Jin carves, and it is like the Blacksteel wants to obey him. It cannot want- that is not what it is, and it is strange to even consider the possibility of such a thing, but she has no other way to explain how it moves so easily under his hands.
When he asked for a new piece of Blacksteel, a chunk larger than the others she’s given him, she assumed that he was going to jump back into cultivation. With the amount of identity inherent to his current cultivation, it should be fine, unlikely to taint him beyond what he should be able to correct, and she’s keeping an eye on him. Not the best cultivation aid for him, but better than the dead sands of the earlier desert or the constants ghosts and such.
But then, using a chisel that he seemingly carved himself out of some branch he found (no idea how, she’s frankly kind of impressed that he managed it on his own), he started fucking chiseling into the Blacksteel. And it broke. Easily. Just as its edge most easily found itself capable of violence, it would seem that to Jin, its nature found itself malleable in a way she can’t quite explain. It doesn’t shatter into obsidian shards, doesn’t form a more perfect and dangerous edge- in truth, it barely acts like metal at all, chipping away as if simple limestone.
She’s not sure what he’s carving, and he hasn’t told her, but he’s asked a few more questions, here and there throughout the day. Seeing as she’s capable of holding multiple conversations at once, and he’s literally inside her body, it’s easy enough to answer.
Once again, she’s kept herself to her human form, doing away with the illusion of clothing and restricting herself to a ‘baseline’ form. It’s funny that it’s almost like a challenge now, forcing herself to remain the way she once was rather than adopting a better form. If she wanted to, she could have a dozen other sets of legs, travel through the world on an infinite series of forms and possibilities, and-
Hmm. Could she fly? She hasn’t even tried, really. Before, she didn’t have the skill for it, but now, there’s a chance that the weight of her body might interact weirdly with flight-mechanics, even (and perhaps especially) with her spatially-altered insides. She sets one of her bio-brains, the least busy one, to work on the thought, saving it for later.
Jin is carving, and she can feel Li Shu cultivating, though not in the same way that cultivation should feel. Or traditionally has, at any rate. Rather than pulling in Qi from the world outside, digesting it, absorbing it into the wider cycle, she’s focused on her Sacrifice.
Raika can feel it, pulsing through her Heart. Neither Qi nor Dao, but the thing that underpins and wraps around both- concepts.
Li Shu absorbed concepts of healing, medicine, biology and more during the incredible stress of the fortress city, and she’s focused on that for now. Raika can feel some vague sense of energy, the idea of a thing, being pulled into the keratin needles that Li Shu has created out of what were once her nails. If she time-lapses her awareness, a fun little trick she’s picking up on, she can actually see the changes occurring as the needles become slightly longer, patterns in them starting to look almost like some sort of diagram of veins or nerves. Not like they’re alive per se, but… references to the concept, wrapping tighter around the Sacrifice.
Witches do not cultivate with Qi, they cultivate with the abstract. With concepts. The needles now draw on their surroundings, from the idea of biology inherent to Raika’s, well, biology, molding it with the other ideas. According to Li Shu’s notes and ideas, even without her influence, her needles could more easily suture wounds or be used as medicinal tools, but would have, at best, a perfectly normal amount of utility when trying to crochet or stitch clothing. As she advances, they’re likely to push forward such that anything they do will inherently work towards healing or towards the idea of a ‘healthy biology’, considering what she’s drawing from.
They’re both busy, is the point. And Many-Grasping… well, Many-Grasping is mostly just eating, apparently. Eating and resting and pacing.
Raika really needs to address her guest.
The tent idea opened up a lot of possibilities to her, and while it took some stretching of Supreme Body Art: Gigant to accommodate the changes, she managed it. Rather than isolated rooms, each entirely disconnected, she’s built something like a building complex inside herself. The design is still under review, but it’s pretty straightforward so far-
There are three rooms, one for each of her current passengers, with a corridor connecting the three of them like branching paths to a centralized room. In that central room, Raika’s designed a series of seating areas, a larger table which most food gets generated or stored near, and a ‘lower floor’, a space with several artificial cushions and lounging spaces with one wall completely decorated with chromatophores. On it, she has one of her brains training in their use, using her Camouflage technique to not just mirror how her surroundings look on her body, but accurately recreate a sort of moving picture or illusion technique on the interior wall. She has an almost panoramic view of a 180-degree cone facing ‘forwards’, and projects it constantly into the room.
