Chapter 441 - I Am Me. Am I Mine? (Patreon)

Whoof. Loooong day today, but my emotions are mostly stabilized. Had some really funny coincidences pop up throughout the day, most of them sort of bleh, but overall, it feels... nice. Maybe it's a cyclical and hormonal thing (hopefully it is) and this is my new baseline, but we'll see as we see, won't we?

I'm not the only one having introspective thoughts, though, am I? Some people out there are even better at it than I am. Especially people with just sooooo many brains!

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Eat the flesh, sup the blood. Gnash the bones, carve the skin. Cut the meat, twist the joints. Drink the marrow, rich or thin

Rolling tongues so long and wet, enjoy the taste of pain and sweat

Rumbling appetite so vast, filled and sated at long last

Eat the flesh, sup the blood. Gnash the bones, carve the skin. Cut the meat, twist the joints. Drink the marrow, rich or thin

Hunger starving deep inside, open up your maw so wide

Guts a-churning warm and slick, fill them up right to the quick

Eat the flesh, sup the blood. Gnash the bones, carve the skin. Cut the meat, twist the joints. Drink the marrow, rich or thin

Throats aquiver, spread out wide, eager for some food inside

Let them wriggle, let them cry, still between our teeth they’ll die

-Three verses of the Song of Hungry Beasts

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It’s strange to have so much to do and a moment free. 

Raika is currently pursuing a list of active projects that includes: digesting a Warrior Realm fighter trapped inside her guts, arranging nodes of conceptual Qi in orbit around each other on a layer of space that allows the altered spouses to keep moving about freely, rebuilding lost terrain from the battle with the one she had to run from, actively digesting and integrating all of the new inspirations and prototypes that her trial takers had her doing…

Well, there’s a few more, but what would be the point of listing them all? She’s doing a lot. Most of it is pretty useful, and some of it might even make sense to an outside observer. 

Simultaneously, she personally doesn’t have anything to do right this current second. 

Turns out, making a few dozen Raikas and throwing them at a bunch of problems makes a new problem all of its own. Too many cooks in the kitchen ruins the soup, as the old saying goes. None of them feel like sharing or need any help right this moment, so she’s left as a free agent within herself. 

Aria is still in active negotiations with the elders, including some new arrivals from the other allied sects that aren’t quite as impressive but hold authority in their own lands. They’re all seated now, though, with the still-sleeping rebuilt disciples taken away somewhere while their seniors drink tea. Tea which is doing wonders for Aria’s cultivation, and whose proximity to her outer leaves and the fold in space is allowing in a gorgeous draft of medicinal and herbal energies. 

So. Probably doing alright, all things told. She’ll call if she needs help. 

Ko is handling the Crimson Manse’s remains, organizing the servants and spouses, and another Raika is spending time rebuilding their campus from the ground-up using Raika-exclusive materials. Another Raika is fielding (or, more realistically, ignoring) the requests for clarification coming from the crowd of new disciples that she’s going to have a lot of fun helping. 

And so… of all the Raikas, there’s one extra. 

So much to do, but nothing she can think of just yet. 

She spends a few hours distracting herself by picking at some of the safeguards and tripwires in her brain. She even clears a few of them, though the tougher ones remain hard to find and harder to remember. She spends another few hours figuring out whether or not she should revisit giving more of her creations hair and pores. She spends another few hours figuring out how to properly replicate a day-night cycle inside herself, mostly by doing her best to figure out what’s even causing the light in the first place.

So many projects she could be doing. And so little time, too. The assassin is coming for her. The bladeless hilt. And she can’t beat him yet. 

So that’s on her mind. Constantly. Every moment of the day. Which, quite frankly, is pretty annoying, and frustrating, and hard to fucking deal with. 

So she keeps working.

By the time she turns back to look at it again, the manse is built up completely.  It’s a near-perfect replica of the original, including the shape of the grounds around it and the style of plants growing there, though it’s all recreations birthed from the stuff that she digested earlier when she pulled the place into her. The spouses and servants seem to be mostly avoiding it, keeping to the smaller, quieter outer sections and outside of the buildings proper, which…

It’s a little hurtful. Raika did put a lot of work into fixing that up. She understands, though. Tough situation to bounce back from when you’re not really used to Pain. Still, sort of rude. 

The other disciples haven’t hesitated nearly as much. They’ve been moved in just fine, taking up places of residence in one of the side-buildings, separate from the central campus. She’s pretty sure she told them to do that, or at least another of her did, and they’ll probably settle in just fine. Give them a few hours, maybe a couple days, and she should be able to start experimenting with them again. 

They’re inside her, so they’re hers. So they’re Her.

