Day 4
The mountain is in front of the sun now, when the night begins to settle. The whirling, writhing fire highlights its shadow, making it all the darker around her all the sooner. She has forgotten all about her mission, all about the intended idea to find the inventor of those strange weapons she’d fought with Qen Hou all those many months ago. It’s hardly of any interest to her if the Empire gets its hands on yet another mass-producible weapon of war or mad invention, they have plenty already, and there’s an entire team of experts ready and willing and far more experienced on the case. No, she is here now to draw the heat away from the others and as crisp early-autumn air swirls around her, she can’t help but feel free.
It takes ignoring where she is and why she came here, but for a while, she is not a slave. It’s… shameful.
Especially with who has started to visit her.
The beasts have started appearing less regularly. She has more time to heal. This whole time, even as she’s flooded her body over and over again with the saturated flesh of those hunting her, she’s kept her own, far more painful flow of Qi up and running. She is, physically at least, as strong as she’s ever been, even if she hasn’t had time to really implement many changes. But that doesn’t mean that no changes have occurred.
She has visitors now. And she can feel the thing getting closer.
That’s the best way she has to phrase it. “The thing”. The more she eats, the more she fights, the more she consumes, the more she can feel this tension in the back of her mind. It’s intermittent, but it keeps popping back in, over and over, here and then gone. She can feel it, though. Getting closer. Not something she can see or feel or taste, not something she can understand or even really perceive, but somehow, in some part of her, there are signals screaming that it’s getting closer to her.
It isn’t crawling or running or moving. It is simply there, then not, a feeling inside her growing that it is here and then fading. Not a presence, no; a moment. Something is coming closer.
It’s not the only thing. She has visitors now.
There is more and more time between the waves of her own personal beast horde. More and more time for her to fight to stay awake, after three nights and four days without sleep. Dink, of course, has been instrumental in this. She lost the chain she was holding it with sometime on day one, but as it turns out, her body digests monster meat much more easily than metal, and so long as she barfs him up every few hours he’s fine. Hasn’t even tarnished, really.
All that and the fact she hasn’t pooped in like, two days does make her think her stomach is kinda weird.
But in those moments of rest, it is with her again. A security blanket and minor aid, one she hasn’t used much since… since JiaJia. Since the memory of time in the alleys became more burden than motivator. But she has visitors now, and Dink is one of the only things that makes them go away.
Small figures. Human. A little over a dozen, maybe, all of them wearing small, accidentally delicate masks, war-painted to hide their faces and decorate themselves with bravado, wrapped tightly with thick scarves. Some of them carry spears. Some of them carry daggers. Some of them carry farming tools.
She hadn’t thought of them much as a cultivator. Not since she got her new name and new reputation and let the memories rot as best she could. But ever since that night. Ever since the stain. She’s thought of them. And now they’re here. Standing, in the woods all around. No heartbeats, no smells, no sounds to them, but here nonetheless.
There’s one more. A bit younger, more of a mid-teen than young adult of the masked folk. She doesn’t look at him.
They don’t let her sleep. She’s afraid they’ll touch her.
She is a little worried that she has been out here, alone in the woods, in pain and in danger and awake without sleep, for maybe longer than she should have been.
“Dink”, agrees Dink. But it doesn’t judge. It’s here. She’s not alone. It’s here.
And so are all the ghosts.
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Day 5
They’re not in waves anymore. Not really. More like… arena fights.
Before, it was a dozen or two dozen, all roaring and getting in each other’s way in a sort of rabid dash to try and taste her and kill her and eat her. The starved and the weak, perhaps, sensing an opportunity and acting desperate.
She has apparently disproven the usefulness of that behavior, because now they come in twos and threes.
Each one towers over the others she’d fought. A stag almost as tall as a house, its horns made of white crystals and its eyes dropping blood and ichor from swirling, alien pits, all five of its limbs and its long, beautiful tail moving with grace and purpose, matched alongside a serpent almost a dozen yards long, as thick around as her entire body, its scales covered in soft down that she later discovered left miniscule poisonous hairs in her skin. A four-winged bird with three heads and plumage that emitted smoke like night, accompanying a fox seemingly made of water and something like a badger, but made up entirely of teeth and tusks.
