Book 2, Chapter 3 - The Joys Of Horrific Transformation (Patreon)

TBH I'm running out of things to put as blurbs at the start of these chapters. Y'all might start getting them raw soon. Ah well, I'm sure you'll live without my stunning rambling illuminating your days.

__________________________________________________________________________

I do not believe that any being which cultivates power is sane. 

The closest to sanity might be the beasts, but then, the definition sort of breaks down outside of a society and conventions, doesn’t it? To cultivate is to dare, to dare to exist and to change and to change the world in turn. Would it not be sane to simply accept reality as it is, and to live according to those principles? Would it not be more reasonable, logical, to see what the Heavens themselves have decided is the natural and right way of things and bow to it? 

I extend the idea of power broadly, though. I think cultivating a garden is already deep into the realm of the unhinged, never mind building a house or using cutlery to eat. We are as the Heavens made us, perhaps– which only means that they have made us with madness in our hearts, that we might reject the state we are born into and change according to desire as much as need.

Then again, maybe the Heavens made us in their own image. Are they not the most powerful of all?

-Ramblings of a drunken man, sitting in a crater that was once the campus of the Profound Downpour sect

____________________________________________________________________________

She stands in front of the mirror. The lines of how it has shattered are precise. It took her three tries to get it right.

There are other mirrors in the bathroom, there for her to check out her entire body, to see her shape as it is at rest and in totality, but she doesn’t need them right now. The broken one is more important. This one, if she stands in just the right spot, she broke in just the right way for her to see only what she needs to see.

The eyes. The external muscle layer. The abdomen. The joints. The throat.

She’s changing a lot more than that, of course, but those are the areas that require a bit of a visual tuning as she changes things. It’s hard work, and harder still when the Qi and biology inside her both cooperate to try and shift things back to how they “should” be right after. It takes time to change them, and much, much more time to try and make any shifts permanent, but it’s always better to be prepared, especially when she’s trying potentially deadly modifications.

She started with the muscles.

She still can’t really control any of the organs and softer, squishier bits she can feel inside, but that’s probably for the best until she has a better understanding of what everything does. That’s next on the list, but until she’s willing to reveal the details of her changes, or sure she’ll be able to only reveal just enough, she’s held off on asking for any medical texts or expertise. Still, the muscular functions, including the heart, most body fat, tendons and ligaments are more than enough to get started with, especially with what she’s figured out.

She Dinks against her forehead, quietly. It tells her that she’s not alone, and that it’s just like old times.

And it is. She’s been giving herself Qi poisoning again.

Her body has already adapted to the old quantities she used to use, and the vibration of that Qi nowadays only causes pain, not delirium or temporary organ failure (at least at the levels she can manage). So, to rectify this failing, she’s kept her heartbeat going all the time. So long as she’s awake, she’s manipulating the bloodflow, and just like any Qi that is constantly moved, circulated, and bashed against its own likeness or similar Qi, her reserves have started to move even more chaotically and multiply.

The more one cultivates, the more Qi one has, the more they can store, the more they can pull in from the world. The perfect circle of cultivation. Except she’s not really storing it; her Dantian and meridians are still gone, not a trace of them that she can find to even think of repairing, so instead her Qi is saturating, contained only by her skin. That’s why she was healing so fast; all the Qi in her, at a slightly higher rate than she’s generating it, is being absorbed and used by systems forced to consume the only resource available. That’s Qi poisoning, and that’s what she’s begun to adapt to, and the more she adapts to it, the more Qi she can force her “biological formation” theory to create, and the more she creates, the more her body starts to feed on it.

Of course, without spiritual organs, there’s no way for her to directly touch Qi, and thus no way to control it delicately. “Friction” has to come at a cost, and that cost tends to be pain. 

She’s kept little clusters of constantly smashed-together whirlpools and razor-squalls of Qi active constantly in multiple points. It feels like those areas are on fire, tiny knives inside of her running against veins and muscle, and she tries her best to nudge them towards fat storage. Supposedly it’s good for storing things, and if so, then maybe it’ll store the energy better, since Qi theoretically makes things “more of what they are”, but she’s not sure. After so long starving, she doesn’t have much, but she’s used what she has carefully. 

She slowly disconnected and reconnected the scraps of fat on her frame all over her body, leaving them as strategically placed pillows to cushion organs and her more vulnerable areas and then shifting and forcing the muscles around them to condense them until it’s not visible on the surface. The theory of Qi storage hasn’t proven much, yet, but she thinks her frame has filled out a bit, which may or may not be the fat beginning to store it like it would calories, or her positioning of it, or just the fact that she’s eating properly for the first time in years.

Then, she went back to the muscles. The major leg-tendons got improved first, forcibly stretched and relaxed until there’s less tension in them (not as useful, since she can just force them to hypertension with her will), giving her more length and a bit more height. That translates to more force to work with and less danger of tearing them. Most of her joints went next, the tissues supporting the ball-and-socket joints being both strengthened and made more flexible through a mix of stretching, modifying connection points and toughening the material. Funnily enough (after the first day or two of figuring out why her arm stopped working when she disconnected this or rewired that), it’s actually not that hard to find places to do small improvements, little optimizations in where things connect and how they’re woven.

Finally, the actual fibers themselves.

