Just over two hundred brains acting in perfect synchronicity, and it’s still not enough. No matter how large she grows, there’s always just a little bit more to do.
Still, she can’t complain. She’s starting to think she prefers things this way.
She’s preparing to go. The outer edges of the rings are calling, the places at the edge of all that is. The lands of the Pack, so far from the Empire’s authority that they have grown to oppose them, in their own ways.
But not yet.
Work to be done.
Symbiosis is an interesting word. Two beings, living in synthesis, both contributing to a gestalt, a larger system. Like lichen- algae and fungi, joined together in symphony, making a new organism.
She smiles at the simile. She’s been learning.
Li Shu closes the third manual, placing it on the ground between them.
“Alright. I… think it’s done.”
Raika looks at the three books before her.
When she left the third ring, when she left the place closest to home in her heart, she left with books like these. Supreme Body Art, Truth Comprehension, and Core Creation. The last of these led to her Reactor- the first of them, to her current biology- the centermost of them, to her being as a whole.
None of them are complete, per se. There’s certainly better ways to create her “reactor” in future, or modifications to be improved upon; her body is in constant flux, always growing and changing and needing more; her Truths, above all, define her very being, and their context keeps changing.
So she and Li Shu have updated them.
It took a few days. A bit of intensive theory-crafting, a lot of writing, a lot of review- but in the end, there are once again three books before her.
Supreme Body Art: Evolution.
This one was the easiest. Obvious, even. For all that her power is impressive, she’s still brute-forcing it more often than not, and there’s bits missing from her tapestry. Her Dao trees are proof enough of that: her comprehension of flesh, while larger than Blade and Gun both, still feels small, like there are branches missing from it, limited by experience.
She’s not so arrogant to say she’s mastered her current skillset… but there’s more to biology than insect and mammal. Her use of reptilian and avian traits is lacking- there must be ways to optimize there as well. And if not, then there absolutely are in the fields she’s missing most- plant life.
She feels [SOMETHING BAD IN THE DARK OF THE WOODS] stir at the idea, as it has every time.
Is a tree not a body? Is sap not like blood? Are plants, too, not alive?
An entire branch of the evolutionary chain she hasn’t grasped yet, but which feels close. Like she’s missing just one, maybe two notes before she can figure it out.
She thinks it has to do with scale. The glimpses of those pieces, smaller than threads, smaller than veins- individual little… clusters. Or concepts. She’s not sure what to call them yet, but Li Shu assured her that they do exist. Her manual, gained from the fortress city, confirms it, but the terminology is… dense.
She can go deeper. The common thread, the next step… it goes deeper. And she can almost feel it.
Comprehension.
A compilation of their Truth text and, now, their ideas on Dao. The ways she made herself into a sort of bullet to travel- that’s evidence that even hyper-specific Daos can be applied to broader contexts. She needs to examine them, actually work to grow them herself rather than just absorbing comprehension. The way that Flame and Lightning both branched out when she absorbed Plasma, forking into a single knot between them… there’s something there. Broader concepts. Just like she can go beyond just fauna in her grasp of biology, so too is there possibility in energy, in violence, in… in everything, really.
She’s more now. She can run as many simulations as she needs, direct as many minds as needed to comprehension. She doesn’t need to sit and meditate and roam out for experience with a single element, doesn’t need to dedicate centuries to each concept- if she needs it, each blade of growth in her Dao garden can get a hundred brains to it, recombining and re-dividing as needed, never resting, always learning.
The last book… took a while to figure out. More and more of their ideas kept circling back to the other two manuals. It took until Raika brought around one of her biggest flaws for them to find a way to center in on it.
The third manual sits, clad in leather as opposed to the wood of the other two:
Craft and Arrays
A powerset she doesn’t quite understand, one in which Li Shu is advancing quickly. There’s a lot of overlap, apparently- while the Sacrifice ritual is integral to the Craft, the weaknesses that the loss of cultivation opens up are countered primarily by a deeper understanding of natural sciences and arrays. The style described in the books of She of Still Waters is distinct from the Imperial style they’ve both seen Yun Ka using, but it’s similar.
And even beyond learning how to properly wield arrays… well. She has some ideas for a potential Sacrifice of her own.
She sits back, taking a deep breath as she looks over the manuals. They’re more a compilation of ideas and reminders than a specifically outlined path, but that’s sort of the nature of making a new path.
