She draws heads as she crosses the street. She can hear Pai Jin go to say something, hears Maen put herself in the way to stop him, and to his credit, he does stop, rather than shove past her or use his presence to push her aside. Kaena says something, her senses picking them up even as her mind trusts them enough not to listen and focus ahead, and she figures she’s got at least a little bit of time.
She turns into the alleyway, the buildings to either side tall enough that the hallway of space between them is left shadowed and cold in the chill of autumn air. The gazes that followed her stop at the entrance, most not interested enough in her to poke their nose into why the giant superhuman cultivator was wandering into a dark alley that sounds like a fight, and she breathes. She likes to be admired, but it’s not exactly her favorite pastime. There’s a difference between knowing people find you attractive, knowing people find you impressive, and being seen by strangers as something to be stared at, and she only likes the former two on her own terms. A break from the crowd, no matter how fun of a crowd they may be, is a bit of a relief.
It’s not hard to see the source of the sounds she heard, or the thing that her phantom pointed her to. There’s blood staining muddy ground, and a smaller form curled up in a ball as two larger figures take turns kicking at it, a third watching on with a grin on their face. None of them are well dressed, all in rags that look to be years old or scavenged, but the three on their feet don’t have the look of malnutrition one would expect from proper street urchins. Gang members, maybe? Some kind of initiation, for them or for their target?
She’s not sure. She doesn’t really have the context to interfere here, and to do so is to put herself into another’s life, to walk in and alter things she does not understand.
Then again, they’re kicking a kid on the ground. That’s probably enough context.
“Hey,” she says, keeping her voice human-like.
All three of the attackers turn, staring at her, eyes wide. They’re young. Maybe fifteen, sixteen years old. Flush with hormones, hunger pangs and the bravery of those who’ve survived life just long enough to think they’ll never die.
Well. Maybe not the latter, considering the look in their eyes when they see her. She does pose a rather dramatic figure, nevermind the fact that she’s wearing simple but recognizable cultivator’s robes.
“Honored cultivator!” the one in front says, bowing poorly and awkwardly but with an adorable amount of terror. “We apologize for causing such an unsightly display!”
She blinks. Huh. They’ve got manners.
The first one does at least. The other two have to be donkey-kicked in the shins by the speaker of their group to follow his lead.
“Good apology, decent start. I’ve got a few questions though. I’m out and about, trying to enjoy a day in the city. Why are you beating someone twenty feet from a busy main street in the merchant’s district of all places? Where anyone can see? You don’t have your own back alleys you could do this in?”
The one in front audibly swallows, the two behind him slower on the uptake but catching on quick that this might be serious. They’re in a major Imperial city, and she doesn’t have the mark of any sect on her, but she only knows that might protect them because she knows about cultivation. To kids like these, grown on myths and scraps and with only their leader in the Qi-Gathering realm, she might as well hold their lives in her hands.
Which she does. It’s just there’d be consequences. It’s not like it was centuries back, but the stories of passing cultivators doing a casual slaughter because they felt insulted aren’t even mostly false.
“Well? I asked you a question.”
The kid blanches and stutters, starting to sweat a bit. “We- that is, he- I mean, we just, we found him here, and he owes us. Owed. Um. A bit. We never thought that-”
“That there’d be consequences beating up some random kid with, I’m guessing, no one to back them up, right?”
“I… yes, honored cultivator.”
She sighs. Long, and loud, and with enough air in her lungs that stray leaves and scraps of trash flutter in the alleyway, leaving all three of the young toughs pale and trembling.
And she doesn’t even have Qi pressure anymore. Probably. She might need to tone down the presentation a bit if she’s going to have normal conversations again. Maybe she can find a way to make herself more person-sized again alongside some of her other ongoing projects, if only for not having to duck doorways or terrify random mortals when she speaks.
Ugh. Tastes bad in her mouth. “Mortals”. Technically, according to the usual nomenclature, she still qualifies, which makes the quasi-slur even worse.
“Alright, listen,” she says, making a conscious effort to modulate her voice box so it’s even further from her natural tones. “Next time, you gotta take your target at least fifty feet back, not twenty. Where you are now, there’s every chance that if they slip by you one good spring has them in the crowd. I’m new in town, but stuff like that draws attention, and I don’t know how the palace runs this town but I’m assuming we’ve got a guard that’s more than happy to dish out some beatings of their own, right?”
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They nod, one of the goons in the back rather vigorously.
“Third, beyond just being away from escape routes and not drawing so much attention, you have to find the right balance for a good beating. Hit them too hard, they end up dead and a mess, one that might get traced back to you, might get you in trouble, and won’t net you anything at all. If he owes you, then wisdom states that you should leave him intact to pay you back, but leave a message. You want them able to move around and keep themselves safe so you can get more out of them, but you also want to leave them wounds that last long enough to leave a message. If you do it right, be respectful about it, you won’t be friends, but they’ll like you more than the other assholes who don’t know how to do a proper beating. You following me so far?”
The young bruiser looks outright dazed, while his friend and their leader stare at her like she’s grown a second head.
