Raika opens her eyes and looks down at her hand.
Nothing in it. The process, half-instinct as it is, failed, and whatever happened inside her is still-
Oh wait. No, there it is.
Probably a little silly to assume that just because she held it in metaphorical hands in her inner world, it would appear in her physical hands, especially considering her biology is only very superficially human. But three different bio-brains all hyperfocused on her internal makeup tend to make for pretty good oversight on what’s actually going on in her body, and as she shifts her greater self towards the spot that’s being pointed at-
There it is. There’s no real equivalent to where it would have emerged on a human body- it’s somewhere between her third liver-gestalt and her fourth set of secondary hearts, but also, if she were spread out and folded into a giant human-shape, that would mean it emerged somewhere about 60ft deep under her collarbone. Whatever the case, there it is, glowing brightly and entirely painless, floating as if it simply popped into existence like a pearl between muscle-fibers.
Spatial warping or no, to pull out something from that deep still takes her a good thirty seconds, but in the end, there it is. It swims up her arm and emerges out of her hand, a piece of orange-brass metal that actively glows, seeming to absorb and refract sunlight in a dozen different ways.
Immediately upon hitting open air, three other set of eyes turn to look at it.
Not like a casual curiosity, not like a simple break in focus- like something inevitable. Like sunlight after a pitch-black room.
“...what is that?” Li Shu asks, her voice quiet.
“I’ve been calling it Radiant Metal. I… sort of transmuted it myself. It’s what happens when I expose Blacksteel to my Reactor for a long time, or at high-levels of exposure.”
Li Shu frowns, abandoning some of her notes (save a single scroll, which she brings over for notes, obviously) to come and look closer at the material. “I suppose it makes sense, but I never did ask, how do you create more Blacksteel?”
Raika shrugs. “It’s not all that hard. It grows like mold- the more death there is, and the more death it’s used for, the easier it is to make, at least once it’s been formed. For me, I can use my Truth, I Can Change, to transmute my biology into Blacksteel directly. It’s… expensive, though. Not a great…”
“Ratio?”
“Ratio, yes. It takes some three or four human-sized arms to make around a pound of Blacksteel, and if I try to turn it back, it only generates maybe a bit of blood, a few ounces of flesh, and always somehow tainted or built around the idea of killing or being close to death. Radiant Metal, so far, I’ve only been able to create from Blacksteel, but, same as before, I can convert biomass into it with my Truth. Problem is, the ratio is even worse. Maybe 600, 900lbs of flesh, including high-value organs and such, to make an ounce of it, tops. If I burned through my entire body right now, I could probably only make around 30 pounds of the stuff. It also doesn’t form from anything I’ve put in my reactor except Blacksteel- everything else just turns into random materials, and then eventually stabilizes as energy.
“Truth be told, I’m still not sure what it does. I think it can acquire different properties, but I don’t have a list of them, or how to make it happen. Still figuring that out. But that’s not the important part.”
Li Shu finally breaks eye-contact with the piece of metal, turning to look at her. “Really? The new alien supermaterial you can magically generate isn’t the important part?”
Raika smiles, chuckling a bit. “Yup. In fact, for today, it barely matters. What really matters is this.”
And with a slight push of her will, Raika drops a nearby piece of vine into her inner world.
Compared to the Blacksteel or the Radiant Metal, it’s downright easy. Easy, but not simple. First, she scoops it up, carving it out with claws, and then she absorbs it into her body in the most directt way she has; a mouth opening up in her palm. Transforming the space between that mouth and her stomach into a tube, all it takes is a single convulsion, and it falls into the depths of her stomach.
She’s not sure exactly how it connects to her inner world, but considering what she did instinctively to consume the Souls and everything else she’s absorbed, it definitely is connected. Just like her lungs, her stomach is much, much bigger on the inside, and she hasn’t done much to ‘catalog’ its interior- hasn’t really needed to.
And yet, as she shifts her perception back to her Soul, she sees something, growing from the soil of her inner world.
A piece of a vine, carved up by claws.
And, just like when she plucked the Radiant Metal out, she feels no pain.
It’s not much. Barely anything at all, in point of fact, undetectable without a cultivator’s senses or the abstract perception of her inner world… but there it is.
A gap. A miniscule sliver of space between the furthest shoot of bamboo at her perimeter and the band that surrounds her world.
When next she opens her eyes, she is grinning so wide her cheeks hurt.
Maybe the Emperor always intended for her to find this ‘loophole’, maybe not, but once again, she’s changed what it means to be as she is. It’s not a leash, forcing her into a specific shape, only a specific size. Add too much and it squeezes inward, punishing the growth, but this…
She turns to the centi-croc, her eyes crazed and Intent on full blast. Even in its addled state, the reptilian meets her gaze with a wide-eyed look of its own.
