“What is it you want from me?” Raika asks her cell.
“Well, first and foremost, I want to make it clear that we have no intention of ending your journey to whatever-the-hells it is you’re becoming,” the voice responds. “From what we’ve found of your history, that seems to be a bit of a trigger for you, yes?”
“It is what it is,” Raika replies. “I Am Me, I Am Mine. I lost everything, and still didn’t stop, but yes, if you intend to try and take myself from me again, don’t expect me to take it lightly.”
“Ah, yes. I’d heard rumors you might have found something like that,” the voice mumbles. “That phrase. “I am me, I am mine”; did you hear it somewhere?”
She frowns. “No,” she says. “It’s something I made up a while back. Feels right. As a cultivator, aren’t we all defying the world and putting ourselves under our own will?”
“Sure, sure, but most people wouldn’t phrase it as you have, or with that weight, hmm?” She’s not really sure how to respond, so the silence drags for a moment, before there’s a surprisingly harsh “huff” from the illusory voice. “Considering the chances of you stumbling onto information about the concept, I doubt you know more about it. But, good news; I do. I’m the local head of the Division of Altered Cultivation. Have you heard of us?”
She frowns. “Rumors, maybe,” she eventually responds. “Not in a few years, but I never paid attention to that sort of thing. Something about the Empire trying to fix or improve weird cultivators, or qi deviations or something?”
“Something like that,” the voice agrees. “If it’s alright with you, I’d prefer to talk about this face to face. If I go in there to talk to you, can you promise you won’t try to eat me?”
Raika shrugs. “Try not to look too delicious,” she says, “but I promise I don’t intend to attack unless you do so first.”
The voice laughs in a deep, vibrating baritone. “Fair enough,” it says. “See you in a moment.”
The chamber goes quiet, and she takes a seat against the wall facing the door, trying to look nonchalant and casually threatening at the same time for whoever this new arrival might be. Supposedly, the voice belongs to an Imperial officer, someone she should be even more subservient to than the sects she’s been a part of, and even more especially since it would seem it’s only by the Imperial Judge in the sect that she’s still alive, but… she just can’t find it in her to care right now. Three weeks of isolation and a general disdain for every authority figure she’s had to deal with since her crippling (and some before, admittedly) have left her… somewhat disillusioned about the utility of subservient respect.
Then a new door, one on her right, opens just as seamlessly and invisibly as the one in front of her, the portal it opens up glowing a blinding, opaque white light, its brightness warped as something steps through.
She scrambles to the side, new control of her body making the movement simultaneously disjointed and impossibly smooth as she spins into an aggressive, almost animalistic crouch to face the surprise door.
“Ha!” roars a massive, booming voice, loud enough to make her ears hurt. “Hells, woman, watching through the formation does not do you justice.”
Stepping into the room, as at ease as if they were having a casual conversation beneath an open sky, stands the tallest humanoid she’s ever seen. Easily seven and a half feet tall before you factor in the horns, and said horns are barely the tip of the iceberg. The figure before her, dressed as they are in official-looking robes stretched to form-fitting stature by the sheer bulk of the body they’re wrapped around, is an absolute giant, and yet they walk in with impossible lightness of step. His feet and hands bare, both growing incredibly soft fur of a rich brown and white spotted quality, the fur extending up his partially exposed chest, neck and head. And what a head it is; the face is strange, a strange mix of human and bovine features leaving her stunned and unable to speak for how… strangely natural, yet entirely alien they look. Their eyes are all-black with white only at the very edges, their nose a fully bovine snout, and massive, jutting horns decorate their head, wrapped in wavy, curly hair that goes down to his shoulders, both almost a foot tall in themselves and curled, thick and dense, looking more like stone than bone in makeup.
“Holy shit,” Raika says with a gasp. “You really are built like a bull.”
“Yes, and my squad is probably never going to let me live those comments down,” Taurus says with a roll of his eyes. “You know, some things are better left unsaid over open communication runes.”
“How was I supposed to know you were being serious!?” she complains. “A mysterious voice shows up in an empty room and tells me they’re called Taurus of all things, what did you expect my reaction to be?”
He shrugs, moving so much muscle mass to do so it’s like a mountain shifting. “In my line of work we learn to expect all sorts of things. But yes, I suppose it would be a little hard to believe, especially with someone who, it would seem, has a specific history with… certain pick up lines.”
She leaves her crouch, falling back into a seated position against the wall. “Yeah, yeah,” she huffs. “Sorry for not getting up, Runemaster of the Altered Cultivation division, but I’m pretty sure I’d still have to hurt my neck looking up at you either way. Still, this one greets honored cultivator Taurus. Unless… do you prefer Boriah, honored one?”
He huffs back at her, the sound like a gust of wind. “I can feel you judging me already, so let’s say that no, I prefer Taurus,” he says. As the door closes fully behind him, he takes a seat as well, sitting in a proper lotus pose against the opposite wall. “And what do you prefer? Raika? The Bloody? The Ashen?”
