At first there’s panic. Fear. Disorientation. Trapped in a soft, warm cocoon, lit by a soft glow- but wrapped in material strong enough to block Qi, leaving the only senses a cultivator can truly rely on blind. She stirs, quiet and confused- and then panicked, disoriented, Craft-formed needles of Sacrifice trying to tear through her surroundings-

And then there is fresh air, hot and muggy and rich with the scent of wasted iron.

“Hey,” Raika tells her.

Li Shu looks up at her, confused. “What- where are-”

“We’re out. Past the walls.”

She looks around, trying to catch a glimpse of- well, of anything. In every direction there are only dunes, the coppery scent of blood painting off-white sand.

Except… that’s not sand. Her Qi reaches out into the world, free and awake, and her perception washes against the ground. Flavored by medicine and healing, by pain and biology, it recognizes exactly what it is that makes up the world here.

Bone. Bone and corpse debris, bits of what remain after rot and destruction have taken their due from what was once alive.

And there are miles of it. There are stratas to it. Her Sacrifice flutters around her, keratin spikes making a halo for her perception to anchor on and showing her how deep it goes. If you turned cities to powder and sifted every bit of biology from the ruins and sprinkled it onto a field, it might make two or three dunes, perhaps, atop blasted rock.

Her Qi goes down, further and further, guided by keratin down into each needle as each needle is guided down closer to the floor. For every inch she travels, she finds another, and another, and another, fifty feet down or more at the lowest point. And it goes on in every direction for as far as she can see.

How many battles for this much death? How many centuries, to spread it across so vast a terrain? How many millenia, to grant it so many layers, so deep against the world?

She looks down at the thing she’s laying on, with the body that grows from it and looks down at her.

Raika.

The formation of Qi running through her body, carved in by runes and made into a proper curse, makes it impossible for her to really see inside of her, as she can the dunes. But she helped theorize and plan a lot of the ideas that Raika later evolved, and has her own knowledge of how a body works. Of what a body should be able to do. She can see the shape of her biology in its own shadow.

Like a dog the size of a chariot, twice as long and wide as a horse. It walks on ten legs, each of them a long and perfect stilt of bone, chitin and tendons, and at its front, there is a long and tall head, on a neck that arcs upward, atop which is a dome of eyes which looks in all directions and tastes the air in every way and form.

And from the neck joint, right above where Li Shu has awoken and arisen on a bed of luminescent fur, is something like the upper body of Raika.

Not quite. The details are… off. Not wrong, per se, but different, like something both younger and older. Like the littlest changes have taken place, no one of them significant enough to create a deviation but, together, making a slightly altered version of her friend.

“...what happened?” she asks, her voice heavy.

Raika sighs, her upper body leaning back and “pulling” two legs from the main mass. She sits and leans back against the towering neck of her main body, looking out towards the horizon behind Li Shu. Back towards the strange indentation on the edge of sight, a smooth line detailing where the Wall sits beyond a desert of death and war.

“I got cocky.”

Li Shu waits, letting her friend and patient organize her thoughts.

“It’s… I assumed incorrectly about how things worked. Apparently having special constitution on the Wall is… messy. If I’d used the Hungering Roots sect, or the Empire, it might have gone better. Higher chance they’d figure out my name, it’s not exactly common, but… well, they wouldn’t have tried to kill me right away.”

Li Shu lets out a breath, the cycling of her Qi in meridians and Sacrifice both hitching slightly. Is… is this something that Raika caused? An exaggeration? An issue of bias?

“We went in there with no backers, and that fortress, probably every fortress, had something like a Heart. Like what we found beneath Cragend, the altered tunnels that Shapefixit told us could make monsters, can eat away at Qi and flesh inside its domain. They decided that some no-name healer could work in the infirmary with an assistant, and a no-name special constitution with no Qi, no records, no sect backing or Imperial name… well, that constitution gets fed to the dungeon. Literally. Something for it to build off, make other tools.”

