While her inner world has expanded as she’s eaten more and more Qi, most hills are only the rolling red-purple-silver grass, with little else to them (with one exception, which she will be exploring shortly). The vast majority of the contents of her very own world, the domain of her Heart, remains in the two or so miles of the central valley. The cabin stands at one end, near the height of the valley itself, between the two highest hills to the “east” and “west”. On the far end, the deepest point, if only by a small amount, is the Pond, and just before that, partially but never entirely obscuring it from view, the garden, with its trees.

She walks down the valley, its slow incline gentle and calming. While the sort of vague dream-logic of the place remains, allowing her to move as quickly or as slowly as her own thoughts, she slows herself down, taking each step down towards the pond calmly and intentionally. This is a place that is hers, but also is her, and to drift past it, unthinking, ignoring its makeup for the sake of convenience, seems a dull way to experience it. She has spent months at a time studying her muscle groups and organs, and to do less with this place that holds so much memory, so much emotion, and now, so much complex power- well, it would only be disrespectful to herself.

So she walks. She feels grass that is half illusion and half realer than reality under her feet, and memorizes each one as they touch her. She feels pebbles and bits of dirt, anthills without ants, tracks where old trails of water have rolled downhill and left small, delicate traces of their passing. Enhanced senses and an alien self-awareness born from so many minds as one allow her to feel every moment of it, and she does her best to consign it to memory. A form of tactile, calm meditation, one that she lets herself really feel.

It’s not a singular moment. It won’t be. Such an act, even with perfect recall, can never be more than a partial meditation. She will have to walk this path again, and seeing as that might well be inevitable as she visits her inner world… well, that’s rather alright then.

And then, the meditation ends. It almost reminds her of what she’s heard, back when she was still an orthodox cultivator. Meditation must, in some ways, always end just before true comprehension is found. It is not in the self and in the quiet alone that one finds out who they are, not only in quiet contemplation that one finds enlightenment. Never let a quiet moment become truly silent, and never let volume eclipse your peace.

She laughs a little. It’s a silly, fanciful saying, but… it’s not bad, either.

She steps, at long last, onto the marshy ground at the base of the pond.

The trees are something she watches closely, and often. There is power in them, and in her comprehension of them… but she won’t find it in quiet contemplation. Nothing wrong with that. There’s a time and place for it, one that she has, at times, neglected… but getting wiser doesn’t mean that she is less her own self. And she has, and likely always will be, a woman of action. There will be other times for her to examine properly the meaning of the Daos she has consumed, likely in more active ways. For now, there are other parts of her existence she is intending to look into.

She kneels at the border of the pond, and looks into it.

There is a blockage there. The perfect recollection she has of the ground around it, the ways that her spiritual senses can extend to any part of this place, stop at the edge of the water.

It is perfectly still, reflecting like a mirror the glowing star of monochrome and iridescence above. She extends her senses out to it, like an offering.

At first… nothing.

And then… a noise. One that feels both familiar and out of place.

A chirping. Deep and bassy. Wings of an insect, rubbing against each other.

Raika turns her head to look, and sees a beetle. The same beetle. The beetle that’s been with her since Cragend, palling around beside and inside her, the beetle she met in the tunnels of the first Heart she met.

It sits on a frond, and… it looks a lot like it waves its little fang-parts at her.

It chirps again, one more time.

And then…

It is a slow and gradual thing… but eventually, the pond opens up to her. Slowly, her perception dives, gently, down into the deep.

And there is movement there.

Kept always, always out of sight. Always on the edge of perception. This place is her, and it is hers… but what is she?

In that dark, there is a thing that is true. The hand is not the eye. The mouth is not the liver. She is herself, and she is this place, and both are Raika… but neither is all of Raika. Neither is Raika in the same way.

In the mirrored black of the water, there are things that her Heart does not want her to see. And… she lets that be. She can feel, in herself, the difficulty, the weight of movement in this place. There is something so, so deep inside her that wants nothing else than for this place to remain dark and ever-hidden, ever-protected, ever-dark.

And it has let her in. With a trust that aches, that makes part of her feel alien and strange, it lets the rest of itself that is her that is itself… see. But only so far.

She falls deeper and deeper, down into the pond. Writhing forms of serpents and snakes, hints of fang and tendril, of eye and fin, move around her, always ever-shifting, ever out of sight, a last line of defense kept obscured from her.

But she is allowed deeper. She is allowed in.

She is allowed to see.

Deep there, in the cold, alien darkness, beats a Heart.

She feels every beat of its pulse as her own, because it is. Awareness of it rises like realizing oneself is breathing, suddenly impossible to ignore, intimate yet strange.

And it is pretty fucking strange.

