Somewhere along the third day, with the sun dipping low to her right, Raika realizes that she’s been following a path.
Not precisely, not with perfect accuracy by any means, but it’s there nonetheless. Following the arrow in her mind, placed there by the dungeon core of the fortress city, she’s been heading almost directly east. But the more she walks, the more she can find patterns in the hills and sands, in the dunes and the dead. Some areas are significantly more active, the skittering things of blood and hunger beneath the sand awake and writhing and absolutely chewing through her legs. Those areas usually have more leftover bits of guns and swords, hardened shells from spirit beasts, pieces of metal. It’s possible that that’s where the deaths are freshest, blown in from far and swept by the tides of the dead sands. There’s more Qi along those trails as well, though nothing too notable from what she can tell.
On the other hand, there are sections, small and winding, where the sands are heavier, less awake. There is still detritus there, but it’s more… decayed, more rusted. The properties of the dead wasteland break down even these particularly tough materials, but it seems that without fresher bits of death, they eventually get quieter. They still nibble away at her, but they don’t force her to rebuild entire limbs every hour or less. Following these quieter sections, she notices that she’s on a sort of trail. She can cut straight across in places where it winds into deeper twists and turns, so she’s not particularly faithful to the path, but there are clearly rhythms and undercurrents to the ever flowing deserts.
And that’s how she finds the people.
The smell of blood and rust and death is overwhelming, but her senses have only improved since they became superhuman, and she’s gotten more creative since then. The orb at the top of a long neck she’s made holds thirty eyes, each of them facing a different direction and compiling a 360-degree view of their surroundings. That particular trick took a bit of finagling, but building another sensory-based brain and training its neurons by making them grow alongside the head made up for it. Adding in additional scent glands and fine hairs, based on how insects and snakes “smell”, completed the package. Putting all that together, she can sense for kilometers out in this deadzone.
And there, on a lovely patch of sleeping sand in a dead place, there are people.
She sees them before they see her, senses a hundred feet off the ground in every direction. There, sitting on a tarp made of some sort of hide, are three people. Only one of them seems human, and only two of them humanoid, but between their Qi on the wind and the crackling of language on the wind, it’s clear that all three of them are in fact people. They have thick cloaks, pale and off-white, with the barest hint of Qi wafting from them, some sort of pattern or arrays to them.
So. People.
She grows a set of vocal cords and a breathing tunnel to use them through into Li Shu’s room.
Turns out, long-term exposure to Qi flavored exclusively of death, rot and war isn’t the best for one’s constitution, and that’s before you factor in the decayed flesh, bone dust, and rust in the wind. Additionally, as it turns out, when you have glowing flesh and a body that’s larger on the inside than the outside, it’s not actually all that hard to make a room.
Apparently it smells a bit like meat, but Raika is pretty sure that’s just the outside air she’s filtering. Just as she has also assured her friend that it would be very rude to comment on a lady’s smell.
Internal eyes open as she forms her head and shoulders out of a wall, growing into an oval room with a smooth floor of chitin and walls covered in bioluminescent fur. There’s a table, a small bed, a patch of ground covered in faux-moss for meditation, and a small plant to one side with a pitcher-shaped body that fills with water periodically. Li Shu blinks as Raika emerges, coming out of meditating on her breakthrough.
“Is something wrong?”
Raika shakes her head. “Just that there’s people ahead. Wanted to keep you informed.”
Li Shu frowns. “Soldiers? A detachment?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Three people wearing grey-white cloaks, sitting on a rug. Might be bunkering down for night. The Cold Sun is fucking bright around here, and I have to assume there’s some weird stuff going on with the sands under it.”
“But nothing you’ve seen?”
She shrugs the shoulders, creating articulation and joints only to dissolve them after their use. “I don’t stay still, don’t leak any Qi, and don’t stop to sleep. I just cycle brains and keep going. Chances are there’s plenty of predators or dangers out here that we’ve avoided or which haven’t found me appetizing.”
“Cycle brains?”
“Yeah, I figured out continuity of consciousness and some stuff about self-identity. Since I’m still me after losing my brain, then replacing one brain with another doesn’t really change the fact that I Am Me. So when one starts to get sleep deprived, I just copy the neurons onto a new one and goop the old one.”
“You goop it?”
“Best words I could think of for the process. I turn it into goop.”
Li Shu sighs… but Raika notices the little glint in her eyes. There’s just a hint of her friend peeking through the depression and focus on her latest advancement.
“Any chance I could… maybe take a look? If you could replicate the process for me, or give me the brain instead of ‘gooping’? There’s a lot that’s unknown about how brains work, even now, and studying that could be-”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I- really?”
