So here’s the thing about begging; it’s not actually that hard. Like anything that can be done, there’s an art to it, skills to be learned and improved on. For all she knows, there’s someone out there who has a Dao of Begging. Not her, obviously, considering she’s not very good at anything right now, but maybe somebody out there. Meanwhile, the practical skills tend to appear only as she encounters them; how to sit, where you can sit without being bothered, what sorts of bowls collect coins without looking too bad or too good, what times are best for it and what times give nothing at all.
Still, though, it’s not hard. Once you have basic knowledge to know where to be, when, and have something to collect with, you don’t need much else. Everything beyond that is just refinement, and who needs refinement when you have brute force? Turns out, visibly missing limbs, a poorly covered scarred face as bad as hers, and a visible lack of meridians for anyone who bothers to check work great for “brute force begging”.
It’s still a difficult first week.
She spends a couple days worth of rations quicker than she hoped. Some to make sure she’s still healing, yes, but mostly because she makes barely a copper a day in the richer areas. Those, and the areas near the sects, are the only places she knows, and in the end neither welcomes her anymore. It goes to show how small her world had become, in its own way; she traveled hundreds of miles sometimes, for missions or arenas or any number of other journeys in the pursuit of her cultivation or the will of her “betters”, but in the city she’s lived in most of her life she can’t name more than a few streets or buildings. She never quite gets forcefully evicted; just evicted. Even in the outskirts of the noble’s districts, the guards aren’t quite brazen enough to beat someone so downtrodden. Old, crippled, wounded, all perfectly good targets, but a varied mix of all of the above and more is a bit much. She leaves before they decide to change their minds, moving further and further out of the city centers.
It’s colder in the outskirts, and it hits her the worst in her missing parts. The further she goes from her old home, from what she was, the worse her missing hand aches, the worse her knee trembles and hurts. She can’t feel the qi like before, certainly, but it’s still just… wrong, in her body, in her soul, to be so alone, to be out in the cold. Still, she has a bit more success on the outskirts of the merchants quarters, where people with money but not enough money to be cruel pass on their way to buy groceries, trinkets and tools. The spots closer in are taken by more experienced (and admittedly better looking) beggars, but the outskirts (combined with her looks) manage to have just enough room in it for her.
In the weeks that follow, she manages to scrounge enough to buy rice more often than not, though never often. She waits for her body to ache, for her stomach to growl and curdle and start to try and crawl out of her before she uses the rations from the clinic again, but even still, she runs out three weeks in.
After that, the hunger never really leaves.
Between the hunger and the pain, it’s hard to focus, harder still to plan, but Raika was a cultivator. She spent the better part of two decades learning to focus through pain; this is nothing.
That’s a lie. It’s not nothing, not by a mile and a half. She can’t even sleep right and she needs to sleep now, every single night. Not once a month, like a prodigy, or once every two weeks like a proper adept, or once a week like a regular cultivator, but once a night, nearly a third or more of an entire day every day. It’s ridiculous, and despite herself she can’t help but hate how accurate the term cripple feels. She has to eat, she has to sleep, she has to shit regularly and piss and it’s a nightmare. The pain, compared to all that, feels almost like an old friend.
If not the fact she can’t walk and she’s missing an arm, she’d almost prefer it to the fucking mundanity, the infirmity of mortality.
Weeks pass. She gets skinnier, and smaller, and weaker. Things never start to hurt less, but she gets better at not noticing it as much; if it always hurts, then it never hurts. Kinda-sorta. Rice and water is enough to keep one alive, but not nearly enough to live well, and she can’t eat rice for every meal anyways, so the pain grows and she shrinks smaller. Makes it easier to walk, anyways; less weight to lift onto her crutch, even if there’s less muscle to lift it with, and she had muscle to burn compared to fat.
And the entire time, starved, hurting, limping her way through strange streets from improvised shelter to shelter, she never stops looking for her qi.
In her efforts, Raika gets to learn, over and over and over, that it’s not just broken or wrong or painful, it’s gone. It’s also all those other things, unfortunately, but she can’t sense sharp-edged ruins of a broken dantian, can’t feel limp and shrunken meridians. She is trying to grab something with a missing hand; the thing which would allow her to perform the act at all is simply gone, or so vestigial and ruined as to be impossible to even sense. It might be considered a mercy by the universe, that she has lost the eyes with which she could see how broken she truly is, but somehow the suspense is even worse.
Feng Gui did this. Broke her. Took what she was away. And not one single thing beyond a nowhere clinic that got paid to do it so much as lifted a hand to help her.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Fuck that. Rage before pity, and wrath before despair. If it means she wraps herself in bombs and throws herself at Feng Gui’s doorstep someday, that’s fine, but she’s gotta be tough enough to do it, and to do it and live. She dies now, he wins. He breaks her, and her victory fades.
She can’t feel her body, she can feel parts of her body she shouldn’t, and where qi used to be there is nothing.
