Three weeks they’ve been in this damn palace. Another two to get here in the first place.

After Zhoulong’s death, they were all placed under heavy review and arrested in all but name by the soldiers that were previously their escort. While none of them match Taurus for sheer cultivation, or the frankly shocking amount of control he seems to have over his Qi, the prospect of a hidden assassination of a rival Researcher and the prospect of directly assaulting a dozen Imperial soldiers are two different realms apart. With Zhoulong missing and the entirety of his organization having spent the last two days before his death already in the stone building those same soldiers erected, it was easy to keep them all under a tentative house arrest, or at least ensure that guards followed them if they left.

And then the summons arrive. Almost two fucking weeks of travel in the majestic spatially-altered carriage they were trapped in for the time it took to reach the village whose name she still hasn’t learned. It was a nightmare the entire ride. Turns out, being able to perfectly detect minute shifts in the pitch and roll of the carriage as they fly, combined with the spatial alteration, makes Raika violently nauseous now. Considering again the amount of caloric intake her body now needs, incapable of sustaining itself at her new level even with a set of meridians to fuel it directly, it made for an incredibly uncomfortable journey of puking, eating, and hibernating in equal measure.

And now… they’re free.

Not really, not to any true extent, but free enough compared to the first Imperial Palace she visited. They enforced strict schedules on the first few days, closely monitoring them and watching over their general actions, to the point it began to chafe against her and worse, against her Truth, but eventually the soldiers backed off. Yun Ka took on some of their responsibilities, drawing some blood from each of them, small skin samples to deliver unto the higher-ups at the Division of Altered Cultivation with Taurus.

Who, as it turned out, was eminently comfortable with the whole ordeal.

They hadn’t been able to speak truly privately before he left, not with so many eyes on them, but subtle cues were easy enough for her to pick up. No stress sweat, no fear scent, no increase in heart rate. Taurus is either eminently confident he could beat the charges against him or entirely comfortable with dying early, and say what you like about his convictions and their manifestations, a man of low will he is not. So, just as he trusted her with his plan, trusted her with her life after she showed what she could do against Zhoulong, she trusts him not to fuck this up too royally, and let things play out as they would. She wore the mask for a while, polite and servile and overlooked as another well-trained freak alongside Jun Vral.

Which is another fun note: temporarily, at least, the “experiments” are all bunking together. Jun Vral, Shapefixit (who seems incredibly uncomfortable in the palace and spends most of her time in a truly mountainous blanket cocoon) and 13 are all stored in the same general quarters as herself, Maen, Taran and Kaena.

But Yun Ka and the twins get their own rooms.

Kiri and Kara, they’re called. Both svelte, both attractive, both with patches of gold-and-peach vitiligo on their skin- but neither holding any of the aforementioned qualities as much as Kaena. Clearly there’s some relation there, especially with how easily Kaena took over their combined aura and seemed to know just what to say to get a reaction out of them, but they haven’t brought it up yet. And despite everything, until it becomes relevant, Raika is content letting that remain the case.

The danger with excellent manipulators is that sometimes, the manipulation just gives you exactly what you need anyways. The most dangerous kind of manipulation is the one that is mutual and genuine. Whether or not Kaena’s actively manipulating her, there’s no doubt in Raika’s mind that they’re dangerous, and that they’re not acting out of pure charity. There is also no doubt in her mind that without Kaena’s help, she would never have let Maen get close, and she certainly wouldn’t have left the room she slept in that first night as intact or cohesive as she did. Until they ask more of her or betray the trust that their behavior has built, she’s fine giving them their space, especially with the sort of names the twins were bandying about like insults.

And so the days have passed, and outside of broadening Maen’s horizons, she’s spent most of her time in the room she sits in now, cross-legged and aware of her heartbeat.

Dink still hasn’t recovered their energy entirely as far as she can tell. Possibly sentient tool of power or not, their abilities were newborn when put up against black steel spawned from a Truth so powerful it has a fucking moon in the sky. They didn’t break, and they have slowly continued to mend over time, but it’s been slow. Weeks and weeks later, and she’s only just begun to sense any aura or weight to her second-oldest new friend, though they carry no distinct scent she can discern. It’s just… a feeling. Her subconscious and instinct telling her that whatever energies Dink wields, it does so at least somewhat more and more as time passes and the barely-audible levels they were reduced to in their battle.

And even without them, it’s still a close friend, and an invaluable aide.

