Chapter 428 - Just All Kinds Of Hate, Really, Tons Of Flavors (Patreon)

Ayyo it's chapter time! That's right, some way, somehow, I'm keeping my shit regular and the releases coming! VISCERAE's next chapter is well in the works and I've got all sorts of goodies coming down the pipe. Now that I'm somehow holding on to getting the chapters out on time, I gotta get back to getting book 2 done- edits have been sooooo sloooooow. Wish me luck!

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We’re experiencing some casualties. While 37% of the local sites have been pacified, destroyed, or extracted for future analysis, those amongst them who have actively attempted to defend themselves have put up a surprising amount of struggle. Their refinements are minimal, and in terms of experience, skill, understanding, Dao, and any other number of criteria, the weapons of the Clan surpass them entirely, but almost all of them possess a startling amount of Qi, at a remarkable density. I have rarely experienced the sheer quantities of Qi many of the divergent locations have expressed outside of specialized holy sites or high-tier cultivation chambers of the Clan’s own compounds. Sacrilegious as it might seem to say, inaccuracy would be a far grander crime in this one’s eyes- these locations are rare treasures, and their ability to wield such value offensively is the primary factor reducing the speed at which our objectives are being met.

Resistance from the local hegemons has been minimal as of yet. We have yet to engage in open conflict with the reigning factions, and losses of their lessers have been kept to a minimal standard. While this state of affairs cannot be maintained indefinitely, internal strife amongst interest groups have led to a temporary stopgap against impeding our efforts with the extraction and destruction of the divergent sites. However, this lesser Feng estimates that we will only have a day at the most before responses are sent out against us, and active denial of those responses will lead to inevitable escalation. This lesser Feng requests clarification on the subject of how we should proceed should such an instance arrive, and if higher priority should be placed on mollifying the local leaders.

There is no excuse for failure, and the casualties suffered and delays accrued cannot be classified as anything less. This lowly one will happily offer his head to the honored elders upon the completion of our mission, but can reassure the honored elders that the results acquired will be most pleasing, and that what remains of our parameters will be met in short order.

For the glory of the Family.

-Operational report from forward assets of the Clan’s military operation in the Republic of Morae to higher command.

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Geng He feels the world quake and only barely manages to hold on, the collapsing sphincter full of spikes that passes for a hallway he’s in spasming along with the ground. 

“The hell was that?” 

Lei Hai growls from where she’s bodily wrestling down a creature, pinning the cancerous mass of insect-legs and flowers down even as it tries to stab at her. “What does it matter? Focus!”

Flesh Of Liquid Form Technique: Flooded Dark

Dai Yuhan sends out another flood of water out from her body, turning the flowing locks of water that her scalp produces into a twisting deluge of dark water. There’s a slightly purplish tint to it now, altered as she has been by the gains they’ve experienced in this place, but it works just the same, drowning the tunnel and washing over the incoming beasts. 

“The labyrinth changes!” she yells, veins standing out cerulean blue against her skin as she uses her cultivation. “I’ve felt it in the water behind us. I think it’s changing again!”

“Now now, no need to fight!” Yu Guanyu says, laughing as his whip, tripled in tips and moving more like a living thing than ever, carves through some of the waterlogged creatures. “There’s plenty for all of us, to a point!”

“That’s not the point! That was different!” Geng He yells back at them, his arm coming up to block a descending pincer. It bounces off of the shard of bone growing out of his forearm, the kinetic force stored inside of it reflecting against the blow. “Something’s happening! We need to be careful!”

“Oh, now you want to coordinate?” Lei Hai says, throwing a glare back in his direction. “Whenever it’s something you can’t handle alone, then you’ll talk, to try to bludgeon us into obeying!” 

She punctuates the sentence by driving her fist through the skull of the thing she’s fighting. A moment later, its body is thrown at another, shattering the outer shells of both. 

“Don’t try to tell me what to think!” 

Her technique makes her emotions heightened, that’s become clear, especially with how she’s changed in this space. The others have been far more careful with her, even before he reconnected with their group and others at one of the rest areas. 

Geng He growls back at her as his blade cutting through the torso of some insectile thing. Altered mental state or no, he refuses to be bullied by some brute. 

But then everything goes wrong. 

It’s there and gone in a flash. A fragment of a whirlpool, sharp and steel-bladed and green, shoves its way out of the nearby wall. The pressure that comes with it is monumental. 

It feels like they’re drowning. All four of them, reunited during their trials, stronger from their advancements, collapse to their knees. Yu Guanyu vomits blood as Dai Yuhan shrieks, leaves spiraling out from out of water and seemingly tearing at her skull. Lei Hai manages to keep to just one knee for a moment, but where her body holds firm, her eyes go blank, her face turning slack from some sort of mental overload.

Enough Qi to overwhelm even the landscape they’ve experienced in the hidden realm hits their systems like a falling boulder. None of their defenses hold up against it- it doesn’t even register as an attack, simply the presence of that impossible thing grasping through the wall being enough to tear into their spiritual organs.