She survives each. They retreat now, sometimes, but more often than not she still tastes of them, and less and less often, they taste of her. She’s managed to balance it, now, her body and mind hypervigilant in corresponding and complimentary ways. Her physical reactions are three, maybe four times as fast as before, and her ability to process input and determine courses to take is so much more than before. She slept for an hour or so; basically fully rested, really.
Rested enough to integrate and refresh just a drop, part of her says, and unfortunately it’s technically being helpful so she can’t tell it to shut the hell up.
The less they attack, though, the more she can taste them.
The fox tastes like a clear spring, like waking up on a cool, refreshing day, like diving into water until you’re not sure where it ends and you begin. The crow tastes like ash from a cigarette, like the night sky, like sitting around a campfire and marveling at the dark around the edges of it. The deer… she does not have words to articulate what that one felt like. The most that she can translate is the idea of looking out at a world and knowing it, and knowing where to walk, and knowing what shall be, but not being able to change them. The concepts beside that, flavored vaguely of sparkling powder and velvet, she cannot even begin to communicate.
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Her flesh is changing. Too much, and too fast. She can’t keep track of it anymore. Some changes she makes in the heat of battle, and only realizes after the fact or forgets about entirely. Others she thinks come from the flesh she consumes, her body without organs to process the Qi into a new form and its absorption simply assuming a shape similar to what it once was, requiring correction later. All throughout her, inside her, there is a feeling like a slowly filling lake, mixed with a raging storm, the Qi she naturally generates and forces into chaos and the Qi she consumes awkwardly alongside each other, neither the dominant ideal, neither the perfect option. She does her best to absorb as much of both as possible, her stomach somehow always digesting its contents into healing and growth, even as the storm inside her slowly saturates and harms and infuses. The storm remains dominant, which she’s… weirdly grateful for? It is hers, and it is her, in a sense, even as the other forms remain more comfortable.
She refocuses.
Dink.
She senses the next fight. Only two of them this time. She swallows her friend and tells herself, very firmly, that she is alone in these woods save for it.
There are no ghosts.
There are only heartbeats she can now always discern, and the feeling and sound of air against bodies she cannot see, and the very real sense of the pressure of them. Whatever the beasts use to camouflage from mortal (and inhuman, alien, mutated-) senses, it seems instinctive, as is the disguising of their Qi, but that has a smell too, like flat, stagnant water. And the pressure is much more noticeable, after all her experience with it. Perhaps that’s how normal cultivators track them, but Raika senses it only carefully, as the air itself becomes heavier, as the ground stirs and trembles, as winds start to move differently and more violently, as her blood and the air in her lungs start to tremble.
She gets to her feet, her body holding more old scars than new, all of them faded into as much of a stylistic choice or skin coloration as proof of old harm. She breathes in, and out, and her breath stirs leaves on the far side of the trees around her. She moves her heart again, and almost without needing input, it begins to thunder like a hammer against iron.
She has her teeth bared and flesh ready when they arrive, and amidst summoned lightning and blades of flesh-grown steel, she moves.
Her ghosts watch.
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Day 6
It is almost here. Almost upon her. She can feel it.
She is alone. She does not remember where the village is. The mountain is always on the horizon, somewhere. She rips and tears and is torn apart and remakes herself and sometimes she remakes herself differently and she worries she does it wrong but it keeps her alive and she has no time so it does not matter.
The breaks are longer, the time between beasts greater, but every fight takes hours.
The beasts come closer each time, and she does not have room to be torn apart, because if she lets it happen now she will be unmade.
She thinks she lost a leg, but she still has both, so maybe not. She knows she lost an eye, but she expected that one back.
Her bag is empty of leftover flesh. There is no room for error, if there ever was, and more and more it is like a dance. Some of her partners she allows a bite, allows them to conquer her for a moment if only to be able to breathe, and some of them walk away after that. Others seem only to become hungrier, more desperate, and she has had to tear her way out of throats and stomachs in this last day, ripping open those who try to consume her whole.
She has changed. Something has changed. She’s too dizzy to remember.
The storm is inside her and it is not a storm, a storm is rain and wind and cold but hers is razors and fire and lightning without thunder, cutting through her and wearing her down and slowly eating her as she eats it. She is in her fire and it is in her and it / she will not let her die. She will be perfect, she will be alive, she will be her own, or she will be nothing.
And she refuses to be nothing.
It is as she stands, skin of vibrant russet walnut soaked crimson in the bits and pieces of something that was once humanoid and hungry and thrumming with something like sunlight, that she sees a familiar face.
