Qen Hou is not sure he knows how to breathe.

He’s experienced the sensation before, or at least something similar. Around Raika’s trial, back when he’d made that whole mess his business, he’d been subjected to it more than once. Enough Qi pressure can convince a body it is no longer working, that its systems are simply not enough to continue to sustain life. Those who reach higher levels can craft specific pressure, infusing their killing intent or the threat of violence into their very presence and using it to crush the will (and sometimes the very life) out of their lessers, their senses overwhelmed until their hearts stop or their brains begin to hemorrhage.

This doesn’t feel like that. There is no intention to harm. In fact, he doesn’t sense anything malicious about the pressure at all. In some ways, that makes it worse. It does not feel like someone who wants to kill him, who holds that desire in their mind and can exercise it with sheer will and aura alone.

It feels like he could die because it stopped deciding that he wasn’t already dead. The feeling he gets from the pressure this thing exerts is like that of watching glass creak and groan beneath the weight of an ocean, of the steel beams of a building beginning to warp under something’s weight. The tiger, which is not what it should be called but is the closest thing he can think of, is not trying to exert pressure on any of them. The natural weight of this thing is enough not to make him fall dead, but to crush him to pulp, and the only reason he yet lives is because it strains the world itself to make sure he gets to live long enough to answer.

He can’t speak, of course. He can’t even breathe.

Hao Nera is gone. Just gone. He has no idea where, no idea when he disappeared, but right now it’s just the two of them, him and Li Shu, staring up at this thing.

It’s mouth… spirals. It gapes open, drooling, the liquid thick, viscous and foamy, flecked with droplets of liquid gold and starlight, with the glow of cooling metal and bubbling magma, and from out of it that sound comes again. Like a man screaming, like a cat yowling, like a fucked up whistle through the trees grabbed and shifted and forced, against its will, into words.

“Where. Is. It?” the not-tiger asks.

He can feel himself try to say something, feel his lungs try to remember how to breathe and fail. He tries to push with his Qi, and he feels it stir, only very slightly. The essence of Core Formation is to create a new element inside one’s soul and dantian, further connecting the two. Slowly, by accumulating energy, meditating and refining it in a way that speaks true to one’s self and soul (otherwise known as a cultivation method), a sort of pearl is formed, hollow on the inside. The stronger this shell is, the harder it is to fill it with Qi and let it grow, but make it too thin and it pops like a bubble, damaging the cultivator and usually ending in an explosive outburst of Qi. His own Core is just a shell, barely formed, a framework he can begin to cultivate and grow, molded by flame on the outside even as his fire within it, like a candle or a hearth, slowly builds up heat to expand it.

Right now, the delicate, barely-living framework of a core is all he has, and the Qi inside of it is all that responds to him, the amount in his flesh trapped under the beast’s impossible weight.

Still, he steps forward. He burns the Qi in his core, feels it set him back, maybe by weeks of cultivation. He can feel the structure of it shaking under the pressure, under what he asks of himself, but the core holds firm enough that he manages to pull from it and step forward a second time.

The beast turns to him, its many, many eyes looking at him from a head so vast he could stand in its sockets.

“We-”

He chokes. He drags in a breath by force, with every ounce of his will, feeling his heart beating like he’s been running for miles.

“We don’t know what you mean,” he manages, spitting it out in one strained breath.

“The. Bloody. One.” It moans. “The one. That killed. That ate. That was. Eaten. It is. Flesh. Like. Yours. But not. Like. Yours. You have. Its. Scent. Its. Taste.”

Forced into the crushing vice of its attention he feels his core scream, newly formed and still soft, still weak… and yet not torn, not yet. He embraces it, feels its definition enhanced and his awareness of it magnified by the pressure it’s been placed under. He can feel every part of its circumference, how it shakes and trembles, how it holds just drops more of his Qi, concentrated with tremendous effort over weeks.

He uses everything he has, and takes another step forward, in arm’s reach of Li Shu, who he can hear just barely wheezing out breath.

“We don’t know,” he groans. “We weren’t here. We only- we only hoped to grow from what was left. We did not do this.”

The creature growls, expressing a moment of displeasure, and Qen Hou falls to his knees, feeling his nose gush out a flood of crimson and his eyes pulsing with the pounding of his head.

He tries to get back up, tries to find the strength, but his core is shaking, his soul burns under the weight, his body screams and bleeds, and-

“Raika?”

The voice that speaks it is quiet, strained, barely above a whimper, but Li Shu manages it anyways, speaking the name into existence.

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The not-tiger pauses, tilting its head like its considering. It sniffs, the size and mass of it enough that the breath pulls both of them forward towards it.

“Yes,” it moans in that not-voice. “Rai. Ka. The bleeding. Thing. Delicious.”

“Where.”

Qen Hou grabs Li Shu’s hand, pulling her a step back towards him. She staggers as she does, but he manages to drag her behind him, and with just that slight shift in their placement to it he hears her gasp in a full breath for the first time since this thing arrived.

“We don’t know,” he says. “Please. Honored beast, we do not know. She is gone from us.”

The entity tilts its head again, lowering its gaze almost to the ground, its jaw still slack as a puppet as the tortured voice emerges from it. It crawls forward, some of its many legs undulating along strange angles as it comes closer to him until he could reach out and touch its many, many teeth, spiraling like stairs down a throat that goes… forever.

It sniffs again, once, twice, and almost drags him into its maw. It’s only Li Shu’s hand on the back of his tunic that keeps him from falling too far forward.

