Expanding her inner world is all fine and good. Improving its quality? Absolute delight.

Not what she came here for. Not what she needs right now.

While it’s never a bad thing to improve one’s foundations, she came here to make weapons. If there are things like the Pale Thresher wandering about, and the Empire doesn’t even seem worried about the 4th ring? She’ll never beat them, and the people who want to stay alongside her won’t do much better.

She’s not so stupid that she hasn’t learned that she can’t do it alone. Or, more importantly, that she doesn’t want to. Maybe she might feel a little more secure if the people she loves are all safe and snuggled up tight, but they’re not the kind of people to agree to that or even want it, and that’s why she cares for them in the first place.

People should be allowed to grow. Her fear doesn’t change that, and her fear hasn’t ruled her for a long time. Next best thing, then, is to help those that she can reach to push forward at a higher pace.

And, of course, make weapons.

So she reaches to her Heart once more, this time as directly as she can.

Request.

Acknowledgement. Continue.

Assistance. Transformation. Creation. Deeper.

There is a pause then.

Confirm.

…that’s new. It’s never asked her to reconfirm something like that.

Concern? Danger?

Nothing.

Confirmation Required.

The Intent its emitting shapes itself into a request for confirmation, but behind it, wrapped under the direct meaning, is something she hasn’t felt before. Her Heart has felt fear, contentment, curiosity, passion, plenty of emotions before, even if their complexity is limited.

This doesn’t feel like that.

Confirmation Required.

Not… not quite hunger. Not quite excitement.

Something almost like… arousal?

Confirmed. Request = Deeper Shaping.

Foundational Process = Confirmed. Acknowledged. Glory Be.

And the world starts to shake.

Her Heart is not under her control. Not really. When she was mortal, her heart beat entirely independently from her conscious mind, and this one isn’t all that different- she can feel what it’s doing, but she doesn’t understand it, and she doesn’t control it, really. They work together, they’re part of the same being, but she doesn’t know what it is, and it doesn’t seem to understand much beyond its instincts and desires.

So. Glory Be. That’s new.

As is the thing slowly curling up from within the pond.

A wave of tendrils emerge, like a flock of eels coming to the surface to feed. They crawl and slither over one another, splashing water that is not water across the ground. They writhe around the edges of the pond, like its borders have expanded, tumbling and twisting against the reeds at the edge of the water.

That’s disturbing enough. The changes to the Qi circuits are worse.

Previously, they felt like a single natural formation, spread out across her inner world. She copied the pattern onto her veins outside this space, with some tweaks to account for biology, to create her improved Qi generation.

Now, they twist and writhe. They flex and make the ground shake, as if the entire world is on the back of a vast serpent.

A strand breaks free, and then another, and then another, and they begin to crawl towards the vein-strands that emerge from the pond.

They crawl through her inner world, one after another, and up to the hill she has claimed as her workspace- and when they converge, right before her, the pulse almost feels like a real heartbeat.

And then the ground rises.

Bone white, like the seat that her Heart made for her. But this is much more alive.

It’s not really an anvil. Even beyond the half-real nature of her inner world, she doesn’t actually know how to forge something in the literal sense. Maybe someday, if she has the time.

Instead, she stands before a stone slab, rising up nearly to her stomach, its surface perfectly flat and smooth. It has veins running through it, glowing faintly with a colorless radiance, tinted ever so slightly indigo-red by the feeling of blood running through its structure.

Process = Complete. Progress. The World Is More. Glory Be.

Again, that phrase. Glory Be. And the longest sentence she’s heard from it yet- “The World Is More”.

Dink trembles, leaping from her shoulder to land on the anvil. It pats the stone, ringing with a sympathetic note. [Artistry Of Reshaping Function] waddles over, its gait a bit smoother but still an awkward cluster, and puts its faces right to the table, a dozen machine-arms reinforced by wax running tools over its surface.

Raika can’t help it. She laughs.

“I am… really glad we’re heading somewhere where people might know more about you, buddy.”

Acknowledgement. Eagerness + Curiosity.

“Alright. I can work with this.”

She does not need to speak. Speech is for strangers and people with language centers.

She is the Soul of a triumvirate beast, and she is the alien Heart, and she is the incarnated avatar of [Artistry Of Reshaping Function]. And Dink, in all his glory, is also here.

She does not need to ask anything. She is all of the pieces of her, and the pieces are all her, and they mesh like they have been made to.

Radiant metal begins to glisten, suddenly atop the anvil in a dozen variants. Blacksteel, dredged from her still-regenerating reserves, falls next to it like a rain of glass shards and flechettes. Flesh bubbles in the cracks of the anvil, ready to be shaped, with lots of free space between her borders and the band.