Raika shrugs again. “If anyone gets to dissect me, it should be you. Besides, I can always make more brains. Want me to keep one active in the room, or would you prefer a dead one?”
“Um… alive? Alive would be best?”
“Sure, just be careful with them. There’s no nerves so it doesn’t feel pain, but it’s still part of me. Try not to be too mean about cutting me up.”
A mixture of revulsion, curiosity, and outright confusion flash across Li Shu’s face at that, but Raika just grins and pulls her head back into the rest of her Body. She makes sure to give Li Shu her privacy, but she can’t not-feel someone moving around inside her, so it’s easy to make a pedestal with some living brain matter on it. No reason to give that particular bunch of folds her neurons, per se- it doesn’t need memories, it just needs to be a living human mind, which is pretty easy.
With that done, she dissolves herself, swapping back to the brain keeping an eye on the outside world and her direct actions.
They have, in fact, noticed her.
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Splitting her attention like this is second nature now, so talking to Li Shu didn’t change her ability to react to things on the outside. She’s already shrank by about a third of her original size, reduced her ten legs to six, and started following along the quiet current of the desert rather than cutting through directly.
Her fellow travelers have reacted… rather dramatically. All three of them are currently bowing, kowtowing completely atop their rug, with a small set of what look like Qi stones, foodstuffs, and a tea set placed before them.
They don’t run, but she can smell them on the wind. Yellow-orange fear, purple-crumbly dread, and bits of fizzy, popping gold hope mixed with anxiety.
From that same scent trail and the look of them, it’s not hard to discern their cultivation, which honestly helps to explain a lot of their reaction. Two of them are in the Foundational realm, with one all the way down in Qi-Gathering realm of all places. At their level, she’s genuinely stunned that they’re alive. Coming from the Wall, where there’s almost no one below the Core Formation realm or above, it’s a bit of a shock to see anyone from the “base” realms of cultivation out here, especially not out in a desert that eats through nanoscale armor plating like hardtack.
They do not move as she approaches, holding themselves perfectly still. Their emotions roil, the youngest of them, the non-humanoid, spiking the amount of fear in the group. They have four legs, each of them quad-jointed, with a burnished orange complexion beneath their robes, which obscure much of their form, while the other two look humanoid. One tastes of sweat, the flavor of their breath and skin entirely human-base, while the other humanoid tastes of something like whiskey and incense.
A few more minutes and she arrives at their location, a good twenty or so feet from their rug. Forming new joints, she folds and bends her stilts until her main body is only a few feet above the sands, keeping her panopticon-head up high to watch for danger or shifting tides.
It only takes a few more seconds to form a new body.
Her original is… gone. But everyone’s body disappears. It’s said that every seven or so years, every cell in your biology has been replaced by a new one. Logically, it follows that even if it’s made of entirely new material, or holds a new shape, so long as she identifies herself with it, it is her Body.
Still, classics are classic for a reason.
She emerges from out of the front of her main Body, connected to it by a few threads of neurology and protective tissue, standing easily seven feet tall on the sand. Lithe, but well muscled, she feels the sun on human skin once more, russet-brown and grown over nanoscale armor, enhanced organs and hyper-dense muscle fibers. She grows new strands of “hair”, thick off-white braids that turn to red and orange coloration as they travel from her scalp, filled with heat vents and neural tissue beneath their appearance rather than dead keratin, and forms robes to match it. A black undershirt and bindings, up to her neck but not her shoulders or arms, and half-open silk white robes to compliment loose, dark red pants, and bare feet with chitin soles against carnivorous ground.
Her eyes… she could remake them. Turn them to something false, like she does with her voice, keeping Truespeak out of most conversations. But… why hide?
Her eyes are shimmering radiance, a dozen-dozen colors fluctuating and burning in the colors of her pupils. The four-legged traveler peeks up, a glimpse from beneath their hood, and she feels the fear-stink multiply, joined but a taste like crackling awe.
Despite herself, she can’t help it. It feels… kind of nice.
The member of the trio towards the front of their group, the one closest to their… offering(?) speaks up first.
“Greetings, honored one,” they say, an accent she can’t place coloring the vowels. “This lowly being is known as Ko-es. This one humbly greets the honored one, and offers meager tribute, that your lessers may contribute what little we can towards your journey across the edge of the world.”
Raika blinks.
That’s… new.
“Greetings,” she replies, keeping her tone neutral. She has to cough and clear her throat a bit, reworking the vocal cords to hide the Truespeak again. “This one requires no tribute, save a bit of your time and an answer to some of my questions.”