Fuck it, then. She’ll do anyway.
In the first few weeks she tries and fails to cycle qi again. She remembers the patterns she labored over and memorized, the feel of it flowing through her and into her, strengthening her and changing her. The memories of her cultivation are honestly cleaner than her memories of home, of her family, even of most fights. Obviously and self-evidently, it’s not enough. If that was all it took, every shattered Dantian would be a stopgap on a journey, not its end like it always is. She never even feels a difference, not a warmth of qi or a flush of vitality or the sense that her meridians are being used at all.
So she ditches that idea. Reforming her dantian, even if it’s theoretically possible, isn’t in her grasp, never mind her view. Perhaps there’s a chance it could heal on its own or if saturated with Qi, but A) she doesn’t have the Qi to saturate it with, and B) the possibility of it would still take decades or longer, time she simply doesn’t have. She’ll be even more old and decrepit by then, if she even manages to live past a year or two, never mind decades.
She goes deeper, more fundamental. At its most accurate, cultivation is carefully calibrated meditation, interacting with a law of physics, interfacing one’s biology and mechanisms into gradually evolving and artistically woven self improvement. At least it’s the descriptor she remembers best from when she asked medical pavilion staff about it to pass the time.
Mouthy descriptor, yeah.
Less accurately, cultivation is the act of pulling Qi through one’s Dantian into one’s meridians and cycling it to be absorbed in a particular way. Another step back, then. Cultivation, fundamentally, behind everything else, is to move Qi in your body in a way that changes you. A shitty descriptor, one maybe accurate enough to give to children as a first-day primer on the subject. Also maybe the only thing that keeps her sane.
Because babies don’t have meridians in the wombs, do they? Not before they’re formed, anyways, and there’s Qi in the mother and in the developing body after a point. Nuts and acorns and seeds don’t have meridians. A corpse that got pulped entirely would have death Qi, even if its entire structure, meridians and all, was blasted to oblivion, its stain on the battlefield emanating it like a miasma and forming it from somewhere.
So she has Qi. She never heard of someone with a crippled cultivation being invisible to Qi sense, after all, and she’s visible enough if one were to sense her. Probably. She hasn’t asked, but the way some people naturally avoid her or already know what she is when they look at her would indicate she’s visible to Qi-sense, and she doesn’t get the reaction of some terrifying Qi-less zombie or demon.
So she has Qi. She can’t absorb it, so she must be either generating it or just having it leak in casually, like any thing which exists in the world. Even dead things have Qi, only true demons do not (according to myth and horror stories, anyways). So now, since she can’t cultivate, she needs a formation.
She doesn’t know how to make one.
Raika is (was) very good at hitting things, being hit, and coming back better. Qi formations, an esoteric, complex and academic art, never really factored into that path, and even if they had, they need expensive materials, complicated and delicate Qi weaving to properly create each construct.
So not a formation, then. She needs density of qi, though, something which she can get either in the sect or in a city closer to the imperial capital, where the qi flows richly and there are beasts and Qi formations and items aplenty.
Something she couldn’t get access to even if she was still in her sect, of course.
So. Something less than a Qi formation, in a place less conductive to cultivation, without any of the tools for it. Sure, why not.
She might not have an arcane focus, but she can make a pattern. Something like a trigger they would make for the weaker sect disciples, a hypnotic trick to help them focus and cultivate, mixed with a pattern that Qi can recognize.
Raika does not eat for three days. When she finally hobbles into the store she was looking at, she reeks of the street, of unwashed clothing and sweat and dirtied hair, and she can barely hold herself upright. It is the worst she’s ever felt.
She walks out 16 coppers poorer and holding a tuning fork, and eats what she managed to haggle for and keep as rice with cuts of old meat, the first protein she’s had in… she doesn’t know how long. Time has gotten finicky. She has lain in the filth and the pain and the hunger and she can barely tell when she is.
All she knows is that she can do more. That this is her chance, that surely, surely this will work.
Raika is, of course, entirely delusional at this point, riddled with fever and trauma and desperation. She is doing something irrational to fix a problem that is impossible, and she has just spent three days worth of truly desperate begging and pleading for the sake of something less than even an instrument. She is starved. She is nearly gone. She does not even remember walking home, much less what it feels like to sit in the dark corner she has found without the agony of a living being gone to rot and ruin.
So it is to everyone’s surprise, including her own, that she doesn’t die that same night.
She takes a rat from a cheap trap she made and, too weak to break its neck or crush it, bites out its throat to kill it.
She cooks it as quietly as she can, over glowing embers rather than a proper frame.
She takes the tent of rags and broken box she uses for a wall, takes the stolen, moldy straw she uses for bedding, and uses it to hide every part of her that she can cover.
And then, under the cover of night, the taste of rat and the smell of burnt meat holding what's left of her together, she taps the tuning fork against her forehead.