Geng He spasms, his balanced thrown off and his body convulsing on the floor. He can barely look at it without screaming, except he can’t scream at all, because he can’t even breathe.

His mind flashes through panicked memories, like an animal trying to find a way out, and he thinks back to his cultivation manual. The strange inclusion of dream-energies into the cycle. 

It doesn’t do much, but here, now, he looks at the whirling optical illusion that has carved a bleeding hole in the wall, and sees something more than that impossible madness.

It looks like a hand.

And then it vanishes as fast as it came. There’s a sonic boom, and all of the air in the hallway is explosively dragged through the bleeding hole it came through. Geng He’s lungs collapse, all of the breath ripped out of them, even as the wall closes shut and fresh air rushes in to replace what was lost.

He chokes. He hears Lei Hai gurgling, like her lungs are full of fluid, her muscle-based techniques collapsing without her conscious control. The others aren’t faring much better.

The only saving grace is that the creatures in the hallway fared worse. Shattered shells and viscera are splattered from where the vacuum sucked a lot of the exoskeletal creature’s insides to the outside. 

It stinks. It hurts. He tries to breathe but his lungs are shaped wrong, collapsed inward and emptied completely.

He might die here. 

The thought is loud. He didn’t have that before. He just fought and fought until he couldn’t think of anything at all anymore, until he went blind and mad and kept cutting and fighting and reacting. Here, now, he feels his body spasming, trying to make itself function again and failing in spite of his newfound vitality. 

He doesn’t die quickly, though. Too much energy in him for that. Too much enhancement that this hidden realm has offered.

So he just keeps spasming, trying to get his mind to work again.

“Wow! Sorry about that! Let a little something slip for a minute there!”

He hears the voice, but the words are basically gibberish.

Then his lungs inflate, and the broken ribcage he didn’t notice resets, and all of the exhaustion and pain in him is just gone.

“Don’t worry though! I promise it won’t happen again! I’ve got a handle on it now. At least I think so. Probably. Enough that you all should be fine.”

He turns his head, Yu Guanyu still retching to one side but trying to do the same. Geng He notices that the bloody puke from before has vanished, right alongside the plant-growths that were trying to crack Dai Yuhan’s skull open.

Growing out of the ceiling is a disembodied face. Well, not disembodied really- there’s a long spinal column wrapped in thick muscular tissue that lets it extend down from the ceiling, but the only “human” thing about it would be the face itself. 

The spirit of the hidden realm (or of this temple, or of the trials, or whatever the hell it is) smiles down at them. Geng He thinks it’s meant to be reassuring but it does not do a very good job of it. The eyes are wrong.

“Your Flesh should be all fixed up! Don’t want any outside interference on the trials, right? As a little apology from me though, if you take that corner, I’ll put up a rest area with some medicine for you to take with you. How’s that sound?”

They hear the flesh ripple down the way, portending said changes, even as the creatures splattered around them also start to squelch and shift and get put back together. Slowly, but not so slowly that it’s not visible. 

“Great! Good luck again! You guys are some of my favorites!”

And the face is gone, retracted with a wet sucking sound into the ceiling above. 

Geng He groans. 

Worst. Hidden realm. Ever.

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Raika wonders if there’s some kind of word for indigestion if it’s not inside your stomach. Then she wonders if there’s a word for when your entire body is a stomach. She really needs to figure out how to get words out of people, quick, because she’s starting to feel like she’s running into too many concepts she’s having trouble to define. 

The Feng in her inner world spasms again, throwing itself out, trying everything in its power to leave and return to its Domain, its Soul- but she doesn’t let it. 

[Domain Of Woods Both Deep And Dark] is trying to collapse, but she doesn’t let it. An iron grip of Flesh holds every single living thing in the space to her will, and Flesh is Space, kinda, and so it stays right where it is rather than going with its creator.

[Blessed Shadow Dances Beneath Leaves] keeps trying to dance, but she doesn’t let it. The leaves are all glowing, casting no shadows at all, and the entity that is the Soul curdles at the suffering she inflicts. 

In another world, maybe she’d have a way to do it tactfully, with experience and intelligence and magics. As it is, she does it with brute force.

With the Feng inside her body, she has nearly limitless Qi reserves and Flesh completely saturated with it, to the point of transcending mundane material and turning to natural treasures. Every inch of grass, every millimeter of fibrous earth, imbued with the potency one usually has to look to alchemy to find, and all of it turned inward to containing and consuming that which she’s eaten.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it?

It resonates within her. A piece that she can almost remember, that’s got too many safeguards but which is eating its way out.

We Are What We-

It’s inside her body. Only the fact that the Feng isn’t made of flesh right-this-current-second has stopped her from simply reaching into it and unraveling it, but that doesn’t last forever. Its transformation felt temporary, impermanent, and she can keep holding it, because she produces more Qi than it does, by a lot. 

And she’s pumping most of it directly into the cage she’s making for the thing she’s digesting. 