It does not make it nearly far enough before she’s pounced on it, grapple-holding it down.
“Relax, big guy~” Raika says, even as she starts summoning more material out of her inner world out into her Body. Measuring the Qi and weight of the creature, she takes approximately the same amount of ‘ground’ from one of the unused valleys of her inner world, the Heart following her will and wielding its instincts in the direction she points.
Interestingly, yet again, it doesn’t appear from her stomach. Whether it’s intentional or some misaligned instinct, the material summoned appears somewhere in a cluster of bones and nerves, forcing a partial collapse of some of her biology as Supreme Body Art: Gigant is disrupted. Regeneration kicks in a moment after, her bio-brains shifting the weight onto other architecture and expelling the ‘foreign’ mass out of her.
But then…
I Am Me, I Am Mine. All of her is her, and all of her is hers.
Why bother tossing it away, when she can use it instead? It’s part of her inner world, and while she doesn’t understand how her Heart created it, she knows the materials it had access to. The concepts she consumed, the Qi she devoured, and the biology she did both with, all altered by CHANGE. So it’s still hers.
Red-purple grass and loamy, vibrant earth transforms itself, her refusal to dissociate from anything that is her forcing veins to bloom from within them, nerves to blossom through them, skeletal calcium deposits to form from what was once almost stone. In moments, her internal architecture has shifted to accommodate an influx of a few hundred extra pounds and a fresh infusion of Qi into her system.
Her Soul is her Mind is her Body is her Heart is her Inner World.
I Am Me, I Am Mine.
I Can Change.
We Are What We Eat.
The true shapeshifter’s trifecta, acquired by embracing her own identity to her core. There’s some irony in that.
And if she can shift mass and energy in and out of her inner world and Body, well then~
The centi-croc makes a panicked little honking noise as she literally opens her torso along a seam and swallows it whole. There is a moment of darkness, the feeling of it squirming in fear as it is swallowed, unchewed-
And then it appears with a plop and a further little honk-snort on a patch of ground that tastes weird.
Raika watches as it manifests out of some weird fold in space directly on top of one of the fields squirming with ever-spawning life, confused as can be and running its hundred legs in a circle around itself. The moment its spin is complete, it stops, freezing in place as it finds itself facing directly into the eyes of a beetle.
For a moment, she just watches them as they stare down at each other. One, a massive beast, two to three times the size of a human, equipped with incredibly tough scales, ambush-predator instincts and a maw powerful enough to bite through metal and stone. The other, a beetle, herculean in might and valor… and about the size of a person’s palm.
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The beetle raises one of its little legs, stamping down on the ground. It scoots itself back, then forward, stamping once, then again, then spinning in an aggressive little circle and patting the ground with its herculean jaws.
The centi-croc just kinda… stares at it. Then it huffs, the breath enough to very nearly bowl over the little insect.
There is a moment of outraged silence as the whole world holds its breath…
And then the beetle makes a clicking noise, and a puddle of squirming flesh rises up out of their feeding frenzy on the ground in a mass revolt, and charge headlong against the centi-croc’s vile disruption of their leader’s authority.
Perhaps because it’s still kind of high after eating Raika’s Qi-rich flesh, or deeply disoriented from being swallowed into this weird afterlife, or simply startled by the sight of such miniscule creatures directing their wrath so brazenly- it honks again, and turns to run.
Raika can’t help but laugh, her mirth ringing across sky-kissed and rain-struck valleys of strange growth as a beetle and some worms chase after a very confused spirit beast.
She taps Dink against her collar, whispering to be heard.
“Keep an eye on them, ok? Warn me if the big lizard gets any ideas.”
For a moment, Dink is a manifestation, a tiny little person of noise and vibration, throwing her a little salute. And then, it’s a tuning fork once more, on a rope necklace.
Raika comes out of the semi-trance to find three different people staring at her, horrified.
“Raika!” Li Shu just about shrieks. “You- I-”
Jin, his eyes painfully wide, is just staring, mouth agape. Even Many-Grasping seems wildly confused about how to react, half-raised to her feet and awkwardly shuffling in place to avoid slipping off the roof of their tent.
Raika looks at them, confused. “What? It’s fine! It’s not like I ate it!”
She ducks as Li Shu throws about six notebooks directly at her head. “That’s literally exactly what you just did!!! What the hell was that! At least kill the poor thing first!”
“What- no, I put it into my inner world! The same place as the Radiant Metal, where my reactor is-”
“Likely story!”