I Am Me, I Am Mine. 

They did literally ask for it. It’s not her fault they didn’t understand what it meant when they asked. 

Speaking of not understanding what things mean- the spouses.

They’re hers. There’s a reason she was able to modify them even before the dome closed, even before they were technically fully “inside” her. They’re connected in some kind of way, some trembling frequency between her and each of those promised to the original Raika. Something else to look into.

But there’s another Raika already dealing with the spouses, now that she’s done rebuilding the Crimson Manse. So… meh. 

Outside, it’s been well over a day, and Aria is still sitting there, still talking to the elders. She’s starting to look tired, but that tea they have seems to be keeping her empowered, and Raika’s making sure to send a bit of added vitality to her whenever she has a free moment. Not this Raika, obviously, but the Raika in charge of keeping track of all that mess, helped by the Raika that’s keeping an eye on the further surroundings, making sure a fresh batch of Fengs don’t sneak up on her. 

This Raika, the one that fixed the sky to pretend like there’s night and day, is still busy ruminating. 

She could work on some of the beasts and life inside of her. There are fragments that remain very much a part of her, but which don’t have the full neurology or the full identity to see themselves as more than pieces at most. The sky-snake fluttering through the air, the den of wound-vines, the rabbit-like many-eyed many-toothed things that frolic through the grass, free of the sort of self awareness that Raika’s struggling with. All of them are part of something very similar to a proper biome, if more limited, and if she modifies them, they might be useful as weapons against the Feng assassin who seems to be able to just erase chunks of her. 

Plenty of work to be had there. If she takes the designs for some of the constructs she was using in the trials, makes some new additions to her internal landscape with them, sees where that goes… well, it could be interesting. And if she can fuse them with some of the other parts of herself, then she can probably boost the entities inside herself well past the Core Formation Realm upper limit most of them are currently at. 

Yes. She could do that.

Raika thinks about the techniques she learned earlier. Or that she… remembered earlier. 

Supreme Body Art: Fluid Jet and Compression.

She hasn’t used anything like that in a while. Or… technically she’s using something like the Supreme Body Art literally all the time, to the point that it’s as much a set of techniques as it is her intrinsic existence. But somehow when she acknowledged it, when she thought of it as a technique, it made it more solid. 

And that’s how Intent works, isn’t it? And how Truth works. And how Comprehension and Dao work. By acknowledging it, adding thought and intention and understanding and opinion and perspective, something becomes more. 

There’s other ways she could use that. Most of the safeguards around techniques feel safe, or at least half-loose. The memories of context are much more dangerous, and the context behind those techniques means something, but the techniques themselves, in isolation, can be thought about almost freely. 

There’s more she could do with that. If she used Supreme Body Art: Compression directly, not as a technique but as a tool to design her body, she could squeeze considerably more mass into considerably smaller places. To begin with, any of the blood-compression bombs she makes will be a lot more dangerous. If she designed her mountains that way, she could probably start to warp space just by the amount of matter she could squeeze together. And the Fluid Jet technique… 

Mmh. Potent. 

There are other techniques she can recall now. Supreme Body Art: Specialized Enhancement allowed her to us Qi to bridge the gap between what should be alive and what shouldn’t, allowing her to bond to other forms of alkemy and inorganic tissues temporarily. 

Supreme Body Art: Overclocking was what she called it when she shoved so much energy and potency into something that she could force it to operate at a higher level, high enough to start damaging itself outright.  

Supreme Body Art: Full-Body Transmutation allowed her to go one step further than either, treating anything in her body as Flesh, independently of whether or not it should be possible to do so.

She never got that much further, did she? She never really needed to either. A lot of power in those techniques, and they built the backbone of how she fought and how she existed.

They can again. She can push them further than before, transform them as she has been transformed. She can probably use it to enhance the changes in the creature-parts of herself, in her new volunteers, in her future weaponry. Hell, she could just see what happens if she adds her Dao into them. 

No excuse for this one. No Raika working on those ideas right this current second. 

Mmmh. She probably should go ahead and work on this. Go ahead and get started on it, or at least send the ideas out into the rest of herself. That’s pretty bare minimum.

She doesn’t. 

She can excuse it. She doesn’t have to, really, but she can. She’s thinking about other things.

She’s thinking about how bad it feels to think the thoughts that feel best. That offer the most possibility, the most meaning, the most direction. She’s thinking about fear, about what it means to have someone she cannot defeat and can’t control and can’t avoid forever. She’s thinking about all those other pieces of her, floating out in the void made of Herself, who sometimes, even now, wink out of existence.

She’s being hunted. 

