Raika sighs. She’s been doing that a lot the last few minutes.

That was… surprisingly unenjoyable?

Getting to humiliate a couple of arrogant bastards was cathartic, but not very much. The joy of beating the shit out of someone who deserved it got progressively less joyful as it became clear that they really didn’t stand a chance against her. She’s sure they’d be able to harm her eventually, and they’ve probably got some fun techniques she didn’t get a chance to see, but she could’ve ended the fight in seconds if she’d wanted. Hells, technically she did.

And she didn’t need to use True Flame, or [INFUSION] to cause any CHANGE radiation, her whips, or any Supreme Body Arts beyond Overclocking and Gigant, and she’s literally always using Gigant nowadays, at least internally. The fight didn’t push her, didn’t offer a new experience, and without the ability to consume Dao and Souls like she could before (nevermind the fact that she did promise Li Shu) there’s just… not a lot to get out of a fight like that.

Holding herself back for the sake of experiencing new techniques isn’t bad in and of itself, but it felt frustrating to expect some big catharsis, only to be met by two idiots she could kick the crap out of easily. While she may not technically be ranked like an orthodox cultivator, she’d put herself at peak Nascent Soul or maybe anemic Warrior realm in strength, at least going all out.

And now she’s got two unconscious idiots just sort of laying here.

Well… no reason to spend time in the danger zone if it’s not needed. Wrapping some bands of bone and hyper-durable tendon around them, she absorbs them alongside the platform she’s made. Then, annoyed at the sheer expense of keeping her combat-form running (it’s enough that her Qi generation falls into a deficit, even with her Truths), she grows her own body back out of her Body, spawning from out of a gap in her nanoscales and reabsorbing the much larger war-form back in.

She takes a few long, deep breaths, opening rents along her back to add to the oxygen intake. Her Truths allow her to use and adapt to a lot of carbon dioxide, but there’s only so much of it she can use. Another point in favor of learning how to make plants part of her biology in the future. It takes her a good few minutes of just breathing, inhaling and exhaling vast amounts of heat, until her lungs have enough air stored and her Qi has regenerated enough for her to feel comfortable with moving again.

At which point she has to break off and deglove both of her feet from standing still too long like an idiot.

She goes to sigh again, but…

No. That’s not a great mindset. It was a good fight, enjoyable, and she got to feel strong. That’s not nothing, and the loss of a few inches of material off her limbs to be able to enjoy some time just standing around isn’t bad either. At least not for her. And there’s nothing wrong with realizing her growth or realizing just how she still has to work on getting more of it.

If anything, that last part is sort of exciting. For everything she has, there’s new avenues. She knows for a fact that she’s only superficially using her Daos, and there’s so much room to grow in her biology and its possibilities that it’s dizzying. It’s good to remember that, and to recognize just how much fun she’s having with theorizing new ways to grow, new things to do.

But she acknowledges that it is at least a little bit of a cock-tease to get to beat up a bunch of arrogant cultivators and get no fun out of it.

She starts running.

Not in her strider form. She wants a challenge after that rather disappointing fight, and running in humanoid form through an area literally made of razor-sharp stone is a hell of an added challenge. The strider form is perfectly optimized, but that’s sort of a failing of it- it is situationally perfect, but requires constant adaptation if she wants to use it for anything other than walking and being tall. An imperfect form means she has to find much more complicated solutions, solutions that can apply to much broader systems- good things all around.

So it is that a seven foot tall naked woman starts sprinting at nearly half the speed of sound across razor-sharp stone flowers.

Every few steps she has to leave behind a bit of skin, transformed to stone against her will. She can feel her Truth struggling against it, but considering that the Nascent Soul cultivators in this place needed to have their Domains in a sort of armor-technique to protect themselves, it’s doing a damn good job. The Truth of I Am Me, I Am Mine forces the environment to have to push through something fundamental about Raika before it can affect her, and it’s a testament to how lethal that environment is that it’s able to get through at all.

She sends a message in glowing letters inside herself to Li Shu’s room, where she’s examining Jin and Many-Grasping. She makes sure to remind her to check for internal infections of stone-growth. While they didn’t directly touch the stone like she is, there’s a chance some of it was in the air, earth/stone Qi or no.

She sees Li Shu read it and nod, throwing a thumbs up. The concern is fairly minor, but if anyone can do something about it, it’s Li Shu.

Raika wonders why the cultivators weren’t using flying swords. Those are probably still a thing out here, right? One of the older and more awkward modes of transportation pre-Empire, and still in use today in some cases.

Could be it was a training exercise, or they disembarked when they expected a fight. Something to ask her surprise prisoners about later maybe.

She moves faster than a normal body would allow, streamlining the edges of her body where air resistance becomes an issue, reinforcing spring-loaded pistons and hyper-dense muscles to launch herself off of individual stone flower petals. Some of them crack beneath her weight, and she shifts more of herself into her spatial alteration, optimizing every muscle group and bone to reduce unnecessary weight without losing the challenge of maintaining and improving her current form.

