeons and lairs beneath the earth Godflesh. The more Qi and Dao it consumes, the more it forms into a world inside her body, alongside her mortal soul, somehow bridging between it, her body, and her mind.

And it is her.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

Whatever world that the Heart within the pond creates becomes a part of her, just as she’s a part of it, and vice versa. Just as I Can Change facilitates the transformation of her flesh and her survival of it, I Am Me, I Am Mine allows her to be every part of herself that she knows to be so, and control it in turn.

And one last Truth cinches it.

We Are What We Eat.

She’s still not sure what the Heart even is, really. How something so clearly alive has no organs of its own, no true biology, not even the strange semblance of it that a spirit beast or wraith might have. It seems to somehow instinctively, near perfectly control and shape Qi, transforming her veins and patterns in her body into true natural formations, integrating Dao and foreign energies into itself seamlessly. Where it comes from, what it is, and why so many of them were beneath the earth (and, it would seem according to Shapefixit, why so many were taken by the Empire) all remain a mystery.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

But one thing is absolutely certain- whatever it is, it’s important on some kind of fundamental level.

She has her new visitors to attest to that fact.

Looking up, she sees the first of them.

[Divine Will From Starry Eyes] dances amidst the sky, manifesting and de-manifesting around her central sun. It matches what she saw of it when facing the star-skinned cultivator, but certain details are vague, seen as if from behind a veil, while some sections are missing entirely. High above, orbiting her newborn solar Reactor, is a starry night sky. Until it moves, at which point, like a trick of the eye, it has always been a massive body, ephemeral and cloudy but titanic in form. It’s an illusion, though- she can sense its makeup as clearly as the blades of grass around her, and she knows it to be barely held together, death and disillusion taking its toll on the humanoid night sky.

Looking down, she sees what’s left of [Perfect Strike Of Tribulation], and figures that the Soul above is still doing ok in comparison.

[Perfect Strike Of Tribulation] isn’t as… fluid? As [Divine Will From Starry Eyes]. “DW”, for short, has room in even its name, a space for interpretation, like a Truth with range.

But for a perfect strike to be imperfect? To fail to land? To fail to act even as a tribulation for its target?

There is a mound, on the other side of the pond, about fifty feet tall. Buried in it are fifty spears, each one an ornate, near ceremonial piece, their blades made of golden jade. Flickering electricity still crackles between them, but there is no true animation, not even the shadow of will in the near-ghostly [Divine Will From Starry Eyes]. Just a burial mound of spears the size of columns.

[Enacted Artistry Of Function] seems to be having fun with it, though.

That’s the name she gave to the array-wielding cultivator’s Nascent Soul. Or maybe it’s original name, considering how readily the thought appeared to her. Like the others, it’s not all there, half-formed at best (which is sort of the definition of the ‘Nascent’ part of the Nascent Soul realm). Unlike the others, it seems to have some sort of direction in its movements. It’s shaped somewhat like a deific figure, floating in the lotus position, but it also is simultaneously centaur, tank-tread, and branching array of arms and tools. There’s a beauty to each tool, the simplicity of form giving the impression of purity, of beauty, but there’s no face to it, no mind to guide it. Still, it rolls / cavorts / skitters through the graveyard of spear-columns, occasionally tapping on them.

It’s also about as tall as her knee.

And, curiously, it carries a little bundle of crystals in its arms.

In battle, the array-wielder and crystalline cultivators had been clear allies, working together with exceptional teamwork. It would seem that even in death, what is left of each of them cares for the other.

The crystalline cultivator didn’t have much of a Soul, though. Whatever Domain he built clearly held his attention: the elements of his true self were highlighted, but not its shape. [Enacted Artistry Of Function] holds the small crystalline ball close to its… tool-center. The ball blooms out, jagged little shards of crystal sprouting and then falling away to nothing, but occasionally tapping musically against the metal and ceramic of the one carrying it.

Her Heart doesn’t just consume, integrate and use Dao.

It also takes in Souls.

And again… they are her.

