The first thing Raika does, trapped beneath the rubble and half-looking at the apocalyptic battle happening all around her, is look within herself.

Mind, Body and Soul turn inward, looking for modifications, for proof of the golden band that nearly crushed her. Her experience with Zhoulong and Taurus, as well as the intimate knowledge of herself that the Tribulation brought out, mean that she’s confident she can find it, wherever it may-

Oh. There it is.

Surrounding her inner world, what was once a weaving sea of infinite chaos is now a glowing, violently bright shoreline.

The sun above, her altered Reactor, continues to shine in monochrome and iridescence, and the trees and small growing “plants” of Dao remain in the middle of the valley. She tracks each and every one of the fallen Souls within her, partially-formed as they are, and finds nothing amiss with any of them.

But what before was infinite change, infinite transformation, a formless chaos that reflected what she is… is silent. Blocked off by a thing of incredible weight and heft.

Even upon finding it, she still turns her gaze further inward. With her enhanced awareness, her ability to perceive and control every part of herself, she tracks the shape of her Soul, the neural connections in her Mind, even the potential nuances in the tiniest little cells and fragments of her being. She knows herself foundationally, that understanding catalyzed into something constant and profound through the Tribulation. And yet… there’s nothing. Not even a strange gap, no weird moments of absence, something she can’t perceive. Down to the depths of her being, everything is still… hers. It’s still her own.

But there is a band around the world that she is.

It doesn’t press in, it just sits there, unmoving, right at the edge of the bamboo perimeter. The world itself has expanded, just as she felt from during the Tribulation, and many of the Dao trees have sprouted or grown taller. What was once a single valley has grown larger, with more hills sprouting up outside the central curve. The long, shallow slash of the initial valley remains the center of the world, with her cabin on one end, still un-repaired, and the pool with her Heart in the far end, with the trees in between. Now there are a good four other valleys, more hills, like the valley has refracted or reflected over itself to create other valleys. The grass in the other valleys are tinted a different shade, not green, but a mix of purple, red, and silver-metal. The central valley’s grass has changed too, though it holds dozens of colors, not just the three or four of the other hills, matching the Dao trees and the elements they reflect.

All in all, it’s much, much larger and far stranger than it was before her Tribulation, but where before, over the horizon, there was that formless sea of constant Change… now there’s a band.

Her Soul walks out to it, moving in that dreamlike form, where by walking, she simply arrives where she intends. The bamboo perimeter is broad and thick, heavy, but if she presses against it, her Heart responds, shaping a thin, thin path between them.

She walks out, through the bamboo forest that marks the edges of her being, until she meets a wall.

Gold, glowing… something. It’s not metal, though it has a sense of weight and density to it, a purity, that matches something like an alloy.

She pushes her hand out to it, and-

Pressure.

The entire thing constricts, just barely, just a centimeter, maybe- but it compresses the entirety of the multiple hills and valleys all at once, making the entire world quake. The world cracks, the bamboo forest shrieks and bends, and this new place that is the center of all that Raika is hurts.

And then her Soul becomes aware again, wrapped tight by the bamboo perimeter around her. She’s been pulled away from the golden perimeter, as if to protect herself.

But it hasn’t stretched back out. The cracks where it pushed in the ground remain right where they were, held in place by the violent gold.

She wasn’t even able to push against it. She just tried to touch it, had the intent to move it, and it…

Fuck.

It hasn’t changed her, doesn’t seem to have altered who she is, but…

Who she is can be guided, the thing had said. “Don’t grow too fast”, it said. That she’d get tumors.

And it hadn’t even seemed to care about the thought that she might turn that growth against it. Like her death was foregone, like no matter what she did, it wouldn’t be bothered… so long as she didn’t grow too fast.

Fuck.

Well fuck whatever that thing was. And fuck what it wants. She’ll have to figure out exactly how to break the band and whatever put it on her. The fact that it “let” her keep her Truth… no. Fuck that.

She IS, and she’s going to shove that down that thing’s fucking throat.

But that can come later.

Survival comes first.

She wakes back up to the world outside, her Body already adjusted to what’s happening. Her armor has condensed, minimizing her size, six limbs branching out into a sort of architectural framework, and Blacksteel scales have formed a dome around her to hold back the weight of the collapsing fortress.

And it is collapsing.

The ground around her is like a reflective black glass, glistening with eerie reflections even on parts without light. The floor has been pressed down, as if compressed or fully eroded by the light of the Tribulation, and she can see part of the pattern of the scar it’s left. The form is-

Hmm. Ok, so one of her sensory brains fully just shut down when she looked too hard at the shape of it. Good to know.