She shrugs. “Just Raika is fine. “The Bloody” was always more aspiration than literal, and The Ashen isn’t really a name either.”
He nods. It’s weird; for how alien his eyes look, it’s easy to see his thinking in them, the way he’s taking note of her every response. “Tell me, then, Raika; what do you think is next, here?”
She pauses. To lie, and perhaps look a bit better, or tell the truth, hoping he’ll respect that more… She’s had weeks to think about this, in between the torment of self-imposed physical therapy and relearning her body, and to figure out the angles of what might be to come. With only so much information about the outside world, it’s obviously been a limited thought experiment, but…
“Well,” she says, “I imagine there’s three major directions to be taken on your end. I’m considering that you’re the most important factor here, since you’re the one in here talking with me and you’re the head of the division you mentioned. So, there’s you deciding I’m not enough of whatever you’re interested in, and the sect wins face and gets to kill me, probably in a nasty execution. Second, there’s you thinking there’s something too interesting, and I get to stay in this cell or something very like it while I get cut up and examined. Or, option three, I pass your test, or meet your judgment, and I get the privilege of working as someone’s subordinate. You’re hoping it’ll be as your subordinate, if we go that route, but I don’t think it’s a guarantee, honored cultivator.”
He nods along, giving little grunts at certain relevant points. “Yeah, that about covers it. You missed one, though.”
She blinks, then takes a half breath and freezes as pressure enters the room.
Since her crippling, Raika has had limited ability to engage with killing intent or Qi pressure. She knows it exists, but it’s like holding her hand over a candle; if she can’t feel pain, she won’t know she’s being burned, and most candles can only burn so bad, so its effects don’t last. The one exception so far was Shiru Hei, who hit her with the full concentrated force of her Qi pressure on arrival to her fight with Lu Feren.
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Taurus is not a candle. The smell hits her like a truck, a sudden, violent scent that smells almost entirely of overwhelming force. Taurus smells like a hurricane wrapped in flesh, like muscle and stone strong enough to crush mountains barehanded, all wrapped in a package that smells like open woodlands and some sort of… creature, there.
As soon as she smells it, it knows she’s there.
By scent alone, she can feel it move. Feel the presence of something animalistic and vibrant and old, so very, very old turn towards her, turn to face her. It towers above her, above the room, above the ceiling and the building and the sky.
In a moment, there is no furious hurricane except the wind in its fur, no mountains to crush save the pebbles beneath its hooves, and she is but a small thing outside the pack that has dared to touch it with her awareness, with her mere existence. It has seen her, and it has deemed her an insult.
And then the scent begins to dim, and Raika realizes that she can feel her entire body trembling. Every muscle feels sore, her throat feels like she’s been screaming though she knows she did not, her head pounds with an ache like she dove beneath a lake, and her heart is scrambling to compensate, beating way over its resting rate. She coughs, slightly, before looking up at Taurus again.
“There’s always the path we take where I kill you before we ever leave this cell,” rumbles the Nascent Soul cultivator across from her.
He lets her take a moment to breathe. It takes… longer than she expected.
When she looks mostly recovered, he continues. “It isn’t uncommon,” he tells her. “Something happens, and I get called in to deal with it. A demonic infestation turned parasite, a hidden Dao uncovered and malformed, some strain of Qi infecting and mutating someone into something dangerous. Some things are better left unknown, and out of the hands of those who would misuse it or fail to contain it. So, sometimes, I enter a room a lot like this one, and I sit down, and we have a talk, and when I leave, they’re not anyone’s problem anymore. And all the Emperor asks of me after are three forms I need to fill out and sign.”
She says nothing.
Eventually, he smiles, wide, flat teeth in a too-human face. “Good news for you, I hate paperwork. So we’re going to do this differently, yes?”
She… simply nods.
“Good. Now. Tell me how you’ve managed to survive this far, and what you’ve done to do so.”
She takes a deep breath. It’s not a secret; hell, she’s talked about it with Li Shu more than once, openly, in public even, but… there’s a difference between the ramblings of a madwoman and a proven idea. And whatever she’s doing, it’s proving something. A part of her, a part that remembers the struggle for even the most basic of martial texts or cultivation techniques at the Hungering Roots sect, tells her how valuable any technique is, ever. Another part agrees, demanding that she keep it; it is hers. She made it, she should have the right to keep it.
A much larger consensus remembers the scent of that impossible, looming thing in the soul of the man in front of her, and recognizes that she doesn’t have much choice.
“I tried to make a natural formation,” she eventually says.
“...go on,” he says.
“I’m not a formation expert,” she tells him, “but I know they exist, and that they were invented by studying natural formations. So, I used a tuning fork-” (Ding, her trusted second, still missing in action)- “and my own heartbeat and bloodflow to try and… well, to try and make one happen inside my body. I figured since I had no Qi defenses or inherent Qi of my own to reject energies coming in, it was worth a shot, trying to make a pattern and movement that would attract natural Qi from the environment.”
