Raika can hold her breath way longer nowadays.

It’s something she’s noticed before, but it implies a lot of things that it doesn’t outright say, and testing it to properly understand the change was challenging without proper time to explore it. Turns out, it is quantifiable: she can pull in somewhere around four or five times more air than she should be able to hold before her lungs start to expand enough to ache. She can feel said air inside her lungs, though; it’s not vanishing into some nether-space, it’s held intact inside her.

The conclusion is a bit concerning, but also severely promising. It’s not just material improvements or her ability to control it that have changed: her biology is slowly but surely becoming distinctly inhuman. Rather than a “normal” cultivator’s ability to hold their breath for longer or fuel themselves with Qi alone, or even recycle the air in their lungs, she can just store more. That and, of course, get more out of it: even with her much more energy-inefficient, larger and more demanding form, she can go for much longer on a single, regular-size breath of air than most, capable of holding that one breath and running at a decent clip for minutes before she has to breathe again. It seems that the amount of Qi saturating is doing more than just reshaping her body, it’s restructuring the properties that her body holds.

Maen and Yun Ka have been instrumental in tracking the changes, Yun Ka on the mathematical side of things and Maen a bit more… creatively. Speaking of which:

Raika lifts herself up from between a shapely pair of legs, languid and relaxed like a sated carnivore, pulling her tongue back. And back. And further back still. Slowly, almost a foot of prehensile muscle draws back into her throat, which she clears politely.

“I think I hit thirty minutes that time,” she purrs, voice a strange mix of lyrical notes and animalistic vibration, casual as can be. “You wouldn’t happen to have the exact timing on that?”

Maen mumbles something incomprehensible and sort of twitches in response.

“Mmh. Pity. We’ll have to repeat the experiment later, perhaps?”

The flushed and utterly drenched-in-sweat felinid sort of moans something or other, which Raika takes as a vague sort of yes. In spite of repeated trials, the tan cultivator has yet to back down from so much as a single “experiment”, and somewhat happily Raika worries about what’ll happen when that insatiable spirit is finally met with a cultivator’s body capable of matching it.

It’s been nice, seeing Maen improve. Foundational realm isn’t exactly an undreamt of height, even in Maen’s old life as a sect’s servant, but to achieve several steps into it in a few weeks rather than years and years has been joyful for both of them. Raika’s pretty sure that Imperial metrics probably have moment-to-moment tracking to determine one’s progress, but it’s always been more natural to her to go by the vibe of the journey, and she’s certain Maen’s is going well. Maybe not halfway through Foundational, still strengthening her meridians and dantian and their connections to her mortal body, making sure that the flow between them is seamless rather than abrupt and disconnected like in Qi formation, but saying she’s made it almost a third of the way into the realm might not be amiss. Breaking through that first barrier has clearly done her good, as have the resources of the Division of Altered Cultivation (and, Raika likes to think, some of her own advice on the matter).

She sits up, letting Maen rest and recover a bit and enjoying the morning air. Combat helped, but time outside of battle has also done its part to help her adjust to her new senses, and she takes a few seconds to just let herself feel every touch of the breeze, the smell of dew and sharp, cool air and the more distant scents of dust and food and smoke. It washes over her, and she lets it, before locking her senses down a bit and compartmentalizing as it gets to be a bit too much. It doesn’t make the sensation go away, nothing save altering her nerves does at this point, but it helps her not to focus on it, and the meditation exercises that brought it about have helped as well. It’s to the point that she can experience the rush of scents, the constant press of air pressure and movement, the touch of cloth and the dizzying amount of detail her eyes can pick up without needing to stop and recalibrate or muscle through with a mask and sheer force of will. Good thing, too, considering where they are now.

She gets out of bed, body flowing smoothly, only half as heavy or muscled as she was back in the fight against the corpse-smith, and walks across the room. It’s another ostentatious architectural feat, another part of an Imperial Palace (which always seems just empty enough to accommodate visitors) they’ve been sequestered in. Gilded pillars, white marble, an extensive bathing room off to one side, a massive lounge area recessed into the ground from the upper area of the massive canopy bed that decorates the back end of the room. And, as a finishing touch, a truly colossal balcony, fit for a ballroom, its railing etched subtly with runic formations, its curtains vast enough to be sails on any reasonable smaller fishing vessel and fluttering in the wind. She walks to it, picking up a robe from a nearby clothing hook that held nothing when she last looked at it, and wraps herself just enough to not flash the whole city first thing in the morning as she steps out and gazes at the city.