And the flora all around, shaped by the patterns of reality, bend close, as if eager to add their elements to the creation.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Yeah. She can work with this.

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

Raika sits in front of Li Shu, her body manifesting from out of the wall. In the hours of travel, she’s made enough of herself to give folks different rooms, and her friend has taken a moment to vomit in the corner now that the others are alright.

Li Shu senses her, even without Qi.

“Sorry,” she says, wiping her mouth. Her breathing is ragged, but steady.

“It’s fine. I’ll vent it or recycle it.”

“Please don’t eat my vomit. Have better standards, I beg.”

Raika shrugs, making her dreads jingle against each other. She put little beads in them this time.

“Don’t sell yourself short. Half of that stuff is from me anyways, remember? Lots of good stuff in there.”

“I reiterate- please don’t eat my vomit.”

Raika smiles, soft. “Sure.”

Li Shu says nothing for a while. When she eventually sits up, her back to the wall opposite the one Raika has formed herself from, her breathing has steadied a bit, and her eyes, while bloodshot, are calm.

“Did you try to pick a fight with that thing?”

She shakes her head, forming a pipe as she does. “No. I thought it, and I guess it leaked out. I wasn’t trying to project Intent, but… well, I can sense Intent from things that don’t know how to project it. Should have caught myself.”

Li Shu laughs, soft and tired. “Oh, gods. You really are crazy, huh? Wipe out an Imperial base and then, look here, a Divine Beast, let me wonder if I can kill it around it.”

“Puts credit to the stories of cultivators killing people for no reason, though! Maybe they could sense Intent!”

“Or maybe they were… see, I was going to say something scathing, and now I’m scared it would hear me.”

“It might, actually. We’re not as deep in my biology as last time, I’m still rebuilding.”

Li Shu snorts. “I’ll be careful then.”

For a while, silence.

Then-

“Did you do something? A few minutes ago? The Qi channels you have felt… weird, for a minute. Like something shifted. Can’t pinpoint it though.”

Raika blinks. “I… yes. Something in my inner world, though, not my Body. You felt that out here?”

Li Shu levitates one of her Sacrifice needles up, gesturing vaguely at it. “Blame these things. Usually they just sense things aligned to what they’re aligned to, but they positively hummed a minute ago.”

“...any idea why that is?”

Li shu sighs, breathing out long and slow. “Yeah. So… you know how my Truth let me keep my meridians, instead of transferring them into my Sacrifice? I think it left them emptier than normal. I can store Qi in my Sacrifice and my Dantian, but I also think I may have sort of… skipped ahead with the Craft stuff by accident.”

“How so?”

“Well… I sacrificed my nails. The keratin on my fingers, to be precise. Normally, a Witch then loses the ability to cultivate, so they instead do rituals and arrays only, and their Sacrifice shapes the arrays by imbuing its properties into the working. In my case, stuff might… I don’t know, crystallize? Heal itself or generate more with power? Keratin-stuff. It’s different for every Witch, according to the texts we…”

“Got from her dead body, yeah.”

“...that. Anyways, the step after that, once they understand the properties being expressed, then a Witch is meant to put new concepts into the Sacrifice. It has… “room” for it, for want of a better term. Similar to how She of Still Waters had concepts of… I don’t know, monster-spawning in her eye-Sacrifice. Like you’re teaching it… not Dao, but-”

“The stuff beneath Dao. The things the patterns are made of.”

“Right, that. In the fortress city, when I went into that trance, I think I started imbuing concepts into my Sacrifice. Mostly healing and medicinal ones, with some of biology. Wasn’t on purpose.”

Raika scoffs. “Would you have chosen something different?

Li Shu joins her in the laugh. “No, I don’t think so. But… I’m not sure what to do now. Just making my Core more powerful, advancing that way, is all fine and good, but I don’t want to neglect the Craft. I think now… I either pick a second Sacrifice, or try to refine the concept in my current one.”

“...Any preference?”

They meet each other’s, and there is a moment of nonverbal understanding between them.

Li Shu wants to be strong enough to heal the world, to know all that can be known about the medical arts.

Raika wants to be strong enough to change the world, to make herself into something more.

“I’ll try to refine my Sacrifice. Keep it specifically to the idea of healing, deepen the connection rather than just using it as a tool.”

“I’ll make you a cultivation chamber. Vent Qi into it, so you can improve your core faster. And… would something to work on help?”

Li Shu smiles, and for a moment, she is neither afraid nor exhausted. She looks happy, and relaxed, and like she’s about to laugh at something silly her friend has said. “Why yes, Raika. I would, in fact, like you to make a bunch of model bodies with creative ailments for me to practice on.”

