Chapter 439 - Negotiations, Again! (Patreon)

Things are going sooooo well for Aria and the spouses and all the friends. Just stellar, really. Nothing but positives over here, definitely not surviving and trying to pull shit off by the skin of their teeth.

________________________________________________________________________

The bubble is being all wobbly. There’s all kinds of smells and noises going on inside and they’re getting louder all the time! You told me to watch and I’ve been watching and listening and sniffing but they have the big bubble and it’s…

Why words? Words! For pale monkeys and idiots! 

World says words, I do words. Words. Fine.

The bubble is weird and bad and now there’s a ton of weird in it, more than normal. The pale monkeys aren’t watching their borders like they used to, but they’re stirred up, full of scared and angry, like ants. Some of them are fighting, but not too bad, and just the little ones. All of the bigger ones are going away. Just the border-gods still around, but some of them are moving too, trying to hunt and fight maybe. 

Ever since that big bunch of ripples a few suns ago, is big messy. Hard to see or smell through the bubble but some of the big shapes like the mountains are gone or look different and lots of smell of blood and of scared. Their nest is not so safe I think.

And I do smell her. Loud. Like sun-down and killing and bleeding and music. Smells weird though. Not like the piece you gave to sniff. Here though. Definitely here.

-Transmitted words, moving through a simple long-distance communication technique from the borders of the Republic of Morae going out

______________________________________________________________________

Raika screams as loud and as hard as she can. 

Considering just how big she is and just how many lungs she has, she can do it very hard and loud indeed. 

The landscape shakes with her frustration. The remaining mountains surrounding her northern side vibrate with the sound, echoing it up and down into the rivers and valleys below, making the trees and grasses and puddles and ponds and rocks all vibrate in tune. The sky quivers, the surface of it out far beyond conventional sight but the effects of its spasms visible all the way down on the ground. Beneath the ground, crimson stone cracks and heals and cracks again, tectonic plates in miniature trembling with the force of the emotions on display.

Below, the trial-runners are all looking about, reacting to each other and the dangers all around. The trials don’t stop in the midst of all the chaos. Some of them do pause, or are disrupted by breaking ground and shaking walls, but the biomorphic constructs keep fighting mindlessly and with complete violence, and the environmental hazards don’t vanish either. Clouds of acid and pools of transformative enzymes splash or fill up different passageways, while spikes or vents of superheated gases shoot out towards different targets inside massive underground caves and manufactured complexes. Serpents and crabs and humanoids and insects, all ranging from miniscule to colossal, fill the bounds of the lower levels, acting as direct dangers and sources of food and natural treasures both. 

Above the ground, a ruined few miles of terrain have collapsed from where they fell out of the air when Raika pulled.

If one looks at it from the right angle, they might be able to see the shape of what used to be a campus, what used to be buildings, torn open or unmade almost frame by frame. Conventional rock, dirt and plants are vanishing moment by moment, being digested away by the ground they’ve landed on, leaving just Raika and the corpses and the people who didn’t quite end up that way. 

Close to a third of the spouses have died. Closer to half of the servants, be it of the spouses or the Crimson Manse itself, have been made gone. Corpses in all but form, because there is no blood or collapsing biology, just bodies with absences, pieces of them crucial for existence scooped out of them and the resulting voids simply existing.

Aria is alive. The ones she chose to enhance, who volunteered for their modifications, are alive. Others (and she hasn’t learned the names of any of them yet and part of her feels wrong about that and part of her does not care) are still alive. 

And as the seconds pass, they stay that way. 

Raika keeps screaming. She also keeps looking everywhere, checking on the state of every single person and aspect and piece within her. 

The seconds pass, and she keeps shaking with her rage and frustration, and they stay alive. 

The man who Is Not There… isn’t here. 

They’re all talking. All those different voices, figuring things out, trying to communicate or understand what’s happening. Aria is one of them. Aria helped, and had a good idea, and she should probably listen to her. One Raika is, actually, but even she’s a bit distracted. All the others, though, are focused on thinking.

She can’t remember the last time she ran from a fight. For once, it’s not just because her brain is hard wired to explode itself if she tries. She thinks, she genuinely thinks, but there are no safeguards, no blocks, nothing that implies there’s a memory or part of her identity she’s restricted from accessing. 

She doesn’t run from fights. Raika doesn’t run from fights. She doesn’t- maybe she’s avoided fights, or had to retreat, had to be smart, but nothing fits the criteria, nothing. She had to run. She had to run.

She should maybe still run. 

She keeps ignoring all of the voices vying for her attention, letting other Raikas deal with or not deal with things as needed, instead turning to focus on her “exterior”.

The moment she refocuses on the exterior of the fold in space, a head turns to look at her in a bit of surprise.

“Oh! Hey, you’re back. Master, this is-”

She tunes Ko out entirely, instead growing several new eyes and tendrils to move them out of the branches and ground to look around. 