She forms clusters of eyes across the surface of the armored dome, looking all around. Some of them are blocked by debris, but it takes barely a thought to extend threads of flesh through cracks in the concrete all around her and burrow up to the surface to make new eyes.

All around her is pandemonium.

She can’t see Shin Ren or his team, but most of the area she’s been fighting in has been thoroughly decimated, turned to rubble. She can see the sky above, the air still sparking with electricity from the heat and intensity of the Tribulation they experienced, and beyond that, she can see the upper peaks of the fortress city, the spires and array-towers at the top of it.

Half of them are crumbling or on fire.

Above her, she sees what may perhaps be the largest living creature she’s ever caught sight of being ripped apart by what look like some kind of war-constructs. Many of them possess additional limbs, all of them seem to be made of strange materials, but most notably… all of them bend the light around them, like they have more weight than they should. Like they’re absorbing the space around them, bit by bit, leaving trails of emptiness in their wake that flicker oddly as they are filled back in.

Even at a glance, she can tell what they are. Daemons.

Every child has heard at least one tale of a heroic cultivator slaying some Daemon consuming part of the world. Unlike spirit beasts, beings of Qi and flesh and soul like anyone else, a Daemon is a void, whose shape reflects only what it has consumed. In their natural state, they’re like a mote of anti-nothing, an event horizon quickly spawning as they consume everything they touch. If they find something that matches to a pattern, or is, for whatever reason, “tastier”, they focus on that thing exclusively, eventually erasing even the memory of it from the world.

Bound Daemons are much the same, only more directed. The War-Daemons fighting up above are made to consume specially made bodies, full of specific concepts and ideas, before they can develop the ability to choose to consume some things and not others. They then are forced to regurgitate what they’ve consumed, becoming a sort of inverse of whatever mold they’ve been poured into.

They hurt to look at. They hurt to watch move. Sometimes the void that they are regurgitates more limbs and more weapons, more tools and brass and dimensions and shape, and every time they’re wounded, they just regurgitate more of themselves into existence.

It’s like watching an inverted star from the sky vomit out a corpse made of weapons that it can wear.

And the thing they face is little better.

Well over a hundred feet tall, only the taste of its Qi lets Raika know that it’s a spirit beast and not some sort of illusion or hallucination. Its central body is a ball of wings, each one well over a hundred feet tall in turn, but it does not fly. It waves its wings and they come apart into showers of feathers made of some kind of liquid metal, flowing as if each one is alive and capable of flight, but this, also, is not how it walks.

Seven heads, similar to but unlike a heron’s, emerge sinuously from within the central mass of wings. With each step, one of the beaks of shining silver and gore stabs into a soldier or a Qi formation, the ones behind it retracting to swallow their prey and then emerging to strike again. The pressure it gives off eclipses anything she’s seen before, even Feng Gao or the iridescent tiger of the arena so many months ago. She’s not sure how spirit beast’s powers work, what separates a divine beast from a spirit beast, if they form a Soul or a Domain, but… whatever the process, the Many-Heron is at least stronger than the strongest she has met in the Warrior realm.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

And it is feasting.

The Daemons throw themselves at it over and over, each one twisting in shape and size as their bodies are destroyed and then recreated from inside themselves. Skeletal and bio-mechanical constructs dripping with Flame, Lightning and other elemental effects, always Black and Red for the comprehension of death and harm, roiling and raging against the divine beast. At the core of the constructs, a black hole, its edge shaped like a spiral or mimickry of their bodies or a simple horizon, falling forever inward-

And they’re barely holding on as the Many-Heron spears them, over and over. The beaks that are used to attack are quickly worn down by the Daemon’s natural properties, only to be retracted back into the main body with bits of the Daemons and be replaced by newer beaks again. She can sense the depth of the Dao in each strike; concepts of Piercing, of Predation, of Harm and more, all wrapped around each other and stronger than any version of Dao she can currently create with what she has.

It’s like watching a vision out of the Hells. Out of a story about the horrors of the old age.

And the whole time she’s watching, transfixed, the fortress is falling. There are other spirit beasts roaring, the unnatural and almost mechanical screams of creatures that the Empire is throwing back at them, the screaming and dying of cultivators and soldiers joining in the chorus.

The stench of blood and smoke are overwhelming.

With a thought, Raika reabsorbs the eyes and the armored dome, letting the crushing weight of stone fall atop her body. With her brains and some backup organs moved into a well-defended core, every other part of her can be lost or regrown, so long as she can afford to waste the biomass. It only takes a moment of conferring with her Heart to manage the changes she’s looking for, her limbs and central mass warping and falling in on themselves.

