Li Shu turns, looking to Many-Grasping as the beastkin woman snaps upright, looking out from the cave they’re in. Raika did a fine job in building and fortifying the place, and in the hours she’s been gone, she’s done her best to secure it further. It’s not much, but she’s set some arrays around the space, simple runes for alarm and to manifest small shields around the cave entrance. Enough to discourage stray animals and forewarn them of something incoming, but she’s still working on refining the formulas for runes to properly hide them.
She’s currently in the middle of carving in fresh formulae to keep Qi-flows smooth, calm any ripples they might cause with their presence, but it’s delicate work. She’s only got half an array complete when Many-Grasping startles.
“What’s wrong?” she asks with a whisper.
Many-Grasping turns to her, and does… it’s that not-language that Raika seems to have figured out, but Li Shu hasn’t had the chance to study it yet.
“Say again?” she asks, holding her focus on her Sacrifice.
Through the keratin, she feels Many-Grasping’s heartbeat, breathing rate, bloodflow. It’s not perfect, but she tracks a little bit more, and before Many-Grasping gets exasperated and starts to point, Li Shu figures it out.
“Enemies? Coming in fast, right? Same direction as Raika?”
Many-Grasping blinks, then nods. She makes a sort of chuffing noise, and a series of hand gestures, but once again, Li Shu has to rely on her Sacrifice to figure out what she’s saying.
“Maybe enemies. Risks. You step back, ok? Go to the back of the cave, keep an eye on Jin, keep him safe.”
Many-Grasping hesitates. Another set of hand-gestures, another moment of interpretation through bio-scanning.
“...I’ll be fine. I can handle the arrays, remember? And I’m Core Formation realm, you’re Qi-Gathering. Better me than you two.”
Still a moment of hesitation. Many-Grasping looks like she wants to fight, like she’s willing to struggle either way. She was told, by Raika, to help them, in that weird language without words, and while Li Shu doesn’t know the details of what went through that communication, she can feel how seriously Many-Grasping is taking this.
She reaches a hand towards Many-Grasping, a sign of peace.
“We’ve got a kid and someone incapacitated in there. I can manage the arrays to keep us hidden, and I’m strong enough to put up a fight. Raika wouldn’t hold it against you to do what you can, rather than getting yourself killed.”
Many-Grasping isn’t very vocal, even without a shared language. Still, she gives a little grunt, quiet and breathy… and then reluctantly pulls back, keeping her eyes on the entrance as she retreats.
Li Shu, meanwhile, splits her focus. It’s not easy, and certainly not the multi-thought that Raika can maintain, but just like cultivation can create a trance-state that makes it easier to visualize, so does her Sacrifice. When she focuses on it, it’s like her attention slowly gets diffuse, spread across each of the keratin constructs and the quasi-core that’s forming from one of them.
She’s not sure it’s supposed to do that. But then, she knows for a fact that her Truth interacted strangely with her use of the Craft. While all Craft users apparently keep one Truth, she added a few extra.
As Above, So Below.
As Without, So Within.
To All Things, A Cost.
All of it revolves around balance and reciprocation. The small things in the big things, the big things in the small things, a balance of dualities, and to change it, a price.
She’s willing to pay a price to keep those under her care safe.
To All Things, A Cost.
But she can choose the currency, if not the price.
She can feel it. The ways that her Sacrifice might grow, what it hungers for.
The Qi is what it is made of, but by being a Sacrifice, it can consume more. It has fed on medicine, healing and biology, and to further it, it wants payment along the same direction.
She starts to feel lightheaded as she feels blood drain from her body and, as if by magic, appear in her Sacrifice, tinting the keratin red. She gets short of breath as she pushes her oxygen into them. She feels her hands begin to bleed and ache as skin and surface tissue slowly vanishes from them, empowering her Sacrifice further.
She falls deeper into the trance, feeling and knowing how her Sacrifice works, what it can do. She is it, and it is her, and as she wills it, it begins to move.
As Within, So Without
As Above, So Below
What would have taken her another two hours of work instead takes less than a minute as her needles carve across the stone all around her. She feels her Qi drain out, her cultivation struggling to hold on to its half of her soul, and it takes all her focus to make the enhanced speed into something useful rather than random chickenscratch.
And then she falls to her knees, her meridians drained near-dry by the act, but the array is done. The area around the cave is wrapped with runes carved into the stone, and she can already feel the Qi in the air beginning to shift, flowing over the space like there is no cave to drift in and out of.