She’s still in the crater where she took out the Feng and forced the other two to retreat. She can sense the mountain, the river, and the sea in the form of people still present, each of them still hovering above the ground in varying states (though they have made themselves more comfortable). She can still taste the encampments out further, where dozens of lesser cultivators continue to wait in safety far from her. 

The sky has a few wisps of cloud, coming in from far away to fill the void the previous explosions left. The mountain remains charred and torn apart, only the colossal scale of it ensuring that it doesn’t collapse from the carved out devastation where the plateau used to be. 

There is no sign of the Feng. 

She takes a few seconds more, and she isn’t erased. 

She closes a few eyes, makes a few empty spaces where she isn’t actively seeing things.

She still doesn’t vanish or get erased.

Alright. She has time. A little bit of time, maybe.

She should probably move again. Find a new place, relocate, hide, and-

Hide.

She hates.

“Master?”

A few hundred eyes blink, then roll and roil over to stare at Ko.

He doesn’t flinch. She actually doesn’t even sense discomfort from him. It’s… 

Has she been sensing discomfort from people this whole time? Is that what that was? Its absence feels loud.

“Yes, Ko?”

“Did you… have an opinion on anything?”

“I have opinions on many things.”

“As is only right. But you were just screaming very very loudly. And you have also not answered any direct questions in a few minutes. Also, you seem a bit tense.”

“That’s accurate. Was there something you needed me for?”

“Not right this immediate second, but I am fairly certain I’m going to be violently killed sometime in the next hour or two if I don’t adequately represent your interests and prove my ability to negotiate on your behalf. I should note I am also not very good at negotiating.”

“That’s fair. Sorry you might die. Do you think it would help if Aria were here? She’s helping with the spouses right now.”

“Huh. A bit funny, that. Usually it’s reversed.”

“Oh, that’s perfect then.”

She pictures where Aria is standing and the space where Ko is standing as opposite ends of a tendon, and Flesh is Space and she pulls at it.

Aria immediately stumbles, briefly taking a breath before she gags, turns, and vomits loudly into some of the nearby bushes. Which are also Raika. 

Ko, to his credit, doesn’t puke. It might be because he also has a space-like affinity with how he teleports to his sound-waves, but it might also be that she did a better job because she was more actively focused on him. He does, however, go a bit pale and get a pretty big spike in his stress-scents as he sees the view in front of him- what’s left of the Crimson Manse digesting into the landscape of Raika, with dozens of confused, terrified, and sometimes quite powerful cultivators turning to glare at him.

“What is this childish stupidity before me?” asks one of the elders. 

She could probably kill him. No, she could definitely kill him. She has mountains, she is mountains, and a mountain, no matter how big, does not surpass space or the world or the idea of flesh made manifest.

Should she kill him? She’s not sure. 

Is this what it’s like to be afraid? A mind constantly darting about, unable to focus? Or is it a symptom of how she’s lobotomized herself? She’s not sure.

She’s not sure of anything except that she ran away and she hates.

“Just resolving some things,” she says instead of narrating all of that. “Turns out I had to fight a bunch more Fengs somewhere else and now I’m a bit tired from it. You understand.”

The mountain-man frowns, his eyebrows doing a funny wiggle as he furrows his brow. “You’ve fought more of their ilk? Where?”

“Oh, I can connect to other pieces of myself now. By the way, I think I’m almost done with the trials. Any more and they might come out a bit too weird. Would you like them back?”

“The survivors from those within our sects must be returned to us, spirit,” says the woman who is a boundless sea full of monsters.

“Yeah I can do that probably. I might need to repair some of them, though, some of the ones that died got their parts used for other things and I should probably make replacements so they don’t die forever when they leave.”

That, apparently, is either disorienting or distracting enough to shut up all three of the Warrior Realm cultivators for a bit. Not long, just a few seconds- they’ve probably heard weirder things in a few millenia, maybe. It’s enough time for Aria to stand up and throw her hand out towards the fold in space that is Raika in the universal signal for “stop”.

“That’s– master, stop fucking talking right now please.”

That’s reasonable. Probably. She’s not entirely sure.  Raika stops talking.

Aria spends a few more seconds catching her breath, shuddering in a mix of adrenaline and active nausea from the multiple spatial translations in a short rush. It doesn’t take her long, though, to take a breath, inhaling long and deep, and then exhaling, cycling her Qi just the once to settle her cultivation and center herself.

Then she turns to the elders.

All three of them remain above the treetops Raika’s commandeered, each one in a different pose. The mountain man of the Peak of the Iron Tortoise simply stays in the air, entirely still, as if he’s part of a structure that touches the Heaven and the earth and is simply choosing where in that stretch he manifests. The woman that is an ocean is sitting atop a pearl that floats in the air like water, a buoyancy that defies gravity and physics alike and is thrice the size of her body, while her counterpart, the impossible river, also of the Peak of the Azure Serpent, is sitting on a full-scale boat he’s summoned from somewhere.

All three of them have pulled their auras back only just enough not to crush a Nascent Soul Realm figure, and not an ounce less. Even if Aria were to try to fight them, she wouldn’t be able to extend Qi out beyond her body without being crushed and overpowered entirely.

