In interesting news, Raika has just found out why Shin Ren didn’t kill her. Or more specifically, couldn’t kill her.
She eats, and tears through flesh and bites into bone to sup on marrow, chin dripping crimson, and it feels wonderful.
Her Qi, if it can be called that, is raw, unrefined in the most literal sense, and using it is like forcing green, wet saplings to catch fire, or like using pinewood ash and glue to write without mixing either; theoretically possible, if one is willing to endure a fuckload of discomfort, extra effort, and maybe even outright pain to see it done. But the Qi that she consumes now, that dribbles down her chin, infused into blood and muscle and modified living tools to be used by the dead spirits beasts all around, isn’t nearly as raw as the flesh. No, it is, in the truest, most delicious sense, refined. This Qi, circulated through organs meant to purify and convert it to usable energy to each specific organism, is made to be used, custom-altered to suit the nature of living flesh and flood into it. She may not have the meridians to circulate all of it throughout her, but in terms of the ease of absorbing it into her body and the fact that it is not chaotic, formless energy but something designed to augment and improve a living body makes it practically a moot point. Her body has adjusted to surviving and absorbing Qi as raw and ragged and frightfully chaotic as any Qi-deviation poison’s wet dream; in comparison, this is nectar.
Raika tastes what is left of her kill, and experiences communion.
Her flesh reknits like new, her skin filling out and regrowing over the missing gaps. At first she tries to be careful, tries to keep a close eye and make sure that nothing is scarring or growing back wrong, but somehow it just… isn’t. She feels an urge, like a pull, trying to get her to move towards something else, but it’s not that much of a compulsion; just a suggestion. She doesn’t understand what she is eating, is experiencing it in random chunks, and while the Qi in it is designed to supplement a specific body, it’s not so niche it can’t be moved into a new form. Her whole body absorbs it, drinks it in, the constant agonizing static of the Qi she has forcefully cultivated and kept alive briefly quieted in the face of pure, ecstatic rightness.
And none of this even speaks to the taste. All the scents they’d been hiding, magnified into flavor… it’s a fucking experience.
She doesn’t have time to eat all of them, and Qi-absorption properties or not, her stomach has limited capacity. As tempting as it is to just stay here and let them come for her again, however long it takes for the scent of Taran and the memory of his guns to fade, if the last wave was any indication it’s not particularly survivable. Instead, she grabs her bag, half-trampled a ways away from the one Maen was hiding behind, and takes out her bedroll. It’s nasty as hell, but she starts tearing apart the bedroll and wrapping up cuts of meat that she does her best to drink the blood out of, trying to package as many as she can while disguising the smell and any leakage.
The smell is likely to be a moot point, seeing as they’re finding her anyways, but if she is going to stay out here, drawing them away and delighting in them then she’ll need supplies with which to heal and eat. And at the end of the day, she’d just rather not have a truly disgusting sack of wet meat on her back if she can avoid it.
She looks up above, tracking the sun in the sky as it squirms. It falls there, to the south, and they walked a rather circuitous route from there, vaguely southeast… if she tracks where they’d come from in an arc, then the village is almost due east of where she stands. The mountain, then, is east-northeast, visible over the top of the trees.
She’ll head there. Eventually. When and if she feels she has absolutely no other option, she’ll head there, if only because between the village, escape, so full of promised violence, and the mountain… well. She remembers what he swore to her, and the hunger in those strange eyes as he’d said it.
She’ll go to the mountain. But only when she has to. Only when needs must.
She starts walking, heading due north. She’ll circle around mountain and village both, while keeping the aforementioned obstacle in between her and Maen, and the rural little nothing that they’d briefly stopped at. If they need her for something, surely they can find her; that’s what getting chipped against one’s will is for, after all.
She starts moving, getting out of the clearing while the sun still shines. Even as she starts to move, she can feel the difference in it; she expected to leave that last struggle, wounded or not, in near ruins from how hard she’d pushed untested systems, but as it stands, with the addition of refined, flesh-coated Qi to eat, she’s almost entirely ready to go.