Array-work is fucking hard. She’s not sure it’ll work, but… it’s the best she can do.
She takes a few steps back into the cave, letting the array do its work. As she waits, she takes a few herbs out of her bag, and shapes two of her Sacrifices into a mortar and pestle. A few moments later, she rolls the mashed paste into a ball, improvising a pill. No furnace here, no heat to cook with, but that’s fine, she wouldn’t have time anyways. She swallows it whole, letting the Qi of the plants and their properties begin to mold into her body.
It won’t get her back to full, but it’s enough that she’ll have something when the danger arrives.
And then she waits.
She’s not a fighter. She hopes that she never will be. But behind her, there is an unconscious young man, a child, and a woman no older than her with less than half her cultivation.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She remembers what she told Raika. That she trusts her to do the right thing, and that her killing wasn’t some impulse or monstrous instinct.
She hopes that she trusts herself to make that same choice.
She never senses them. Not even when they land right outside the cave.
A couple of vines, some hanging greenery- all that keeps them from seeing her. She’s gotten used to sensing Raika’s energy- it’s not cultivation, but she exudes a kind of aura from how much power she casually carries around. These strangers don’t even have that.
They look dead.
Not like corpses. Not like the wounded.
One of them turns to look in her direction, and its head is a skull, wrapped in glass. It is filigreed in gold with incredible complexity, motifs of delicate flowers and anatomical models giving the impression that the skull is resting on a golden field.
The rest of its body is wrapped in a long set of robes, but they’re as intricate and complex as the glass relic it wears. Wisps of smoke rise from it like steam in cold air, and as it turns to face her, she catches a glimpse of a hand from within its robes, a glimpse of its chest.
All bone. Skeletal tissue, somehow alive- yet completely lacking in Qi that she can sense.
The other person, next to him, is a woman, or at least feminine-seeming. They are dressed in similar robes, but more of their skin is exposed, and-
Oh.
There’s no skin.
The raw musculature is exposed, but the person seems undisturbed by it, and nothing is leaking out, nothing affecting the color of her robes. She wears bluish-white, the detail on them enough to classify them as a work of art, and Li Shu recognizes pieces of something that might be runes woven in.
The feminine-looking stranger, equally dead to her Qi senses, also turns to look towards the cave.
Li Shu doesn’t dare to even breathe.
The undead turns to the skinless one, their facial muscles exposed to the air around bright and staring eyes. They seem to communicate without words for a moment. Not in that all-language that she’s started to pick up on, either- just like their Qi, whatever communication they use besides eye-contact is nonexistent to her senses.
Her lungs start to hurt. She can feel her heartbeat screaming from the lack of oxygen.
She doesn’t even twitch.
Slowly, the smoke from the moving skeleton begins to grow, expanding out further. It begins to take on vague shape, turning from formless grey wisps into something like hands, reaching out. Then into faces, screaming silently, their eyes hollow sockets, the illusion of teeth gnashing out against an invisible screen.
And then it grows further.
The smoke billows out wider, vaster, until the hands and half-formed bodies grow to straddle the space between the vines. The grass begins to wither, turning grey and black, like the hands the size of buildings that reach for every part of the little valley are bringing a monochrome filter with them.
And then both of the strangers snap their heads to the side, staring out in the direction Raika went in.
Li Shu has to track her memory afterwards to figure out what she saw. They’re gone, faster than she can track, and it’s only after the fact that she recognizes how it happened.
The skinless, feminine figure twitched, and then her robes, blueish and gilded, suddenly unfurled.
There were veins in it. Like skin.
It wrapped around them both, and then they vanished.
Li Shu keeps her breath held. She refuses to move. She refuses to move her Qi, to so much as allow her Sacrifices to twitch.
Only when she can hold it no further does she let air slip out. Only when she feels like her skull is about to split does she breathe back in.
She couldn’t see, or sense, or feel any Qi.
But that woman… that was a Sacrifice. Li Shu can’t think of anything else it could be. She was wearing her own skin.
And that skull, that mist that exuded from it. The way that it grew, so very fast, until the figures in the cold steam were larger than she’s ever seen Raika turn into?
She doesn’t need to sense Qi to know power.
A few minutes later, Raika returns. Even tracking the sort of quasi-aura she expects from her, Li Shu can barely sense it, like she’s been wildly diminished.