Many-Grasping spends most of her time in there, fascinated and enthralled by a world she knows of and has lived in but has never seen. Considering her cultivation level, the way that she was traveling as an apprentice or as a favor to another in the desert, she’s probably heard about and never dared to wander into the overgrowth in her life, certainly not through random directions rather than specific, safe pathways.
But she does still pace, and she is eating… more than Raika expected, though never by much.
Always better to have things to do than not, at least in her experience.
She has subminds to work on the idea, process it long term. In the meanwhile, she has a world to explore, and a destination to reach.
She’s had her fun, and gotten at least some of a feel for the surroundings, enough to adapt to it at least. It’s been nearly two weeks since she left the fortress city- it’s time, now, to move. She was given a request by something mighty and terribly, terribly broken. The fortress city spoke into her with such force, such fervor… such pain. Such fear. Such long-form horror. It gave her a place, and it had begged.
Even if she were not looking for power, or trying to explore, or trying to find the tools needed, she would still go.
It begged, and she would not deny a fellow victim, no matter the scale of the shared horror.
So she runs, due east, through impossible overgrowth, deeper into the 4th ring. She traces a strange instinct, planted within her Heart, out across vines so thick and dense that she could dig straight down into them and find nothing but more vine, beneath trees so vast and strange that they change how the sky looks. She runs, and she moves so fast that the air bends, and pulls her hair back in a curtain around her, and dances to the beat of so many hearts and the pulsing of forever-blood.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
She is building, even now. Ever-changing, ever-shifting, making more and more and more of herself and making sure that everything she makes is distinct or powerful compared to before. She has people she loves and wants to protect working inside her, building themselves in their own ways, and so many possibilities to look into. The beast-tide that she heard about, the one that helped her break the fortress city around her. Whatever plots and possibilities that Taurus has pinned on this place, including the implication that something is to come in just over two years now. Getting strong enough to come back and change the world, get revenge and stop the Fengs and people like them, find a way to provide for and protect Maen, Kaena, Qen Hou, Hao Nera, Taran, nevermind everyone else she’s met that does not deserve pain like hers-
She stops that train of thought. Too vast, at least for now. That’s for long-term brain to think about. For now, she has a destination, a plea, and nowhere else to go, at least until Many-Grasping recognizes some sign of civilization and they have any reason to go to them.
So she runs, and there is joy in the running. There is a vast and joyful power in the freedom to choose a shape, even one that limits her, and push it into such a form that it challenges what should be possible.
She spends the better part of another day just running, the world moving past her in blinding velocity. She has to use her Overclocking technique just to make sure she can process what her senses give her, and she launches herself forward further and further.
It’s not enough.
The second day into the latest stretch of her travels sees her finally abandoning the human form, shifting into something much more complex. Six legs, panther-like but armed with insectile piston-mechanics, jettison her forward further and farther, her body a sleek and well-designed engine of mobility. She dashes from vine to vine, moves from branch and shrub with the lightest step her size can afford, reaching closer and closer to the point where air resistance becomes a wall to push against, impeding her.
So she streamlines. Faster. Faster.
And still, her objective feels like it’s barely any closer.
On the third day, she finds herself drifting. Her ability to adapt has made the movement almost instinct by now, her body as optimized as she can make it without either switching her Overclocking target or pushing to try and enact the technique on two different systems at once. The primary concern there is an ironic one- the more she grows, the more focus and awareness it takes to maintain Overclocking on the necessary system. As it is, multiple brains are required to sustain Overclocking on multiple brains, and the stress of it redoubles if she has to apply it to any section of her incredibly complex body. Add to that the constant regeneration, further draining her Qi reserves and generators, and it’s not something that’s exactly easy to sustain.
She does manage it for a while, striking a balance, but upon nearly losing a limb on a branch she missed whizzing by, she reduces it back down. Something else to train, later. She’s running out of time and ability, even with all her advancements, and not for the first time, she reflects on the fact that most higher-level cultivators need centuries to advance, even in the Imperial age.
She doesn’t have centuries.
She’ll figure it out.
As her attention wanders, though, she starts to notice more. Not needing quite so much focus on her movement, instinctive as it’s becoming, she can pay closer attention to the minutiae that she’s dashing by, the minor details she’s barely even noticing. She starts to pick up on things that she’d missed, entering an almost meditative place as she runs.