“You feeling alright?” Li Shu asks, breaking the silence.
Raika blinks, turning to face her. “...Yeah. Why?”
Her friend shrugs. “It’s… I don’t know.”
Raika looks over her friend, really looks over at her.
Li Shu looks… good. Like, surprisingly good. She’s made what feel like several leaps into the Core Formation realm, and its evidenced by the Sacrifice floating behind her. While Raika’s not sure how the progression looks with more traditional Craft, the way that Li Shu formed her Truths means she held onto her original meridians to an extent, and it is reflected in the Sacrifice: her Core floats behind her, an orb of keratin that’s been growing denser and heavier as time goes on.
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That’s not her only notable change, though. Her Sacrifice itself, always the bland off-white of keratin, has shifted, gaining what seems like a medical diagram of veins and musculature carved upon them. Whenever they get closer to a person’s body, they shift, the diagrams becoming more three-dimensional and real, and Raika’s seen the needles and medical tools they can transform into literally move through flesh intangibly, fusing and unfusing from a damaged body without disturbing it.
Li Shu mentioned that her time with the Witch of the city, by the name of Kina, allowed her to better understand the next steps of her growth. To fuse a concept into the open space of her Sacrifice. If Raika had to guess, she bound either Biology or maybe Healing into them, and seems to be preparing for more.
“What’s going on?” she asks. “If it’s your expertise you’re worried about, you’re still leagues better than me at most of this stuff. Doesn’t matter how many brains I can make, most of the time I’m still figuring things out by feel and observation. If you think something will work, I’m inclined to believe it.”
Li Shu shakes her head. “That’s not it. I… I don’t mean to be arrogant, Raika, but I do think the ideas we have here are going to work. I was much less confident in my senses than I am now when we made our last set of theories, and you managed to make them happen even better than I’d hoped. It’s just…”
Raika waits. No need to rush, not here.
“It would be safer if we took it slower,” Li Shu admits.
“...Do you think we’re overlooking something?”
“No. I just… you don’t have the pressures you used to have on you, but you keep acting like you do. Like any moment, Taurus or that Zhoulong figure you mentioned or the Emperor itself is going to come and crush someone. It’s ok to be worried… but most things don’t move as fast as you do. There wouldn’t be much harm in slowing down a bit, figuring things out more gradually, and it carries less risk of you, I don’t know, spontaneously gaining super-cancer.”
“What’s bringing this on?”
Li Shu takes a deep breath, and her Sacrifice swirls around her, all twenty parts of it orbiting like moons. She nervously fidgets with one of them, turning it from scalpel to pliers to needle and back.
“I’m worried,” she admits. “That’s it. I… really, I don’t have anything I can point to and say that I know it’s going wrong. I worry about our friends. I worry about Hao Nera and Qen Hou. I worry about us pushing too fast and everything collapsing, because we’re dealing with big shit. And I want to! I want to deal with big things, big ideas. But it still scares me, that if we go too fast, we’ll get something wrong. That we’ll miss something. I guess I just want to know how you feel about it?”
Raika reaches into her Body, pulling a cigarette out of a compartment. She makes sure to tamp it a bit tighter as she lights it. Rather than taking a pull, she just watches it burn for a moment, like incense.
“I’m scared too, sometimes. It’s just… not my most important concern.”
Li Shu tilts her head, and Raika takes a moment to rephrase.
“It’s- it’s not that I don’t worry about things. It’s that worrying hurts more than it helps, for me. I’ve always been action-driven, and I’ve been in situations the last few years where if I stop and plan, rather than react and plan ahead, someone gets hurt. Usually me, but not always. I trust our friends to look after themselves until we meet again, and I think that… yeah, we probably could take a few decades, make sure things line up right. Fuck Taurus’ plan and all that, wait till after to see how the pieces fall.
“But… I don’t want to.”
Her friend waits, but when Raika takes a pull on the cigarette and shrugs, she blinks.
“That’s it?”
Raika nods. “That’s it. I could wait to try to get things perfect, but the longer I wait, the more the things I can’t stand about the world keep going. If I spend a hundred years in a cave somewhere I’d probably come out strong enough to eat Heaven, but in that time, how many people will the Fengs hurt like they hurt me? How many more deaths will pile up against the Wall? How many more Tribes get wiped out?”
Li Shu frowns, goes to say something… pauses instead.