Still, the battle clearly demonstrated that those systems are flawed. Some of her muscle fibers are woven far too tight, too ready to tear and unable to resist the force she’s putting on them, while other new patterns she’s made in her flesh and connection points for tendons made it so she had limited range of movement that she hadn’t recognized before. Pushing herself that hard, at the brink of death, left it clear that even relying on how her body has gradually been strengthened by Qi, a lot of her would-be improvements simply don’t make sense when exposed to the realities of stress and combat.
She can’t stand still, though, and she doesn’t have days to work. She has to modify on the go.
Some of the muscle groups and patterns she sets back to “human standard” (at least if her original could be considered standard), keeping them as what they were until she understands them better. Others, she starts to refine, bit by bit, keeping pieces of herself still even as she starts to sprint.
That part, at least, she got right. Her heart beats fast and strong, having survived the abuse she keeps putting it through and, with the wonder of Qi, healing back better, able to keep her blood flowing all throughout her as she runs. Her lungs pull in air faster and quieter than ever before, drinking in the oxygen all around her and sending it all throughout her so purely, with so much sheer, gorgeous potency that she can even hold her breath as she runs and have no difficulties moving for minutes. She marvels at it, and wonders if this is what it’s like for those in the Nascent Soul realm, but figures that even then they have to burn their Qi to achieve something like this.
All she has to do is hurt herself.
Her lungs are barely stressed even as she sprints at the absolute highest speed she can manage, her legs moving so fast they’re blurring. She can only barely keep up, only barely perceptive enough to keep an eye on the terrain around her. She gets dizzy more than once, newly enhanced eyesight leaving her disoriented and dizzy from the sheer amount of information she’s seeing all at once, but after she breaks through a tree and re-fucks up her ribs, she is a bit more careful about how fast she’s going. Still, the distance blurs past, and it actually takes over an hour for her to find the first spirit beast that has caught up.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
There’s more rustling around her than she thinks she’s causing, more sound and mess in the woods, and it doesn’t take long for her to figure out she’s being followed, even without the use of her sense of smell. To confirm, she slows a bit, forcefully sending her heartrate down fast enough that she actually stumbles with how dizzy it makes her.
There. A second heartbeat, behind hers. It’s trying to slow down to match her, but either it can’t keep pace or it can’t go that slow, because she hears it distinctly. Distinctly enough, in fact, that she can tell it’s coming from her left.
Instantly she lands hard enough that she feels pain shoot up her shinbone all the way up her spine, almost spinning in place and launching herself in the direction of the other heart. There’s a brief “whuff” sound, a surprised exhale from something large, and then that very same something goes soft as she slams into it.
The beast looks a bit like a wolf, made far too large, skinless, and with chunks of bloody jelly oozing from most of its joints. It splatters like a balloon when she hits it, unfortunately for the entire clearing behind it and most of her outfit.
And then it starts to flow back into shape.
She finds and rips out something important-looking in one of the meatier chunks of jelly squirming about the clearing, but it’s still moving by the time she senses another heartbeat.
And another.
Apparently, by way of bloodletting, she’s rung the dinner bell.
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Day 1
Sometimes things stop, for a while. The things around her, a spectrum of twisted life molded in perfect madness and power to be lethal and unique and glorious, sometimes retreat, maybe once every few hours.
She wonders about Maen, then. She hasn’t heard any far off thunder, so it seems likely that Taran got back alright, but no one’s come back to check on her. Oh sure, it’s tactically sound to keep the monster-bait away from the main base, but she did sort of assume that someone would have come to see if she needed help, maybe. Her tracker likely says if she’s alive or not, but she has no idea what other information it’s supposed to transmit.
So Maen’s still alive. And she’s on her own.
The others might be well. They might not. In the end, all she has are idle fantasies in the face of a world of teeth and hunger.
And the mountain. Always on the corner of the horizon. The mountain. Source and end of aaaaall her problems, if only she chooses to go there and ask for help.
Mmmh. No.
She hasn’t rested much, but she does in those moments of retreat, a few hours at a time. Sometimes just a few moments, barely long enough to put herself back together. She’s still refining things, and she’s gone almost two years without proper combat training; rusty instincts can only do so much. So far, they have done just enough to keep her core intact, though she’s covered in cuts and slashes, her skin bent and folded all wrong to patch what she can, even as she’s started to get better at controlling the bloodflow. No lost organs yet, though they’ve gotten close to her eyes more than once. She sometimes notices them acting strangely; every now and then, one of them takes a bite out of her and they all seem to scream, the whole wave reinvigorated and violent and gloriously, horrifyingly hungry.
