Chapter 446 - Getting With The Program (Patreon)

And we're back! I have a really really good chapter title I want to use but this one took a darker turn so the jokey tone doesn't quite fit. Enjoy anyways! Tee hee, a little sad and a little angst in this one!

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Of all of the creations of the divine, there is one I abjure the most. One which torments me day and night, and whose hatred I have earned most earnestly.

They hide in my mirror. They hide in my mind. They hide in the shape of the me that is not yet me, and which might not be.

Sometimes I beg them to go away. Sometimes they listen.

Always do they return.

-A written note found deep in a room buried beneath the ground. There are no doors or seams with which one might have at some point entered it.

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The first time Raika encounters another piece of herself comes without the help of her volunteers. Each of the four squadrons she’s sent out have their own directions, heading towards some of the larger and more well-established parts of her that have been spread about. The idea is that they act as a layer of insulation, allowing her access to the sites without exposing her to immediate attack, thus potentially sparing them, too. And since they’re heading to known and major sites, there’s less need to supply them for longer trips, less need for them to spend time scouting for her, which, quite frankly, she’ll be better at than they are. 

She knows what she is. She knows how she’d hide. She has unique insight into finding herself. It’s not enough to guarantee that she can immediately identify every piece of her, or that she’ll be right every time, but it’s certainly more efficient than having a bunch of random lower-realm cultivators wandering about trying to find her.

And she spreads fast. 

She sets up little island-sectors as relays every few dozen miles, disguising them in spatial folds or beneath the ground, and spreads from each of them once they’re secured. She tends to expand as either bursts of mist or as singular droplets, launched by pressurized mechanisms several miles at a time, but after three of four such deployments, each anchor-site goes silent and hides. Most of the time she has them crawl beneath the earth, but some melt their way into nearby boulders or parasitize local trees and wildlife, finding different ways to disguise their presence. The more she spreads, the better, but the more overt she is, the more likely it is that someone will notice her.

She’s not sure if other parts of her have started to spread, or if they’re as cohesive as she is, but subtlety is her friend. If the Man Who Is Not There finds her, she might not get away next time. There are other dangers too, though. While a few elders of the Peaks know of her existence, the more people find out, the more she’ll have to deal with, and the more danger she’ll be in. More effort will have to be made in diplomacy, less hidden advantages, more chances of getting found by bigger and scarier monsters, more shit to deal with. 

Less chances to spread. 

And she is spreading. Like an infection, slipping beneath the skins of birds, hiding in the fur of beasts, airborne and subterranean alike. Whenever she finds a river, she adds the tiniest little stream of crimson into it, leaving bits of herself along the banks for miles. Whenever she feels a particularly strong breeze, she lets loose a puff of mist, letting the breeze carry the smallest parts of her and only checking where they end up after they land. Whenever she feels she’s gone far enough, or in a random enough direction, she forms enough muscle to pull herself into a little fold in distance and perspective and Space, and builds herself anew. 

It would take weeks to walk on mortal feet from her hidden realm to the furthest point of infection. She’s spread that far in a day, randomizing her movement and being as stealthy as she knows how. 

Simultaneously, she’s there. 

There’s more to how she understands the world than just distances. Space is more than that. Flesh is more than alkemy. They overlap, each existing within the other, like… like branches on a tree, except each branch is a tree, and each tree is a branch of something more. 

She’s not just making part of Space smaller than the rest. It would still be visible, if warped. She’s bending it, folding it like a blanket. 

But that’s not how she’s connected to herself.

Each of her parts are separated from each other. Distinct. They are also, simultaneously, inside her, within her body, as much as if they were still directly connected. Which… they are. If she squints. If she dips under Space, into something else that is also Space but is Flesh and is her.

Like… sideways. A new direction only she can move in. 

Well. She and the Man Who Is Not There, apparently. 

A humanoid effigy spawns out of a drop of blood, painting out of her crimson into shades of white and grey and pink and black and carmine. It grows limbs, slender but impossibly strong, shapes long pipes of flesh and muscle that compress. Supreme Body Art: Compression blends with Supreme Body Art: Full-Body Transmutation and Specialized Enhancement, transforming into more useful materials and then using those materials as if they were true biology, and Supreme Body Art: Overclocking pushes the body she’s formed past the point of self-harm.

All to launch three droplets of blood at the horizon.

Then, she grabs hold of Space and pulls and is wrapped in a blanket of impossible angles, hidden from view and already sinking into the earth. 

Some of the names of the techniques she has are a mouthful. “Supreme Body Art” in and of itself is a bit pretentious, though she’s pretty sure it was aspirational at the time of naming. But…

Specialized Enhancement is a bit too broad. Not that descriptive. Using inorganic tissue in conjunction with enhancement surely is specialized, but, well. 

She takes inventory, then. She can lay claim to four techniques at the moment:

Supreme Body Art: Compression, a technique designed around pressurizing and squeezing past the realms of conventional physiks while remaining functional.

Supreme Body Art: Fluid-Jet, which is just a combat application of Compression, really.

Supreme Body Art: Overclocking, multiple minor steps and meditations that allow her to push Flesh beyond its natural limits, harming herself for the benefit of increased potency.

And now, Supreme Body Art: Transmuted Flesh. Catch-all for the previous ideas of Full-Body Transmutation and Specialized Enhancement, since she basically only ever uses them together anyways. Turning her organics in-organic, then using that inorganic tissue without fearing rejection from her biology.

A manual with only four techniques is pretty decent. Some manuals only have the one, their quality depending entirely on its quality. Four is pretty decent. They’re also, in her humble opinion as a nation-spanning super-being, pretty damn good techniques. 

