She’s pushing further. She’s getting stronger.

It’s… it’s not that she was holding back before. Not on purpose. But always running, always moving, always needing to optimize, always needing to maintain resources. And some things, you just… don’t think about. It took her almost four months of concentrated thought, support, and madness to come up with her “reactor” idea, and every other transformation she’s made since then has been in a fit of inspiration, or the chaos of the moment.

But she needs more.

She’s trying very, very hard to make sure she doesn’t de-value the people around her, to make sure that she doesn’t lose perspective. She can’t fix the world. She isn’t the only person in it, either, and others deserve to try, to not be pushed aside for a myopic view of her perspective alone.

But she can do more. She can do more.

She has to do more.

As she spreads through the city, through the woods beyond it, she examines that. The need.

As veins of her Body spread through back-alleys and hidden corners, disguised with chromatophores and camouflage, she reflects. As little roots of her own climb up the sides of the great tree at the heart of the city, she wonders.

Is she still broken?

Her psyche is no longer divided, no longer compartmentalized for her own survival. The scars of the invasion on her mind by Zhoulong, another poorly thought-out consequence of her plans, have nearly healed over.

As she holds four conversations at once, she wonders if she is still broken.

She is herself, in the house that is her, speaking to an ancient beast, strange cultivators, and political allies. She is herself, in the back alleys of a city so alive that it rings in her ears, keeping a distant eye on a child that she has taken as her own and hurting from the beauty of watching him grow and just be. She is herself, speaking to a vendor, trying to see if she can convince him to accept a little extra for the quilts and woven clothes that she can smell his home on, the hands of his wife and their children and his sister on the threads.

And she is herself, stalking the darkness of the backstreets, looking for the dead and dying.

As she spreads, connected to herself by thin wires of neural fiber and her own ever-growing web of sensoria, she watches the world, and she wonders.

Is she still broken?

It’s a beautiful city. A beautiful place, really, kept in this perfect bubble of protection, of harmony with the overgrowth. The trees out there, some that she can see which dwarf even the one the city is built around, which transform the world with their Qi and their sheer scale, like humans are only microbes to them. Everywhere she looks, she sees life, even in the death of things, even in the shape of how farming, butchery, and funerary rites work.

So where are the wounded?

Qi is a wonderful thing, but it takes more than Qi to regrow limbs lost to war. It takes more than herbs, or manuals, or even healers- it takes talent, dedication, logistics, resources like housing, food, time. No city is truly capable of simply healing away all its sick, even if it were entirely willing, and she can’t imagine a place that would be, not even a place so alive and thriving as this.

So where are the sick?

Where are the wounded?

Where are the dying?

Is she broken? To look for it? To try and see?

In the time of a cultivator’s life, even a cultivator in the Division of War, a year is nothing. A year is a joke, something to be spent in and out of a meditative trance, or finding a specific resource, or acting on a mission from one’s sect or commander.

But she remembers the year. One year and a few weeks. Living on the streets, in the cold. Begging for money, for food, for attention, for someone to help. She remembers the pain of her joints, which hurt always, and the missing parts of her, which hurt worse, and the ache of her ribs against her skin, and the pounding, slow bruising of a body starved and poisoned.

One year. Nothing, in the grand scheme of things. With her biology, her powers, her Truth, she could probably crawl in a hole and not need to come out for a hundred times that. She’s closer to ascension than she ever dreamed of being, and only a few years after that one.

These people talk about the Invaders. Capital I. They live in fear, she can smell it, the scars and wounds on their psyches from living in danger beyond even the forests around them, protected as they are by the weight of those who choose to live amongst them.

So where are the broken?

She spreads, and as she spreads, she begins to feel the strain.

All things generate Qi. She took the minute amount that a human body could generate, trapped it inside herself, and pushed it to grow by cycling in… what might well be the worst way possible, but which didn’t kill her. Her Truth turns Qi to to flesh, then to select materials, then back again, but they don’t make something from nothing.

And she is vast. She is pushing further.

She starts to weave with more intention. New minds spawn, entrenched in the spaces inside of her tendrils. They guide instinct into form, tracking what the Heart tells her and making it real.

She never studied arrays. Not really. She improvised a lot into place, did herself a bit of mad science with her curse on herself and Li Shu’s help. But she never actually learned the details.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

She still should. She still might. But… she doesn’t need to, at least not to start. Her Heart thrills deep at the feeling of entrenching itself, at the thought of putting roots out into a static part of the world, and its instincts have never felt quite so calm or clear.

She lets it guide her, and a dozen minds in tune with each other wrap those instincts into form and function.

The veins stop spreading randomly. The neural weave and tendrils that she laces the city with begin to change, begin to form patterns. She can’t absorb Qi, not through her surface, but she doesn’t need to. The patterns form, and she begins to cycle faster, more fluidly. A network of pipes and valves and roots and veins, becoming self-sustaining, self-sufficient, above and beyond what any human or beast could do.

She starts forming new patterns. Things she can’t understand, that she can’t quite figure out, but which simply happen as she lets what she is go free. New bubbles of Qi, little cores to store her newfound supply, places to act as miniature hearts to pump more, and-

Oh. Are those… are those Dantians?

She could have made more this whole time? She… she’s copied some of the bodies she’s eaten, the pieces, here and there, but never a dantian. Never…

Did she think it wouldn’t work?

Did she not want to? Did she just not think of it?

No. It’s… they’re not copies. A human dantian wouldn’t work for her. It would have hurt her, and not just physically.