She must be delicious. Why else would they all be so eager to join her in an ever-moving ball of death and Qi?
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Day 2
She thinks she has a left arm again. Maybe. It might have been a memory, because there isn’t one there now.
The sun is back.
After those first few hours when Taran came by, they haven’t stopped, not really. Pauses, small breaks, but nothing beyond the first few hours. She hasn’t slept yet, hasn’t breathed without the scent of violence and destruction. She’s left a trail miles long of fallen trees and upturned earth.
As time progresses, the beasts seem to multiply, not just in numbers but in strength. The longer this goes on, the more blood that is shed, the more they seem to appear, possessing stronger and stronger abilities.
She still hasn’t seen the bear, the twisted needled mutant from before, but others have come to take its place. One something like a bull or cow, something she takes joy in tearing apart, which would throw clods of earth with exponentially more force and mass than should be possible at her. Another, some sort of bird, would whistle and warble, the sound pitched and then altered to make it sound like it was everywhere and nowhere, until sudden bursts of it would cut like knives.
There’s classifications to these things, she knows. Spirit beasts are rarer and rarer nowadays, but not necessarily dying, which is a fun conundrum; while hunters and those who make a living off of spirit beast materials never seem to go hungry, there’s never any easily visible or near centers of civilization. Some suggest mass migration to the fourth ring, others suggest adaptation to human hunting tactics and hidden dens, beneath the earth, in pocket realms and amidst the clouds. Fanciful, maybe, but not unrealistic.
She’s found the answer, though; they’re all right here. All the classifications and species and unique materials one could wish for, throwing themselves at her like starving dogs.
She gets to her feet again. She mends her flesh again, tasting a buffet of flavors and scents and Qi and doing her best to drink in a bit of every animal dead around her when their rivals retreat. She starts moving again. The mountain is almost to the east of her now, no longer north. She has a ways to go before she considers quitting, because while the exhaustion grows, the pain doesn’t, coming and going in waves of violence and healing. She can keep going. So she does.
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Day 3
She drinks blood like wine.
She breathes, and tastes ambrosia in her mouth.
She moves, and it makes her dizzy with sensation. What was once static is now chaotic, burning sensation; her flesh is like water, so much does it move. She hurts, she is hurt. She screams, and the world roars back at her.
In one moment, she is torn open. In the next, she tastes flesh on her tongue and feels give against her teeth, and is whole once more.
They taste her too. They tear her apart and unmake her, and she remakes herself from them, in joy and in madness. She still hasn’t slept. Three days awake, since the morning of the day they arrived. Three days awake, because to close her eyes is to expose her throat to a hundred hungry mouths, and she has yet to find if she can survive without it longer than a few moments.
Because she has survived without it. For a few moments. So long as she tastes them again. Even though they still taste her. Every time one of them steals a piece of her rather than simply wounding her, the entire pack or crowd or horde roars along with it. She’s seen some of them retreat, actually, nursing their bite of her flesh and calling quits.
She can’t help but look on it kind of fondly. She’s killed enough of them, after all; they’ve earned a little nibble, right? Especially considering how many of them she’s eaten. She’s starting to wonder if she just tastes delicious enough for the whole third ring to come and try to get a bite.
She swings. She claws. She tears, and kicks, and can barely remember if she’s using techniques or not. Too little control and there’s too many openings, too much and she can’t react in time; it’s a real pickle is what it is. Takes her a while to figure out the right balance, the right mixture of force-grown instinct and intentional control.
The control part is easy. Trusting herself outside of that firm grip is much, much harder, but she manages it; she learns her lesson when she doesn’t react in time to a claw that thrusts through one side of her and out the other.
She is a puppet, and she is a puppeteer, she’d thought. But that’s wrong. She is a tool, a weapon, a system of pieces that all work in their own ways to make for the intended outcome desired, and she is the desire, the thing standing behind it and above it and within it and pointing the way.
I Am Me. I Am Mine.
And if they want her, they have to earn her.