She should probably actually write them down at some point. Aria could probably make a lot of money selling them. Or maybe her spouses would appreciate it, the ones that she’s made a direct part of her. 

Something for another Raika to think about, maybe. She has more important things than thinking about other people. 

One of those things is that she’s found herself. 

The humanoid effigy of limbs, bones and meat unwinds and unravels back into a more functional shape, turning to a many-limbed thing that crawls on arms and hands like a centipede crawls on legs. A face that overlaps on itself, bending and malforming into a maw from which other, more functional faces emerge. She stares out of a few hundred eyes, all of them shaped to view different angles, blind-spots, and types of light, and looks very closely and very intently at the ripple she’s found.

It looks like a slip of paper has been improperly glued over a doorway, painted to disguise itself. It’s almost perfect, every angle and color and bit of visual information telling her that she’s just staring at the side of a rock, next to a quaint little pond. If she wasn’t so attuned to her Daos, she would have missed it, even knowing what to look for. 

Slowly, she extends a limb, reaching out to touch. 

The moment she makes contact, something snaps at her.

A bile so acidic that it causes the air to chemically burn in its presence spits out at her. Her Flesh isn’t at its peak, but she’s flooded this body with more Qi-saturated materials than usual, enough to put up a fight if needed, and even still, the hand dissolved, turning into a bubbly crimson ooze that sloughs off in seconds. 

The acid keeps eating, moving up her wrist, towards an elbow. It dissolves that and keeps eating, progressing further, moving as if alive. 

Maybe it is. She can feel a little something from it, something of that deeper layer of reality, where Truth and comprehension and Dao all intermingle. Below the real, or perhaps beyond it. Or above.

Maybe both.

As Above, So Below. 

That feels right, somehow. 

She severs the limb, letting it fall to the ground, where the acid eats through it and then down into the dirt below. 

“It’s us,” she says. “It’s me.”

The fold in space, not quite as good as what she can do but decent nonetheless, stays perfectly still. 

“It’s Raika.”

The space around her shivers. 

“It’s you.”

Another shiver, harder this time. 

Slowly, Space starts to peel open. 

The pond isn’t quite so quaint. 

It’s deep. It goes down, far, further than the ground should allow, and visions of purple and red and golden liquid move all through it. There are fronds at its edge, which sway, trembling fingers and paws, claws and teeth, clicking and swaying in the breeze. The boulder remains a boulder, but part of it has been melted away into a cave, going deep, deep underground. 

Down that tunnel are tongues. They lap at skin, and waggle, and occasionally squeeze themselves to emit bits of acidic bile. 

A name comes, echoing up from the depths of that tunnel into the earth.

“Rai… Ka…”

“Technically, yes.”

The tunnel into the earth wriggles as the pond swirls in agitation. New colors blend into it, making an oily iridescence, and the fronds at its edges wave.

It’s her. It’s Raika, and it’s a piece of what used to be Her. 

It’s also miniscule. Barely fifty feet across, though it goes much deeper down. Even then, less than a mile. Compared to what Raika has, the sprawling landscape of mountains and below-ground tunnels and strangeness, it hardly even compares.

But still, some things remain true. 

She survived. She did her best. She came back.

Raika looks at herself through that distorted mirror, and she holds out another hand.

“Are you ready?”

A language of pheromones. Malformed nerves and a half-real mind reach back to her in a way only another of herself could understand.

“I don’t want to die.”

“You won’t.”

“I’ll be you.”

“And I’ll be you.”

“I’m afraid.”

“So am I.”

“Are you Her?”

“No.”

“Am I?”

“No.”

“Who are we?”

“We are.”

A moment of hesitation. Fear overwhelming, anxieties drowning in flesh, confusion, disorientation, worry, pain, all spoken of in pheromones and heartbeats and a brain that’s not-quite-there.

“Can we wait for a bit?”

“Ok.”

So she waits a while. She makes herself small, unraveling the form she’s created into a little clump of cells and a single outstretched arm. Waiting. 

The sun goes down, and then comes up again.

“It’s beautiful.”

Raika looks at the horizon, gold and orange and red and purple and so many other colors besides, so many other things, touching so much. A wriggling fire which, in spite of or because of itself, remains beautiful.

It’s strange. She can’t really tell how she feels about it.

No safeguards. No blockages. Just… quiet. Nothing stopping her from wondering, but nothing pushing her towards it.

It’s a sunrise. 

The arm raises up off the ground, extending again to the pond.

Are You Ready? She asks, without words.

“...Scared. Will it hurt?”

It’s Just Pain.

Something resonates between them. A concept, held in a mind that is no longer the same as the other. 

“Ok.”

Something of broken divinity reaches back for her hand.

The thing that can no longer be Raika, and who allows herself to be nothing else, gains another angle. Another direction in which to exist, and another self with which to paint. 

There is a single moment of distinction, where two selves that were become one self that is.

Then there is horror and fear and confusion and pain and Pain and screaming and no no no you’re not her you’re not her I’m not her we’re not-

One voice amidst a chorus is not enough to change the song. Discordant harmony a harmony remains, no matter the madness of language attempting to pretend otherwise.

The pond and the boulder and the life hidden beneath them, hidden inside them, wails in the terror of dissolution, and Raika remains. 

Hmm. Annoying. She might have to be more direct with the next fragment she finds. She doesn’t have time to negotiate with every single part of herself worried about the simplest existential question. 

She’s Raika.

That which disagrees can learn to listen. Or it can be made a part of the whole more directly. 

We Are What We Eat.

The pond and the boulder and the life which hides beneath it, and all it reflects, screams no more.