Raika walks carefully, each step spearing into the earth far below. Figuring out the walking pattern got easier with practice, and now, each of her ten legs moves in synch with the others, long needles stabbing down towards the dirt far below and rising again before said dirt can eat them.

Because the ground here just… does that.

It took three days to escape the flat, alien landscape at the edge of the Wall. Even now, eyes formed to look behind her can see the strange ridge at the top of horizon, a single, perfectly straight line that replaces any and all forms of mountains, hills, or valleys. There are flickers of sound, even from so far away, like thunder across the world, like the crackling of static… but she recognizes the truth of it. Gunfire and cannons, lightning and Qi arrays and crumbling stone, and, intermittently, the roaring of titanic entities.

Li Shu and Jin both have remained unconscious so far, neither of them so much as stirring. She kept them hidden in her body as she crossed the battlefield wastelands before the Wall, digging through piles of bodies and crumbling hillsides. Most of the things she hid from, she did not recognize; many were recognizably spirit beasts, but she saw no other Divine Beasts in her escape, and many more creatures she was forced to guess at the nature of. Hordes of death and undead, re-weaving themselves from within the mountains of bodies, many of them dead for days or weeks. Mechanical things, like clockwork bear-traps, barbed wire and steel string making rabid automatons. Daemons, some of them still flickering with “life”, littered the battlefield, creating domains where some of the rules didn’t apply or were weapons rather than facts of life. She hid from a copse of trees, possibly spirit beasts of some sort, who had corpses woven amidst yellow leaves, in a bubble of space where the air was solid, the properties of a gaseous state absent. She had to swim and dig through air itself to find a place to avoid their eyes.

It was only on the third day that she came across the desert.

Beyond the wasteland and the forever-corpses, the millions of lives thrown unto the Wall and its breach, the things living amidst the dead and eating from the war, there is a desert. Powdered stone, bone, and debris, blown away from the battlefield, have formed dunes. Bits of dried blood, shells and bullets litter the ever-shifting sands, and every now and then, she stabs an insectile leg into the ground and bumps against a broken sword, bits of armor, or the occasional desiccated body.

And there are things in the sand. Things of the sand. Strange furls of Qi, bits of ghosts and “natural formations” which spiral in on themselves, until everything they touch becomes just as hungry and twisted as they are. What must be the remains of millions of the dead, and millions more remnants of techniques and arrays, dancing amidst a landscape built entirely on war and death.

So she makes sure to walk very high and away from them, risking the possibility of some long-sighted cultivator or array seeing her in exchange for not having to drown in the carnivorous landscape. Blacksteel helps, granting an End to what should by rights be dead already, but there’s simply too many small and aggressive particles for even the sharpest edge to get them all. Ten limbs, thin and skeletal, none resting on the ground more than a second, and she still has to regrow the occasional spike she uses for feet.

She tried consuming some, using her Truth, but… results are mixed. Back in the fortress city, We Are What We Eat allowed her to consume everything used against her, and would have allowed more if not for the “Creation Engine” fighting back against her and held back by her Heart. But that was before the Tribulation.

She absorbs the war-sand into her body, diverting it to her stomach or forming faux-stomachs as needed. The faux-stomachs don’t have the supernatural capacity of her main one, something she has yet to replicate, but they still serve her Truth. Some of the trees in her inner world grow in response, the garden in the valley slowly getting more crowded, but… some of what she eats just hurts. The ground shifts to accommodate new growth, add new concepts, and the golden band around her soul squeezes, the slightest touch enough to force her to stop everything.

She’s been burned alive and kept moving. Broken nearly every bone in her body and kept right on going. Part of it is how temporary pain can be; with her regeneration, it’s rare that something hurts for more than a few minutes nowadays. Truth be told, though, she has acquired a truly impressive pain tolerance over the last few years.

And yet, a miniscule shift in the binding around her Heart is enough to force her to nearly collapse. Pain that she cannot stop, that she cannot control or heal from, an ache that remains long after she has adjusted to the pressure.

