Raika stares at herself.

The small maze of smaller bathing rooms spreading about the edges of the main swimming pool sized bathtub all hold marvels of their own. Steam rooms, hot tubs, ice baths, showers, and rooms enchanted to hold out moisture full of makeup, mirrors and essential oils spread in repeating fractals, with more than enough room for a dozen individuals to explore simultaneously.

Raika finds herself in one of the latter type of said rooms. There is a table and chair here, equipped with lotions and potions and delicate concoctions for beauty and youth and comfort and virility, but she stays standing, and hasn’t given them more than a passing glance.

Raika stares at herself.

It is the first time she’s seen a mirror since… what, a few days before her fight with Lu Feren, the arrogant outer sect disciple? Not long after the ritual had faded from her skin. She hasn’t seen herself since then, not before the battle with Shin Ren, not before her imprisonment, and certainly not during.

She looks better.

But moreso than she expected, she looks different. Time plays a factor, but as she’s healed and changed herself, she’s started to shift her perception, assuming subconsciously that she’d be returning to who she was before she lost her cultivation. As she stares at herself in the mirror, she can’t help but marvel at how wrong she was.

She’s taller now. A couple inches at least, closer to 6’3 than the 5’11 she used to be. Her skin remains the same general tone, but her suntan is gone, and she’s been painted over by minute, precise slashes, concentrating on her arm, shoulder and chest but with some spread all over her body. She’s starved, thin, but not dying from it, ribs visible but not jutting out, the rest of her frame filled out with a lean, tense muscle. Her hair is shorn short on her head, her scalp healed from the burns but the process of growing her hair back taking its time, and a lot of her scars look older, standing out as pale ruin that closed up the damage and looking healthier, more in tune with her body. In that same vein she’s surprised to see the missing chunk of her cheek has healed surprisingly well; it’s not fully back, you can still see some drastic scar tissue and a glimpse of teeth on the right side of her mouth, but where before there was a torn-open face exposing skull, now there's an actual structure and flesh there, her jawline more intact and her cheek mostly filled out.

But it’s her eyes that catch her attention.

They used to be brown.

What they are now isn’t golden, but it’s… close. There’s a paleness to it, a sharpness that doesn’t quite suit gold, and a glint of red behind it all that speaks of flecks of fire and ember. Her eyes look like a painter’s rendition of a pupil, made out in the colors of a sunset. They’re gorgeous.

She blushes a bit at the fact she’s been gazing into her eyes for a solid minute, completely nude in front of the mirror. She shakes her head and flicks herself on the forehead, the ingrained habit pulling double duty in recentering her and reminding her of what her next steps are.

Taurus seems like a fine enough fellow, and she’s not stupid enough to outright defy the Empire and her apparent recruitment, not just yet, but she’s had a life here. There are other, older debts and connections she intends to pursue once they’ve left this place, but Paleblossom city, despite all the torment it’s brought her, is something like home. There’s almost a half-dozen people she’d rather not leave behind, and a few things she plans to take with her.

It’s a bit embarrassing, but in spite of how much she’s been helped by so many, she can’t help but miss Dink, the poorly built little bastard.

Soon, she vows.

Still, there’s an issue; namely, the fact that she’s technically still a prisoner.

Oh sure, the cell is damn near mansion sized, but it’s still a cell. She heavily doubts Taurus will just let her walk around unsupervised through the city, especially since the Purple Flame-something sect probably remains furious. More than even that, no matter how considerate or protective of his chosen few he seems to be, he’s still a stranger, working for the same institution that Feng Gui apparently works for (and wasn’t that a shock; not a hidden master at all, just a wandering demon). The less information they have on her, the better. And, if she’s being honest, there’s a big part of her that just aches at the thought of having someone watching and taking notes as she says goodbye to her people, or who might confiscate or track anything she takes with her. Raika’s not a private person, per se, but she is her own person, and she’s had more than enough of her autonomy and control taken from her.

So priority one; whether or not she decides to come back, she needs to find a way to escape. Either this palace they’re in or, more indirectly, the observation on her while she’s out and about, if they let her do so with an escort. The number one priority in that plan, then, is to discover exactly what tools she has at her disposal.

Raika bows her head and closes her eyes, letting herself breathe deep. First things first; she can do so a lot more cleanly than before, her ribs clearly realigned and no longer pressing on her lungs. What’s more, she can fit more air; she draws in breath, and then keeps drawing it in, well past when her chest should be forced to expand.