“No,” it moans, somehow conveying satisfaction through a sound like a man whimpering. “Not. Gone. You are. Tied. Oath bound. Promise. Your. Souls. Both hold. The. Same. Wants.”

It leans back, turning its head until they are both held in its gazes. It has three eyes, and a thousand eyes, a halo of vision growing like antlers from gaping sockets, or insectile eyes made of human ones in sockets overflowing with them, or something else he cannot put a name to. For a moment, long enough that he feels his sanity quake and his cultivation tremble, feels Li Shu gripping his hand so tight she grinds their bones together and breaks the skin, it makes eye contact with him.

“Not. Enough. For a. Snack. Not. Enough. For a. Trail.”

It lifts itself up, eclipsing the sky, the sun, the moons, outlined in an impossible rippling light that is its fur that is oil that is flesh. It tilts its head away, then back to them.

“I. Will. Eat You. Later.”

It smiles, the sight the worst thing Qen Hou has ever seen.

“You. Are. Welcome.”

And, without enough time even for him to blink, it raises a paw that is infinite paws, fractal and spreading and recursive, and bats them away like a cat with a toy.

Their sled comes with them. Hao Nera comes with them, the shadow he hid in torn bodily from the ground like a physical thing and the illusion he disappeared into shattering, showing him bleeding from the eyes and ears and clutching at his sword so hard his grip shakes. The hillside, and a dozen trees, and a few tons of stone and earth and carcasses dripping with moving, wriggling light all move with them.

And then they land.

The process takes maybe a quarter of a second, at most. In less time than a heartbeat, as the entity bats the world aside, Qen Hou feels the air and the distances around them shake and tremble and whimper and be batted aside. He still breaks his arm on arrival, is still launched at a slab of stone that moved with them hard enough to feel the ground shake and the rock crack, but from where he lays, staring at the horizon, he can distantly see the mountain of the village, and how much further away it is.

He lays there for a while longer. It’s hard to tell which is stronger, the agony of broken bone and the impact, or the relief of being able to breathe again.

A beast of the depths. Some ancient, twisted thing, more god than beast even. There are myths about things like that, things which have consumed and mutated past all conceivable limits. Most are hunted by the Empire immediately on confirmation of their existence, treated as serious threats to be eliminated as soon as possible. The Black Serpent, the Final Wingbeat, She Of Many Mouths… even before the advent of the Empire, there’ve been stories of things like what they just saw, and few of those stories involve survivors. It had to be from the deep wilds, the fourth ring, perhaps… but then how did it make it into the third, past the citadels? And why hold itself back, speak to them?

After reflecting for a moment, he uses his unbroken arm to lever himself off the ground and look for Li Shu.

Hao Nera is already there, a trail of blood showing where he crawled from. Li Shu is sitting there, kneeling in the dirt, the carcasses and materials they collected splattered all about, making the whole shifted, disjointed landscape they created on “arrival” stained red.

He makes his way over to her, slowly, his core drained nearly to the point of dissolution, his Qi aching as it cycles through his shaken psyche and flesh. He makes it, though, leaning against another stone dropped unnaturally into the ground.

“Your girlfriend is fucking trouble, Li Shu,” he says.

She doesn’t laugh, but there’s an exhale, minute, and finally seems to wake up, wiping at her bloodied eyes and nose. Hao Nera does laugh, faintly, from where he lies collapsed.

“I’ve heard of crazy pussy before, but…” he mumbles.

In spite of himself, Qen Hou can’t help but roll his eyes and scoff out a chuckle.

“She’s alive,” Li Shu says.

Qen Hou says nothing for a moment, lets the sounds of the forest slowly come back as the trauma of their spatial dislocation is gradually accepted.

“She’s alive. And she killed those beasts, didn’t she?”

He nods, once. “Seems that way.”

Hao Nera looks between the two of them, still holding his sword, one of his eyes bloodshot to the point of near-crimson. “Shit. You actually know something about this?”

Qen Hou nods. “Tell you later,” he says, wearily. “Owe you that, I suppose.”

Hao Nera laughs, weak but genuine. “Don’t owe me shit. Figured I’d hide out, drag one of you away while it ate the other. Couldn’t even manage to move. Don’t owe me for that. I hid.”

Qen Hou shrugs. “It was the best move you could have done, and you did it without hesitating. I’ll say plenty more about you when my chest doesn’t hurt so much, but you’re no fool, Hao Nera, and it seems we’ve gotten you mixed in our business now.”

Li Shu looks at him in confusion, matched by Hao Nera as he realizes that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“It said it would eat us later,” he sighs. “Not that it was letting us go. And if it can smell someone we haven’t seen in months, can smell an oath, I’m willing to bet it knew exactly where you were, brother.”

Hao Nera’s eyes widen, and he spits to the side. “Damn,” he growls. “Knew you two were too convenient to be true. But noooo, Hao Nera needs to take risks, needs to gamble. It was going so well, too!”

“So it was,” Qen Hou sighs. “Seems we have to grow, or find someplace to hide. And that we owe you… some kind of payment, if only to soothe my honor at how small we just were.”

Hao Nera snorts, but… doesn’t refute him.

He looks at Li Shu, and after a moment, she meets his eyes. Unspoken communication passes between them. They don’t owe Raika anything at this point, did more than their fair share to help her, protect her. Still…

Power to kill all of those beasts. To be hunted by something from the deep wilds. And of course, Li Shu’s promise, reaffirmed by the words of something beyond mortal comprehension. It bears the hallmarks of something… powerful.

“Ho there!” says a voice, startling them from their conversation. “You lot seem rather troubled! Wouldn’t happen to need a hand, would you?”