“I did! It’s safe, look-”
Turns out, making the head of a very high, deeply disoriented lizard-beast emerge from out of her shoulder does not, in fact, reassure anyone.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
She does, in fact, manage to reassure them in the end. Turns out, at least according to Li Shu and Many-Grasping’s agreed-upon knowledge of cultivation, that ‘inner worlds’ aren’t usually so literal. Plenty of tales of Emperor realm masters making their domains into permanent bubbles in the real world, even making hidden realms only they can access, but that too doesn’t sound quite like what Raika’s doing. Her Heart is doing some sort of transmutation, and it’s not bound to her Soul or cultivation, for one.
For another, it doesn’t work cleanly, doesn’t manifest out from her or mold the world according to her ideals. It works according to those same dream-physics, not quite real, but also selectively obeying laws of matter, energy, biology. Again, her stomach seems to be a decent portal in, but even with her last demonstration, the beast appeared someplace random in her, and she had to drag it up to the surface and out. There’s some kind of correlation between the spatial warping of her inner Body and the spatial warping between her inner world and ‘reality’, but she hasn’t figured it out yet, and she’s fairly certain her Heart isn’t making it so awkward intentionally.
But still, the experiments prove the hypothesis. Her inner world can manifest in the world around her through her body, and once she figures out how…
She pictures the fields of strange, insectoid life, ever-spawning and ever-changing, growing and dying in the valleys of her Heart. She pictures how fast they’re growing. She pictures the mouths of the fortress city, spewing forth endless hordes, dark and screaming, constructed to the specifications of slaughter.
It’s not a good image. Not really. The idea of making something so purely a weapon feels wrong, even without her Heart stirring in fear at the thought.
But the idea is there. What she creates in her inner world can become a tool in the outer. At bare minimum, she proved that she can take mass and energy from it directly, shrinking it to power her own body and its regeneration in an emergency. Another potential source of healing, one that is far more expensive in terms of lost resources, but a potential ace-card in a moment of desperation.
And Jin…
Well, once he calms down and gets back to cultivating, he grows.
It is as night falls, earlier than usual this far out from the sun’s arc through the sky and all its writhing coils, that he comes to her.
It is hard to give privacy when you have so many minds working at once, changing over and sleeping in shifts. Harder still when several of those minds are literally designed to keep track of sensory input and her own biology, and the tent they’re sleeping in, multi-storied and high-quality though it is, is made of her. Still, she does her best to give space, and selectively avoids tracking as much data from around her allies as she can. Adrenal reactions, impacts, and subconsciously keeping track of more-or-less where they are is the best she can do.
But it does not take much to feel the footsteps, hesitant though they are, coming closer to her sleeping area.
She wakes herself up from sleep, cycling in different brains to take the load and forwarding them the information. A few moments later there is a small pillar of bone emerging from a nearby nightstand, itself made of chitin and mostly used as a small table. The bone begins to glow, a faint and orange light, mimicking a candle.
She waits for Jin to knock before she opens the membrane, sitting up in ‘bed’ and turning to face him as she does. She cracks her neck, once- as much habit as necessity, likely more, and looks at him.
He’s hesitant. Tired, traumatized, only just recovering- but something else now, something she didn’t even see when she… well, when she ate a centi-croc alive in front of him. There’s a bit of fear, a note of anxiety that she hasn’t scented from him since their first month together.
She smiles softly, nodding to him. “Come in, kid. You alright?”
He nods, but it’s a bit jerky, like he hesitated partway through the act. He sighs, taking in slow, calming breaths.
“You… feeling a bit off?”
He nods again, still quiet.
She smiles, saffer this time. “Yeah. Nights were hard for me too for a while.”
“...what happened?” he asks, his voice quiet.
“...someone broke me. I won’t go into much more detail than that. That old granny from your village asked, and telling the story is… it’s a weight, even now. Hard to keep the right headspace for it. But I got… torn apart. Not so bad as you saw in that medical pavilion, but worse than the villagers by a fair bit. Got left, after that. Alone in the cold. It… well.” she lifts the stump of her left arm, the regeneration stopped near where her elbow would be. “It’s left some scars. Some I keep because I choose to, and some that… stay.”
He says nothing for a little bit… but he does enter the room, and takes a seat, quiet though he may be.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.
“...I don’t know if talking will help.”
“It won’t always. But words… they’re limited, but there’s power in a limit. By putting words to something, it can help define it. Doesn’t mean it’ll help tonight… but it will someday. Don’t want you to shy away from that.”
“Did it help you?”