The dungeon beneath Cragend possessed the ability to alter space and time within its domain. She’s not at that level, but the newfound awareness of herself as a whole from the Tribulation gives her the insight she needs to replicate part of it. Rather than transforming her body and then forcefully feeding it into the altered space of her stomach, she just… shrinks.

The mass doesn’t change. It doesn’t move into an internal spatial anomaly, like her stomach. Technically speaking, she’s not even any lighter than she was before. She just… pulls the materials and organs and limbs deeper and deeper into her body, and finds that there’s room for them in there.

It’s not as immediately useful as storing materials in her stomach, but she doesn’t have to then “regurgitate” them back out, and she can save it for things she needs to actually digest, or things that she wants to preserve.

The Body figured the trick out first, actually. During the battle with the Platoon-leader cultivators, the lightning-wielder stabbed her with a blade quite a bit longer than her width, but it just sank in to the hilt without ever emerging again. The railgun shot from the artifact and array-wielding cultivator made it out the other side, but only barely.

Fuck the golden piece of shit, she can compress herself all on her own.

Several hundred pounds of expensive flesh fall into her body, deeper and deeper, until she’s barely larger than a simple snake. She laughs a bit internally, wondering what Jun Vral would think of her now as she slithers between the cracks in the rocks.

And then… something interesting.

She’s not the only body under the rubble.

Well, she helped him once. Might as well follow through.

She turns and crawls between a particularly large piece of concrete, wandering towards the scent of Qi, muffled though it is under the rubble and the chaos of the battle above. She doesn’t have time to go slowly, even though stealth is paramount to avoid the chaos of the fighting, she needs to get to Li Shu and Jin- but she can smell blood coming from the direction of the familiar Qi.

The moment her head emerges from a crevice into a little pocket of air, someone chops it off.

Ok. Fair enough.

She spreads out, emerging from three different points. Two of them get cut down almost instantly, but the third one grows quickly enough that she manages to form a hand and a head from it.

“Relax,” she mumbles, her voice slurred and raspy as she generates new lungs. “Not here to fight.”

The sword of the sky-climber stops, barely an inch from her skull. His blade is still infused deeply with Qi, but it’s not as threatening as before- she feels like he needs to take the steps he’s dancing through before it grows into the state it was in earlier. Since he doesn’t follow through on the blade, she reforms her body more completely, keeping it genderless and bald for the sake of convenience.

They’re all standing in a small pocket of debris, maintained by a few convenient pieces of stone and metal ruins. The sky-climber is here, obviously, but it takes a second for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and see the others.

Shin Ren is awake, but seems out of it, breathing heavily. His Qi smells feverish, still mid-transformation, and she’s not sure if he suffered some kind of backlash or if he’s just in recovery from their shared Tribulation. Considering that she spent over two weeks unconscious after her first experience, he’s doing great.

The other two in their little cave aren’t doing quite so well.

The cultivator from… what was it, the Blessed Clouds sect? Had to be, with the scent of clouds, precipitation and shining light coming from him. That and the techniques he used cinch it. Has a gaping wound in his chest, only partially closed over, and is seemingly half-conscious, cycling Qi intermittently.

And, in an only partially surprising turn, the illusion wielder is here too.

The attack she’d made earlier was a guess, but apparently it was a good one. The illusionist certainly isn’t dead, but the sight of her getting torn to pieces by Raika’s whips was obviously false. She’s covered in cuts, but there’s a misty aura around her closing up the wounds, one by one.

“Three out of four out of commission, and you’re not exactly at your peak.”

The sky-climber grimaces, but he turns it into a smirk. “Neither are you, I would imagine. After all, you clearly don’t want to be found any more than we do by that chaos out there.”

She nods. “Besides, I’m a woman of my word. I’m not here to fight. Ren, you ok?”

The sky-climber and the illusionist both raise eyebrows at the familiar form of address, but she’s not exactly in the mood to bother with being proper. Shin Ren, for his part, does respond, blinking his eyes open and staring at her. The feverish heat climbs a bit, rising higher as flames of Red, Black, and hints of other colors briefly come ascendant.

“We’re… we’re alright,” he says, his voice like crackling smoke. “I… don’t think I was meant to absorb so much at once. It’s taking a moment to digest.”

“I can relate. I doubt that was a conventional Tribulation, as these things go.”

The sky climber nods. “I haven’t seen many, but my sect has experienced a fair number. They usually last a lot longer than that, and I’ve never seen one so bright. The sky sort of… flickered when it hit the two of you, then more than doubled in intensity, then flickered out. Still enough to burn through half the fortress.”

