Basements, Tseludia Station, Pantheonic Territory, Fourthmonth, 1634 PTS

Rachel had just informed me that there were Seiyal trapped here, but… seeing with my own eyes the living man strapped to a table, while they prepared to tools to perform some sort of surgery on him.

Rachel had not needed to say a word for me to know her intentions. If we rescued the subjects, we would have evidence of the government’s wrongdoing. The price to cover such a matter up without reprisal would be far more than our measly funds could pay, even with the additional money we had stolen from the nearby gangs.

My eyes glanced back to the man who I knew had to be Ester Perivar. To the pair of glistening orbs dripping blue liquid onto his face, just as my own skin dripped beads of the same. I smiled like I knew Cyrus Yu would have. Finally, the opportunity was before me.

Rachel smiled again as she faced the small crowd of brown-clad scientists, and her eyes narrowed. She lifted her hand, and a blade appeared in her hand with a flourish, as if she had performed some sort of sleight of hand. They cowered before her, but one of them stood out from the crowd, sneering.

She was a tall woman, with very sharp features, and she glared down at myself and Rachel, slightly taller than the two of us.

“I don’t know how you escaped, nor where you acquired that strange equipment, but if you surrender and return to confinement, you will be allowed to live.”

The words were spoken in perfect seiyin, with a slight Tseludia Station accent. It struck me as silly how the researchers all seem to assume we were escaped test subjects, even despite our obvious Seiyal weapons and disguises. Was it really so impossible to imagine that someone had broken in without setting off alarms? Perhaps it was. We were only able to do so because we had a being who was something like a Shade with us, after all. Rachel sneered up at her in response.

“Do you really believe you can persuade us with just that? You really lack any understanding of the situation, don’t you?”

Her voice held a distinct tone of mockery, and the woman seemed taken aback, affronted by Rachel’s words. But before she could formulate a response, I had arrived at a conclusion of my own.

Cyrus Yu would have abandoned the man to his fate, simply because that was the wiser decision. But I was not Cyrus Yu. I was the miasma, I was-

I was a force of nature, and the laws of this puny government could not constrain nor confine me. I was the pounding gale of slaughter that tore against the vice grip of society.

I raised my sword from its sheath, and the overbearing woman instinctively flinched. I supposed reality had finally begun to set in for her. Rachel held her hand up in front of me wardingly.

“I thought you said you would avoid killing the researchers.”

I nodded.

“He did say that, yes.”

For a moment I considered heeding her request, but the blood and fluids inside of the Staiven before me cried out to be spilled, and so I complied. Such individuals were monsters, more so than any mere fiend was. It was only right for them to be culled.

I did not even need to use complex techniques. My motions were mere butchery, and the mortal researchers could do nothing to stop me. My robes quickly became soaked in multi-colored fluids, the room a mass of viscera. Rachel looked up at me, surprised and annoyed. Rather than horrified by my actions, it was more like she was annoyed by them. She sighed.

"This will make matters more difficult," she muttered, glancing around at the corpses.

Without saying another word, I strode towards the operating table, where the elder Staiven shivered in horror, unable to move because of his tight bonds. I quickly cleaned my sword and then stowed it back in its sheath as I continued to approach. He grunted and moaned through his gag, but that would not stop me.

Unlike the cruel researchers, I felt bad for this man. Ester Perivar had never done a thing to me, and for all I knew he had been an outstanding individual. Having a surname meant he had come to this station from afar, just like myself, in his case likely seeking a new life.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

His life would serve to extend my own.

I reached out, fingers grasping into his eyelid and wrenching out the first eye with a sharp twist. He screamed into the gag as the blue miasma dripped from my hands down his cheek. With my other hand, I reached over to take the other one, digging into his eye socket to tear that one away as well. The screams pained me, but sentimentality was a weakness I would not allow to kill me. I had no choice in the matter. I had to choose between myself and this alien I had never met before now.

It was not a difficult choice to make.

I turned to Rachel, who was intently watching Perivar. He was writhing in pain, the death throes of a truly unfortunate individual. It was odd to think that these years of pain and suffering he had experienced here were something that most Staiven would eventually go through. Untold trillions of lives tortured to their deaths by their own people over the course of centuries, likely. Even the scientists who performed the experiments would likely one day become experimental subjects for the next generation.

