Feng Chun is afraid.

Pride has defined her. Pride has elevated her. Pride, and the privilege which spawned it, has made her into the impossible, victorious Warrior she is today.

Feng Chun crawls like a maggot on the ground as she bleeds.

Life-saving defensive artifacts are for failure. They’re for death and ruin, and no Feng family member should ever allow any of these things to exist. The pendant of jade and crystal-grown gold lies shattered now, turned to sand and debris beneath her robes.

Even still, she has to crawl.

The monster… it should not have been. Any beast can master Dao, can understand and feel the patterns of things, but that creature… it Cut her like an Aspirant. Cut into a deeper thing, behind the pattern, behind the Dao, from which the Dao comes from. It tore apart her Domain, and her forest has always been one of her strongest techniques. No sword should have been able to cut that. Her own Dao should have stopped it, should have made even a Blade into part of the Hunt, kept the situation under her Control.

And then that second thing. That radiance. Beyond fire, beyond life and death. It had spoken to something foundational, something as deep as the DIVISION she has only seen in those at or beyond the level of Aspirants.

It should not be.

And yet, whatever technique that the monster used, it forced a gift from her family to be broken. Even with that protection, which should have been able to save her from all but a Daemon of the seventh circle or above, it still damaged her severely. Besides the arm she had to rip off, she can feel her intestines crawling with crystalling maggots, feel something like bird-beaks made out of chalk and sunlight digging from her collarbone out to air, feel her legs turned from meat into soap and wax and leaves. She is unmade.

She crawls desperately towards the barracks.

There are medicinal pills there. Arrays, for emergency contact. Defensive measures and enchantments. She might lock herself in the armory, perhaps, find a prosthetic limb she might forcibly attach so she can protect herself or just crawl faster.

The defensive artifact broke. Her family is coming for her. They’ll come for her. They’ll…

She does not let the word enter her mind. She will not be saved. She is Feng Chun, Warrior realm cultivator of one of the Empire’s great houses, and she is too proud to be saved.

But the thought circles like a hungry dog, ready to bite into her the moment she loses focus. Ready to make her into meat for the logical fallacy that is her current state.

It doesn’t matter. Deviated cultivation, damage to Truth and Soul, none of it matters. She has to live. She has to crawl. She has to find a way to reach safety. She has to make it.

Something steps in front of her.

It looks like a paw, but the claws are so very, very long. So very, very wide. Like daggers of black metal.

Her one remaining eye turns to look up. Her neck cracks, skin turned to clay, muscles half-slurry, as she tilts her face up towards it.

A single cyclopean eye stares down at her. Like a sky made out of gelatin, a perfect white ooze with a pupil ten times the size of a human head swimming in it. Behind it, at its edges, she can see a mane, like a lion, but made of wriggling tendrils, blood red and sharp as knives.

The eyeball makes a sort of wet popping noise, as if trying to say something. There is something almost like Killing Intent in the action, something familiar but fundamentally wrong. It promises violence with every movement, but not so much that the rampant CHANGE killing her is pushed to its conclusion.

Another gelatin-pop, like an eyeblink without blinking. The beast tilts its head like a cat, staring down at her. Her Qi senses are almost gone, but even still, she can feel this thing.

A Divine Beast. A lesser one, maybe, but a Divine Beast. Worthy of facing a Warrior realm master at their best, or more than one.

She almost whimpers. She forces it deep into her throat, choking it down.

Feng Chun is afraid.

The cat raises a single paw, a Dao of sharpness glowing in it-

“No.”

The voice isn’t human. It’s beyond guttural, like a meat grinder trying to make words, but there is something lyrical to it. It is beauty and horror at once, and it whispers against the same part of her that seems to be about to break, scraping against her Truth.

She turns her face, feeling part of her throat sloughing off in the action.

The monster is there.

It looks like a corpse. Like a dead body, left to be eaten by scavengers. It only pretends to be human, missing pieces, standing on legs that are more bone and tendon than flesh. It looks like it’s been burned alive, like parts of it have sloughed off like wax, and its body has some of the same strange features Feng Chun’s has, impossible combinations of random materials decorating gaping wounds.

Half its head is missing. Part of its brain matter is exposed, and its sternum gapes obscenely, dripping wet viscera onto the ground as it walks.

But it walks.

And deep behind that viscera, Feng Chun catches a glimpse of radiance, pulsing veins of CHANGE through the abomination.

It opens its mouth, the teeth that remain razor-sharp and jagged.

“She’s mine.”

The not-lion thing looks at the monster. Down at Feng Chun. Back up to the monster.

Again, the gelatin of its eyes does something like a movement. A blink without an eyelid.