She practices holding her breath, and makes it to about eleven incredibly boring minutes before she feels it start to ache.

Next, her heartbeat. When she saw Yun Ka she felt a rush from it, pulsing into her blood and flooding her with a sort of strange energy. She focuses on the organ, wielding far more control over it than before, and starts to… flex it, like a muscle. She can vary the beats, increase their intensity, change its rhythms, even slow it if she wants to. It seems tougher, too, it’s default heartbeat sending much more powerful rushes of blood through her body, and increasing it even slightly leaves her a little giddy from the rush of oxygen and strength that floods her, the clarity and speed of perception that flashes into her mind.

Other muscles are easier to test. She can balance on either foot easily, her knee reshaped so any lingering scars and damage are a minor background soreness rather than a limiter, and when she picks up the metal frame of one of the mirrors in the room, it takes what feels like minimal force to press her fingers into it, slowly warping and flattening it until it’s nearly flat, the impressive filigreed art turned to shiny, smooth surfaces.

She still can’t really sense Qi, not beyond the tingling in her body. The scents of it may have sharpened, which may be what allowed her to so clearly and minutely detect Kaena’s repressed Qi and the images she’s seen in Taurus’ scent, but there’s no guarantee. As it is, though, she can sense that her time in the baths has calmed the tingling sensation, bringing it more closely in tune with the rest of her body, so that only when she moves abruptly does the sense of numbness and discomfort rear back up.

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She frowns at that. Is that a good thing? While there’s definitely a limit, as early experiments with Dink proved, the discordant tingling (the Qi deviation / poisoning, in effect) has been instrumental in her “cultivation” to get stronger. Raika is of the opinion that it may be her body slowly adjusting and adapting to the damage and discord it’s causing in her. There might be some merit to smoothing it out, but… it feels like it might be slower, even if it’s still acting the same overall.

She focuses on her heartbeat again. On the rhythm of it. She lets the world fall to the wayside, the warmth of the bath house comfortable enough that she doesn’t feel a need to block out sensation entirely. Say what you will about isolation, it can very much help with mental focus if you’re careful about it, and lack of trance-state from meridian cultivation or not, Raika has gotten very good at sitting still and thinking hard.

She pumps her heart, a bit harder.

Slows down its beat, but pulses again, harder.

Slows it down more, until her mind starts working in flashes, pulses of blood determining wakefulness and a strange drifting lightheadedness.

She focuses on the tingling. How it changes with each heartbeat, how the blood flowing through her body excites and interacts with it. There are nuances there, things she’s not really sure about yet, details and intricacies she just doesn’t have the means to see or knowledge to understand, but at its core, she can see it. Where her blood slows and pools, the tingling starts to feel wrong, like bending an arm the wrong way, then begins to fade. Where her blood rushes and bursts, the tingling increases dramatically in effect, starts to hurt, but doesn’t quite seem to twist and feel like when it’s still.

She has a thought.

It’ll take effort, but she’s no stranger to that.

It’ll take a lot of fine control, but she needs to learn that anyway.

She just needs to find someplace she’s not being watched, first.

There’s been a pervasive, background discomfort that’s started to slowly build since she woke up. Taurus, otherwise known as Runemaster Boriah, likely has any number of tools to properly examine and spy on the clearly strange and probably troublesome people he seems to have authority over, and the room they gave her is her number one guess as to where most of them have been planted. Whether or not the discomfort is her instincts trying to confirm her theory or just building paranoia is unclear, but it’s way too likely for her to feel comfortable here, even if it wasn’t a gilded cage.

Now, she could spend a few days finding the right spot to potentially hide out in this sprawling maze of luxury. There may be some forgotten closet or corner somewhere, and she might be able to inhabit it without being noticed. A lot of effort for a lot of maybes.

Or… she can try a little trick.

Kaena has used a flower to flood an area with Qi. Not nearly enough to obfuscate someone’s Qi or presence, of course… unless they don’t really have a Qi signature.

Will it be enough? Who’s to say. Will it be more convenient than trying to find some broken drywall to crawl through over the course of days or longer, while allowing her to enjoy a hot tub? Absolutely.

Life’s little pleasures.