It has changed in the time since she last saw it. Its flesh remains bulging, overgrown, but it has grown to match it, gaining a good foot and a half of height on all fours from when she last saw it. Its skin, still covered in a perfect projection of needles, has grown duller, darker, thicker, and the needles themselves sparkle and glisten in the light of dusk, like crystal or pearl. Its eyes, no longer empty, are like sunken pits with droplets of magma at the bottom.
She remembers how much of herself was left in its paw as it wandered off, and wonders if she truly is such a magical meal, to make of a thing like it was a thing like it is.
Intestines and pulped viscera slide off her. She looks at the spirit beast, and, slowly, kneels into the crater she has made of her last opponent's chest cavity.
She plucks its heart and takes a bite.
It tastes of sunlight and burning flesh, and it matches her like joy does sunshine.
The beast waits for her to finish her meal. It waits until the heart and the lungs and a good few pounds of flesh are gone.
The moment is so close.
It is only when she steps clear of the body that the beast moves into the clearing they have chosen.
Whatever hold it has on its camouflage, it releases it, and she smells it again. Like falling stone from impossible height, like meat laid out on a cutting board of pearl and fine wood. It has changed since she last smelled it, and she can’t help but wonder if it’s weird to feel a little proud of it.
It huffs at her, something like a word or a question.
She does not remember how to speak. She huffs back.
She is not camouflaged, so she cannot undo some trick that disguises her Qi. Instead, she moves her heart into its proper, more violent rhythm, and lets out a long, slow breath. She can smell herself. Like heat, like blood, like fear and like joy and like wrath, the scent of her fills the arena.
She is a storm in flesh, about to be torn apart by fiery winds and lightning made of steel.
She is a mad, mad thing without scent to which the weight of the ambient Qi around them bends, even if she cannot see it.
She is mortal and flesh and possibility.
And the spirit beast does not back down.
It launches itself at her. She launches herself in turn.
Her skin blocks the first swipe, tough enough that even its enhanced quills can no longer pierce so easily, but when it swipes it still leaves a scarlet paintjob of torn-open flesh. When ripped away, a bed of needles even only a millimeter deep still hurts, and still opens her up for more damage. This thing, through luck or evolution or cultivation or however the hells spirit beasts grow, is perfectly suited to ruin all it touches, to turn it to meat on a plate and to crush all beneath its weight.
Raika does not care.
She is full to the brim. She has reshaped flesh like putty for days just to survive. She has seen and felt and tasted the shape of a hundred life forms so alien they may as well be from other worlds.
And the moment is almost here.
And so, in a burst of blood and viscera and bone and something almost like fire, like napalm, that glows and ripples and is hot to the touch and ignites in strange colors on all it touches, she stabs it in the chest with what she makes of her left arm.
It is not an arm. It is not a limb. From the remains of what was, she makes a fucking tree. She makes a branching, snaking, series of vines, of bones tough as metal, of flesh which grows and regrows and regrows, of blood that glows with fire and magic and sheer fucking will, and it exists and it is possible because it is her, it is hers, and she can shape it so.
That’s all it takes. Two hits. An opening gambit, leading to more attacks, more claws and rolls and sharpened pearl needles, matched against a single, explosive instant of madness and apotheosis.
The moment is here.
Its flesh melts. It lets out a long, mournful wail, long and slow and quiet now, as it is pierced, impaled on a dozen impossible branches, and she mirrors it. It is dead. She is dying, or maybe being reborn. Either way, they wail, together, low and quiet as she cries and it dies and everything in her shudders at feeling that death so close.
All around her, her ghosts watch.
Behind her, JiaJia watches. And she is proud. And she is ashamed. And she is afraid.
And the moment is here.
Her flesh begins to melt, the impossible heat and pressure and static and glow inside her reaching a breaking point, far beyond her body’s abilities to absorb or use no matter how much she harms herself. She reaches a tipping point and crashes past it, and she falls, and the beast falls with her, and together, her, the beast, and the blood of that which they fought upon all die and melt and begin to become.
There is a sense of pressure. A smell, like wind and mountains and giant, endless plains beneath the tread of impossible weight. The world bends to the pressure of something impossible and vast and alive.
The last thing she sees is the sun, setting behind the mountain. Six of its many limbs seem to circle it or emerge from it, like halos or tendrils of flame against a perfect black.
And then she is gone.