Raika can admit that she’s having a lot of fun wondering about how annoyed the sect elders are right now.

Apparently whatever that judge had been (whose name she never got), their word carried a lot of weight in the sect. She’d figured that them being at the trial (or the trial being held in their room, maybe) had been something of a formality, and maybe she’d been right, considering the lip service the elders had paid to her being judged before they elected to just splat her on the stone floor and scoop up the bits. The delivery of actual judgment apparently skewed that intended result, and now she was finding herself very entertained wondering how the sect was going to weasel out of this one.

Funnily enough, a fight to the death (or defeat, whatever that might entail) with a cultivator is a life saver, because it complicates things. There’s got to be at least a few people there to witness it, and when news gets out, more than a few people are going to want to see it. More importantly, she has been making them lose face, in small ways just by being here and working with their robes, and in a much more fun way in nearly slitting open an outer disciple, but if they send out someone so strong they could crush her by breathing, doesn’t that just make them lose face even more?

So the judge, perhaps inadvertently, has made it so that she won’t be fighting anyone of a high enough cultivation that people will talk about how embarrassing it is for the sect to need someone so high ranked to kill little old her. More or less the same applies if they cheat too obviously; then rumors start that the purple-whatever sect needed to cheat to kill a simple worm. The elders, if they’re to save face, need to spin the hell out of the whole fight, while finding the perfect candidate to sucker into such an “embarrassing” role of executioner, while also showing off their strength and righteousness somehow mid-murder of a lesser. Raika is tempted to think that the elders are going to be bleeding out of their noses with annoyance at the judge. She… vaguely hopes the old whatever-they-are doesn’t have to deal with too much from them, even if they did condemn her to a deathmatch she can’t win over self-defense.

But… well, there’s can’t, and there’s won’t, and she will, so can’t can suck it. It’s a chance to survive, and seeing as she’s been locked in a fucking cage for another week on minimal rations, chained up, manacled, and left without windows and in impenetrable walls, escape doesn’t seem like so steady a shot. She’s a fighter, anyways; if she’s to go out, might as well do it properly.

Still, she’s done her best to spend her time productively. They didn’t let her keep Ding, which is a fucking heartbreak even now, but she’s still managed to use her heartbeat, even in here. Maybe especially in here, actually. The environment is starved of Qi with some sort of formations or runes, making sure it’s a punishment for a cultivator to be sent here and not just a vacation to cultivate in, but that doesn’t matter to her. She couldn’t breathe in Qi before, and she can’t now, but whether the manacles aren’t working, there’s too little to be noticed, or the changes to her skin are more than she expected, there’s still what little is inside her.

She’s kept her heartbeat-meditation going this entire time, the constant, neverending awareness of it beating making it impossible to forget. She wonders if she’s maybe gone a little crazy from it, spending a week alone with a ticking, tocking metronome of her own flesh, inescapable and unforgettable. It’s useful, though, so the fact she can hear it in her sleep is no big deal, probably.

She practices holding her breath, absorbing not even air for long enough to put strain on her body, and focusing on the pulses of her heart, feeling it move the bloodflow over her entire body. She focuses on one part at a time, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, until she feels she has mapped out everywhere the blood can go by the pins and needles sensation of trapped, divergent Qi that it moves around. She tenses muscles, one at a time, to feel exactly how the flesh moves, how the bones shift, and how the heat and pain seem to make her more aware of their details. By holding her breath or hyperventilating in random measures, she forces her heart rate as high as she can make it while sitting still, until she’s sweating from exertion and pain and the focus it takes.

She can’t feel anything different, per se, but either from getting used to it or from a shift somewhere along the line, the tingling of trapped Qi seems to… fade into the background, a bit. It’s almost like her old meditation, though not really; she can feel hunger, exhaustion, and a need to use the bathroom (the far corner with a grate) far more often than she ever did as a cultivator. At the same time, the sense of carefully understanding what’s inside the self, of feeling out what is happening in one’s body, is… nostalgic. She won’t be able to say for sure until the manacles are off and she’s free to move, but she gets the impression that whatever she did by deciding to trap Qi inside her and using her heartbeat as some sort of focus for it may finally be making a real difference.