The miles blur past, hills of moss and endless varieties of lilies, carnalias and other flowers she can’t name speeding by as she moves. She spends the trip optimizing what’s needed, and just… running.

It’s a joy. She moves faster than she ever has before, faster than when she was a cultivator, faster than she has yet, and she could go further still. Acid burns through her muscles and vanishes a moment after, Qi regenerating into flesh to replace what’s been damaged as quickly as the damage accrues, and every time she fixes it it comes back just a bit better.

The landscape is beautiful, and even as a half-dozen brains watch over the people she’s protecting (and kidnapping) and modify her Body, she feels quiet. At peace with her thoughts.

It’s a good run.

Eventually, she starts finding hints of green spread throughout the stone. At first it’s just bits of jasper and malachite amongst the flowers, but before long the scent of chlorophyll and dirt starts to make its way into her nostrils. Another few minutes at speed, and she can feel the air quality start to change, the density of Qi not fading, but shifting. The flows of Qi feel strange, out past the Wall. One of those things you don’t realize until it’s gone, but the flow of Qi in the Empire felt… static? Stable? It ebbed and flowed, same as here, but it was slower, smaller quantities. Here, it’s like she can feel the wind, just on the edge of her senses, the range that she can feel out to giving a hint at a larger picture.

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There are tides here. She can feel the ebb and flow as just louder, less restrained, more alive in some way. She can imagine, over the course of a year or more, the Qi from the stone prairie terraforming out further, only to shift as a different wave of Qi from elsewhere brings new properties. The edges of the space between them there must be even more chaotic, a spectrum of transformation that life has evolved to encompass

A paradise for cultivation, if you can find the right spot or the right resources. Possible instant death if you end up in the wrong one. A far more chaotic environment than in the Empire, far less stable, which, for civilization, for people, is a bit tough.

But for her? For her hunger? For her everlasting CHANGE? For the desire for more that she can feel churning so much deeper than her gut, deeper than her very soul?

It’s… beautiful.

Jasper and malachite become more and more common, until the orange and grey and white of the stone prairie begins to imitate chlorophyll, and then the plants start to bend beneath her. Tougher stalks and powerful trunks begin to replace stone biology, flower petals of gemstones on less Qi-altered areas. The vines get thicker, overtaking the moss and the flowers, and then thicker still, until almost every vine she comes across is part of a larger maze of tree-trunk sized tubes of chlorophyll and moss.

And then they get bigger.

A few hours into running, the vines layer over each other, larger than buildings, nearly as tall as some of the sect-plateaus Raika’s seen in the past. Each one’s trunk is hundreds of feet thick, and they emanate and absorb Qi in equal measure, almost like they’re breathing in a language all their own.

In the far distance, Raika begins to see trees, and realizes that some of the vines are not vines.

They’re roots.

And some of the trees are larger than mountains.

She admires the view, drinking in air that’s nearly syrupy with pollen and mist, emanating from between the vines and roots and glowing in the afternoon heat, rainbows of light flickering through them constantly as she runs. With more consistent footholds, Raika starts to approach the sound barrier, the density of the air and the heat of the plant life all around making the air hard to move through. She hears distant bird-calls from birds that sound truly massive, feels the rumbling of colossi from miles away, and experiences the million scents of a deep sea of life all around her like raindrops on her skin.

It’s beautiful.

Raika makes sure to take a few chunks of vines and some samples of moss to add to her growing internal terrarium. She’s going to have to come up with a name for her body-storage thing soon, maybe add it into the manual for Supreme Body Art. Either way, it’s always good to have things to reference, and she’s sure Li Shu will love it.

She also plucks a few fruits here and there, just to make sure that her guests don’t have to exclusively eat of her flesh. She’s getting better at making meat-fruits, but they still aren’t that good. It’s never a bad idea to stock up on supplies.

It’s as she’s plucking the seventh-or-so fruit, though, that she detects something new.

Where before, especially at her velocity, the details of the life all around sort of blurred together, now she can tell that some of the signals she’s getting are stationary- and others are stationary to her. Moving in lockstep, synchronized, and with one of them now approaching.

She grins wide as she backflips over a pair of snapping jaws, tossing her head just so to keep her dreads from getting chomped on.

She lands on the side of a vine, perching there just long enough to watch the scaled figure of something crocodilian vanish into the ferns and mossy lesser vines that clutter the space all around. Even with her senses, she finds herself pleasantly surprised at how she struggles to properly identify where it’s moving and how.

Luckily, her senses have a bit less trouble detecting the next two sets of jaws.

She laughs, pure and joyous, as she flips and throws herself through the air, the wind whistling against her body, staying bare inches away from the jaws of the predators around her. They blend seamlessly into the wider flora, entering and vanishing almost perfectly, leaving behind just flashes of skittering legs and massive open mouths like churning pits.

They’re so very lovely, and she lands hard on another wall of flora, transferring enough force from her leap that it creaks, and soon she is moving again, dancing between more maws.

