Chapter 443 - So Many Cooks In Them There Kitchens (Patreon)

Back to your regularly scheduled content! This chapter's got mostly setup and character development but good news for us all, that's like 2 out of 5 of the things stories are good for in the first place.

__________________________________________________________________________

What’s happening? Why haven’t the great ones above responded? Entire sects have fallen. Masters in even the higher realms have been killed! There are invaders, running rampant, demonic cultivators destroying institutions centuries old, and nothing has been done! It has been nearly a week and thousands have been lost! Why haven’t the Peaks done anything?

Thousands dead. Maybe tens of thousands. This can no longer be seen as something so minute as simple interference, but a true declaration of war. Perhaps it might be viewed as a “little spat” amongst Emperors, but these outsiders have come and destroyed our ways of life, and yet those in power continue to stand idle. What must be done? How many more must be lost? They’re tearing us apart. 

We must join forces. We cannot view this as isolated incidents any further. We must join an alliance, and act as the idea of the Republic we were once promised. Or else we will allow this imperialist invader to undo all of the peace and prosperity we’ve built up for all peoples.

-Tan Jiang, formerly of the Broken Skies sect, speaking to fellow cultivators of the Divergent Paths.

__________________________________________________________________

“Are we certain that this is a good idea? The last time you connected to a part of yourself was when that weird guy showed up and started killing everyone. Do you think he’ll find you again if you do this?”

“Maybe! I don’t know if there’s any way to tell, because I can’t detect him or track him or perceive him properly and I don’t know how he’s finding me!”

“So… it might do that?”

Raika nods, smiling. “Yes!”

“It’s still an honor to be on a mission to aid the great and mighty Sunlit Flesh!” Yu Guanyu says, bowing again. The spinal columns of his whip have crawled up and down his torso, in and out of the robes he’s redesigned using materials from inside her. His eyes are wide, the white, red and purple of his robes matching the intensity of his gaze.

Beside him, the rest of the traveling party she’s put together follow his example, bowing at the same depth as him. Beside him, a woman with purple-blue hair of flowing water and a well-muscled, compact figure in identical robes to Yu Guanyu stand, both more familiar with him and seemingly more comfortable in general. They’ve got names too, and she’ll record them as soon as she cares to. The other one, though, seems a bit more hesitant. His robes are still stained brown from old blood, and his eyes are distant and haunted, very much not seeming his best. 

She’s excited for this group. She modified all of them considerably, and it’s kind of exciting, thinking about what they might be able to do out in the world. 

Off to one side, though, is another figure, one with his arms crossed and a glare on his face. 

There’s some crazy awkwardness as he glares at the others, clearly holding back from saying something. Incredibly clearly if even Raika can tell. 

“I’m glad you think it’s an honor!” she says. “It has a very high chance of getting you murdered in a way that sort of erases you. Not sure if you’re into that, but it would be surprising and weird if you were.”

“We shall endeavor to the best of our ability not to fail you in such a manner!” Yu Guanyu replies, bowing again.

“You bow a lot.”

“Only as much as it would honor you, great one!”

“Someone else should go with them. Keep them on track.”

Everyone turns over towards where Geng He stands, his glower only more prominent when attention turns to focus on him.

“If you mean that you should go, then I really disagree!” Raika tells him, smiling. “You’re the only one who doesn’t complain and asks for more when I do new and interesting things to you, so I’ll keep you around for now. Unless you leave, which you can.”

“That’s not- I don’t mean that I want to leave, just that-”

“You want to feel special by being respected and want to do violence, because your brain chemistry is really interesting and full of trauma.”

His mouth opens and closes at that, almost like a fish, which is sort of funny in an interesting way. She’s pretty sure that the muscular, hyper-compact woman gives a little giggle at him.

“All of them want to leave. Or think that they should. I don’t know. Or care.”

The one in bloodstained robes flinches a bit when she says that they’re the ones who want to leave. He’s the one who asked her for immortality all the way back when, and immunity to stuff, and apparently he’s still a little bitter about the whole affair. The others seem a bit more comfortable and casual about the whole thing, though they also seem a bit uncomfortable with her presence.

She’s getting used to that. It’s pretty normal, at least given her experiences. Everyone’s uncomfortable around her.

“Anyways,” she says, turning back over to Aria, “I figure that sending out individuals, who have some strength but not that much, and who have some parts of me but not that much, makes it a smaller chance that they’ll get detected. Especially compared to if I went out myself.”