So.

We Are What We Eat.

And so, the Emperor, or whatever that thing was, created the perfect chain. She can still eat whatever she wants. She still becomes what she eats. But now, if she consumes carelessly, or if she tries to consume a new concept, one she doesn’t already possess, it aches. It might well destroy her.

And there’s… nothing she can do about it. Not yet.

I Am Me, I Am Mine… which is still true. It is not a leash, not a command. The Truth doesn’t let her, say, control a stone coffin around herself, and so it doesn’t control the enchantment or curse imbued into her. She is still her own, can still define herself, but that same self-definition can harm her now.

We Are What We Eat… but being something means accepting consequences. Becoming something new, consuming to transform, can lead to transformations that harm her more than help.

I Can Change… but Changing is agony. And Changing can kill her.

A perfect shackle, designed just for her. Inhibiting her greatest abilities without the normal faults or exploits she can use her Truths against, using the broadness of her self-definition and comprehension against her.

The thought is infuriating. To come so far, and be trapped by limits once more, captured in a framework of her own making. A hard limit, she could find a way around. Bodily harm or mental intrusion, she could subvert or regenerate from. But this doesn’t actually remove her choices, it just forces a new rule upon them.

Stolen novel; please report.

Remain as you are, and be well. Become more of what you are already becoming, and get just a bit of leeway. But consume blindly, or grow into something new, and she risks a kind of damage she can neither control nor easily recover from.

She can withstand losing her Mind, or at least most of it. She can survive with only the barest bits of her Body remaining. There’s a strong possibility that she can find a way to recover from Soul damage in the same sort of way… but she’d rather not find out just yet, especially not when it might collapse the inner world of her Heart entirely in the process.

So for now, at least, she focuses on what she can control.

Her Body is like a long and twisted hound, skinny and sleek, her ten legs sharp and skinny as they elevate her a good fifteen feet above the ground. Deep within its spatially-altered confines, she has two pods of bioluminescent fur, air, and warmth for her companions, carried safely deep inside. There is at least another day, likely more, before she reaches the end of the war-sands, and all that she can do in that time is to suffer the sun above and walk.

Slowly, carefully, she splits her Mind.

Sub-minds are all well and good for added processing and interpreting data, but they’re not what she needs. There’s only so far that a single mind can go, and being able to almost have multiple trains of thought is not the same as actually having them.

She takes a long, deep breath, gill-vents along her sides gusting desert air through her body. She’ll be fine.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

Two hemisphere divide into two individual brains, and then regenerate the missing hemisphere.

Raika thinks at Raika.

So. We’re here.

So we are.

It’s surprisingly easy. Both minds look upon each other, and themselves, checking for defects, examining each other for flaws. There’s a moment of dissonance, yes, but… not really?

Her minds, simultaneously, form new arms and touch Dink, hanging off her neck.

It hums awake, like a cat rolling over on being poked during a nap. She feels it ring and sees a single note glow from it, synesthesia turning music into language.

She doesn’t need to speak, not really. She and Dink are a bit past that point. It exhausted itself earlier, keeping Soul and Body in sync without the Mind to connect them, but that same act allowed her and it to reach a much clearer understanding, and she can tell that it gained something from the encounter. The sense of presence the artifact spirit exudes when awake is almost double what it was before, and while still less so than a person, the sense of awareness it has is much more refined.

Without needing to be asked, Dink begins to sing softly, quiet notes that ring through Body, Soul and Mind, touching on the world of her Heart on the way between them. She feels two small things in her inner world, no larger than a blade of grass, wriggle and dance along with the notes. She hasn’t given a name to every blade of grass, and is only just figuring out the whole-ass trees, but this one is familiar.

Vibration and Frequency hum in tune with Dink, uniting the whole of her together.

Two minds, but which together are one Mind, find that they are both… entirely fine. It takes effort to think different thoughts, they have to choose to focus on other things, but… they’re the same person. Just as her Soul isn’t her Mind, and her Body isn’t her Soul, but all are Raika, so too are both brains Raika, while neither being each other.