Of course, cultivation is the product of years of mentoring, refinement, bla bla bla, which means it could be next year that she is truly altered by whatever she’s forcing to happen inside her. And the fight, as it were, is about… six minutes away.

Her guards brought her out from the cell about an hour back. She got a new room, a bucket of cold water, and a lye stone to scrub with, and when she was done (really fucking hard to bathe yourself when you have the disabilities she does, never mind the conditions) she found new robes, colored by plain, boring red with no decoration or variation, ready to be worn. She’s not sure what they’re usually used for, but considering how close the color is to a dull bloody crimson, she wouldn’t be surprised if it was made specifically for this event, to keep anyone from getting squeamish about staining white robes or peasant clothes or something. Bad for image, that.

Then, still shackled and manacled, she’s escorted by a crowd of four spear-wielding disciples of the Purple Campfire Flowers sect down a hallway and out into sunlight.

It’s overwhelming to start. The glare of natural light, the burning heat of an early summer day, the sudden flood of smells from both the outside world and the people in it, all crashing against her senses all at once. She flinches, blinking her eyes as hard as she can to try to get them to adjust, damnit, even as she hears a wave of whispers start and build up to annoying heights.

There’s a crowd watching her emerge, and she gets the impression this may have grown a bit more than anyone expected. Standing a respectful few dozen meters from the edges and main paved walkway to the punishment center of the sect, a brutish building that looks half-blackened by old scorch marks and obsidian gates, there’s an absolute throng of people eager to get a look. She sees almost exclusively cultivators, with perhaps a few minor nobles with a relationship to the sect joining the eager crowds, and she knows walking through the minimum two hundred cultivator crowd is going to be hell on her sinuses.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

They mostly keep quiet, but she hears more than a few of their whispers. “Not as big as I thought she’d be”, whispers one. “No Qi at all, I thought they were joking,” whispers another. “I hear she’s some rabid half-monster, bred bad and wild. Thirty silver says she takes a bite out of the young master,” whispers her favorite yet. She’d probably have to do it anyways, but she’ll be proud to deliver the enthusiastic little shit his thirty silver if she can help it.

The words “young master” keep creeping through the crowd, though, the headache of that phrase melding casually into the headache of so many different smelling Qi’s. They found a “young master” to kill her, because of fucking course they did. Make an event of the whole thing, maybe punish an uppity privileged shit by having them kill her in front of a crowd, while also making the kid perform as well as possible to save face. Add to that he’s probably got his own artifacts to bring into the arena, and the sect won’t have to be seen equipping him against little old Raika the overly-bitey.

She just knows that whoever he is, he’s going to be insufferable.

It takes almost thirty minutes of walking to reach the arena, due to just the sheer size of the damn sect grounds and the plateau they rest on. If she’d been a Nascent Soul cultivator, she could probably just waste truckloads of Qi floating over there in five minutes, tops, or if she was important, perhaps they’d have an artifact or someone cultivating wind techniques to carry them over. As it is, it still takes her longer than normal, because get this, they didn’t give her a new cane and she’s shackled, so the limp is particularly bad today. Interestingly, it doesn’t hurt as much, even if it’s just as pronounced, which is at least an improvement. Could be her pain tolerance just got way better recently, but Raika decides she might as well believe it’s going to magically regenerate by tonight. Why not?

And then they arrive, to the sound of a murmuring crowd. No roars of enthusiasm, but the sheer number of folks and the Qi they put in their voices to talk to each other make the colosseum’s volume just short of awkward. Which is good; she’s been in enough colosseum fights to be ashamed if it was so quiet on her arrival it was awkward. Raika the bloody does not do boring or awkward, even, or perhaps especially, on her fucking death march.

The rings of stone around them are laced with smooth obsidian, limestone and slate bricks melted together into semi-organic shapes making up the colossal stadium and the thousands of seats all around them. From the gaping archways of the cardinal entrances decorated with scorches shaped like plant life, to the hundreds of sconces and rivers of molten metal and stone used as lighting and decoration along the central pathways and pillars, to the almost conch-like shape of the structure proper, the whole place gives off an air of vitality. Like an unearthed deep sea beast, or an ornate demon long hollowed out and bound in runes, or like a building grown from a single explosive flex of magma. For all she knows, the Purple Kitchen Marigold Smoking sect has some kind of great ancestor that made one of her theories literally true. Whatever the case, the stadium is nearly half full, a crazy amount for a purely in-sect production and for the execution of a criminal mortal, and the acoustics perfectly mute and magnify their presence.