It doesn’t take more than a few moments walking between different hot tub rooms for her to find one that has one of the flowers in it. They each seem to have similar but slightly different sets of bathing accouterments, as if prepared for different guests or simply for the sake of variety, but she elects not too wonder about it too hard.

She sits in hot water, letting the bubbling, disturbingly and divinely hot water flow around her and leave her almost sweating, and takes a long, long breath. Twelve minutes before strain, before; maybe thirteen minutes if she pushes herself, then? A bit longer than the flower lasted in the main pool, then. Maybe she’ll be lucky and it’ll last longer in here. She tears a petal off and lets it float on the water, holding her breath to keep that rush of vitality from infusing her like before, and closes her eyes, hoping that she’s strange enough and the flower’s Qi is enough of a distraction for her to be mostly hidden.

And then, she starts altering her bloodflow.

It’s daunting. Every minor change she makes she has to memorize and make sure she can undo, lest she start creating blood clots or somehow let part of her body necrotize. As she shifts in the water, the heat high enough to be a bit painful and certainly designed for someone of higher cultivation, she starts guiding waves of energy through her body, altering her heartbeat and her veins to slow down and speed up different sections of her body. In some parts she concentrates the feeling of unnatural music in her flesh moving through one cluster of veins in a concentrated burst, the surrounding vessels slowed to the point of agony until the energy feels faded and dull in them. In other parts, she accumulates tiny pools of blood in still muscle and veins, the sensation deeply uncomfortable, but ready to rush back when called by a heartbeat she’s magnified until she can almost physically hear it.

And finally, when she can feel two large, distinct masses of energy, straining at the properties of her flesh to burst out, roiling and churning like bundles of razor blades moving through her, she reorganizes their pathways, and with one more roiling, burning, overclocked heartbeat, collapses them both against each other in the middle of her heart.

Ah, Raika thinks; so that’s what having a heart attack feels like.

Her whole body spasms from where she’d been sitting, like she’s been stabbed by a hot poker. Surveillance is the last thing on her mind, but if anyone is watching, they’re definitely going to notice that. The warm, wet tears she feels start to come along are probably pretty noticeable too, hotter than her eyes should be, and she can’t help but smell and taste copper both as her whole body clenches and rebels against the pain. She’s crying blood, juddering and shaking like she’s having a seizure.

But she’s been hurt worse. Say what you will about Shin Ren, but he knows how to burn someone so it hurts.

She forces herself to stay awake, to keep the spasming as restrained as she can (she only knocks a few things into the water!). She’s grateful for the hot water and the size of the pool, as she’s more floating as she leans back than she is slamming her head into tile as hard as she can, even as scalding hot water splashed on her face.

She does not let herself breathe.

She does not let her heart stop beating.

Whatever she’s doing to herself, whatever this level of control she’s using over this minute but potent internal reservoir, it’s clear her body isn’t designed for it. Her body is, ideally, designed to absorb Qi organically once it’s been processed by a Dantian, not to coexist with explosive scraps of it in entirely different systems.

Her body, however, is an idiot and a coward, like most flesh tends to be, and she has the control to tell it to shut the hells up and listen.

She forces her heart to beat again, opening her blood vessels back to normal as she does, and the stagnant blood rushes in. It hits the roiling spark, the waves of little razors crashing against each other, and it’s like all that sudden violence and pain and unbearable heat is blasted apart. Where before there was a single ball of unbearable harm, now a thousand comets of pain and sharpness and heat and roiling, chaotic trembling shoot out to every part of her body, guided by her blood, dragged apart heartbeat by heartbeat. Her body wears away at the newfound core of pain in her, like a glacier pulled apart by the waves, washing again and again against it and taking its sanded-down fragments to every part of her body.

Raika doesn’t know how long she floats in the bubbling water, forcing her heart to keep beating. She’s fairly certain she lost control of her breathing at some point, as minute flutters of the cool, refreshing vitality of the unnamed flowers trickling into her and soothing the raging fire. They might even be reducing the effectiveness of whatever she did alongside its strength, but she can’t find it in herself to be disappointed, not right now.

All she thinks of is keeping her heart pumping, and making sure she doesn’t slip under the water and drown.

While she has no idea how long she stays floating there (a lot longer than twelve minutes, that’s for sure), she knows one thing for absolute certainty.

She really, really misses Dink.