An insect horde of crocodilian monsters dance with her, predicting each others moves and counter-predicting in turn. While it is not language, because in truth it is never language, she feels their Intent flaring to life as they try to bite into her, try to consume any and all sources of movement. She laughs and leaps and turns and flourishes, pushing past the burning of lactic acid, pushing into and through the possibility of exhaustion, playing with the shape of her Body like an instrument.

This. This is what she wanted from that fight.

She is here. She is pushing herself, and exploring a new challenge and a new joy, and changing in every moment by the joy and the challenge and the push and the new.

Eventually, the dance starts to break down. Eventually, the press of the jungle-vines overwhelm, and even with so much Mind and so many senses, her steps begin to slip, the jaws get closer and closer and snip off bits of hair and the surface-touch of her skin. What was briefly perfect, and by its nature could never remain so, fades and changes as all things do.

And isn’t that lovely?

At long last, a single violent undulation, a desperate lunge from a hungry and frustrated beast, places her square in the path of a set of jaws. She feels through how they slice through the air how sharp those teeth are, how they hold both the beast’s Intent to kill her dead and an edge of what might someday be Dao in their porcelain points. Even without the Dao, there’s something about the Intent, focused and honed in so sharply on the beast’s fangs, that makes her almost feel like they’re more deadly than they should be.

Hmm. The beasts have worked very hard. She Overclocks her mind for a half-second, wondering if she should let them get a bite. While it’s been years, that was something she did during her first impromptu beast-tide; as she ate of their flesh, she accepted that they would eat of hers. It wouldn’t cost her much to allow this particularly successful one a bite, would it?

It would hurt a bit, but pain is just a thing that she knows and speaks with. She already knows what it will say.

Raika smiles toothily, hungrily, beatifically as she twists her spine just enough to let the centipede-crocodile bite all the way around her right hand and forearm. It’s earned a bite, and losing her remaining arm is no big loss, considering how quickly she can remake it.

Then she feels something yoink her torso up and forward, dragging so hard that her enhanced biology almost gets whiplash. Her right arm, still held in the maws of the centipede-crocodile, is torn off roughly, unevenly, the Intent and unnatural sharpness of the teeth fighting against the Qi-saturation, density and complexity of Raika’s biology. The Centi-croc is obviously surprised, flailing and managing to tear off most of the limb but leaving the wound ragged. The last thing Raika sees as she’s pulled away is the sight of the poor beast’s eyes dilating massively at the taste.

Well, at least someone likes her new recipes.

Her senses describe to her what has ‘yoinked’ her without needing to look, but she forces her eyes against the pressure anyways, just to confirm. A massive fish-hook, barbed on the hooked end, broad and curled, made of some kind of bone that feels impossibly tough. There’s a line of something that glows with such a slight and well-hidden blend of Qi that she almost can’t sense it, connected with a complex knot to the fishhook, and it reels her in at a speed faster than she was running by a lot.

She doesn’t sense harmful Intent from the hook, but she can barely sense anything from it. It’s like it’s hidden, blending in with the surroundings even better than the centi-crocs did, even as she stares directly at it.

Powerful. Dangerous, then, and likely wielded or created by someone much more competent than her with Intent, maybe. Possibly with enchanting or formations, too, if that’s part of what she’s sensing in the complex flows of the fishhook.

But by its nature, it’s dragging her towards a given target or location, rather than leaving her wondering where her target might be. She decides to let it drag her, but pulls her warform from the depths of her spatial distortion, layering it much, much closer to the ‘surface’. Additionally, she prepares a few different pockets of Qi under her skin, Blacksteel shards primed to detonate them into True Flame. If whoever is dragging her away tries to kill her right away, she’s fairly certain they won’t expect a bomb in response.

And then the whiplash lessens, the wind resistance diminishes, and she finds herself crossing an open clearing carved into a vine as if by some old battle. Invisibly, perfectly noticeable to her senses but somehow muffled and hard to notice, an arm reaches out and grabs her around the shoulders.

A bone blade is already forming out of the stump of her right arm, moving to strike-

“Woooah there! Looks like ye almost got knackered, ya did! You alright, spicy thing, or you gonna try and split me open?”

A tall man, almost stretched out, his limbs long and gangly, gives her a broad grin, his teeth blackened like perfect midnight and all four of his eyes near-mercurial pools of green. His skin is a bit darker than Raika’s, a richer mahogany, and he’s dressed in a series of bandoliers and floral patterns, matching the smile he absolutely radiates.

“Don’t suppose ye’r a feral, are ye? Would make it a mite bit tougher to keep friendly if you try to slip me some teeth, and you seem tough ‘nough that you ain’t passed out yet. Do ya speak, beastie?”

Raika can, in fact, speak. Instead, she bursts out laughing, splashing blood and sweat all over the vine they’re standing on.

“Oh, gods and spirits,” she cackles, “I love this place. The name’s Raika, friend.”