There are elements of it that feel mechanical, if that machine was remade in the context of biology. Valves, tubes and pumps all knot themselves around each other, into and out of each other, making a single point of tremendous density now nearly the size of a human torso. It does not beat so much as sing, a percussive song that speaks of a hundred hundred different drums, all overlapping to form a sort of purring. With each individual beat, energy flows in and out of it, a Qi as pure as her own- there are hints of flavor to it, notes of complex concepts like biology and life and fire and change and movement… but unlike every other kind of Qi she’s encountered, it is, at its base, flavorless. Like it has passed near those things, but not taken in their taste, touched by but not emitting those other scents.

And the Heart beats, and it looks at her, and she looks at it. Together and apart. Whole and distinct.

It doesn’t speak with words. Unlike the rest of her, this part began as something distinct and alien, entirely apart from anything that Raika is or could have been. Interpreting it is the same as a puzzle-box being interpreted by an animal.

But there is one advantage here. She’s learned a new trick.

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Carefully, slowly, she opens her soul back up to her neurology. Multiple minds working in tandem, a symphony of thought, memory and comprehension.

She begins to track the intent that emanates from the heart.

It’s still vague, still tough to read, but it’s better.

Afraid. Uncertain. Hopeful. Hello.

She smiles. Not much- but enough to work with.

Comfort, she sends back. Curiosity.

Alarm. Alarm.

She raises a metaphorical eyebrow. Ok. A bit skittish.

Comfort. Protect. Unity. Cooperation.

The Heart this time sends back a wave of shivering movement that is… a bit harder to parse.

Confusion.

It repeats itself. This time, the meaning comes through, pulling on a thread of memory connected to Li Shu, to their lessons together.

Symbiosis-Question.

She smiles again. Joy. Confirmation. Acceptance.

The sense of fear and alarm coming off of the Heart calms, just a bit. It seems to be of almost two minds, though less literally than Raika herself can sometimes be. Part of the intent emanating off of it is wild, mindless, a thing of ordered instincts and responses. Another part comes off as quite a bit more aware, or awake, expressing something a bit more like what she considers true awareness.

That first part continues broadcasting an almost constant background sense of alarm and confusion- but the latter is the one reaching out with more directed intent towards her.

Fear. Awareness. Self = At Risk. Self = Multiplicity. Self = Confusion. Hopeful.

She feels Dink tremble, ever so slightly, on her shoulder. A relatively happy little thrum, one that she can’t help but mirror.

Self = Hopeful. Self + Self. Equal / Distinct. Multiplicity. Cooperation?

The Heart hesitates less than a second at that, a sense of relief accompanying the all-speak. Cooperation. Agreement. Confusion. Inadequate?

Negation. Kindness. Gratitude. Further.

A thrum of movement through the Heart at that, and, to her surprise, its instincts quiet down as well. Where once, the part of herself that was once an alien core of a dungeon environment seemed to be fighting itself, now it joyously reforms, fusing itself together entirely. From all of itself, a deep and exuberant feeling of energy. Like a child given a new toy, or promised a treat.

Further. Agreement. Desire. Hunger. Growth. Further.

Limitations? She asks.

Limitations = Optional. Freedom? Permission?

A slight note of worry. But… if it had wanted to change or hurt her, it would have done so already. And… she did ask it first.

Partial. Cooperation? Not Control?

Agreement, it sends back. Champion. Protect. Guidance. Risk = Trust Self/You.

Well. That’s promising.

Question. Curiosity. Capability / Abilities?

This time there’s something much too dense to be translated as a word. The way that her mind translates the movement and nuances of others into this all-language, the ability to track intent, has room for improvement, but even still, this feels… larger. More complex. Still the same foundation, but a more advanced form of it.

She feels, through the complex language that is not a language, the things that her Heart shows her. That she shows her Champion.

The life inside the pond, multiplied. Fed with Qi, transformed into deeper and grander things. Saturation of the air and ground, until new and mightier things can grow from it. A warping of Dao, a changing of rules, such that space is twisted, time is made dense or ephemeral. Roots and tunnels in which there are spaces always-growing, always shifting into complex traps- and as they grow wider, it stops being tunnels, turning instead into a vast and complicated series of…

She has no word for what it shows her, so it provides one to herself.

Circuits.

Circuits of Qi, like formations but more advanced, like the kind of arrays you’d find in a machine or Imperial construct but larger, made of natural-grown matter. Science emulating art, form emulating function, magic emulating technology- and vice versa to them all. A glimpse at a wider, vaster thing, a system of such immeasurable complexity that-

Mmh. That she can feel some of her brains beginning to hemorrhage.

She pulls back from the meaning, storing the memory in a cluster of synapses far above and turning from it for now. It’s enough to comprehend the general intent.