There are trails here. Like in the dead desert, but not exactly. There, it was about awake or asleep, dead or alive. Here, it’s more like patterns, wandering through the underbrush. Where prey-forms wander, predator-forms follow, and the variety and types of flora make eddies and ripples in the movements of both. The shadows of the leaves above, the trunks holding them miles high, shape which plants grow where, and how.
Always and forever, patterns. She feels the tree of flesh and blood, of organ and synergy, ripple in her inner world, sprouting just a centimeter further. In this pattern that she tracks, there is Dao, the patterns to which the concepts of life, death and more all play. Her tree of the Dao of Life stirs, ever so faintly, as she recognizes what she’s seeing.
And then, a break in the pattern. A note in the symphony that does not fit.
Panic, but not animal fear. Adrenaline, its taste intermingled with a very sapient dread.
She doesn’t need to turn her head- to do so now would only send her body skittering wildly off-course. Her senses ping on the new sensation, over and over, and track it back.
About ten miles off course, further south. A younger, smaller cluster of vines, the tree they hang and grow from barely half the size of the ancestral behemoths surrounding them. As her awareness pans over towards it (ten miles? She’s following the patterns, sure, but the last time she remembers checking it, it took all her focus to look half that far), she more properly tracks the responses, and-
There. The heartbeat of something young, the forest and her own senses feeding back in a cycle to show her where she needs to go. Behind it, three more heartbeats, steadier, focused, missing the scent of panic that her synesthesia tells her is flooding the younger one- and one thing more. One thing that hits her senses like a truck.
Powdered dust. Like marble, turned to a fine powder. Cold, unfeeling, precisely alchemical in a way she knows intimately.
The smell of Imperial formations.
Here, in the fourth ring, weeks of travel out from the fortress city. Chasing after someone.
There is a thrill of joy at the thought. None of the fear she expected or worried might taint her, none of the guilt she might once have made herself fear- joy.
There is no need to hide herself here. No need to think of what will be thought by her ‘masters’. Here are Imperials, chasing someone through a land that is not theirs. Here she is, flush with power and lethal skill.
She turns her head, and a bullet-sleek body cuts through the air like a blade as she shifts a perfected form to a new heading.
She turns, and begins Overclocking.
Supreme Body Art: Gigant, to ensure that her internal morphology and impossible size work.
Supreme Body Art: Overclocking, doubled up to push neurology and tendons into a state of overdrive.
And then… a thought.
Her bullet-sleek body cuts through the air like a blade.
Her inner world stirs as the Heart hears her desire, and the trees that are metaphor and pattern realized stretch through her comprehension into the world.
Supreme Body Art: Pressurized Indigo
Dao of the Gun.
Dao of the Blade.
A bullet’s path is to launch from where it is fired to where it is pointed.
A blade’s path is to slice apart what is before it.
With a twist of reality, she is both more of a bullet and more of a blade than she once was, Dao weaponized into her being. A burst of pressurized indigo blood explodes out from jets behind her, launching her forward, her nature taking on aspects of the gun and blade, and she feels the air whiplash open and boom all around her as she breaks the barrier of sound.
Bullets, famously, are not very good at stopping. Not without damage.
She smells the panic and the fear of the heartbeat-pulse she followed as she lands, her eyes catching sight into sound that tells her of the horror and fear of her arrival.
The world explodes, a vine turning to wooden debris and cast into tumultuous explosion on her arrival. The canyon between it and the vine beside it ring out with a thunderous explosion, only for a second to echo in a moment later, the sound of her arrival delayed behind her from sheer velocity. She can smell blood that leaks out of ears, hear the trembling impact of viscera and internals quaking under the impact, taste the Qi recoil from the force and become flavored by aspects of impact, sound, and explosive violence.
And then, as the chips of wood and detonated plant matter flutter and clatter to the ground, she emerges. From out of near-liquified biology, she reforms herself, reabsorbing the damaged matter and folding a new body, fresh and mostly humanoid, out into reality in its place.
She shades her eyes against the sun, exposed to long-shadowed landscapes from her arrival, and catches sight of the source of what she sensed. Four people, three of them human and wearing armor of black, jade and gold, one of them wearing an ornate set of robes seemingly made entirely from woven grasses of different colors.
Raika smiles, seven feet tall, entirely nude and with eyes that glow as black sclera juxtapose against rainbow-radiant pupils.
“What a joy it is to meet you all,” she says. “What have we here?”