“...eventually. Yeah. I think back in your village was the first time I ever really talked about it, at least to more than one person. I had someone else before that. A woman called Maen. We were… we weren’t perfect, but we were good. Maybe we’ll be great, someday. In the end, it’s people. That’s what helps it, I think. Time and people, and living long enough for both.”
Jin sighs, but this one shakes, ever so slightly. She does not need to track his heartbeat to feel his breath hitch.
“I saw… so much. And it was bad. And it was so much.”
She stands up, coming around to his side of the table. At first she just sits, making sure he still has room… but when he doesn’t react negatively, she leans forward, pulling him into a hug.
“I know. I know.”
“But you don’t,” he says, his voice harsh even as he lets her hold him, even as he trembles with the weight of holding himself in. “No one does. You can see the echoes if you push for it but there’s so much more. It’s so big it could eat the world and it’s dark and horrible and no one deserves that, no one, no one-”
She pulls him closer, letting him talk. He starts to panic, his breathing speeding up, his adrenaline beginning to grow-
She starts to hum. She does away with her superficial vocal cords, letting Truespeak color the notes as she does her best to remember a melody. She’s never been very musical, but… a distant memory. A good one. Before the sect, when she was little.
Raika hums a little tune that she remembers, dimly, coming from a woman much taller than her, in a little log house next to a little farm.
For a while, all there is is his breathing, the melody, and the slight sound of an accompanying bell, ringing quietly in harmony from the tuning fork around her neck.
Eventually, he calms. She’s not sure if its been minutes or an hour, and refuses to check her other brains to see. It’s been as much time as he needed, and only once his breathing has evened out and his heartbeat has slowed does she let herself stop.
“You’re right,” she says, soft and quiet. In the lyrical purr of Truespeak, she whispers to him. “I don’t know what you see. But I know it’s painful. I know it’s scary. And I know that as much as I can, for as long as I can, I will be here to help you with it. And someday, it will not be stronger than you.”
She’s not sure if it is the inherent sense of weight that Truespeak carries, or the words themselves, but a few moments later, he lets out one last, loud breath, halfway between a sob and a note of exhaustion. Without him needing to ask, she forms a smaller futon next to her own, lifting him up. For him, to make the journey easier, she uses both arms, her left once more made whole to help her carry him, and he does not struggle as she lays him down on soft fur and a warm mattress.
As she goes to lay down beside him, he surprises her with a question.
“What was he like?” he asks.
“Who?”
“The boy. The one that you said goodbye to.”
For a while, she does not say anything. For a while, there is just the warm flickering of bioluminescence in the room, tuned to be just enough light to see the contours of the room.
“His name was JiaJia,” she says. “He saved my life when I was broken. Kept me alive, even when he had barely more than me. Just a few years older than you, not yet a man, but… he was good. Smarter than he gave himself credit for. Kinder than he realized, I think. Always had a witty comeback or a good insult to throw at me when I was being an ass. I had just started to figure out some of the stuff I have now, barely anything, but I helped him how I could. When he learned to cultivate… fuck. Should have seen his smile. He smelled of open fields and tangerines.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died. I got him killed. I was a mess, and I didn’t let myself look far enough ahead to see what my actions could cause. Someone I had just started to trust killed him to prove a point. He said he did it to protect me, protect what he was doing, and I don’t think he was lying… but I do think he was wrong. Or weak, maybe. Broken, like I was, but in his own way.”
“Did… did he suffer?”
“...no. No. He was gone before he even knew what happened. I kept a shoe of his for a long time, a sandal, but… well, about six months before I met you, a bunch of crazy shit happened, and I lost it. But no, I don’t think he even knew he was gone.”
“Maybe that’s… maybe that’s why he stayed. For so long, I mean.”
“...maybe. I’ve… I don’t know. We did some research before that ritual, and I’ve never heard of a ghost, an echo like you call them, staying long without some sort of power source, or becoming a wraith. I don’t know how he stayed, or why. But he saved me again. Back before we went to that valley, near where I found you, something else bad was happening. Messing with my head. I think he saved me from that. Helped me find a way back to myself. I don’t know how he stayed… but I owe him my life twice at least. And he’s gone.”
For a while, there is silence.
Jin sits up a little bit in bed, moving so quietly that if she weren’t listening she might have mistaken it. She turns her head to look at him, sensing his nervousness but also… also a determination.
“If… is it ok if I make a grave marker for him?”
She blinks. And she… she takes a breath. Lets it out, low and slow.
“Yeah. I think that’d be ok.”
Jin nods, and there is a firmness in it this time.
And then he lays back down, and she keeps watch until he finally falls asleep.
He breathes easy, and the sound of his dreams are like raindrops and incense.