It lowers its paw and steps back, all six legs cushioning it as it lays down.

The monster comes closer.

Feng Shun begins to crawl again, and this time she can’t hold in the sound of her fear. She sobs, the sound wet and strained through a body that is more a diagram of elements than a functioning organism. She crawls. She drags herself forward on her one remaining arm, leaving her hand behind as it crumbles into something like mud mixed with blood.

She is Feng Shun. She is the pride of her branch family. She is part of the great and supreme Feng clan, greatest of the great families, servants of the Emperor itself. She will become an Emperor one day. She will prove her value to the family and Take What Is Hers, and-

The sound of bone and jagged material marks another step closer. And then another.

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She sobs again. Her remaining eye can’t cry anymore, but it tries anyways, blood leaking onto her face. She tries to crawl faster, feeling her joints breaking, the different materials she has been CHANGED into pulling apart with the friction.

She just has to make it to the barracks. She just has to make it. Please. Please. She just has to make it there.

She can’t die here. She can’t die here. She can’t die here.

The monster gets closer.

Please.

She is Feng Chun.

She is-

She’s-

She’s so afraid.

A hand made of bone and molten flesh grabs the back of her head, and holds it still as the monster crawls atop her and begins to eat.

Her lungs don’t work well enough to scream anymore.

She is Feng Chun. She is Feng Ch…

She is Fen…

She is…

Afraid.

Hurts.

Afraid.

And then she’s gone.

—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Raika wakes up to the sound of herself chewing.

She existed before that point. She’s fairly certain she was making decisions, even. She remembers walking like she was in a dream, a strange haze of not-quite-thoughts rolling through a skull that she’s fairly certain is currently half-empty.

She swallows down something that tastes like fear and candied flesh, and only when part of it nearly slips out the side of her neck does she realize how bad it is.

She tries to form an eyeball to look around, but finds that for the first time in… maybe years? She has no Qi with which to do it.

Her body is empty.

She has to turn her head away from her meal to look behind herself, and its then that she sees where most of her has gone.

There is a hill made out of flesh behind her.

With Supreme Body Art: Gigant failing, her internal architecture collapsed. Spatial alteration is fine and good, and she’s not entirely sure how her Heart caused it in the first place or how it affects her weight (by rights she should crush anything but solid steel she stands on), but there’s limits. The internal weight of that much meat, that many organs and bones all together, is more than enough to turn a human body to jelly.

Her flesh is different, that’s true. The Qi saturation of her biology makes it so her body has properties far in excess of what a normal non-cultivator should have, but there’s limits. Without her brains maintaining the architecture of the Gigant technique, it fell apart.

There is a furrow of flesh vaguely in the shape of a humanoid. A trail of ruined biology, ripped free and dripped onto the floor, leads to her current form.

She has no Qi. She can only distantly feel her Heart, still moving, but it’s a far-ff feeling, like she can’t quite tell where to find it. Her inner world feels distant and quiet, and the impression she gets is one of lethargy, like its been drained.

It has. Of course it has. She drained every drop she could pull from her Reactor, and her entire body, all the dozens of vein-formations she used to farm Qi, are either missing or drained to nothing at all.

Slowly, she starts some of them working again.

As she waits for the Qi to generate, she continues to eat.

Her meal stopped struggling a while ago. She bites, and her stomach, even as she feels it leaking from gouges somewhere, fills with the taste of Qi-rich flesh.

It tastes like mana. Like ambrosia from the Heavens.

She bites, and she can taste tree bark. Hungry roots, thick and full of starches, dense and nutritious. She chews, and there is the flavor of leaves, fresh and bright, dark and herbal, like a salad made of juicy tea leaves. She swallows, and it goes down like a drink of vibrant sap, syrupy and rich. All throughout it, like a spice or an infusion, she can taste the shadow, a sort of vinegar and dark sugar marinade.

Her meal wriggles a bit. Reminds her to keep eating.

She tears off another morsel, chews it and swallows. Then another.

There’s a joint in the way. The meat is part glass here, part porcelain, but it is meat, and all of it is infused with Qi. She pulls and tears, and for a moment the meal almost struggles again- and then the joint pops off, and the top part of it comes off.

The flavor is different here. It cracks under her teeth, and she can taste hints of pride, like sour caramel. Notes of fear, like bitter citrus, made salty from adrenal panic, meld with the molasses-sweetness of dread, with a near-alcoholic tang of despair.

She keeps eating.

Only when she’s done, only when all that’s left is blood on the ground, does she look up.

By this point, her Qi generators have managed to kick up the smallest bit of energy. She repairs the rents in her organs, regrows a layer of skin. There’s no extra tissue she can use, not now. She managed to re-fuse with her split selves before, but both of them were alive then, flush with Qi. Now, the nerves are… dead.

