Raika dissolves her body, eliminating the physical remnants of the idea that she’s human. Her only body is the Body, which is currently a ten-legged desert strider with a giant neck and a head full of eyes, and it can be… anything. All that limits her is fuel and imagination, and she’s progressed far with the Supreme Body Art and her ability to interface with biology. She’s even bound up the concept in her Heart, that of CHANGE, screaming from inside her Reactor, to use the Full-Body Transmutation technique, shifting between states of matter and materials to anything she has access to and can picture. Flesh to marble, bone to gelatin, blood to water, skin to grass, if need be.

It’s a tremendous skill, one that supplements the near-infinite possibilities of bio-mechanisms that she’s still only just starting to properly comprehend and explore. At this point, especially with the golden band around her inner world, her Body is her strongest tool for defense, versatility, adaptability, and more.

But… it needs updating. Against even nascent soul cultivators, while she could maintain a higher output for longer, that isn’t always relevant in a fight that can trade a thousand blows in under a minute, and stops being a factor at higher realms, where one’s Soul and domain provide near-constant enhancement and saturate the body to a much higher baseline. Additionally, most of the time she uses it to either increase her capabilities in a specific way, defend herself, or regenerate from harm, occasionally gaining new utilitie, but she’s still mostly using creative variations on what she already knows- mammalian biology. Only recently has she started truly branching out with her thickened purple blood. It’s still by far her strongest and most versatile tool, but in terms of attacks, it offers little (yet).

But, as was proven in her fights during the fortress city and against the Dancer-Between-Layers, surviving something isn’t enough to win. To win, you need to vanquish what’s in front of you.

Supreme Body Art: Pressurized Indigo and its lesser variant, Pressurised Crimson Cut, both offer powerful tools… but both technically rely on Blacksteel to be effective. And both are big maneuvers, but not suited for dealing with distant targets or stranger defenses than just solid structures and constructs. Expanding her grasp on biology is paramount, but that can wait, lest she let her other options lag behind. She needs to expand her understanding of what she has, and how she can use it.

At the moment, outside her biology and the Truths that empower it, she has three tools.

First, Blacksteel. The alien material is still one of her most faithful gifts, stolen from the END itself (or a shadow of it, at any rate). It’s hyper-lethal, slowing regeneration and increasing lethality, the smallest sliver of it enough to kill someone without the proper cultivation base. While it takes time to manufacture, and can be broken, the material itself remains usable even as splintered shards, and it’s a universal tool for causing damage to all but the hardiest bodies.

On the other hand, it’s limited. It can only be made into armor or simple weapons, not full constructs, not without making them sharp and unwieldy at best. Its concept fights against being used as anything other than a sharp thing that kills whatever it touches. It also requires her to wield it, her martial arts and biology to strike with, which isn’t a guarantee against spatial-warping, people faster than her, better technique, or more complex or esoteric defenses, and against an overwhelmingly solid construct or individual, it tends to lose out. Sure, it will get through eventually, but only if it doesn’t break down past utility, and while it might get through faster than a conventional Qi attack, that’s still a generous window of time where her opponent could retaliate or escape. Maybe if she made a sword of it, fifty feet tall, it could overwhelm any and all defense- but that just doubles down on production time and unwieldiness, and frankly, she’s pretty sure it wouldn’t help much.

Second, her Reactor. While primarily a support tool for her Truths, boosting her ability to control and change her Body and self to much higher degrees, much faster, she also used it as a weapon against the lightning-wielding platoon leader. When facing the creator / self of [Perfect Strike Of Tribulation] (and she’ll get to that thought too), she managed to infuse the radiation of her Reactor directly into a blade. It destroyed the weapon, transforming it into a thousand different seemingly random and utterly incompatible materials- but she moved quickly enough that it also did the same to anything it touched and cut through, like the cultivator’s neck. As far as trump cards go, it’s a damn good one, and considering how it transformed both the air and Qi it was in contact with, probably one that’s incredibly hard to block.

Not to dodge, though. She still needs to swing and attack with it, once again relying on “conventional” methods of attack.

On their own, these two tools alone can just about guarantee victory against anyone caught unprepared, but both have their limits. So long as they constitute the majority of her arsenal, there’s simply too many ways to get around them, and too little she can actively do with them.

That, of course, brings up the third and final tool.

Dao.

The trees in her inner world, taking the form of the concepts she’s consumed directly. It’s… iffy. It isn’t her own comprehension, so it feels a bit awkward- by following the patterns of Dao, she can manifest the concepts associated with them more easily, but can’t yet put her own distinct spin on them. She has three central “trees” in the garden of her inner world- Flesh, Blades, and Guns, with a smaller tree that isn’t quite at their level, that of Flame. Each of them has roots that diverge into nearby concepts- both the tree of Blades and Guns have roots that connect to a patch of grass she’s calling “metal”, for example, on account of… well, the grass is a bunch of different metals.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

On the other hand, the trees themselves also have trunks and branches. The trunks seem to highlight the concept behind each Dao- if Dao is the pattern reality makes when a concept interacts with it, then glimpses into the core of the Dao-trees seems to be a glimpse at that concept in a purer form. The branches, on the other hand, seem to be more specific versions of the Dao- her Dao of Blades has branches on it that take the shape of small swords, daggers, and spears, with some half-formed branches that look a bit like claws and teeth, reaching out towards the Dao of Flesh.