“While that does make sense, why these four?” Aria asks, arms crossed behind her back, eyes turning over each of them. “Walk me through the logic for it.”

“Well, one of them is religiously dedicated to me, so he’s in just because he’s probably not going to betray me or fail if he can help it. The short one is his friend and wants him to live, but not so much that she’ll do something really stupid about it. Water-hair feels uncomfortable with her changing body and wants to leave but doesn’t want to be ungrateful. And then there’s the immortal, who gets closer to crying or peeing the longer I talk and just really wants to leave, but is too scared of me to try to sabotage anything. I think. I’m still figuring some of the details out. You’d be amazed at how complicated brains are, even when you can taste them.”

The immortal Zhong Li lets out a little whimper.”

Aria nods. “Alright. That makes four groups. Do you think that will be enough?”

Raika shrugs. “Maybe. I don’t have a ton more people we can send, and you don’t have a lot of locations either. Any more would probably start to be its own issue.”

Again, another nod. “Very good.”

Raika tilts her head, angling her body in towards Aria a bit and getting a sniff of her brain-matter. Hints of fear, bits of discomfort, trepidation, a little splash of relief blended with the sharp taste of long-term worries…

She’s pretty sure she has these flavors and scents down right. One Raika spent the last week figuring that out, with help from volunteers to boot. 

“Were you testing me?” Raika asks, trying to see if she got the profile correct.

Aria smiles, bowing very, very slightly. “I was, and will continue to do so, master.”

“Why?”

“Considering how erratic you’ve been, and how you seem to have different memories and ideals than the version of you I’m familiar with, it seems prudent to make sure there’s a logical throughline for some of your decisions.”

“That makes sense. I continue to admire your brain and its many well developed folds.”

“I… appreciate that, master.”

“Anyways!” Raika says, turning back to the group in front of her, “You’ll all be heading out to one of the other ‘hidden realms’ of me. When you get there, you’ll plant a piece of my flesh into a piece of that other my flesh, allowing me to connect to it, and then I’ll get stronger and kill all of the Feng, who I hate so profoundly.”

“Do you need to say that part every time?” Aria asks.

“No. I will, however, continue to do so.”

“Can it be any piece of your holy being, Bleeding Mother?” Yu Guanyu asks, bowing again as he does. 

“Technically yes, but I’m also going to give you some weird seeds,” she says, before reaching a freshly grown hand into the “dirt” to do just that.

The arm manifests fast enough to catch fire a little bit and let off a lot of steam, bone turning to vein turning to muscle in sequence, and the ground molds itself to match, making itself act more like a liquid than a solid for her. When the arm re-emerges, grasped in its still-steaming hand is a small pearl-like orb, off-white and colored slightly pink at the edges.

“It’s also useful in case you’re dying. If you’re dying, you can just break it and something will happen that might make you not die.”

“You would come to our aid yourself, honored one?” Lei Hai, the squat buff one, asks with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh, no, I just put a bunch of stuff in here that should grow into something super weird and dangerous if it breaks apart. It’s not delicate, but you should probably still be careful with it. It makes those bombs I used to throw out look like children’s fireworks.”

“What bombs?” asks water-hair (Dai Yuhan? Maybe? Maybe she shouldn’t remember their names. Sort of rude but whatever). 

“Don’t worry about it. So! Are you all ready?”

Yu Guanyu reaches out his hands in supplication and gently retrieves the precious pearl, holding it to his chest like it’s the most precious item he has. Maybe it is. She never really looked into why he’s so passionate about her. It’s sort of weird. She’s pretty sure she hasn’t seen him use his cultivation once yet, just sending Qi into the whip of hers he has and the other tools he’s politely requested.

Weird guy.

“We stand honored and prepared, great one!”

The other two of his closer “teammates” nod and bow as he does, mimicking his words, while the immortal Zhong Li simply bows, doing everything in his power not to make eye contact or draw any attention to himself. 

“Great! Goodbye!”

The ground bubbles up and flows like water, tendons and fats joining together in a superheated example of mutation to wrap around them into a dense, dark shell, shaped vaguely like a bullet.

Then she pulls.

Dao is Flesh is Space is Pain is something more is everything and she takes what part of it she understands and is hers and changes things. 

Just like that, a bullet-shell of condensed meat starts falling out of the little red cloud in the sky, a few miles over the horizon.