Right? Probably?

Something to look into. Later. When she has a chance to figure out what “dead” means in the context of her neurology and how her Body works.

For now… she turns back to the creature before her.

Dancer-Between-Layers looks down at her, and while it has no mouth or tongue to speak of, it gives her the impression of a happy, panting cat, lounging in the sun.

Little Sister = Scary, it says, its Intent full of a mixture of joy, affection, and loving wariness.

She holds onto that last one in particular. If the Divine Beast tried to kill her here… there’s not much she can do to stop it. She’s got one brain to her name, and it’s still re-growing, firming itself up. It might be hours, might be days before she has her previous resources.

“I do my best,” she says, not trusting herself to properly use her Intent to speak. Despite everything, Truespeak, whatever it is, still comes to her easily. Just as her blood is thicker and richer than it should be, just as her stomach can digest Qi and fit way more than it should, her voice ripples with a deeper weight.

It has disadvantages, though. Every promise she’s made with it has felt… binding, powerful in a way they otherwise wouldn’t be, and she can’t lie while using it. Or maybe she could… but it feels like she really, really shouldn’t.

Do Well, the Dancer says. Eat Good. Much Bite. Many Chew.

“...Yes?”

Yes.

“...what do you want, Dancer?”

The Dancer once again uses its Intent and body language to imply something like a cat, panting, or a dog smiling with a loopy grin. Was Hungry. Was Curious. Now = Satisfied.

“Too much to expect for you to be worried about me, is it?”

She regrets it as soon as she says it. The voice, her Truespeak ringing, almost seems to pull against the Divine Beast, like it demands an answer to the question.

But before she can take it back, before she even worries about if she’s offered offense, the beast answers.

No.

She is silent for a moment.

Then, she bows, down at the waist.

“I am grateful for our relationship, then.”

This, of course, seems to inordinately please the beast, as it wiggles its flanks. The lidless eye of its face squirms pleasantly.

Happy For Sister. Survival = Optimal.

She huffs out a laugh. She’s exhausted. It’ll take her hours to get back to the others, and that’s if she can figure out a way to reconnect to severed ‘dead’ tissue before she travels. The feat she used to get here, using her Dao of the Gun to shoot herself across the world, is most certainly not an option for now.

But it’s done. The base is dead, and she has time now to make it back to them.

And then she blinks, and realizes there is something there.

Like it was standing in front of her all along, but her mind simply slid right past it. Something like Hao Nera’s amnestic technique, or the way that the Fisher hid its Intent, maybe.

It’s a bit shorter than her at around two meters. It too stands like a humanoid, but its arms are too long, its entire body too slender for it. It is coated in white fur, and long, slender ears extend back from its head, which is small, but made to appear even smaller by the size of the eyes on it.

In the time it takes her mind to catch up with the thing in front of her existing, she has already stepped back and prepared to swing, only one arm intact enough to do so.

And then her mind catches up to the other things she couldn’t notice before.

Behind her and to her right, her mundane senses (no secondary minds to create synesthesia with) speak to her of something tall, more than twice her height. It stands on four legs, but it has the upper body of a human. Each of its four legs ends in a hand, each finger ending in a hoof, and its main body is blue-green, like the color of a sea. Long, winding hair protects something like its modesty, and it stares at her with an eyeless face.

A third newcomer, off to one side. She hears a tearing sound, a bird that reminds her of some sort of ostrich mixed with a chicken and a peacock, its feathers dripping quicksilver-mercury, digging into the hill of meat that was once her. Sitting at its feet, relaxing atop a chitin-plate like it’s a chair, is a man wearing a complex weave of vines and a carefully embroidered shawl, his eyes a dark orange and his hair tuned to match.

She stops herself from looking from one to the next. Keeps herself from stepping back, from showing any sign of weakness.

The lapin-lupine-feline thing in front of her turns one of its eyes to face the Dancer-Between-Layers. For a moment, waves of Intent and nonverbal communication bounce between them, faster and more intricately than Raika can track right now.

It turns back to her.

Why Do This? It asks.

She’s surrounded, on all sides.

To her senses, not one of these things seems weaker than the Dancer.

She looks down at the bloodstain that was once a Warrior realm cultivator and a piece of the Empire’s rot.

She flicks her eyes to the rubble she has turned this fully-fortified forward base into.

She looks back at the humanoid spirit beast before her, its Qi powerful enough that she can taste the corpses beneath fields made for running in.

“Because I chose to.”

A long, drawn out silence.

And then, she hears the eyeless centaur give a chuckle.

Dancer smiles with its eye, sending out its Intent to the others.

Told You You Would Like Her.