Paleblossom City, for all of its charm and the genuine spirit it had, was fairly small in the big scheme of things. One of the larger locations for its placement on the third ring of the Empire, sure, but no major exports to its name, limited imports, and most of its influence localized to the colder regions and mountains before the true north begins. Cragend, on the other hand, is a fucking metropolis, and its namesake is no small part of that.

Stretching far off into the horizon, a massive canyon shatters the land, like part of the world itself cracked and split from an ancient force millions of years past. Its sides are smooth in some sections, worn into beautiful faux-jewels by wind, water and time, while other sections remain jagged, cracked and shattered into edges and caverns in their own ways. This early in the morning, with the sun only just beginning to coil back together at the southern horizon, its glow remains, the depths of the cavern shimmering with an aurora all their own of dark shadows, bright blue and green shimmers, and above all, a faint and pervasive orange-gold light.

The city grows around it, the very tip of the canyon’s jagged end stopping just before the Imperial palace in a sort of upper-class town square, while the city proper grows on both sides of it, bridges extending off across the narrower parts to connect its two sides. Several walkways and elevators lead down into it, the early, thinner section already mined and explored thoroughly and repurposed for habitation of all sorts, but especially those down on their luck.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

But that is the focus, here: mining. Rare minerals, ores and gems saturated in natural Qi formations and deep flows that gather within the invisible depths of the world-wound are Cragend’s main and greatest export, with commissioned mining teams sometimes spending months below the surface braving underground spirit beasts and strange demi-realms of concentrated influence to find specific pieces to match a sect or cultivator’s needs. There are even several pits at the far end of the city, opposite the Imperial Palace and the noble and merchant districts behind it, where large quarries and mines have been dug into the earth to make for better access to some of the more readily available ores.

The canyon isn’t infinite, of course. It has a definite end, and while it stretches for miles, if Raika strains she can see the end of it clearly, dividing out into hundreds of smaller cracks and scars until gradually the ground is whole again. It’s actually even more dazzling that far out: the shallower cracks of the “crag” have turned to estuaries, connected as they are to one of the few large bodies of water in the central rings, the creatively named Cragend Sea (both for being only a few miles from the city, and for being at the other end of the crag). It is almost more ocean than sea, the whole body of it actually managing to go further than Raika can see by a pretty wide margin. The entirety of it is almost seven-thousand kilometers in a straight line, never mind its circumference, making it the third largest (and fifth deepest) body of water in the known world.

Overall, the view is breathtaking, the city and its engines and luxurious technological “trains” and rails making for one of the most technologically advanced cities in the third ring, and its industriousness meaning that even this early, it is twinkling and awake, matching the aurora of the Crag with its own fairy-lights and the sounds of people living and breathing in it.

Raika picks up the cup of tea that she did not make and did not ask for, but certainly is happy to enjoy this early, off the railing next to her, and gives the thing that brought it to her a nod and a soft smile.

She can’t quite tell, but she’s pretty sure it immediately vanished from her perception when she does.

The Imperial palace of Paleblossom had some of the same entities, she’s sure. Even without traditional Qi senses, she can’t smell them either, their presence indicated almost entirely by minute changes in air pressure and the movement of dust particles. She doesn’t imagine that most other cultivators can tell they exist either: Kaena, Taran, and even Yun Ka have never mentioned any invisible servants or react when they’re near. Maybe Taurus knows, if only through his runework or his far more advanced cultivation, but she’s not really sure. He doesn’t seem like the type that would ignore any possibility of a security breach, so either he knows and isn’t worried, he knows and has set up defenses, or he doesn’t know yet, and she maybe potentially has another bit of information over him.

They only really move when not being focused on. Not just not seen, either: she’s felt them disappear from her perception or go perfectly still when she spent too long “looking” at them by sensing air movements around where she noticed them. There’s always more than one around, though.