And then she is before the arena proper.

Three steps, leading onto an upraised platform. Carved in ornate red calligraphy, a story is written on a massive slab of gorgeous white marble, detailing the history of this place or some such grandiose nonsense, making up a perfectly circular slab of stone raised above the ground. There are no railings on its sides, no sand to muddy it’s middle; this isn’t some competition of Foundational gladiators performing for the entertainment of the masses against captured beasts or each other. This is an arena made for excellence, made for flame and fury, made for cultivators to carve each other apart and climb to greater heights in the heat of battle and blood. There may be other fighting halls in other arenas, or they may have taken away multiple smaller arenas for the sake of this battle, but whatever the case may be, Raika knows, instinctively, that this is the place where duels of honor, duels for glory and power and sheer joy, ring out against the spiraling columns and echoing stands.

She takes a long, deep breath, ignoring the confusing mess of scents that clash and focusing on just the air, warm and pure and filled with the scent of sweating bodies and warm stone and cold steel. Now this is an arena. What a place to kill people in.

She comes out of the brief trance to the sound of metal “clunk”ing against her legs. The metal cuffs are unlocked by a force of will and burst of Qi from one of her guards, simply clattering to the floor as the locking mechanisms spiral apart. A moment later, the same happens to the heavier, more mechanical and runed manacles clamped twice on her right arm, letting them fall to the ground with a “clang” that echoes a tiny bit, and letting her feel like she can stand upright properly for the first time in over a week.

On the other side of the arena, watching the process, is one of the most gorgeous men she’s ever seen. Seriously. He could be drawn on posters and in pictures in romance novels from here to the southern seas and no one would bat an eye (except in jealousy or arousal, really). Beautiful red lips, bright golden eyes highlighted with just a touch of shadow, a jawline that could cut steel in a somehow still soft face that seamlessly adopts and empowers the other sharp angles of his cheekbones and nose. His hair, black as sinner’s wallet, cascades down to his lower back, made into some kind of single ornate warrior’s braid, matched perfectly to the onyx robes that he wears, themselves highlighted with a tasteful blend of magenta, pink, and crimson. His clothing is kept simple but all the more notable in its quality from lack of gold and poems and extra sleeves that might decorate it, and is only matched in quality by the blade he wields. In other men, some might joke about overcompensation, but with how artfully he holds and casually spins the long, refined spear of pale white wood and runic obsidian blade, she thinks it just advertises skill with such a long and potent weapon.

Summary; the dude is hawt, and he knows it.

What fuckup he must have done to be stuck performing execution duty to a crowd must have been truly embarrassing, but the elders must have thanked the gods for having such an absurd creature act as their face in the proceedings. She can’t imagine they haven’t offered him a lot more than forgiveness for whatever slight he must have done, and she can’t even blame them. Again; he is. The hottest guy. She’s ever seen. And she usually prefers the more feminine types, but clearly defined muscle, noticeable height and a well-honed physique on display, even with his face shaven, paint a very clear masculine image.

Damn. If she wasn’t so sure she’d rather do literally anything than give up, she might just let the dude win. What a gift to die to someone this hot. She understands the whispers she heard before a bit better; if she’d been born in a competition with this guy, even a perceived one, she might be desperate for him to get a bite taken out of him too.

Well, she’d still want to bite him even if they weren’t fighting but- well. Ahem. Refocusing.

Taking a deep breath and lightly slapping her own face once, then again when the first time isn’t enough, she bends over and picks up the chain for the manacles, making sure to resecure one of the cuffs around her forearm and letting the other stay loose. One of the guards gives her a look and goes to open the cuffs again, but she just growls at him, and he rolls his eyes and lets her keep it. As a weapon, it’s shit, but when you’ve got none, you make do.

To the sounds of hundreds of whispering voices, Raika straightens her spine, pulls on all her new strength, and steps up the stairs onto the stage of her intended execution.