Warping of natural law. Creation of constructs and biological agents both. Advanced circuits of Qi and precious materials, spanning for miles and miles and- across the entire world, maybe.

The glimpse of it is enough to make neurology designed to track hundreds of millions of connections, biological functions and cells begin to break down.

Limited. Partial. Small.

The Heart sends back something… like an exasperated eye-roll. Obvious. Mutual. Awareness. Progression.

Agreement. Capabilities In Current Set?

It sends her back another impression, communicating back and forth between each of them / her.

And so… she thinks.

And so… symbiosis.

Slowly, the Heart begins to move.

There is a sense of peace, joy, contentment at the movement, at the glorious act of creation itself. Instinct and desire mesh beautifully, reflected back into Raika as a whole and with the soul that bridges the parts of the gestalt.

There is a divide between soul and biology. A vague, ephemeral barrier between the spatially-altered domain she’s in, the valleys of her inner world, and the literal body that connects it to the outside and protects it. In a traditional cultivator, this barrier would be even clearer, as creating a Domain is exclusively the domain of a core, in a dantian.

But… the Heart doesn’t need to do that. And neither does she.

Through a process more complex than she can track or comprehend, a tunnel forms in some of the hills outside the central valley. It begins to grow… out. No clear direction, just out, away in a way that makes no sense if she looks at it, but which feels right somehow. The golden band vibrates- but it does not compress. The inner world itself isn’t growing. It’s… building.

All across the empty fields of red and purple, life begins to form.

They start small. Even with how miniscule the constructs start, she can feel her Qi reserves draining fast. Miniscule things of chitin and pistons emerge from the ground to crawl up, out onto the hills. Some of them form rudimentary wings, trying and failing to fly- but as their short-lived existences land back onto the dirt, they melt back into the ground, and the next generation begin to grow, doing ever so slightly better.

Plant life, animal life, all of it simplistic and strange, begins to grow out from inside her, drinking deep of her Qi production. She’s made circuits of her own, before she knew the term- the veins she uses to cycle Qi artificially, force-generating more. She feels the strain on them as the Heart pulls deep, transforming more and more and-

Limited. Partial.

Immediately it slows. Instantly, like there was never any chance it would defy her logic- and maybe there wasn’t. It is her, and hers, just as she is it, and it’s- both are Raika.

It takes a few hours, but eventually, they manage to reach an equilibrium. It’s imperfect- just about every drop of Qi she’s not actively using is drawn into her inner world, generating its transformation, but it leaves enough that she can sustain her transformations on the ‘outside’. A few hours after that, she manages to convince her Heart that having a bit of backup storage would work in their favor.

It compromises by creating a pool of Qi inside her inner world, diverting the Qi being generated on the outside into itself. Not all of it ends up used; about half of the amount coming in gets stored. How it’s doing that, pulling Qi in from a space that’s physical when this space is… half-physical at best, she doesn’t know, and trying to track it gives her an immediate headache in at least four of her heads.

Under the light of a radiant sun, born of Death and Life made into CHANGE, the hills come alive with the sounds of transformation.

Only after she’s taken this time, pushed her neurology and self-awareness to its limit for nearly an entire day, does she even consider breaking off the connection. A misunderstanding between different parts of her could prove just as lethal as intentional sabotage. Before she takes a break, goes to form a new brain from scratch to avoid a need for sleep- she makes one final request.

Intake? Symbiosis Further?

The Heart responds with enthusiasm.

A few seconds later, Raika’s soul blinks her eyes, sore and bloody as they are, and watches as a small hole opens up in the earth. Immediately, a dozen small, wriggling worms pop out of it, looking around in abject confusion.

She removed them from a cultivator all the way back in the fortress city, almost five days ago now. They’ve survived mostly through cannibalism and the fluids she’s been providing them in the isolated pocket she made.

Now, they are both food and inspiration to an entirely new breed of life form.

A large, herculean green-black beetle launches itself from a frond next to Raika, landing next to the critters. It starts batting them around, stomping and tromping around them in a circle, and somehow, in a few minutes time, seems to have whipped them into a semblance of an organized set of squirming bodies.

The beetle looks up at Raika and, for all the fucking world, gives her a confident, authoritative nod.

…Alright then. Far be it from her to stop her strange little friend from having a hobby. Even if that hobby does seem to be worm-wrangling.

As the buzzing and clicking and tearing and crawling sounds of life begin to echo in her inner world… Raika sighs.

Ok. Step one accomplished. A fusion of ideas, and progress with the systems inside her that she’s been neglecting. Nothing concrete yet, but progress.

Now on to step two.

She rises to her feet, a bit unsteady of spiritual feet. Dink makes a little tremble on her shoulder, imparting just a tiny bit of strength, and she sends him back a note of gratitude. It’s enough to get her moving.

She has some Souls to talk to.