“I’ll take your silence as a yes. Close your mouth boy, you look like a fish.”
“As for you!” she walks past the trio, who scramble in desperation to get out of her way. “You alive down there?”
She can hear their heartbeat, but it’s faint, and the breathing is irregular. Still, the way it picks up when she gets closer, she’s pretty sure they’re conscious.
“You have to protect your head better,” she says, reaching down and adjusting thin, almost skeletally malnourished hands. “Focus on the rear and sides, the top if you can spare the attention, and use your forearms to protect your face. Curl up smaller, keep your back to the ground or a wall, you can live with a busted rib, you can’t do much with a busted spine, and don’t cross your legs, it’ll be harder to move them and easier to break them.”
The figure just trembles, bleeding slightly.
Ok then.
“Alright,” she sighs. “You three run along. If I see you again and you aren’t showing clear signs of improvement or, better yet, showing wisdom and actively trying something new and less likely to put you in this same situation, I’ll break all the bones in one limb of my choice.”
She doesn’t need to say much else. They’re gone in a blink, scrambling and scrabbling and running into each other in a mad dash out of the alley that’s almost funny, if not for how genuinely desperate they seem.
She kneels down in the dirt, her sandals muddy and her robes starting to show similar muck.
“Hey,” she says, quieter this time. “If they broke something bad, I need to know before I can help you. I don’t trust handouts either, but it’s your lucky day, kid. I’ve got a ghost that would be pissed if I didn’t do… something.”
Nothing. They just shiver, curled up tight.
“Alright.”
She places a hand on them anyway.
She misses having a Qi sense. It’s incredible how useful so many of the powers of cultivation are, and how easy it becomes to rely on them. Poisoned? Flush some Qi in there. Want to see new colors, sense things about other people? Point your awareness at them, the cultivation does the rest. Want to fly or cast spells? Find the right shape, the right words, an old technique, and woosh, slap some Qi in there. She was never very good with all that esoteric stuff, or talented to learn the depths of a lot of what she did know, but even an amateur’s Qi sense can tell if someone with mortal-level cultivation has wounds or abnormalities in their body to some extent. And all it would take them is a bit of practice and sticking some Qi in their perception.
Still, she has her own methods now. They’re not convenient, or easy, or quite so versatile, but they’re there.
Through the contact she takes in as much information as she can. The heartbeat, of course, but also how the little body bends and creaks as it strains, the scent of adrenaline pumping violently when she’s this close, the gurgling of excess stomach acid with nothing to digest, the constant trembling and the way they let her feel microfractures vibrating in tune.
This is not the kid’s first beating.
She smells tangerines, and the memory of cold, snowy nights alone, and then with company. She wonders, briefly, if JiaJia’s red-light house ever had many other unclaimed children like him, and if he ended up in an older brother role for them. If maybe he hadn’t been, but had started to grow into it, before… before.
She lets her voice slip back into its natural state, her body’s constant infusions of Qi leaving her vocal cords inhumanly strong and strangely musical.
“Child,” she whispers, like a thrumming note of music and a hungry thing in the dark, “look at me.”
He freezes. Perfectly still. Not even trembling anymore, though it’s hard to tell if she had some kind of weird effect or if he just froze out of fear.
Slowly, very slowly, one of the stick-like arms lowers. One eye pokes out from behind it, the body still curled up, the terror still in every ounce of animalistic defensive posture.
“Do you want something to eat?” Raika asks, in a voice as human as she can manage.
They say nothing.
She nods. “Smart. Good not to say yes to things when you’re desperate.”
She’s not a cultivator anymore, but some of the old rules, be they customs or rituals or something stranger, still apply. She extends a nail into a razor-fine claw and runs it through the palm of her other hand, letting a few drops of blood drip onto the ground. It’s not quite red, anymore: it’s so bright that it goes a step past crimson, and there are flecks of gold and a steely, metallic sheen to it. It almost seems to glow in the shadowed sunlight of the dark.
That’s pretty cool. Something to look into later, maybe. She hadn’t noticed that when they’d drawn blood samples a few weeks back, and she wonders how new the change is, and why she didn’t feel it.
“On my blood, on my honor as a cultivator, and on my own name, I swear to you I mean you no harm, and that anything I give you in the next day shall be freely given, to take or deny as you will, without tricks or hurt.”
Something shivers in the air, the tension of old ritual and the thrumming of ancient, mountainous things making itself known.
That’s also never happened before.
She really needs to figure out what the fuck is going on with her body, because transforming musculature and dense bone are clearly not the end of the mysteries.
She can’t help but smile at that a bit. To think, she’d have not just strength but mysteries again. The world, horror that it is, is a wonder and a glory, sometimes.
The kid is staring at her, eyes wide less in fear now and more in awe, of the original kind. Fearsome and wondrous awe, which shakes one to the core.
And yet their heartbeat has slowed.
“So,” she says. “Now that that’s over with. Would you like me to buy you something to eat?”
Silence in the alley.
Then they nod.