The vibrations are purer now, clean and vibrant, and as they ring out when she takes Dink against her forehead, she feels her entire body shiver slightly in tune.

With her enhanced perception of her own body she can sense, feel, even minutely track almost any change in her form or internals, controlling individual muscle fibers if needed, but her mind remains almost frustratingly human still. She just can’t feel it all at once, and once something becomes background noise it’s hard to find it again. As Dink’s vibration runs through her body, traveling through her blood and calming the pools of riotous Qi she’s cultivating, every minor flaw, missed step and weakness feels like its been highlighted, a sense of wrongness or lack of balance suddenly blooming along points all over her. Losing out on the Qi production is a solid trade: she can always force her body and blood to grind it against itself and spark back into its more chaotic, dangerous and literally productive form, but she can’t always see what she’s missed. It’s more of an annoyance the larger her stored pools become, taking longer and longer to incite back to painful violence inside her, but still a good trade, especially in this rare time of peace.

Relative peace, anyways.

She ignores the room around her, as bare of one as she could find but still gorgeously decorated. Sheer stone, without furniture, but in every wall there are minute carvings, almost invisible at a distance but all together making a disorienting effect like the walls are rippling. The few candles she lights only add to the effect, highlighting another weakness: like her vertigo, her senses fall for the classic tricks more easily. Even mundane, non-fantastic optical illusions can give her a headache in seconds now, and echoes are particularly disorienting.

All excellent things to alter, then.

She takes her time. Nothing better to do but eat and spend time with Maen, and there’s all the time in the world for both stuck in this damn palace. It takes another hour of meditation to make sure that she’s in the right headspace, her outside senses put aside, her discomfort and awareness of her body as her entire self fading into the background and eventually fading away entirely.

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Only then does she ring Dink’s sound against her forehead a second time.

Her heart is still flawed. This has not changed. Outside of stopping it and removing it entirely, there’s just no way to heal the damage done, not with the blade that was used. The lesser black steel she could hold off and maybe eventually heal, but the blades put into the modified weapon-corpses were refined, forged properly, and she had to rip off any piece they’d cut and grow it back raw, something she can’t yet do with her heart, not until she understands how best to replace it. She just can’t spread her attention to keep her blood flowing completely without its help, and the limitations on her style of Qi generation only magnify without it.

So she built a second one.

It’s smaller. Much less powerful overall, and at first prone to overheating and damaging itself, but she’s gotten it mostly right. Right above her hips, back near her spine and a bit to the right as her normal heart is on her left, it only has four valves as opposed to her improved heart’s design of seven, only three of which are at maximum operation currently. Her bloodflow is much improved, and by clashing the beats of her hearts against each other she’s made raw, chaotic Qi formation much more damaging and efficient. Her original heart she’s kept now for practical as well as sentimental reasons: the threat of dying if its removed entirely remains, though she’s taken worse risks, but there’s something to the thought of resistance training she can’t shake. She’s forcing her body to heal constantly, lest the cut spread even further out and into more of her organs and crucial systems, and the more she heals the better she gets at it. Her cultivation began as forcing her body to adapt to lethal conditions: this isn’t any different, though it’s far more immediately lethal if she fails to keep it under control.

And it’s worked. It’s shrunk. A half-millimeter so far, enough to let her heart use some more of its pieces without exploding. The effects are slow, the method is dangerous and self-destructive, and it’s an unnecessary risk… but that’s cultivation, and she’s rather proud of herself for being a particularly deranged example of the ways one can push themselves to near oblivion.

Besides. She deserves it. A little pain is far less than what she owes.

It hasn’t been the only change.

Outside of a dissection table or the expertise of a master healer, there’s a lot about her organs she simply doesn’t know. Her digestive tract is mostly gone, throat leading to stomach leading to someplace deeper, just like her lungs, and something burbles in there and hungers and is not sated with the meager offerings of so much of the Imperial Palace’s best cooking. While she still has intestines, they’re slimmer, compacted, little difference between small and large, and they move much slower but much more, in curling, sinuous patterns, their compression leaving more room for muscle and fat that overlap in buffers and armor both, ensuring neither is overtaxed even in exertion. Her appendix is gone, her kidneys are gone and replaced with three smaller things that sit where one of them used to be, and her lungs wrap around in a strange way almost like inverse wings at rest, their shape strange and inhuman and comfortably allowing more blood vessels to take oxygen and other substances she cannot name from the air and throughout her body. There are nodes which she thinks used to be lymph nodes, but she has no idea what they are now, and a strangely spiral thing that she thinks used to be and still is her liver, and she’s never been an expert in genital anatomy to understand the nuances of all that. Suffice to say it’s different and a little weird, though she’s not complaining.