Raika matches her smile with a grin of her own. “Sounds like a challenge. I’ll do my best to keep things interesting.”

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

Raika forms a body out of the wall next to Jin.

To the kid’s credit, he doesn’t scream. He doesn’t even jump out of his seat. He does startle a bit, but in his defense, she did just grow a homunculus out of the wall and fill it with organs and bones.

It’s faster that way. Takes longer to grow the whole thing beforehand.

“Hey, kid.”

“Hello master.”

“How are you doing?”

He frowns, turning away from the project in his hands to look at her. “After the beast’s Intent?”

“I- hmm. Yes.”

He smiles, and it looks… surprisingly reassuring. “I’m alright, master. I dreamt bigger things than that for… well, apparently a week straight. It was a lot, but… not too much.”

She sniffs him. He blinks, only half-accustomed to being suddenly sniffed, which is really his own fault.

He smells… ok. A bit tense, but not much. The taste of his synapses is fine, steady and unpanicked, and he doesn’t glow any colors that worry her.

Synesthesia is great.

“Ok. I was wondering, though-”

“I’ll be stronger soon.”

She blinks. “...what do you mean?”

He holds up the Blacksteel statue he’s been carving, and her breath catches.

It’s a sandal. Small enough to fit into a palm, but undeniably a sandal. One that she recognizes.

“...I think I’ve figured out some insight. I… I sort of know who I am. And it’s like I can feel some of the steps to get there.”

It hurts, but she breathes in.

“What insight might that be?”

“It was the conversations with you, master. How you honor the memory of those you’ve lost. When I think of the deaths I’ve seen, of the Death… it resonated with what you’ve taught me. Not just the cultivation. I want to honor those who have gone. I think that people deserve peace when they’re gone, and… I don’t think that’s common.”

“No, kid. I don’t think it is.”

He nods, picking up energy. “Exactly. I want to honor the dead… and the stronger I get, the more I think the dead respond to that.”

Raika takes a step back, leaning against the wall as she looks at him. Really looks at him.

In the last few years of her life, Raika has universally been surprised by the change that even one year can bring. She was a crippled beggar not even five full years ago, a member of the Empire the year after that, and so on. Even still, it’s easy to forget that for all that a year is almost a thirtieth of her lifespan, it’s just under a tenth of Jin’s.

Well. Less than that, now.

It’s been almost a year since she met the kid, and he’s grown. From a kid of maybe twelve years to thirteen, the edge of puberty is starting to hover around him, but it’s deeper than that. He’s seen much, and what’s more, he’s had the wisdom and the strength to grow from it rather than break from it.

She helped a bit, but… nah.

She chose a very good student.

“What do you want to do next, kid?”

He turns to look at her, and she smiles at just how intense his gaze is.

“I want to make Death into more than just an End.”

She feels the words thrum, deep down into the core of him. It tastes almost like Truespeak, like the words have more weight than they should.

And, for just a moment, she glimpses the shape of a once-person, touching the carved sandal. It has no face, barely a body, barely a hand- but it is a boy, not much older than Jin, and it carries a hint of a familiar smell.

Even as she watches, between the words and the grave marker he has carved, something changes in the echo, even as it changes in her apprentice.

“It takes strength to do something that big,” she tells him.

He nods.

She crouches, smiling, her dreads jingling against each other. “To be free to choose is to be strong. Remember when I told you that?”

“...when you killed that cultivator who followed us from the village.”

She nods. “Mmh. I wasn’t strong enough to have different choices then. Are you strong enough to choose something for the whole world?”

He doesn’t hesitate.

“Not yet.”

She can feel her lips stretching, a grin so wide it starts to hurt.

“Good answer, kid. And in the meantime?”

She feels that weight from before rise back up out of him, resonating with the world. He smiles back at her, though his is almost contemplative, and answers her.

“I Honor The Dead.”

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

She meets her third and final passenger. Many-Grasping is still a bit out of sorts, but she’s recovered surprisingly quickly from the show of Intent and Truth and… whatever the hell the Pale Thresher is.

She turns to Raika and bows.

Lord.

Raika takes a deep breath.

She lets it out, long and slow.

“So I know you’re a guest. It’s in my duty as your host to protect you, and you’ve caused no trouble so far. I have fed and sheltered you, and you have been loyal and as helpful as circumstances allow.”

Gratitude. This One = Honored. Wish To Do More.

“...even if you end up representing me, or caught up in the trouble I cause?”

Honored. Eager.

Raika nods.

“Alright. I think I can help with that. How do you feel about eating more of me?”

…Arousal.