Outwardly and in her Qi, she doesn’t seem to let it bother her.

“Honored elders. I… I apologize for the chaos of the proceedings. Some unfortunate circumstances relating to the active assaults on our sovereignty by foreign powers have forced a small change in negotiations. However, I can most entirely assure you that I am well equipped to represent both the Crimson Manse and its matriarch in our dialogue, and need no introduction to your august selves.

“The Immovable Elder Shao Tsung, of the Peak of the Iron Tortoise, could not be anyone other than the man before me, whose presence dwarfs the horizon. The Transcendent Seas Elder Geng Zhen of the Peak of the Azure Serpent is recognizable even to the blind, as is her bond-brother, Glorious Rushing River Elder Tan Shi. This lowly Rai Aria of the Crimson Manse recognizes and bows before her seniors.”

She does just that, bowing at the waist almost to the horizontal. 

She also, very admirably, doesn’t puke as she does so. 

She comes back up, meeting each of their gazes.

“This junior apologizes for the chaos of the current moment, and thanks the elders for the patience and aid they have shown to the Crimson Manse in this time. Your presence in one of our cult’s hidden realms has paid dividends for us all, a truth that will only multiply as your disciples are returned to you strengthened and changed.”

Ah. Even Raika has a fairly easy time understanding that one. Aria just claimed that the hidden realm always belonged to the Crimson Manse, which it did, technically, kinda sorta, in a philosophical sort of way, while also implying that their aid was a sort of payment for access to it. Then she threatened them by reminding them that they’ve got their disciples still– which is a pretty tenuous threat, but not in a bad way.

The mountain-guy doesn’t much seem to care beyond frowning a bit harder, but the other two seem to acknowledge Aria, with the sea-lady leaning back a bit on her pearl. 

“A rather expensive intervention, Rai Aria of the Crimson manse, and one that should perhaps be understood to bear the appropriate weight.”

Aria bows again, much more lightly this time. “Of course, honorable senior. This Rai Aria would not dare to say otherwise in the face of such august presences. But perhaps this might be best used as a foundation for further negotiations? We may perhaps see such an expensive encounter as a fortuitous opportunity.”

“And how exactly is making more demands of your seniors fortuitous, child?” asks the mountain.

Aria literally just said their names. Is Raika getting worse at name recognition? She might just still be afraid.

It hurts. 

The hurt feeds the hate and the Pain and the Flesh and the Space and the things in between which tickle at her mind and give her ideas that she tries to avoid pursuing just yet.

“Senior, this junior wouldn’t dare to make demands!” Aria says, turning to face him while keeping the other two Warrior Realm cultivators still in her line of sight. “I simply seek to point out the favorable circumstances for negotiation. As you yourselves surely must know, and which will most assuredly be proven once your disciples are returned to you, the benefits of the hidden realms and the artifacts of the Crimson Manse are well known for their potency. Additionally, we have already expended resources in defence and support of each other. Why not use this opportunity to make further steps towards discussing how we might address a mutual problem?”

Huh. Aria really does have a good brain. Raika’s starting to feel kind of convinced herself.

“Explain,” says the river. 

“Before coming to speak with your esteemed selves, this Rai Aria has been keeping a close eye on the happenings of other proprietary locations of the Crimson Manse. My contacts in various sects have similarly reported in that simultaneous happenings have struck multiple sites of interest to us all. Allies to the both of us, subsidiaries of the Peaks, and active disciples of many different sects have all been assaulted in near synchronicity over the last few days by invaders from beyond our borders. These Imperials seek to subjugate us and treat us as lesser for their own benefit, granting no face as they move unimpeded through the Jiang’hu and assault those within it. And yet, here, between our respective organizations, there has been a clear show of cooperation that has secured this location against those same enemies. Would it not benefit us all to see how this relationship might continue and flourish?”

All three of the elders fail to respond right away. Still, the woman that is an ocean smiles behind a fan Raika didn’t see her summon. On its back, facing Aria and the patch of Raika she’s standing on, are several clouds fluttering lightly against a sunny backdrop, which seems fairly pretty. 

Aria, upon seeing the fan, loses a small amount of the violent heart-rate she’s been fighting not to show for the last while.

“Perhaps such negotiations would be possible,” says the man who is a river of gold and serpents. “Trust, however, must be established repeatedly and with vigorous dedication. It has been nearly a week since the disciples and lessers of the Peaks have entered your ‘hidden realm’. Return them to us, and we shall see if a proper dialogue may be established.

At that, Aria turns to Raika, not needing to raise an eyebrow or glare at her to express some of the emotions she is feeling very loudly.

Ah. Right. The disciples. The disciples of the Peaks and sects, the disciples who entered her hidden realm and trials, the Peak’s and sect’s disciples. Those disciples. 

Well, she had to let them out sometime. Maybe. Probably for the best. She’s a bit distracted by the overwhelming white hot rage she’s feeling to really pay much attention to them right now anyways.

“Yeah, alright, give me just a second, let me go scoop them back together.”

Aria’s eyelid twitches.