Book 2, Chapter 10 – Tastiest Ass About Town (Patreon)

Spirit Beasts are a wonderful source of resources. From their hides and chitin, excellent for crafting armors and clothing, to their claws and teeth, useful for making weapons, to their blood and guts, useful in any number of alchemical concoctions, they’re one of the truest examples of “natural treasures” in the world. Even beyond the benefits of flesh enriched by long-term Qi effects, there’s the fact that Spirit Beasts will actively pursue each other and other naturally formed plants and sources of Qi. Unlike orthodox cultivation, Bestial Cultivation, as it’s often referred to, revolves around consuming valuable reagents, materials, and Qi in general, transforming their bodies in accordance with what’s consumed. A much more direct example of cultivation than the spiritual digestion and meditation that orthodox cultivation pursues, a Beast that consumes an enchanted shield will gain enhanced durability and wood-like flesh, a Beast that consumes a Flame-Born Ginger will gain the properties of flame, a Beast that consumes a person will become more person-like in turn.

Thus, the older and more powerful the Spirit Beasts, the more concentrated the amount of resources and concepts bound into its flesh, making harvesting them often as valuable as finding a half-dozen other natural treasures. However, the danger obviously rises in equivalent degrees, as more “profound” Beasts possess far greater strengths and a great breadth of versatility. 

However, their consumption is not a one-to-one process. Some energy is used in the eating and transmuting of the concepts and treasures devoured, and thus weakens the product from its original state. Beasts compensate by eating many such treasures, which can lead to some of the dangers of Bestial Cultivation, but ultimately ensure that their harvest remains one of the most valuable exercises a cultivator can pursue outside of a direct Sect environment. 

– Academic paper on the nature of anomalous natural patterns relating to spiritual beasts, by Researcher Tal’ Oran of the Division of Research

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She tears through flesh, chews through gristle, bites into bone to sup on marrow, chin dripping crimson, and it feels wonderful.

Her Qi, if it can be called that, is “raw”, unrefined in the most literal sense. Without spiritual organs to digest away all the murky lesser concepts that flavor it, without any ability to shape what she absorbs directly, it’s “pure” in the same way that white light is. It’s so full of random bullshit that it appears formless and complete, ironically unpurified though it may be.

It’s mostly aligned with flesh, biology, because that’s what’s in her body, but it’s more of an undifferentiated “world Qi” than she’d like. Using it to modify herself is like forcing green, wet saplings to catch fire, or like using pinewood ash and glue to write without mixing either; theoretically possible, if one is willing to endure a fuckload of discomfort, extra effort, and outright pain to do it, and it will probably end up not-great anyways.

But the Qi that she consumes now, that dribbles down her chin, infused into blood and muscle and modified living tools to be used, isn’t nearly as raw as the flesh. No, it is, in the truest, most delicious sense, digested. This Qi, circulated through organs meant to purify and convert it to usable energy, is made to be used, custom-altered to suit the nature of living flesh and flood into it. She may not have the meridians to circulate all of it throughout her, but she has a stomach which does a much more material version. And in terms of the ease of absorbing it into her body? The fact that it is not chaotic, formless energy but something already changed to augment and improve a living body makes it just better. Her body has adjusted to surviving and absorbing Qi as raw and ragged and frightfully chaotic as any Qi-deviation poison’s wet dream; in comparison, this is nectar.

Raika takes what is left of her kill, and experiences communion.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been eating.

Her flesh reknits like new, her skin filling out and regrowing over the missing gaps. At first she tries to be careful, tries to keep a close eye and make sure that nothing is scarring or growing back wrong, but somehow it just… isn’t. She feels an urge, like a pull, trying to get her to move towards something else, but it’s not that much of a compulsion; just a suggestion. She doesn’t understand what she is eating, is experiencing it in random chunks, and while the Qi in it is designed to supplement a specific body, it’s not so niche it can’t be moved into a new form. Her whole body absorbs it, drinks it in, the constant agonizing static of the Qi she has forcefully cultivated and kept alive made so much louder but somehow just a bit less painful. 

And none of this even speaks to the taste. All the scents they’d been hiding, magnified into flavor… it’s a fucking experience.