We Are What We Eat. Just as her inner world and her Heart are now intrinsically herself, so too are these strange being part of what she is. She worried, at first, that maybe the cultivators could resurrect from these Souls, but… well, they’re still incomplete. Without her inner world, even the flickering embers of them would have died, and there’s barely anything left of their original strength. No sign of intelligence, either.

She just… has a couple weird pets and a big stabby hill in her soul now.

Her Truths are most certainly part of the reason to blame. They’re too perfectly designed for what she’s seeing in front of her, too large a part of what would be required for such a thing to come to be… but she hadn’t pictured integrating Souls into her makeup. Her Truth simply hadn’t had that interpretation when she created it.

But something inside her, added in at nearly the same time, did. A part of her that knew, intrinsically, of the deeper possibilities, full of instinctive control of concepts she can barely grasp.

Her Heart.

What it is and what it can really do… or, better yet, why it seems to have such ideas as inbuilt instincts, have gone considerably further up the list of priorities. Once they’re past the Wall and into the fourth ring proper, she’s going to make damn sure she spends as much time as possible looking for goblinoids like Shapefixit and other Hearts, if there are any in the “wild”. Not just to fulfill her promises to her friend, short though that friendship may have been, but because there’s just too many unanswered questions.

An important note, however. She’ll have to struggle to look for a godflesh in the wild, because here, in the hands of ‘civilization’, it’s all around her.

The realm of the Heart bridges the gap between Mind, Body and Soul, and she effortlessly un-divides her attentions to focus most of her brains on the wall in front of her, out in the real.

The fortress cities are, at least in part, made of godflesh.

Shapefixit mentioned that the Empire hunted down the Hearts, took them from her people, took them far away. It would seem they didn’t take them all that far. In fact, considering how her own Heart seems able to manipulate its internal domain and reshape her body, she wouldn’t be surprised to find others hidden in the Imperial Palaces, one in every major city of the Empire.

Living, breathing, at least semi-sentient gods of matter and spatial manipulation, all of them made into tools for the Empire.

But there’s still questions.

The fortress cities she can understand. Considering the room they tried to throw her body into, it’s clear that the facility itself can consume the dead and build an army all its own to field against the creatures attacking it. Hells, it probably makes for easy building when you can just force a living landscape to make you a fortress in the first place. But why the Palaces? If they even are godflesh, but… what else could they be?

Cautiously, she places one of her palms against the wall, focusing on the semi-spatial connection between the Heart inside her and the wall before her.

There’s… something there. Like a whisper.

Her senses are attuned enough to know that it’s not nothing, but it’s barely there. Like a ripple in a lake, from a stone thrown in across its edge- but through stone, and far subtler for it.

Not acknowledgement. Not even awareness. At most, some sort of twitch in the fabric of the wall.

But something deep inside her sends a ripple back.

And then the sound of heartbeats interrupts her listening.

Priorities.

She needs to find and retrieve Li Shu and the kid. If that’s too dangerous or if she fails, she needs to make sure they’re not in danger before she leaves. It’s clear that the soldiers can’t be trusted to have the best interests of their “volunteers” in mind, so either way, she needs to warn them.

Escape, hopefully while causing the least amount of problems.

Kill whoever is in the way and refuses to back down.

Cold, but good priorities nonetheless.

She’s still re-absorbing the flesh trunk that travels down the large hangar-tunnel, so she can’t go into stealth yet. Further, there’s no chance that Nascent Soul cultivators wouldn’t notice the giant pillar-worm of meat being absorbed into someplace, and they’re already pretty close.

Ok.

One chance to surrender? Her Soul asks the rest of her.

She nods. One chance.

They emerge from out of the ruins down the hall, leaping as if gravity and physics themselves are on their side, moving hundreds of meters in seconds. She raises one arm, her burning Reactor guided by her Heart into shaping a barrel of steel and stranger materials, and sights on the moment the one in the lead touches down.

Then she stops.

Blinks.

A sharp laugh, half-music and half industrial accident, echoes through the space as she lights up the meat-trunk with bioluminescence.

“Pretty-boy, is that you???”