And she’s on the back of… a spirit beast? It has a human upper body, but there are four sort of… hands, or paws, each one ending with fingers that have hooves. The creature has long hair, blue-green skin on the humanoid body and a rich brown-green on its lower half, and it towers over Raika, even at her near seven feet of height. Beside the two of them, there’s something like… like a parody of a human, long and gangly, with ears that arc behind it like that of a wolf or a predatory hare.
Before she’s even had time to stand up or see Raika’s reaction to judge a response, the ghoulish spirit beast turns to face her, its head swiveling almost 200 degrees to look back at her.
Raika moves, but its slow. Weak. Did they hurt her?
“Hey! Li Shu!” she yells, and her voice is strong. Enough that Li Shu breathes a sigh of relief.
Though she also makes sure that her Sacrifice is kept out of sight, wrapped tight and close to her body under her robes.
Better to keep her ace hidden, on the off chance she might be able or have to do… something. And it’s probably best to do whatever she can to avoid insulting the new visitors.
She can’t sense much from Raika, but from these two?
They have Qi.
Cautiously, Li Shu steps out into the open, trying not to show how close the burning weight of their presence is to bringing her to her knees.
And of course, there’s Raika, cool as a cucumber and smiling.
And standing between her and the beasts, blocking their view of her. Very carefully- and very purposefully.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The beasts haven’t spoken, almost at all. She’s fairly certain that the bunny-person either can’t or doesn’t, with Intent or otherwise, and the centaur seems more the calm and stoic type. She doesn’t push. In all honesty, she could use some sleep- it’s been weeks since she shut down all her brains to rest at once, and now, with only one, she is exhausted.
No rest for the wicked, though. The taste of the Feng is still there in her teeth, and considering that she can’t really escape her new friends, she also can’t let them see Li Shu and the others without some way to protect her friends and her apprentice. And… kind of her passenger and potential lover.
She lives a complicated social life.
It’s not enough to bring out any of her real techniques, but she might be able to squeeze out one or two True Flame explosives and a Pressurized Indigo at most.
After that… all she can do is unleash her Reactor, and hope that she survives the resulting release of control.
Li Shu steps out, and… mmh. The smell of fear. Li Shu is keeping it contained, controlling it well, but it leaks out into the air.
Briefly, Raika’s mind flickers back to how that sort of fear can taste. Like bitter citrus, sharp, but refreshing.
She has enough Qi left now that it’s… doable, at least, to form a sub-brain. Enough to get her synesthesia back in action. She uses the spatial awareness to step in between the line of sight of the two Divine Beasts and her friend.
“Hey, healer. Doing alright?”
Li Shu looks rattled, but she gives a shaky smile. “Alive and healing, beastie. The others are alright. Safe for now. Are these…”
“They’re big scary monster, and they happen to like me enough not to kill me right away. Not sure about the white one, though- they seem twitchy.”
The centaur lets out a huff of air, a mix between a snort and a laugh. Raika turns to him, raising an eyebrow.
He shrugs. “That is the kindest descriptor of the Pale Thresher I have heard in some time. “Twitchy”. Is funny.”
The wolf-rabbit hisses at him like a snake, and the sound comes out weird, like from a deep well.
“Don’t worry,” Raika says. “They know that if the twitchy one or the honorable horse-person here do anything, I’ll burn this forest down with them in it. And none of us want that.”
The… Pale Thresher turns to look at her, and its mouth hangs open a bit wide, like a doll with a slack string. Its gums are black, but its teeth are pearl-white and thin as needles, layered thick as a carpet. A hint of its Intent leaks into the air, thick and ripe.
It does not say it in words, but it does not need to. The world gets a little bit darker at the Killing Intent it exudes. Not a prideful, fragile thing like the Feng- the Thresher exudes Intent like it’s all it can do to stop killing. Like killing is and should be as natural as breathing air.
Raika meets its eyes head on and does the same.
Deep in her core, it is beyond doubt to her that she will kill everything in this forest and herself if she has to. The deaths would be just payment for harm on one of those she loves and protects.
It’s not quite as thick as the Thresher’s, more like a syrup than molasses- but it’s enough for it to know that it would hurt. That she would cost it.
It almost seems to relish the thought.
And then the centaur shifts its weight a bit, and the Thresher hisses again. But it backs down first.
Raika grins, bloody-toothed and hollowed out from her own violence.
And victorious.
“Now that that’s settled,” she says, turning to Li Shu who looks quite pale; “how’s everybody else doing? Any reason for me to go and burn down the forest yet?”
Li Shu gives her an exhausted look, but lets out a little breath of relief.
“They’re fine. And I’ve got some news about what happened while you were gone.”