Bereft of knowledge on those and unwilling to be cut open to find out, she’s focused on what she can fix: muscle and bone and late additions to the party.

She’s grown two new adrenal glands, though it took time to identify them and replicate them, placing them beneath her collarbones and closer to her heart for faster delivery. She still hasn’t gotten the details right, and their vision is blurry and indistinct, but she’s managed to make two new eyes, keeping them closed and small along her clavicle. The second heart notwithstanding, her greatest change has been the addition of a third lung, a play on a heart’s valve system with a piece of her “liver” removed and molded into it. It sits beneath her sternum, acting as a sort of quarantine for incoming air and a way to redirect poisons and chemicals out of her lungs, while offering a boost of muscle power to ensure she can draw in air faster and harder.

It’s experimental, and she doesn’t know enough to change much else, so on to the muscle and bone.

The bone she makes lighter by removing dense chunks of it and instead filling it with interlocking patterns of triangles and minute structural supports, until it’s more art project than bone. To the outside it might look almost porous, but within is something almost like a crystalline structure, the gaps filled with additional bone marrow and the bones themselves capable of withstanding a lot more impact and weight with the new structural lattices and architecture. Minor tweaks in shape, and they’re done until she learns how to make something better, which she can feel is just not quite ready in the back of her mind. Something about materials and Qi saturation.

Speaking of: her muscles prove the difficulty there most of all. Reweaving them, unmaking some of the overlapping and occasionally damaging “presets” she emerged with, has been more than easy enough, but she ran into a wall with improving them directly.

The fibers don’t tear anymore. Not without serious damage, which defeats the purpose of exercise.

It’s becoming abundantly clear that classic cultivation is using one’s soul to establish what the body should be, not actually altering it. The level of strength exerted without Qi shouldn’t be possible without superhuman musculature like hers, and yet any Nascent Soul cultivator can bench press a building. It’s Qi, the lifeblood of the world, convinced by one’s soul and cultivation organs that the reality is that they’re stronger, healthier, look better, actual biology and physics be damned.

She’s at the far edge of it, but she still has to deal with physics directly. And it’s a bitch of a negotiator. Qi saturation alters her properties, makes it harder to saturate more, blocks Qi and makes her ontological “weight” heavier, which is how she’s able to control her body and trap Qi inside it. But it doesn’t actually just magically make her strong past a certain point, and she’s past it. So, she had to get creative.

After close review and a lot of detailed minor tweaks, she sets Dink down, thanking them with a whisper and a soft pat.

And then, she takes about twenty minutes to bring a “bubble” of her Qi to a roiling, screaming cacophony, brings it to the surface, and bites it with her black steel maw.

The interaction strikes again: the introduction of foreign Qi pushes her own “raw” energy, unshaped by anything but “life” concept, from growth and chaotic destruction to ignition. That same golden-white energy from her near-death in the tunnels explodes, the very energy of existence caught aflame by its own majesty and a single catalyst. It screams against the air, warps the fabric of it like it’s drawing the world into itself, even as it spreads and writhes, droplets of blood and crimson flowing into it as her arm burns.

And then she pushes more Qi into it, and makes it burn larger.

Soon her whole arm is consumed, and she spreads the flame to the other, and she lets herself burn.

She’s got too much density in her muscles and skin and bones for the fire to catch quickly. Her limbs don’t just explode. They would, with a high enough bubble of Qi burst open, but she’s found the right balance. They burn in fire that should not be, and she lets them, and only when they start to tremble, only when the flesh begins to liquify and strain and the pain is almost entirely blinding does she stop feeding it Qi.

It fades slowly. It dissipates, the Qi reaction no longer contained inside her or fed hungrily and gradually drifting apart until it begins to die down. Her arms are bare, her skin molten in patches and her regeneration all that keeps her limbs intact as they literally glow with residual heat and energy and turn waxen and wrong.

She turns her attention to them fully. Pushes her mind into each ruined fiber, each molten magma droplet of blood and flesh. She teaches them how to be, and in this softened state, they don’t just listen. They drink in the Qi that was so difficult to push into them at their level.

Slowly, she reforges her arms like molten metal into forged form.

It’s arm day today. Leg day’s tomorrow, though, and that one’s a real bitch to get through. Still. Can’t ever skip leg day.