Raika shrugs again. “That’s all it is. I can change things now, even if I can’t make them perfect yet. Rather than waiting, telling the people I love to lay low and the people who are suffering, and will suffer, to just hang on, I’d rather do something now. Even if it means I’m moving faster than is comfortable. Even if it means I’m figuring things out as I go. Easy as that.”
This time, the silence between them is heavier. Li Shu stares off to one side, Raika’s words seemingly swimming in her head. Raika holds the cigarette out to her.
Li Shu snaps back to reality, making the most intense grimace Raika’s ever seen on her. “Oh Gods no.”
Raika can’t help it. She bursts out laughing at that, almost choking on the smoke in her lungs.
Li Shu blushes, flicks a needle of keratin at her, but Raika just keeps laughing. It takes almost ten seconds for her to stop, recovering just in time to receive a second flick to the forehead and fall into laughing again.
“Sorry! Sorry, I’ve just- I’ve seen you digging around my literal guts with a smile, but a smoke? Heavens forbid.”
“Wha- it’s bad for you! Not all of us have super-healing, either!”
“Completely fair and hilarious nonetheless, sister.”
The honorific is enough to break past Li Shu’s embarrassment- only to hit upon something deeper. She blushes, hard… but then smiles, too.
“I’m… honored to be referred to as such.”
“And I’m honored for your help. So… shall we keep going?”
Li Shu nods, her smile soft, but her eyes glinting. “Let’s. It will be a fun puzzle, seeing what I come up with at this pace. Might be I’ll even help you figure something out before you crash us all headfirst into a wall.”
“I’d expect nothing less from my local mad genius.”
Li Shu is already re-gathering her notes, the conversation seeming to act as a kind of inspiration for her. Raika stays where she is, keeping her company, and smiles at a thought.
Frankly, if Li Shu had her abilities, there probably wouldn’t need to be any sort of plan in two years. Pack, Empire, and everyone else would already be under new management.
Li Shu is on her own path, though. Growing in her own way, which is really… all anyone can do.
Raika turns her Mind towards the outside world, and sees how she is growing.
Her newfound ability to remain herself, and remain one being, even when physically divided, was a long time coming. Back in the fortress-city battle, she used her shed body parts as portals for Guns, split herself in three- making it permanent was only a matter of time. She’s not sure how it works, really, but she can reach through herself, down to her Soul, and then back out to any part of herself, even without a Mind branching both pieces at once.
Now, she’s spread through the entire city,
Her Heart, still tied to her Soul, has had a field day with its growth, expanding through every inch of the city of Singheart. She’s grown into and under and through every building, every street, and turned nearly all of it into an instinctual array that acts as a larger Qi dynamo than she’s ever had. Dozens of miles of veins, neural tissue and musculature wind and weave and spiral, every drop of Qi moving through them and becoming magnified as she “cultivates”, using the city itself as her body.
If that were all, it would be enough. A massive upgrade and a stronghold.
But she is all, and always, herself.
Now, any part of her can summon things from out of her inner world, or pull them in. In theory, she could transport herself and her allies back to Singheart in a heartbeat from anywhere she is. Already, she’s started to experiment with it- Beetle and his loyal guard have been going on excursions, taking pieces of her they can plant in places throughout the overgrowth and then retreat from. Watching the black stag beetle riding atop a many-legged centicroc and surrounded by glowing worms, sallying out into the wilderness, has been somehow both sweet and funny to watch, even as she can feel them eating and growing stronger in their little quests.
And where she is planted, she grows. She can send supplies to any pieces of herself, her Heart helping greatly with the logistics, but once she figures out how to interface with flora, she could see herself growing there too. A network of trees and sanctuaries, growing with strange colors and stranger supplies throughout the fourth ring.
The band around her inner world remains, and so long as it does, there are limits to how much she can grow inside herself, how complete she can make her resources and manifestation… but on the outside?
She is spreading. The world is CHANGING, and so is she.
She senses Aurick arriving, tracking him through the streets without ever needing to sense his Qi. Bright fields, fleshy fruits and the strange depths which water them steps forward politely into the space around her home, and she grows a new body with which to greet him.
“If it pleases the Apex,” he says, his head bowed and his Intent subdued, “this one would be happy to guide us the rest of the way.”
She smiles wide.
“Lead on. I’m looking forward to meeting these other Apex of yours.”