Impossible whorling shapes and metal and sharp-edged madness dissolve, bit by bit, inside a gut the size of a valley. The cage she makes is screaming at frequencies aligned with Flesh and metal alike, and starting towards the music of Space, multiple concepts resonating in tune. An inverted pyramid of bone forms, all of it singing, all of it screaming, all of it harder than any mundane metal and closing in on the beast she’s devoured. 

The cage shuts closed, and suddenly, the Feng is cut off from the outside world.

[Domain Of Woods Both Deep And Dark] makes a sound of detonation as it vanishes, air rushing back into where it was. All that remains is a patch of land around the fold in space where she managed to infest and overtake the flora, mutated trees and blood-drenched soil making a strange island in the crater where the mountainside used to be.

[Blessed Shadow Dances Beneath Leaves] has no more leaves under which to dance. It is the Feng, even as it is separate from the Feng, like two organs from the same body, but without a Domain it seems to vanish as quickly as it came, maybe back to its other half.

There is a moment of sudden silence in the resulting echo.

Two black armored figures are hovering over her where there was only empty air before.

Right. The other Fengs. She forgot about them. 

That’s… not good. She probably can’t do a repeat performance. 

Can she move? Escape with her Space-Flesh Dao fusion-thing?

Probably not fast enough. She only managed it with the other Feng because the Pain was addling his senses, and even then it almost caught her multiple times.

Dangerous. Risky. What to do? Do Fengs care about each other? Can she negotiate?

The thought makes her squirm.

Hate.

They also haven’t attacked her yet. Why?

A mountain, timeless, higher than the Heavens and deeper than the Earth. 

A river, so wide that its banks cannot be seen, its depths golden and full of lumbering, scaled beasts. 

The sound of rushing waves in a place with no shore, flapping wings loud enough to match it echoing off its waters. 

The other three Warrior-things. People. 

Warrior realm elders from two of the Five Peaks hover around the crater that is her anchor and being, each of them facing towards the black-armored forests of hate and suffering in front of her. 

“It would seem that you are even less well-equipped than we to deal with such a thing,” says the mountain, his voice rumbling almost subsonically. 

“Step back. This is not your business.”

Even to Raika, they don’t seem quite as easily confident as before. Still arrogant, still comfortable, but no longer in control of the situation.

Two on three against not-quite-equals is much more manageable than three on three. 

Three and a half, if she counts. Which maybe she does! She did tell them to stay out of the way, and she did do a really good job of fucking up that other one. 

The formless, echoing waves laughs, a short huff from out of a well-polished white beard.

“You trespass upon our territory. Try to strong-arm members of the Peaks themselves, daring to think that you are capable of it. You stand here now still making demands, despite your obvious failure, as you attempt to cast yourself as our betters? You have eyes, but cannot see the vastness of the Heavens, junior.”

“I am neither your junior nor someone you can speak to in such a manner. We are here under the authority of the highest, and it is you who is too blind to see that. This foreign contamination is not yours to suckle upon, but ours to annihilate, and standing in our way will be seen as an act of war.”

“War?” asks the river, her voice melodious and husky. “A foolish threat made by the young when confronted by their betters. As if your betters should fear the squalling of armored weaklings. There is asking for face and then there is spitting upon ours.”

Raika, meanwhile keeps screaming at the sharp-edged war-thing inside her, which keeps a solid chunk of her resources dedicated to containing it. Even with an overwhelming advantage and mismatch in technique, brute force and circumstance, it still struggles enough to cause her pain, but it’s just Pain.

She feeds it back to it, and keeps nibbling at its edges. 

“If you do not stand aside-”

“You’ll what, junior?” asks the mountain, joining in on the jest his competitors have started. “Threaten us some more? Fail further? The holy site allows our people entry without harm, while it seems to quite hate you. Even the blind could sense such monstrous Killing Intent. I do rather think it would be best if you left.”

A single, tense moment of silence passes between them. They’ve been talking fast, much faster than a mortal, supernatural speed and processing power making it so that whole conversations can take place in an instant. Even still, the pause is tense.

The elders seem eager, and she can’t blame them. Even without the hate, she knows what prey looks like, no matter how tough its meat or how sharp its antlers.

The Fengs look at each other.

The screaming thing inside her keeps trying to escape, even as she consumes the energy it uses to power itself, even as she convinces it, piece by piece, that it is inside her and hers.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

They can tell he’s not dead. That much is obvious. 

A few hundred trees, their leaves glowing and their bark like bone, open wide mouths that smile with many teeth.

She feels the world bend as their Killing Intent turns in on her, two equals to the thing she only barely managed to fight on equal footing showing their teeth in return.

“This won’t be forgotten.”

And then they’re gone, vanished faster than she can track. A feature of their armors, maybe- there’s a moment where they sort of blur, and it tickles at her sense of Space. Not quite, though. Distance, maybe?

And then it’s just her and the elders. 

Which is definitely much safer, and not another headache to deal with at all.

At least now she can go back to working on her new little projects. Surely no consequence will come of this whatsoever.