Raika nods. “Felt different from my last one in a lot of ways. Did… someone have a conversation with you in there? Other than me?”

Shin Ren shakes his head. “There was… a moment. I heard a laugh. A voice… I think it only said one word. “Interesting”. Then it laughed again.”

“Yeah, that sounds like something it might say.”

Almost reflexively Shin Ren flinches. But he shakes his head, laughing softly. “I’ll… take your word for it.”

She tilts her head over towards the unconscious Blessed Clouds cultivator. “You mind if I help with your friend there? I need to leave, and frankly, so do all the rest of you. The battle isn’t looking good, and the fortress is falling apart.”

The illusion wielder frowns. “Pardon me for asking, honored beast, but are you claiming you can heal him? Otherwise, I’m afraid that this one and her allies must reject your offer.”

Raika chuckles. “Hunger is the last thing on my mind, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not a true healer, but you could say I know just a bit about flesh and its workings.”

The illusion wielder is recovering faster than the rest, her frown disappearing behind a near-perfect mask. Someone with courtly training, most likely, or a proper jade beauty, with all the weight that that carries. Raika can literally smell her brain working, the fizzle of neurons as she starts to puzzle out a way to ensure her word or reject the offer without conflict-

Shin Ren raises a hand, still flickering with the auras of multiple Daos and Flame. She looks at him, confused, but he just shakes his head.

“I trust her.”

She would laugh, if not at the outrageous claim then certainly at the look on the illusion-wielder’s face, but… as ridiculous as it is, it’s true. She trusts him too. At least in this scenario, she knows, without doubt, what his intentions are. Seeing who he is, foundationally, within the Tribulation granted her more insight into his character than nearly anyone else she can think of.

And apparently, she’s not the only one who knows him enough to trust him. The illusion wielder hesitates, but the sky-climber instantly relaxes, his sword re-entering his sheath.

“If Shin Ren trusts her, then how could I doubt my honored brother? I say let her heal him if she can.”

She raises an eyebrow. For someone whose Qi and sense of Dao seem rather developed, that’s a rather dramatic amount of trust to put in another. She’s not sure if that speaks more to his character or Shin Ren’s, but she’s impressed either way.

Shin Ren nods at her, and she doesn’t hesitate. She’s taken long enough here, and she has other people to find. She moves over to the collapsed cultivator and slowly liquifies part of her hand, turning it into a thick gelatin. She lets it rest and ooze onto the wound, staunching the bleeding, and then starts to track the damage.

There’s a lot there. His lung is partially collapsed, there’s shards of ribcage everywhere, and most of his sternum and chest muscles are in ruins. The gelatin holds back and absorbs the blood, letting her route it into the disconnected parts as needed, and she does the same with the bone shards she finds. It’s… actually easier than her own transformations, pretty significantly. Harder in the sense that she can’t control it, but she knows exactly where everything should go, or can feel it out easily enough. Between that and the multitasking her brains provide, even with his Qi pushing back against her, it doesn’t take long to rearrange all of what’s already there.

The cultivator gasps, coughs up blood, still barely conscious, but his Qi really is resisting. It takes a moment for her to realize what the issue is: her curse. She blocks Qi, and her own body is so saturated with it it acts as a block anyways. That’s… interesting. It probably wouldn’t be very hard to weaponize this, and she makes a note of it.

She doesn’t need to fully heal him, though. With his parts in all the right places, his Qi is going to have a much easier time of it all. She pushes some of her blood into him, leaving it as a final booster, and morphs herself back together.

She turns to look at Shin Ren, who is still struggling to internalize all he’s taken in. He just nods at her, quietly.

“I’ll make sure Maen knows you’re ok,” he says.

She blinks, but… nods. He saw into her, too.

“And… tell her I’m sorry my letters are out of date. And that I’m glad she’s doing well.”

He chuckles softly. “For possibly the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen, you’re a surprisingly soft touch about all this, honored Raika.”

She shrugs. “Yeah, well… this world’s hard enough. No need to do the Heavens’ work for them.”

This time he outright laughs, and the sound is overlapped on itself, a voice of crackling flame and of shimmering heat. For a moment, her senses see deeper, synesthesia turning the scent of his overlapping Qi into a view of who he Truly is.

Overlapping hands, all grasping and melting over each other, shaped like a burning body- one with alien musculature and a face like Raika’s own, morphed through destructive CHANGE. A pillar of pure and righteous Flame, feeding into a thousand other sources and standing unbent by wind, rain or quakes.

And beside the other two, a lanky, almost feline thing, of creeping smiles and hateful rules, twisted and turned onto their heads.

“See you around, Ren.”

“Another time, Raika the Unbroken.”