She doesn’t have time to eat all of them, and Qi-absorption properties or not, her stomach has limited capacity. As tempting as it is to just stay here and let them come for her again, however long it takes for the scent of Taran and the memory of his guns to fade, if the last wave was any indication it’s not particularly survivable. Instead, she grabs her bag, half-trampled a ways away from the one Maen was hiding behind, and takes out her bedroll. It’s nasty as hell, but she starts tearing apart the bedroll and wrapping up cuts of meat that she does her best to drink the blood out of, trying to package as many as she can while disguising the smell and any leakage. 

The smell is likely to be a moot point, seeing as they’re finding her anyways, but if she is going to stay out here, drawing them away and delighting in them, then she’ll need supplies with which to heal and eat. And at the end of the day, she’d just rather not have a sack of wet meat on her back if she can avoid it. Moist meat is… acceptable.

She looks up above, tracking the sun in the sky as it squirms. It falls there, to the south, and they walked a rather circuitous route from there, vaguely southeast… if she tracks where they’d come from in an arc, then the town is almost due east of where she stands. The mountain, then, is east-northeast, visible over the top of the trees.

That’s where Taurus is. Looking into where the strange artifacts that attacked Paleblossom City might have come from. Maybe she’ll head there. Eventually. When and if she feels she has absolutely no other option, when the town and the sect that it’s built around aren’t something she has to consider, she’ll head there. Between the village, escape, and the mountain…

She’ll go to the mountain. But only when she has to. Only when needs must.

She starts walking, heading due north. She’ll circle around the mountain and village both, while keeping the aforementioned obstacle in between her and Maen. Between Yun Ka, the sect, and Taurus himself, they’ll be able to find her. If they need her for something, they’ll come to her. That’s what getting a tracking spell chipped in against one’s will is for, after all.

“If I don’t make it back to town in a day, assume I’m dead.” 

Ha. 

She should be so lucky. 

It doesn’t matter. It got Taran to leave and to take Maen with him. That’s what matters.

She starts moving, sunset starting behind her. 

Already she can feel different. She expected to leave that last struggle in near ruins from how hard she’d pushed herself, how much damage she took. And yet, after a few hours of eating and “resting”, she’s… fine. It still hurts, but her steps are steady, her breathing even and her heartbeat strong. With the addition of refined, flesh-coated Qi to eat, she’s almost healed.

Still, the battle showed her that she isn’t enough. The systems she’s building in her body are flawed. Some of her muscle fibers are woven far too tight, too ready to tear and unable to resist the force she’s putting on them, while other new patterns and connection points for tendons made it so she had limited range of movement that she hadn’t recognized before. Pushing herself that hard, at the brink of death, left it clear that even relying on how her body has gradually been strengthened by Qi, a lot of her would-be improvements simply don’t make sense when exposed to the realities of stress and violence.

She can’t stand still, though, and she doesn’t have days to work. She has to modify on the go.

Some of the muscle groups and patterns she sets back to “human standard”, keeping them as close to their original shapes as she can until she understands them better. Others, she starts to refine, bit by bit, keeping pieces of herself still even as she starts to sprint.

That part, at least, she got right. Her heart beats fast and strong, having survived the abuse she keeps putting it through and, with the wonder of Qi, healing back better, able to keep her blood flowing all throughout her. Her lungs pull in air faster and quieter than before, drinking in the oxygen all around her and sending it all throughout her so easily, so cleanly, that she can even hold her breath as she runs and have no difficulties moving for minutes. She marvels at it, and wonders if this is what it’s like for someone in the Nascent Soul realm.

Probably not. They’re beyond a lot of the limits of biology, but she thinks that all but those with specific physiques or cultivation techniques would have to use Qi to achieve something like this.

All she has to do is hurt herself.

She runs as fast as she can, keeping a consistent pace over roots and boulders and hills, her legs moving so fast they’re blurring. She’s moving fast enough that she has to worry about missing little details, only barely perceptive enough to keep an eye on the terrain as she zooms by. She gets dizzy more than once, newly enhanced eyesight leaving her disoriented from the details and the distance she can see, and– 

After she breaks through a tree and re-fucks up her ribs, she starts being a bit more careful about how fast she’s going.