It wasn’t easy, keeping everything connected. There’s still some weirdness, or inconsistency, when parts of her aren’t directly touching each other, but in some way, on some level, they’re also all always touching each other. She doesn’t really understand how that works, and part of her is pretty frustrated at it, but she has bigger priorities.

The point being that she kept the blood-mist she made during the fight around the manse. 

Dispersing it wasn’t hard. All of the parts of it with enough Qi to really do anything got erased, unsurprisingly, not long after she left, but what little bits remained, nearly at the level of “mortal” blood, managed to slip under the radar of whatever Feng clean up crew went her way. Sending them into the air, letting them be carried by the wind, increasing their buoyancy and weight as best as she could, let her start sort of just… drifting.

Even then, some of the little bits of blood got erased. Passing through random defensive arrays or hunted down, she doesn’t know, but the less she used her comprehension or her Qi in those parts, the more often they seemed to survive. After a week, they’ve drifted pretty far.

She erases the blood she just used from existence, pulling it back into herself through that extradimensional space that is her understanding of Space and Flesh. She’s with the team as they fall, tumbling towards the earth, made far faster than they would be on their own. The blood-shell, made of materials as close to “mortal” as she could manage, cuts through the air and uses its weight to accelerate their fall, then, as the ground approaches, opens itself up.

Balloons of fat and skin inflate at violent speeds, using the blood-shell’s fall to suck in wind faster, coating its exterior in thick and reinforced padding. It slows its spin, reducing that extra bit of velocity. Flaps of leathery flesh extend out, acting to catch the air and slow its fall.

It still hits the earth like an explosive.

The blood shell craters the land it hits, plunging a good few feet into and through the dirt into a diagonal trail that makes nearby hills buckle and roil like water.

But the people in it survived, which is all she cares about.

In a flash of Dao, she unmakes and reclaims the blood shell, leaving four of her would-be champions stranded out in the wilds, looking for another piece of her.

It’s a really good thing she has other plans in the works too.

Across the Jianghu, three other impact sites dissolve away and leave behind their cargo, and their cargo’s cargo. It’s not much, but it’s about as stealthy as she can currently manage, which, in her opinion, is still quite an improvement overall. 

She’s learning more all the time. Every day, less safeguards. Every day, less trains of thought locked away.

And there’s still some more blood out there. More pieces of her, drifting, able to allow her to pull herself anywhere and spread from any point.

One Raika, buried deep and still working on her project, sends out a pulse of agreement at that.

Temptation.

“With that all done, I have other matters I must attend to,” Aria says, turning and bowing properly to Raika. “With your permission, master?”

“Sure! Do whatever you want to do forever if you can.”

“A concerning statement I will take into account.”

She turns, then leaps off of the hillside of Raika’s internal landscape, Nascent Soul Realm strength and Qi allowing her to hit the sound barrier as she leaps almost casually from point to point. 

She’s getting stronger too. Slowly, but she leaves behind little markings where she steps, shaped almost like letters but made entirely of something delicate and sharp and hiding. 

“Can we get back to it?” Geng He asks, still glowering.

“Sure! What do you think, ribs first or hips?”

He pauses, taking the time to actually think through his answer (also an improvement, though on  his part rather than hers this time). 

“Hips. It’s getting heavier, and I don’t want to neglect my lower body.”

“Great! This will probably hurt a little. Not too much, that’s annoying, but if you feel the urge to scream, you should feel free.”

With a thought, his lower torso splits open wide, and pieces begin to separate from each other, opening up room for replacement components and for more places to connect the hard-points of the exoskeleton she gave him.

To his credit, he only screams twice.

Raika hums to herself as she works, nodding along to music only she can hear as she changes him. Distantly, she can feel the other Raika’s hard at work as well. Those working on the safeguards, those creating deployable soldiers to canvas new areas with, those spreading more subtle signs of growth in search of her other pieces, those experimenting with fresh ideas and dangerous concepts she’s only just starting to understand. All throughout her, she’s hard at work in a dozen different directions, building with what she has to a higher level.

She can be more.

She’s Hungry for it.

The thought passes, not quite firm enough to grasp and hold as comprehension. But she felt it. 

And if she can find the rest of herselves? 

If she can find that thing she can feel off in the distance of her inner space, that strange light out beyond all the islands that come and go?

Maybe then it’ll be enough.

Maybe then she can take the thing hunting her and unmake it from the inside out. 

She hums. She remakes joints and hip-bone and adds to it an external connector to an impossible armor. She listens to herself making monsters and moves.

And still, she’s tempted.

She can be more.