A series of cracking pops echo across the dunes, Raika’s neck (the human shaped one and the long one) stretching with a shiver of flesh and crackling. She sighs, long and slow, and air hot enough to steam matches her from out of vents along the strider-body she’s using.

“So… I lost most of my brain. Got it shot out of my head. My Body, my subminds, and my Soul all worked together to just kill and eat and survive, and it just kept escalating. Took me a while to regrow my Mind, literally.”

“Wait, you regrew your brain? And you still… remember everything?”

She nods. “Nothing missing that I could find. The intervening space is… hazy at best, but I tested myself on everything I could remember, all the major events. I remember every scar I’ve gotten, where and how we met, what my abilities are, my goals, all of that. I’d appreciate it if you could help me test it, later, make sure there’s no gaps I can’t see, but… I think my memory is at least partially stored in my Soul. My sub-brains helped to connect some data, but it’s the only way it makes sense.”

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“Well that… has a lot of implications.”

Raika turns her head away, looking out at the dunes. Refusing eye contact. “Yeah. I… was hoping you’d like to study it. After.”

Li Shu hugs herself a bit, looking down. At the impossibly beautiful puzzle walking across the blasted landscape. The landscape made of corpse-matter.

It takes very little for her mind to drift. To connect the bits of bone and gristle and shiny pearls of shattered armor to the bodies on the operating tables. To the soldiers dying, their blood on her hands, on her needles, a part of her very self turned to sharpened biology and made to try desperately to heal the broken things, and-

“How many?”

Raika doesn’t answer at first.

“How many.”

A long silence.

“Two hundred. Ish. Minimum of one-fifty, but I’m not sure about individual squads, people in separate areas that got caught up. Like I said, it was hazy.”

“And after you became whole again? After you grew back your Mind?”

“Four. Nascent Soul cultivators, platoon leader rank. They had their forces retreat and came at me directly. I asked if we could talk it out, surrender, but it was much too late for that. They fought well. They cared about each other.”

“...do you regret it?”

“...No. No, I don't.”

Li Shu waits.

Raika turns back to her, checking body language, probably smelling every hormone and hearing every heartbeat. Li Shu… she’s only half here. As much as she’s sitting, staring down at her friend and the impossible creature she owes so much to and is owed in turn, she’s also looking at a man with his throat slit open by a scalpel. Burned bodies along a river, fallen bloody against the foliage. Lives ended under the effect of anesthetic.

Li Shu has only killed once. Her first meeting with Hao Nera. The bodies that piled up did so in part due to her actions, for her own survival.

She still sees them. Still knows, knows that if she were smarter, stronger, more versatile, there would have been a different ending. Hao Nera rarely spoke of his previous groups, didn’t seem to hold a strong opinion on their passing, and that scared her, once. But is he not in himself an example of how quickly change can occur? Of how much deeper people are when you look at them and know them truly?

Raika watches her, as if viewing her thoughts right along the inside of her head.

“I regret that the situation got to that point. I regret not being wiser, more prepared, more aware of possibilities. But by the time I was in the fight… I decided my objective, and they would stop me from reaching it. I decided their deaths. It wasn’t an accident, wasn’t a snap-decision- I didn’t have time for more, and I didn’t have tools for more, and I needed to get past them.”

“And that justifies their death?”

She shakes her head. “No. It’s not about justifying. I talked with Jin about this a while ago. Maybe there are deaths that are just, but I don’t think that’s something that I can ever know or feel unless I know the person, the context, their lives. How often do you think anyone knows that much about anyone? It’s not about it being just.”

“Then why? Why not escape? Why not surrender so we could-”

“Could what? Be identified? Be held back for who knows how long? Be imprisoned or executed? They shot my brains out just for being more useful dead than alive.”

“So that’s it? Someone’s in the way, you kill them?”

Raika scoffs, a note of anger coming into her tone. “That’s not the point.”