Still, the distance blurs past, the light starting to die as she eats up the distance.

She’s not the fastest thing in the woods, though.

There’s more rustling around her than she thinks she’s causing, a few sounds that echo just a tiny bit incorrectly as she runs. It doesn’t take long for her to figure out she’s being followed, even without the use of her sense of smell. To confirm, she slows a bit, forcefully sending her heartrate down fast enough that she actually stumbles with how dizzy it makes her.

There. A second heartbeat, behind hers. It’s trying to slow down to match her, but either it can’t keep pace or it can’t go that slow, because she hears it distinctly. Distinctly enough, in fact, that she can tell it’s coming from her left.

She shoots her heart rate back up, feeling a rush of euphoria as blood circulates at maximum velocity again. 

Yes.

She lands hard enough that she feels pain shoot up her shinbone all the way up her spine, almost spinning in place and launching herself in the direction of the other heart. There’s a brief “whuff” sound, a surprised exhale from something large, and then that very same something goes soft as she slams into it.

The beast looks a bit like a wolf, made far too large, skinless, and with chunks of bloody jelly oozing from most of its joints. Another lesser Spirit Beast, too weak to have eaten enough to form a clear power, but it’s fast, fast enough to keep up with her, and as she finds it, its scent floods her, like a challenge.

Fat-gelatin, sharp edges, slithering, slimy things, the speed of splattering fluids.  

It splatters like a balloon when she hits it, unfortunately for the entire clearing behind it and what’s left of her outfit.

And then it starts to flow back into shape.

In a moment, it’s rebuilt itself partially around her, limbs and ribs at awkward angles wrapping around her and trying to bite, to claw, to kill. She wrestles with it, but it keeps squirming, shifting like jelly, covering her face so she can’t breathe.

Its ribs break with a few good hits, and she drinks down the gelatin with effort, eating it as it eats her. Then she finds and rips out something important-looking in one of the meatier chunks of it,

It starts to try to retreat, trying to reform itself, but she doesn’t let it go.

It’s still moving by the time she senses another heartbeat.

And another. 

Apparently she’s rung the dinner bell.

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Day 1

Sometimes things stop for a while. The spectrum of twisted life, molded in perfect madness and power to be lethal and unique and glorious, sometimes retreats, or waits before attacking.

The night crawls by, stars staring down unblinking and voyeuristic. The distant horizon turns red, then orange, then gold, as morning crawls forward from the frozen north.

She wonders about Maen, then. She hasn’t heard any far-off gunfire, and she can hear out pretty far, so it seems likely that Taran got back alright. But no one’s come back to check on her. That’s good. She’s sure they know where she is, or else Taurus would have come out to find her by now (maybe?), but she’s surprised that Taran hasn’t tried to follow her. Or maybe he can’t keep up. Considering that she’s moving about fairly randomly and has the mountain between herself and the town now, maybe that’s it. 

So. Maen’s still alive. And she’s on her own. 

The others might be well. They might not. In the end, all she has are idle fantasies in the face of a world of teeth and hunger.

And the mountain. Always on the corner of the horizon. The mountain. Source and end of aaaaall her problems, if only she chooses to go there and ask for help.

Or try to murder the thing upon it.

Mmmh. No.

She hasn’t rested much, but she does in those moments of retreat, a few hours at a time. Sometimes just a few moments, barely long enough to put herself back together. She’s still refining things, and she’s gone almost two years without proper combat training; rusty instincts can only do so much. So far, they have done just enough to keep her core intact, though she’s covered in cuts and slashes, her skin bent and folded all wrong to patch what she can, even as she’s started to get better at controlling the bloodflow.  No lost organs yet, though they’ve gotten close to her eyes more than once. She sometimes notices them acting strangely; every now and then, one of them takes a bite out of her and they all seem to scream, whatever beasts are nearby seeming reinvigorated and violent and gloriously, horrifyingly hungry.

She must be delicious. Why else would they all be so eager to join her in an ever-moving ball of death and violence?

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Day 2

She thinks she had a left arm again. Maybe. It might have been a memory, because there isn’t one there now.

The sun is back.