She’s strong, but weaker than she’s ever been at the same time. She’s powerful but powerless, and the power she has feels… maybe not sour, but bitter, somehow, and she doesn’t even get to understand why.

And she’s being hunted by something she cannot stop.

She ran from him. He’ll be here soon, most likely. The Republic of Morae is big, big enough that it takes even those capable of flight days and days to traverse its horizons. Still, he’ll find her. She could… she could feel it.

The way he looked at her. The way that his touch made her not be. The way that she didn’t even have a direction to swing in, because he was everywhere and nowhere and never anywhere she could get her hands and teeth and claws and techniques on.

Powerful and powerless. 

And she should be changing that. She should be transforming herself further, stretching her understanding of herself into practical tools to wield against the world and the thing within it that wants to unmake her. 

But instead, she’s thinking. 

Some of the things she wants to do feel wrong. They feel like things she should not do, and chances are, there’s something inside of her that will tell her why as soon as she finds and unmakes the right safeguard, the right trigger in her brain pointing a fresh lobotomy at a specific memory- or, more likely, a series of them.

But… does she want that? 

She is herself. She is Raika. 

So is the Raika that’s working on the manse, making sure that no one kills each other, creating food and safety and security amidst architecture and design.

So is the Raika that’s beside Aria, watching for the political nuances that she doesn’t quite get and keeping safe someone she cares about, someone special and important.

So is the Raika pulling through the trials and the materials therein, examining dozens of experiments and possibilities, puzzling through new ideas and inventions and designs. 

So are all of the many, many other Raikas who are all very, very busy working on oh so many different projects.

But is she herself?

They’re not all the same person. They’re all Raika, obviously, but they’re not linked as directly as She used to be, which means they’re not the same. If anything, that’s why the Feng assassin didn’t wipe her out all at once- she’s Raika, but not all the same Raika, not anymore. Each one wiped out wasn’t the same as all the others, not entirely.

Those degrees of separation are what saved her. 

Now, they have her questioning.

She exists in the context of never having her old memories. She exists in the context of the moment, and no more. She is making decisions now, based on reality, based on what she can see and experience and understand, and assuming that an older version of herself, one that got incredibly murdered, will have better answers just… isn’t guaranteed.

She still has to unlock more memories, sure. Still has to figure out what’s safe to think about and what’s not.

But. 

A complex, interwoven series of disconnected pieces are implying that she is doing the wrong thing. 

An actively conscious, currently aware, entirely functional perspective says that she’s doing exactly what she can and should.

They offered themselves to her.

And even if they hadn’t, she can take more. She could take. She could have kept those other disciples. She can find more of them, send out agents, pull herself through space to another location where no one is looking and find mortals and cultivators and wanderers and beasts and take them all, one by one.

She’s spent her entire existence without meridians. Without the ability to touch Qi, and without any memory of ever having been able to do so. She had it for the briefest fucking moment, and that was enough to make her want it more than almost anything else. 

And she could have more of it than anyone. She could have a network of spiritual organs that stretches for kilometers, for mountain ranges, for endless fields that stretch up and down into reality and transform everything in a million different ways. 

She wouldn’t need to find him. She wouldn’t need to hit him. She could simply speak, and it would be. She could scream so loud and so violent that she could shake apart the world, through veins and organs that produce enough energy to grow a new moon and sun and world. What would he be then?

Powerless and powerful.

She could just remove one half of that reality. She could pick it up, wrap it in the flesh of those too weak to fight back, and transform it into more fucking power.

And that feels wrong.

And that’s stupid, because it’s the best idea she has, and the thing that makes the most senses, and the tool she has just found that transforms everything.

She is powerful now. If she took the next step to reach forward and claim and infect and take and CHANGE, then she would be more than powerful, she would be anything and everything and beyond.

All it would take would be to reach into others, and make them her. 

She wouldn’t even need to keep them aware for the process. Once she’s in, she can just make them… quiet. Leave enough for the instincts, so she can still have an intuitive grasp of their spiritual organs, enough brain matter for it to identify as her and her as it, and then… then they’d be gone. Forever. And it would just be her.

And then she’d be whole. She’d be whole in a way she’s never been, that Raika hadn’t been for years, she’d be more than anyone has ever been.

She remembers what it was like to be that disciple. Confused and lost and blessed with an experience of the divine so beyond comprehension that she can’t even articulate it.

It makes her synesthesia feel disgusting. A malformed illusion over what’s real. A thing that is dreadfully and entirely not enough.

She can be more.

All she has to do is take.

So she waits, as other Raikas take up the mantle, and process the work, and build and transform and improve and alter. She waits, and she thinks. 

She knows, for a fact, that she is Raika. But she wonders if Raika should be her.