“Then what is the point? I’m a healer, Raika. You’re my patient, and my friend, but I’m not going to go around killing people just to heal others. That’s not what I am, that’s against everything I stand for.”

“I’m not asking you to kill anyone. If you were in that situation, you’d make different choices. If things were different, I’d choose differently as well. But I won’t shy away from killing. They are part of something cruel, and vast, and by their choices and mine we are enemies. And this world is not so kind that all enemies can be stopped, or defeated, or even faced without violence.”

This time it’s Li Shu that stays quiet. That looks out over the wasteland, over lands deeply dead and writhing with the ruination of war.

“I’ve decided, Shu.”

Li Shu looks back at Raika, finding her gaze resolute. The subtle differences of this latest regeneration fade into the background as she stares back at her, pupils changing minutely with every breath, biology reflecting a burning thing deep inside.

“Death upon death. War so old it reshapes the earth. A million million lives, kept to a useful standard or made into experiments, to be tinkered with and broken down. The rich of the inner rings getting richer and more powerful while all those cultivators they’re so proud of helping grow get sent to the Wall, to kill and die and kill and die.

“Taurus. Zhoulong. Feng Gui. All of them are products of the Empire, of how things are done, of what’s allowable. Taurus may be trying to subvert things, but he’s still a part of the issue. Maybe it’s not might makes right, maybe things are better, but that doesn’t mean they’re good. It just means that every minute the Empire stays upright, the rot spreading from it gets deeper.

“I wanted revenge for what they did to me, but… that’s my past. I pushed through what they did to me, became more than I ever was before, and revenge after seeing all this… it’s small. The problem with putting a foot on a tiger’s neck is that you can never let it up, and now, here, I have teeth and claw and blazing fury where they cannot step upon me. It is time. I will not bite the hand that feeds. It is a foolish dog to bite the hands that feed.

“I am monster beyond monster, tiger and lion and wolf, of Dragon Veins and hungering death and all-consuming CHANGE. And the wise dog bites for the throat.”

The only sound is the slight shifting of sand, the chittering of things beneath it, and the whistling of the wind.

Raika breathes, low and slow. Quiet. Slower and longer than any human can fit into their lungs naturally.

“You don’t have to come with me. When I go back, I’ll find a way for you to return on your own, a way to get back to Hao Nera and Qen Hou. If you just want to heal everyone you can reach, then I’ll try to help with that too. If you want, I might be able to sneak you back into the Wall by this time tomorrow, though it may involve further challenges. I owe you at least that much for following me this far, and for all you’ve done for me.

“But mine is the path of CHANGE, and it holds consequence. I will walk it as long as I can, though it will color my fangs with red and burden my shoulders with weight.”

Li Shu feels something inside her shift. Something quiet, and barely formed, some part of herself that is not her Sacrifice and not her Cultivation.

“You’re not strong enough,” she says quietly.

Raika says nothing for a time.

And then-

“No.

“Not yet.”

“Then you’ll be hurt. You’ll need a plan to try and grow properly. And… so will the kid. And so will others on the way.”

“Yes.”

“...Bites need proper care so they don’t get infected.”

As Above, So Below.

As Without, So Within.

To All Things, A Cost.

“I’m a healer. On your way and behind you, there will be people that need healing. For now, that’s enough.”

One of the keratin needles of her Sacrifice snaps, crackling like firewood and breaking in and through itself. Bit by bit it grows wider, a central ball, almost like a medicinal pill, filling slowly with Qi, reflecting the flavor of her own beliefs. Inside the Sacrifice, concepts of healing and pain and biology and medicine from the brief moment in the Wall all wrap around themselves, and in her Dantian, the idea of suturing bleeding wounds and soothing broken bodies begins to circle tighter and tighter.

Li Shu takes her first step into the Core Formation realm, and feels the weight of her choice solidify in her soul.

“For now, it’s enough.”

Raika smiles, low and sad.

“Get some rest. We’ve got another day or so before we hit the edge of the sand.”