So far, she can manifest them a bit, add them to her biology and tools- but there’s more there. If she can further a true comprehension, she can likely do much, much more- and to do that, she needs to face them. To go inside herself, and look past the wonder of her chemistry and biology for a moment.

It’s about time she went to explore her inner world in depth.

So… she dives.

She grows distant from her brains. The flashing streams of cognition and neurons she’s crafted fade to the background, away from her thoughts, churning in the background. All of them are her, but none of them are more here than this central point, this pinprick avatar of awareness. Hormones shift, synapsis fire in new patterns of consciousness, and she falls down into herself.

She opens her eyes.

She is here.

Here is she.

Raika’s eyes turn to look one way, then the other. Their cone of vision is… wider than last time. Different than before. The last time she was “here”, she felt herself as human- strange, yes, but similar to what she presented as on the exterior, added to by the tattooing of scars across her body, some bright, some faded.

But in that escape, in that final battle, in the days since, she’s digested something truer.

She is not human.

She is a person. A being, a consciousness, maybe even optionally humanoid- but she’s not human. Maybe she hasn’t been since she was crippled. Or since she survived self-induced, long-term Qi poisoning. Human is a small label, when there can be such possibility in power, such impossibility in identity, expressed through ontology and might. The literal term of “human” is one that demands a specific shape, specific methods of perceiving and interacting with the world, and while those demands are broad… they no longer limit her.

She stands on bare feet. Her range of motion is different, the shape of the joints and toes made for more dynamic movement, and she feels her spines stretch inside her, the idea of them meaning more than any shape they might take. She looks around with more eyes than she used to have, and sees her inner world.

She stands up, instinctively ducking a bit at the top of the porch’s proximity to her forehead. She “awoke” at the cabin, which, in its own way, makes sense. If there was ever any place that felt like home… it was here. The Hungering Roots sect held some familiarity, but never any real comfort, not until Hisheng, and he… wasn’t her focus. Her childhood home, so fucking long ago, is a memory on a dream, and if she was happy there, it has gone from her. The Imperial Palaces between moments in the Division- well, the less said, the better.

But for six months, she lived in a green little valley, in a house made of wood and shaped by hand, with people who loved her. Not as Maen or Hisheng did, no, but love nonetheless. She learned that she likes to cook food, that her new senses are gift as much as burden and tool, that she likes the way people feel when they taste something they like. She slept in a bed where she could hear the heartbeats of loved ones, just far and muffled enough for privacy, just close enough to be there.

If there is any place that she should awaken and feel secure, feel herself, it would be at the cabin.

It’s broken, though.

Li Shu’s Sacrifice ritual shattered it down the middle, tearing through logs and beams and infrastructure and leaving a big jagged crack all down the roof. Sections of the walls remain broken too, cracked and chipped from the arcane force, and, most likely, from the turbulence of… being eaten. Kinda.

…She should fix that. When she has time.

She doesn’t walk into the cabin. The porch, the place between safety and strangeness, familiarity and the unknown of the self- that’s fine. But inside the cabin, broken as it is, full of memories as it is… well. It’s not fear that stops her, not this time. She will go in, and she knows that, and she has peace in that.

But not just yet. It’s not time.

She steps out from the porch and onto the grass.

With her awareness of her inner world, of her “Heart”, and with her new “eyes”, she looks out over this place and tracks its changes. The central valley, the one that was once a place in the real world, remains… more or less the same. It’s grass is still green, it’s sky is still blue, so forth and so on.

But walk past the valley’s hills, or out from the end of the gorge past the pond, and you see the other hills. The ones that were never a place in the real world.

The grass in them is red, purple, and silver. The sky is black and white, with a single pupil at the center of the Reactor-Sun of iridescence, of rainbow colors ever-shifting. There are no trees, no rocks, no ponds or lakes- just strange grass and rolling valleys.

And… she knows, deeper inside herself than even her soul, that it doesn’t have to be that way.

She listens to that deeper voice, and takes a step towards the pond, and the garden on the way.

And then pauses.

“...Dink?”

Nothing.

“Dink, I know you’re there. I can hear you humming.”

Slowly, something peeks out from behind part of the porch’s railings.

It’s not a person. Not nearly enough shape for that. Ghosts, literal fading, half-formed echoes of people, have more distinct shape than it does.

But there is substance. And there is form. And there is, at the top of a strange little puppet, about four inches high, a tuning fork.

Like a stick-figure made of hazy silver air, it slowly and carefully maneuvers its way onto the railing of the porch… and makes a little noise.

Dink.

She does not cry, but it is a close thing. She smiles instead.

“Hey, little guy. Good to see you.”

Dink.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know. And I’m glad for it. I don’t know what I’d do without you close. But it’s still nice to see you.”

…Dink.

She snorts a little at that. One arm extends out, and she feels the Blacksteel prosthetic of her leftmost limb in this form hum in tune with the little item spirit. Still so small, so vague… but here. It walks on the Blacksteel, each step making a noise that somehow cancels the weight of the lethal material, and does not stop until it is on her shoulder.

Dink.

“Alright bud. Let’s get to work.”