Those are a lot easier, actually. Turns out, what exercise does is just cause tiny stress in one’s flesh and let the body heal it back stronger. Except she doesn’t need to exercise: she just needs to keep from screaming while she builds eddies and currents of razor-painful Qi she’s forcing her body to absorb moving through her muscles, over and over, every day. At first she just let it move, and tried to move clusters of muscle groups around like she did with the fat, but that… didn’t work, to put it lightly, and she almost bled out from it once. So she just tried damaging them worse, fraying them harder. 

That’s when she started cutting herself open to see. And that’s when, with her new eyes, she found something out.

It’s basically just fancy rope.

She’s not very good yet, but… she can weave rope. She can tighten it. She can change the pattern of it, add more strands, almost… braid it into a new shape. And the more Qi she focuses, the more strands she can make, and the more damage they heal from.

She found a pattern that works, mostly. She hasn’t had a chance to test how strong she is, not yet, but she thinks it’s a lot more than before. 

Next, the bones. Bones and muscles she could mostly do simultaneously, even, so long as she’s careful around her chest and stomach. She just lets the energy… sit right on the bones for a while. No clue if it’s working, if it can’t saturate because of the bone’s density, if she needs to destroy the bones like she did her flesh to get regeneration to kick in and grant her more control… they’re still a bit of a mystery.

Still, she isn’t breaking anything when she moves, so she thinks it’s doing something beneficial. Might as well keep at it until it kills her or she finds a better idea.

The eyes, though. That’s what helped her figure out the trick.

They’re brighter now. The pupils expand and contract faster. They bear a different color, a darker, reddish maroon hue with hints of gold at the very edges, and she can see so much more. She can look at wood across the room and count the ripples on the grain. She can see the haircut on a man standing on a street miles away. She can count the leaves on trees halfway across the palace.

She hasn’t figured out how to make them see Qi yet, but one thing is clear; so long as she focuses more Qi than is needed on a damaged area, it doesn’t just heal back. It heals back better. She’s pretty sure that’s now how it normally works, especially not when the healer’s arts take so many decades and centuries to master. It’ll be interesting if Yun Ka comes up with a theory.

It’s a risk, yes. One that she’s been putting off for almost two months now, since she first arrived here. Yun Ka is a Feng, even if a disowned one, and the weight of hatred, of a desire for vengeance against her ancestor, is loud. And yet, that’s not why Raika hasn’t approached her yet. 

Feng Gui is in the distance. An oath remembered, an injustice recorded, and a monster to be put down. 

Taurus is here. And despite every attempt he’s made at communicating to her how it was surely essential to do what he did, how it was somehow a better option, how it hadn’t been what he’d wanted, he still killed Ji- he still killed her friend. And Yun Ka is his apprentice and direct assistant in whatever research they’re doing here.

They’ve both left her almost entirely to her own devices. The others have given her space and time aplenty. She’s sure Taran and Kaena, her fellow experiments, have well and heard about what’s happened, and she… appreciates that they’ve kept their distance, and Yun Ka, perhaps under orders, perhaps out of genuine common sense and empathy, has followed their example. Since that last conversation they had, Taurus has also let her be, making sure that she’s not bothered and doesn’t see him whenever she leaves her room for the baths or food.

Still, she sees the array-marks carved into the walls. She can taste their Qi around her when she moves, watching her, making sure she knows that they’re still around. The cage is tightened, no matter how grand or performative the mercy of her jailor.

But the cage is vast, as he might say, and she would do well to take advantage of it.

So. Time to stop putting things off.

She dresses herself in slightly more restrictive robes, no longer needing free access to her limbs and cloth she can keep away from the blood. Her leg has healed now, the scab already flaking off and falling away, and she covers it with a fresh set of white and gold, tinged with purple; apparently the semi-official colors of the Division of Altered Cultivation, at least for those at its lowest echelons. She touches Dink, her misshapen tuning fork, where she hangs it from a steel chain around her neck, and takes a small black square of cloth that she tucks into her robes. 

Strong as she’s gotten, altered as she is becoming, she doesn’t truly understand what she’s doing, or the ways she can improve it or add to it. And Taurus, for all of how quietly he’s walked, carries a weight beyond any she’s felt in anyone less than a sect elder, dancing at the very edge of the Nascent Soul Realm and almost visibly straining at its limits. She requires strength, understanding, an actual plan and a lot of new knowledge if she’s to take him down, and she stands, for now, in one of the best places she can think of to acquire all of the above.

She begins to walk out of the room, and catches a glimpse of her full body in the edge of the shattered mirror.

Hair growing back strangely metallic-sheened and blond-ish, curly and kinky and left to fall about her shoulders and poof out at the air behind her. A face with strong bone definition, only just filling out from long-term starvation, with a strong jawline and the fading remnants of a scar along one side of her face, now refined to only a small corner of her lip and the cheek it touches. A tall, strong form, once again beginning to fill out with muscle and lean, powerful definition, wrapped in dark skin and pale scars.

And eyes of maroon-red and gold, looking back at her and showing ever so little inside.

She takes a long, deep breath. It takes her nearly a minute before she’s done inhaling, and another two as she lets it out.

Time to start moving.

She opens the door and makes it all of three steps out before a peach-and-gold skinned blur of fashionable silks and fragrant perfumes hits her like a thirty-ton bull.

“Why Raika!” Kaena exclaims, the look on their face seeming a genuine mix of shock and amazement. “Out of your room? At this hour? Oh we simply must celebrate the gifts the Heavens give us on witnessing these small miracles. How are you, dear? Oh, gorgeous beastie you are, you must be famished. Come on, I’m sure we can find ourselves something filling to nibble on.”

The gifts of the gods indeed.