She doesn’t think they’re conscious. If they are, then they’re bound in a way where they cannot communicate at all. She’s tried leaving pen and paper, openly requesting to “no one” that she’d love to have an itemized list of the needs of people in the castle, even trying to see if she could corner one and ask directly, but nothing has had any results. Whatever they are, she’s only ever sensed them in the Imperial palace and its grounds, and they don’t really seem to exist as far as she can tell until something needs to be done or someone might require or want something. It explains a fairly colossal piece of why the palaces have felt so empty: no servants, anywhere. Whatever formation or magics were woven into being to create or bind such an impossibility, it is localized to a luxury for those chosen by the Emperor and their scions. So again: she has no idea if they’re real, if they’re people, a person, a bound spirit beast, a bound spirit, rare as those are, or something greater or stranger than any. Perhaps its a Truth operating somehow, or the Dao of Hospitality or something, enhanced to embrace the entirety of the Empire’s most luxurious holdings.

Whatever it is, it is incredibly, almost dangerously helpful and good at anticipating any requests, and… she really doesn’t see anything wrong in showing a bit of gratitude where she can.

She had a hard six months working with visitor satisfaction in a sect, and there’s very little she’d like less than to go back to that again. Hospitality and retail services are a nightmare even the most hardened and wizened of cultivators may struggle with. And with her time passed over and disregarded as a cripple before that… If she can make this ambiguous maybe-living servant group or living palace feel a bit more appreciated, she wants to, and until it says otherwise or she finds a better way to show said appreciation, a warm smile and acknowledgement is the least she can do.

She hears Maen’s heartbeat finally turn to something a bit less frantic and vibrant, her breathing much more even now and a pleasant backdrop to the sounds of the city and the early morning. She takes a sip of her tea (incredibly pure water, hints of jasmine, vanilla and warm milk mixed with something herbal and lightly citrus in the blend) and lets her paramour take her time making her way out of bed.

“You know, some of us lowly cultivators still need to sleep,” she grumbles as she clutches her own robe tightly, hair all a mess and shivering adorably as the light autumn breeze hits leftover sweat.

“I see,” Raika purrs. “No more late night experiments, then? I really was appreciating the robust added data.”

Maen snorts, lightly punching her in the arm. “I didn’t say that. Just maybe gimme a few hours in the mornings, would you? A girl can only handle so much tossing and turning.”

“You’re a growing cultivator,” Raika chuckles, leaning her head down so that it rests atop Maen’s. “Vigorous physical exercise is crucial at all levels of cultivation, but especially the early ones.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Maen rolls her eyes and bundles her robes tighter, blinking in surprise as her own cup of tea manifests when they’re both not looking and steams lightly on the railing of the balcony.

“I’ll allow you some rest,” Raika says. “So long as you ask for it like a good girl, later.”

She gives her a wolfish grin. “That way you can’t blame me if we don’t stop.”

“Wuh- I can’t always talk right sometimes when- fine. Fuck you, you gorgeous freak of nature, fine.”

Raika purrs, lifting herself up above the shorter woman and patting her on the head, lightly scratching the base of her ears as she does. “Good pet,” she whispers, her voice vibrant and strangely melodic enough to make the air between them tremble.

Maen audibly gulps and blushes a bright pink.

Raika lets her rest, though. She’s not one to leave her so tired she won’t be able to cultivate or do anything with her day: as much as she enjoys playing with her newest friend and lover, she’s not so jealous of her time as to leave her too tired to enjoy it.

They look out over the city together for a while, with Raika eventually taking a seat on the marble and inviting Maen to curl into her lap as they watch the sky change colors as the sun is reborn.

“When do you think he’ll be back?” Maen asks.

“Soon, I think. For better or for worse, soon.” She runs a hand through Maen’s hair, hoping to lull her back to sleep, away from things they cannot yet control.

“Think they’ll blow us all up when he does?” she asks as she snuggles against Raika’s considerable body heat.

The cripple-turned-abomination stares out over the city they have been left in, free to roam but not to leave, and wonders for a while.

“No,” she says, to the sleeping kitten in her lap. “They’ll probably do something we’ll like a lot less.”

She smells the scent of tangerines and open fields carried to her on the wind, and pretends it is one of the invisible servants she senses standing in the room behind her as she watches the sun rise, and prepares for the day ahead.