Hmm. That’ll make for an interesting experiment if she ever needs to fuse two brains together. With her spatially-altered biology, she probably shouldn’t need to, but… well, which one of them will become Raika? Or will it be neither? Would it matter?

Hmm.

Depends on what we / I think about continuity of consciousness, I / we suppose.

Right. Are we still me / ourself every time we wake up? Or just a fusion of experiences, a brain rebuilding a sort of model or persona for a bigger idea?

And what about after I / we got our / my brain shot out the back of our / my head? We / I can’t be that Mind, almost by definition, but I’m / we’re still Raika. So… does having the memories count the most? Experience and perspective define personhood?

Probably. I / We assume neurology and our Soul have something to say about it too, otherwise perspective shifts and experience is lost.

So… so long as our Soul exists, and our Body exists to house it and us, we’re / I’m good. Besides, why worry about “who becomes the real Raika?” Whatever comes after us / me, but from us / me, will by definition be Raika, so long as they identify as such. All we can do is make sure that who we / I become is who we / I choose to be.

Exactly. And that’s… sort of just how time works, isn’t it? I / We mean, we’re / I’m always one person one moment, and another the next. It’s not like the person I was / we were exists in any way except as a part of my / our new self.

Right. So I’m / we’re good?

Yeah, I / we think so. So long as I am / we aren’t too stringent about “purity”, I / we should be fine. Might be good to set an ur-Mind though? Someone that has ultimate say?

Well that just makes the issue come all the way back around, unless the position of ur-Mind can be changed.

Which defeats the point.

Exactly.

Hmm. Maybe some kind of gestalt? An ur-Mind made of multiple minds?

A possibility, though I / we think that delays the issue rather than fixing it. What about if I / we just… set up a necessity system? One of me / us be the one responsible for talking with others and interacting with the outside world, one of me / us to help guide and interact with the Body, and however many we / I need to make plans, analyze new input, come up with new ideas?

Oooh, ok. I / we like that. And if it’s needed, we / I can revisit the ur-Mind, but we / I can probably just fold in and out of a central brain that acts as a nexus?

Right. Keeps me / us from wasting too many resources running so many brains at once, and helps to integrate the gestalt concept more easily. Ready?

Always. You first.

Ha, ha. On three, ready?

Three!

The two brains fuse back into one, a single humanoid cerebral system forming back from where there were two. I Am Me, I Am Mine and I Can Change do all that’s needed to transform the diverged brain matter back into a single whole.

Hmm. Weird fucking feeling, remembering both sides of the conversation. Is this what having a clone is like? There’s stories about those in the Emperor realm not dying even if their Souls are torn apart, simply re-awakening in another version of themselves prepared as a backup. Old techniques and all that, though hers is… rather obviously more flesh-minded. Heh.

Without hesitation, relying on Dink to keep her feeling stable and for the psychological help in staying focused, she starts to create new brains again.

Each brain is the same, a copy of the others, without modification. Something to work on later, but especially with only just having resolved the identity question, not the focus right now. Each mind gets its own subminds, helping to process and supplementing the limits of a “human” brain, and she makes three in total. One to watch where they’re going, keeping an eye on the environment at all times and making sure to respond to whatever needs responding to; one to think about what’s weighing on her, the things that have come up recently, and think of what comes next; and one to examine her Body and Soul, making sure she understands what-all is going on there and what it might mean.

All three sort brains are Raika, the same way that both her feet are her, even if they’re distinct from each other. She falls into a rhythm of thinking as multiple instances of herself incredibly easy, because, in a sense, she isn’t; with all her brains networked, she has to actually try to disassociate to remind herself that she’s not just one being, one Mind, because… well, she is.

Hmm. That’s… possibly easier than it should be. I Am Me, I Am Mine pulling its weight, or her own self-identity and broader self-awareness making the transition to post-human easier?

A bit of a moot point, in that case. And not one she cares to examine right now, either; she feels Li Shu begin to stir awake inside her cocoon.