It was cruel, and it struck me as senseless. But perhaps I had no room to complain. I myself was a cruel individual when I needed to be, and unlike them I already had a path to immortality in my sight.

Rachel turned back to me as Perivar began to still, glancing at my hands that were covered in Staiven fluids and formless miasma, holding two blue orbs.

“I can give you the time you need,” she said, a solemn expression on her face.

I nodded, giving her a soft smile.

“Thank you.”

I sat down amidst the gore in a meditative posture, and emptied the vial onto my palm. Three blue orbs now rested there, shifting around my palm in wild manners, yet not falling apart.

Despite their different origins, there were many fundamental similarities between Perivar’s eyes and the marshfiend pearl. All natural treasures of a certain miasma tended to have that same sort of convergent similarity, driven by their own inherent miasmic properties.

I took a deep breath, calming my mind until it was as placid as a lake. Raindrops began to fall on the lake, and without hesitation I held my palm up to my mouth, swallowing the three treasures.

The consistency was viscous, and the taste odd. It was difficult to place, something like thick tapioca covered in some sort of oily grease.

Once the treasures were inside of me, I closed by eyes and cycled my miasma. Within me, the treasures seemed to begin moving in an impossible manner, as if it were following the paths laid out within the spirit rather than my physical form. The formless nature of the miasma left it constrained not by bonds of flesh.

The three orbs navigated themselves to my dantians, where the foundations of my cores had long been laid. The slight fracture in my cerebral dantian, though repaired, created a slight disturbance in the flow of miasma, and I knew it would make this process far more difficult than usual. Further directing the flow, I moved the first orb to the area above my groin, where the lower dantian resided.

This core I had chosen to house my movement technique, the technique I understood most of all. It would be the easiest to form, and so I would do it first. While my physical body remained silent and motionless, my miasma spun with vigor along the paths traced out to better suit the Water Striding Steps. In my head I envisioned the movements that were so ingrained, my muscles lightly flexing as if to perform the movements. A piercing pain erupted from the dantian as the vast amount of miasma contained inside of the orb attempted to solidify into a core around it.

A distant voice erupted into a scream, but I ignored it, focusing on the technique and slowly piecing together the treasure’s power into the foundations I had laid. My dantian cracked and began to shatter under the pressure. I filled in the gaps with miasma as the technique began to rebound louder and louder, its motions imprinting in some fundamental manner on the shape, the flow, the nature of these fragments.

In my mind's eye I watched the skittering steps of a vast organism I had once seen, the true king of the Downpour, stride across the muddy landscape, completely unhindered by the rain, the mud, or even its own bulk. Each step touched on the fundamental secrets of the universe, warping and directing them to its whim.

As I had long known, the Water Striding Steps were a technique of domination over the space around me, the ability to move completely unhindered, in a way that defied the logic of those who observed me. It was not a means to close the distance between myself and the place I wanted to be. It was simply the ability to be free, to not conform to my own rigidity. The steps flowed through the spaces between, just as the miasma flowed into my shattering dantian, rebuilding it as what it was always meant to be.

With a sharp crack and a truly immense sensation of pain, the dantian finally shattered into dust, merging completely with the nearly formed core. It was a vibrant blue, and unlike how one typically imagine a core, this one was not a solid sphere. It was a river, flowing eternally into itself. It coursed around my body, moving in an endless flow. Eternally, my meridians now shifted to follow the path it set.

As a manifestation of my oldest technique, my Water Striding core was unconstrained.

Staiven Eyes and Elder Staiven: [For most Staiven, the eyes are mere miasmic repositories, accumulating that which builds up as they age. It is also the source of their primary sense. Rather than vision, this is a soul sense that detects the intersection of their eyes with concentrations of ashata within the brink. Other races often find the nature of this sense difficult to comprehend, but in effect it allows them to sense flows of ashata, souls, lesions, and miasmic concentrations in extreme detail when they are close enough. Their progression system increases the concentration of miasma within their eyes over time, increasing the strength and acuity of this sense. For most Staiven, removing their eyes would eliminate this sense, but would not kill them. When the eye grows too large for its socket and begins to spill out, the miasma begins to affect the body itself more, turning the Staiven into a subtly different sort of creature, one referred to as an Elder Staiven. Elders differ in nature depending on the properties of the miasma their eyes are composed of, and they die if the organs are removed.]