She wonders if they’re like the Dantians she’s eaten from beasts, but… no. Not them either.

She’s not them. She could find a way to integrate them, maybe, a way to adapt them, once she learns more, but her instincts tell her that whatever the difference is, it wouldn’t fit her. She’s her. She is herself.

Is she broken?

Where are they?

Her senses extend, and they cover the world, cover so fucking much ground now, if not in detail. Color and smell and taste and touch all mingled together, the world remade into a tapestry of possibility and sensation, allowing her to see people through walls, to taste thoughts, to see trails and auras of past events.

So where the fuck are the broken?

She is useful. She is strong. She can be more, push further, she is growing stranger and stronger, but she might still be broken. Broken can be useful.

A number of brains closer to a hundred than not feel a sudden pulse of dread. Adrenal and thick, viscous and raw.

Broken can be useful.

She stops looking in the streets. In the homes. Across the landscape and in any buildings.

She starts looking in the roots of the trees.

It doesn’t take her long.

There. A little ridge, a bump of some kind, grown up around fertilizer. Grown into the shape of the thing that the roots wrap up and over.

She can see through it. Through the taste of green and bright and deep and vibrant, down into the shape beneath the ever-growing overgrowth.

A body.

Old. The bones are weathered, true, but the shape of them is the shape of age, broken and healed and broken again. The spine is warped, shrunken by time and the failures of flesh. The Qi in the bones has faded, and she can see the vines threading through it.

If she had seen other people in the city with canes, with crooked backs, with aching joints that go beyond the norm, she would think it normal. A burial practice. A return to the earth, a way of providing for the rest of the city in a way.

But she didn’t.

So she squints. She shifts, and pushes her Mind to turn just so slightly to one side, and sees the world in new shades and shapes.

There is so much life. So much of it, like a pitch-dark place that drags into it every ounce of light, every ounce of pale steam and strange form. It drinks death like wine, like a broth, and it only grows darker and deeper, like tar over the world.

And in the bones, she sees faint little traces of mist. Of the pale white of death.

It is not the diffuse thing of the old, saturated and deep. It is not the sharp, highlighted mist of deadly wounds or the sickly-grey of disease.

She sees the shape of the death follow the paths of the roots into the old woman’s bones.

They grew into her while she was still alive.

It took her the better part of a day to find the body. She’s still talking to the others. She’s picking up Jin now, a few hours after she left him, covered in fresh bruises and a smile bright as the sun and the wispy remnants of pale death that he holds like family, like a friend, and which holds him back. She’s negotiating their departure and learning of her newfound “allies”, the political talks going long. She’s watching Li Shu as a thought finally clicks for her, as something changes in her Sacrifice with a degree of concreteness that wasn’t there before. She’s watching Ko and Aria talk and try to find a way to get communication artifacts working without her noticing. She’s watching Many-Grasping ask her what’s wrong as she suddenly stops focusing on their communion.

She’s standing, in a dozen bodies, over the graves of the once-living, who have been fed to the trees. To the roots.

Some of them are young. She can taste markers of broken limbs, healed wrong. Of illness, festered deep. She doesn’t find any birth defects, at least none that couldn’t be healed, which is a small comfort, because she finds so much else.

Some of them are under the streets. Some of them are in the trunk. Some of them are kilometers away from the edge of the city.

As far as she can tell, very few of them died before the roots got into them. Very few of them died in pain, either, at least from the lingering bits of adrenaline she can taste, glowing in the bones and desiccated flesh- but they died after they were eaten. Not before.

She weighed several tons when she arrived, spatial manipulation allowing her to somehow negate large amounts of that weight. Now, though?

She is spread through an entire city. And it took her a day.

Over two hundred minds, which are all her and hers, all look at the people. Afraid, but smiling. Hurt, but strong. Safe, at least to some extent. Living on the corpses of the broken.

Is she broken?

Maybe. Maybe a few months ago, she wouldn’t keep her changes. Resupply, and then return to her earlier form, smaller, less cumbersome and just a bit less self-sustaining.

Now? No. No, she’ll keep this. Find a way to keep going.

The world is broken.

At least she isn’t broken to match.

A few hundred brains and one Mind turn inwards, to a singular point, a singular concept. She keeps separate the ones she needs, the ones which are busy. She makes sure that Jin is still smiling, still feels safe, gives him and his friends food from a kitchenette she has grown in the back-alleys from herself. She meets with Li Shu, embracing her and her energy as she celebrates her sudden comprehension.

And she turns to look at the table, just as they get up. Just as they get ready to leave. Aurick notices first, and the honey-dark Ro Aian right after, and she can feel the moment where begrudging acceptance of the status quo turns sour in his mind. She can taste how Aurick looks at her like she is pale and has long, slender claws and thin, gangly limbs.

“Before you go,” she says. Quiet. “Before I decide how I’ll be meeting your masters. How I’ll be leaving this place. One last question.”

She senses the weaker Wei Na notice the sudden tension. The way the walls of the room have begun to shift, deep down under the skin and the meat.

“You’ve suffered. This city has suffered. I can see how crowded it is, how much the anxiety and the old scars have piled up, all sour like acid and old milk. I know that the war, the bases just a few days travel away, the burning of whole Tribes, they’ve left marks.

“I also know that everyone here has all their limbs. That the sick are never so sick they might die, not really. That the oldest people here that aren’t cultivators aren’t old.

“So. Before I walk deeper into the world to your tune. Before I leave this place in your… capable hands. Before I accept your promises of alliance and debts.

“What do you do with the broken?”