He cocks his head, the horns on it almost comically tall and wide and making the movement much more than it would be on a normal humanoid. “How is it that you survived it?”
No hesitation to believe it’s possible. Then again, she is living proof, so perhaps he’s just better at accepting things at face value. She shrugs; “I almost didn’t. First time I did it, woke up shitting blood and with my whole body on fire, covered in that pins and needles sensation. But it didn’t kill me, so… I kept doing it.”
He looks at her. “You just… kept doing it.”
She gives him a bit of a look. “I didn’t have much else to do, honored cultivator,” she tells him. “I was crippled and homeless in the middle of winter, and it clearly did something. Something that hurts is better than nothing that doesn’t.”
“Deeply circumstantial and often incorrect, but go on,” Taurus replies.
“Well, it took… most of a year, I think, for much to change. Kept varying up the meditation and the nuances of the tuning fork, seeing what worked, what left me unconscious for longer, that sort of thing. Gradually I started noticing I was a little stronger and a bit healthier. It got me through the winter mostly intact, and sometime in that period I started being able to smell Qi, I think. I don’t tend to smell it constantly, but near someone who is actively using their cultivation or around formations, I tend to be able to get a feel for their scent.”
He nods at that. “Does it tend to be simplistic, like how they normally smell but magnified?”
She shakes her head. “No. The stronger the Qi, the more complex the smell, at least usually, and sometimes they smell like they’re a little off or a little gross, but most of the time they smell like different flavors. Ozone and fire, leather and a clean river, wind on a grassy hill with a big dog on it, that sort of stuff.”
It’s really hard to read his face, but she thinks his expression changes a bit at that. But all he says is “Go on.”
“There was a fight at the cultural festival in town about six months ago,” she goes on. “I… it was strange, and I don’t know how to describe it, but the cold sun looked… well, it looked wrong, and no one else seemed to notice. And then those things attacked. Qen Hou wounded one, but I could tell it was still alive, so I grabbed it to try and kill the thing, because it threw me through a wall.”
“And just to be clear, you were still crippled, yes? Not at the level you demonstrated against a…” he seems to check his notes- “Lu Feren?”
She shakes her head again. “No, just able to hobble a bit better, but I don’t like it when something throws me through a wall.”
He… nods eventually. “Sure,” he says.
“Then, since I contributed, I got to come to the sect. Worked as an assistant in the medical pavilion, kept up the tuning fork routine for some more months, eventually came up with a theory about life Qi and how any living thing makes it just by being alive, even without meridians, and made the ritual to use on myself.”
“I saw it. Smart work, though it looks more like an extended curse ritual. Uses a modification of the “Aldermain’s Curse of Blocked Breath”, plus a lot of twisted qi infusion runes and some rudimentary concepts from barrier formations, yes?”
“Sounds about right,” she agrees. “Had to take some pills to make sure my blood kept flowing and my lungs could still draw in air.”
“I was informed by one “Li Shu” that you were unconscious for several hours during the procedure. Is this correct?”
She hesitates. Should she… maybe. While she was unconscious she'd met the shadow, that thing that reeked of the moon. It was in confronting it that she discovered the phrase he'd commented on, and in surviving that confrontation that she'd felt something... click. But then again... it's a risk. She doesn't know how she knows, but she can feel anything more she says about what she saw during the festival, or the thing that followed into her after, is a risk.
“Yes," she tells him. "It was like I was asleep, following my blood into the runes in a dream. Painful, but kind of peaceful. When I woke up, everything felt different, like I could feel my heartbeat all the time, feel my skin like it was far more sensitive. The pain increased, obviously, but... altogether it had clearly done something, so I was pretty happy with it.
He looks at her, quietly, for what feels like too long a moment. Does he know? How would he? She told the truth. Mostly. More or less.
Eventually, he nods. “Alright,” he grumbles. “And after that, you were blocking in Qi being generated by your body, blocking out environmental Qi, and could control your skin?”
“And a bit of the outer muscles and such near the surface,” she agrees. “Now, after the… the burning, the effect seems to have grown to any area that regrew, so that I can move my body like I used to be able to move Qi. I lost a lot of reflexes, but I can technically move a lot faster and more precisely, and feels things much more clearly.”
He leans forward, here. “And how did you regenerate?” he asks. “Nothing in what you’ve said or your history tells us it was a skill you had. Increased Qi density, sure, but you’d need a lot more than an improvised natural formation and tougher skin to survive the damage you went through.”
This time, she can be honest.
“I don’t know.”
Taurus smiles, a broad expanse of bone in an even broader expanse of inhuman flesh. His teeth, she notices, are like his horns; they look more like stone than enamel or bone.
“Luckily, I think I do,” he rumbles. Without another word, he rises to his feet like a leviathan breaking the surface, standing again at that towering height.
“Come on. The rest of the shitheads are looking forward to meeting you.”