She didn’t sleep. One night isn’t all that much to go without, but she’s been fighting and eating and running and fighting and-

She didn’t sleep.

She breathes in the scent of violence and destruction. She’s left a trail miles long of fallen trees and upturned earth. She’s left pounds of herself scattered through the wilds.

As time progresses, the beasts seem to multiply, not just in numbers but in strength. It starts with just one at a time, so long as she keeps moving, but soon it’s two at a time, then three, and if she stays still too long it’s inevitable that she’ll be overwhelmed. The longer this goes on, the more blood that is shed, the more they seem to appear, possessing stronger and stronger abilities.

She still hasn’t seen the bear again, the strongest one she’s met so far, but others have come to take its place. One was something like a bull or cow, something she took joy in tearing apart, which would throw clods of earth with exponentially more force and mass than should be possible. Another, some sort of bird, would whistle and warble, the sound pitched and then altered to make it sound like it was everywhere and nowhere, until sudden bursts of it would cut like knives. 

There’s classifications to these things, she knows. Spirit Beasts are rarer now than at any time in history, or at least that’s what she’s heard, but no sect can boast a land entirely free of them. Still, while hunters and those who make a living off of Spirit Beast materials never seem to go hungry, the chances of finding one while just wandering the wilds are minimal. Some suggest mass migration to the fourth ring, others suggest adaptation to human hunting tactics and hidden dens, beneath the earth, in pocket realms and amidst the clouds. Fanciful, maybe, but not unrealistic.

She’s found the answer, though; they’re all right here. All the classifications and species and unique materials one could wish for, throwing themselves at her like starving dogs. 

She gets to her feet again. She mends her flesh again, tasting a buffet of flavors and scents and Qi and doing her best to drink in a bit of every animal dead around her when their rivals retreat. She starts moving again. The mountain is almost to the east of her now, no longer north. The exhaustion grows, but the pain stays the same. Just as terrifyingly new and fresh every time, coming and going in waves of violence and healing. She can keep going. So she does.

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Day 3

She drinks blood like wine.

She breathes, and tastes ambrosia in her mouth. 

She moves, and it makes her dizzy with sensation. What was once static is now chaotic, burning sensation; her flesh is like water, so much does it move. She hurts, she is hurt. She screams, and the world roars back at her. 

In one moment, she is torn open. In the next, she tastes flesh on her tongue and feels give against her teeth, and is whole once more. 

They taste her too. They tear her apart and unmake her, and she remakes herself from them, in joy and in madness. She still hasn’t slept. Three days awake, since the morning of the day they arrived. Three days awake, because to close her eyes is to expose her throat to a hundred hungry mouths, and she has yet to find if she can survive without it longer than a few moments.

Because she has survived without it for a moment. So long as she tastes them again, she survives. Even though they still taste her. Every time one of them steals a piece of her rather than simply wounding her, the entire pack or crowd or horde roars along with it. She’s seen some of them retreat, actually, nursing their bite of her flesh.

She can’t help but look on it kind of fondly. She’s killed enough of them, after all; they’ve earned a little nibble, right? Especially considering how many of them she’s eaten. She’s starting to wonder if she just tastes delicious enough for the whole third ring to come and try to get a bite.

Three days. More than three dozen abominations, each one killed as fast as she can and each one taking more time than the last. Some of the fights take hours, dragging through the brush and trees and hills.

She swings. She claws. She tears, and kicks, and can barely remember if she’s using techniques or not. Too little control and there’s too many openings, too much and she can’t react in time; so she learns and tries and hurts. Takes her a while to figure out the right balance, the right mixture of force-grown instinct and intentional control.

The control part is easy. Trusting herself outside of that firm grip is much, much harder, but she manages it; she learns her lesson when she doesn’t react in time to a claw that thrusts through one side of her and out the other. 

She is a puppet, and she is a puppeteer, she’d thought. But that’s wrong. She is a tool, a weapon, a system of pieces that all work in their own ways to make for the intended outcome desired, and she is the desire, the thing standing behind it and above it and within it and pointing the way.

She is herself both master and slave. Owner and owned. Sword and the hand that wields it.

“I am me. I am mine.”

The thought resonates.

And if they want her, they have to earn her.