Immediately, she notes a spike of panic in the lead member, who still has not raised their heat from the mat.
“Whatever you desire, honored one, so long as it be in this one’s power to grant, shall be yours.”
This time, she frowns. Why did his adrenal-response jump like that? Looking over his tribute again, she notes the particulars of it; a pile of twelve spirit stones, incense, and food.
No. Not just food. All their food. The leader has a storage ring, but it’s made of copper and chipped, not something that you could hide multiple days of supplies in, and while there are travel-packs on the rug, none of them have any food in them at all. They placed everything they had on the ground before her, without even knowing who she is.
It clicks pretty easily after that.
Out in the desert, they’re walking with specialized robes and a place to rest, and out from the carnivorous sands walks either a great spirit beast or some sort of bio-construct, one with no detectable Qi. Any fights out here would be lethal by default due to the terrain, but Foundational and Qi-Gathering realm cultivators would be far more vulnerable than anything that proved itself capable of both seeing over vast distances and walking the sands unimpeded.
She literally holds all their lives in her hands. If she wanted to kill them, she wouldn’t need to fight- she could just kick a wave of sand at them and watch it eat through the gaps in their robes, and there’d be nothing they could do about it.
She sighs, cracking her neck a bit. She goes to crack the other side, and… hmm. Feels weird, having an arm there. A real arm, anyways, not Blacksteel or a superweapon. She remembers the shape of her Soul, all the marks of her old wounds and scars, missing the leftmost limb save for a prosthetic.
No need to make anything as brutal as the Blacksteel skeleton she has in her inner world, but… it feels right, having some sort of marker. The fact that she can create tools or limbs to replace the old one in a heartbeat doesn’t mean that she didn’t lose it, and the thought feels like an anchor, stabilizing some inner part of her. With a thought, she dissolves her left arm halfway down the bicep, turning it to bone and blood and letting it flow seamlessly into her skin.
Hmm. Is she getting more distracted, having so many minds working at once? Thoughts carrying over? Maybe.
She forms veins that shoot out at speed across the desert, touching the edge of the traveler’s rug. In an instant, she’s copied the material and density of it, replicating it over the ground for a good ten feet in each direction. It takes a little longer to copy any inscriptions on it, and she won’t be able to power it without transmissible Qi, but she has energy to spare, making the underside into a toughened leather and regenerating as the sands nibble away. She takes a seat on the rug, sighing as she plops down and leans on her arm.
“Well, it’s in your power to raise your head, is it not? I’m not going to kill you for making eye-contact, stranger. We’re all traveling through this mess, no need to make each other’s lives harder.”
She can hear the surprise in his breathing, the slightest hitch in his pulse. He makes some subtle motion, scuffing against the rug slightly, and both of his traveling companions stiffen slightly and stay still. He alone slowly rises, keeping his gaze lowered- but eventually pulling down his hood.
Bright green skin, crags of bark and moss running through it like scar tissue, and brilliant red eyes make for a striking look. This close, and without the muffling of whatever enchantment the robes hold, she gets a better look at him, and finds very little to indicate much human about him at all. While he has a lot of hormone-equivalents, which taste the same at a glance, it’s clear that his veins hold something like sap rather than blood, his biology closely mimicking or possibly derived from a plant.
He still swallows nervously as he looks at her, though.
She does her best to give a lighter smile, nodding politely at him. “My name is Raika. Ko-es, it is my honor to meet fellow travelers on these sands. I’m headed east, and I don’t know much about where I’m going. I have water and some supplies I can offer, though I don’t carry spirit stones to trade, but I’d appreciate some information about where I’m going, if you’re willing to offer.”
Ko-es nods, mostly looking at the ground rather than making proper eye contact. Still, he seems a bit relieved, especially at the mention of trade. “Of course, honored one. If it please you, I might better inform you of what is yet unknown if I knew your setting-off point into the sands. The east is a chaotic place, especially in these current times, as the Pack tries their paws at the end of the world. The northlands and the Deeper Cold are ill-matched to the south and the edges of the Forever-Burning, and the lands are in flux.”
Raika nods. “Of course. I’m from out west, towards the Wall.”
Silence lands on the conversation like a lead weight.
“Did… I apologize, honored one, but you say that you come from the west?”
She nods, hesitating a bit. “I have. I’m not Imperial, if that’s what you’re worried about, but-”
“Did you really come from the end of the world?” Asks the human, her eyes wide and full of awe and horror in equal measure.
Raika’s pretty sure that the leader of the band may have pissed himself a little bit.