Book 2, Chapter 11 - Apotheosis (Patreon)

First ever official manifestation of her Truth! Exciting!

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In truth, discordant concepts are common in early Bestial Cultivation, and perhaps essential to provide a broad base to build from. The mark of true advancement in a Beast is when they manage to curate a proper diet, creating a body whose concepts hold firm even when diluted with fresh ideas. A Beast that is half-water, half-flame, will likely not survive very long, but a Beast of steam might go on to live and grow for decades or centuries more. 

As they age and grow in power, most Spirit Beasts get more selective in their diets, avoiding the consumption of lesser ingredients or Qi infused with concepts antithetical to themselves. While younger Beasts are often forced to consume whatever they can get their hands on, creating unique and sometimes discordant morphologies, their elders are those who have grown past that early phase of chaotic misalignment.

 This means that most Spirit Beasts become less of a danger to cities and sects as they age, but become more of a danger to the Empire as a whole, as they hunt for more potent and rarer ingredients to transform themselves with. The chances of finding something perfectly suited to entirely unique existences is, of course, statistically impossible, but adding rainfall to the concept of clouds is an easy addition, one that allows for evolution without crippling the Spirit Beast’s development. Interestingly, this can also lead to a different danger, as Spirit Beasts claim a territory and begin to transform it using their Qi and unique cultivation methods, creating biomes and environments designed to garden into existence the sorts of foods they wish to grow from, or that come matched to their own existences already. These territories can be a vulnerability, allowing the Spirit Beast in question to be more easily located and hunted, but can also be tremendous hazards and create far-reaching consequences to Qi flows and travel in the areas. 

Truly, they are unique and gorgeous things, and their nature as potential terraforming engines for our world is one often overlooked and misrepresented. 

-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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Day 4

The mountain is in front of the sun now, when the night begins to settle. The whirling, writhing fire highlights its shadow, making it all the darker around her all the sooner. She has forgotten all about her mission, all about the intended idea to find the inventor of those strange weapons she’d fought with Qen Hou all those many months ago. It’s hardly of any interest to her if the Empire gets its hands on yet another mass-producible weapon of war or mad invention, they have plenty already, and there’s an entire team of experts ready and willing and far more experienced on the case. No, she is here now to draw the heat away from the others, but even that’s an excuse.

She’s here because it hurts and it grows and no one has stopped her yet.

As crisp early-autumn air swirls around her, she can’t help but feel free.

It takes ignoring where she is and why she came here, but for a while, she is not a slave. It’s… shameful.

Especially with who has started to visit her.

The beasts have started appearing less regularly. She has more time to heal. This whole time, even as she’s flooded her body over and over again with the saturated flesh of those hunting her, she’s kept her own, far more painful flow of Qi up and running. She is, physically at least, as strong as she’s ever been, even if she hasn’t had time to really implement many changes. But that doesn’t mean that no changes have occurred. 

She has visitors now. And she can feel the thing getting closer.

That’s the best way she has to phrase it. “The thing”. The more she eats, the more she fights, the more she consumes, the more she can feel this tension in the back of her mind. It’s intermittent, but it keeps popping back in, over and over, here and then gone. She can feel it, though. Getting closer. Not something she can see or feel or taste, not something she can understand or even really perceive, but somehow, in some part of her, there are signals screaming that it’s getting closer to her.

It isn’t crawling or running or moving. It is simply there, then not, a feeling inside her growing that it is here and then fading. Not a presence, no; a moment. Something is coming closer.

It’s getting closer. And she has visitors now.

The fodder have died. Those weak enough that she can kill them have been killed, and the ones strong enough to present greater danger have come. Fights take longer, but there’s more time in between them, which she needs. More and more time for her to fight to stay awake, after three nights and four days without sleep. Dink, of course, has been instrumental in this. She lost the chain she was holding it with sometime on day one, but as it turns out, her body digests monster meat much more easily than metal, and so long as she barfs him up every few hours he’s fine. Hasn’t even tarnished, really.

All that and the fact she hasn’t pooped in like, two days does make her think her stomach is kinda weird.

But in those moments of rest, it is with her again. A security blanket and minor aid, one she hasn’t used much since… since her friend died. The kid. Since the memory of time in the alleys became more burden than motivator. But she has visitors now, and Dink is one of the only things that makes them go away.

Small figures. Human. In between bouts of slaughter, where she wins by becoming too expensive to kill as often as she wins by decisive murder, she sees them. A little over a dozen, maybe fifteen, all of them wearing scarves over their faces to hidden them, their bodies painted in simple tattoos. Some of them carry spears. Some of them carry daggers. Some of them carry farming tools.

Whenever they appear, he’s not far behind. Like a ghost haunting her ghosts.

The smell of tangerines and fresh grass. A stain on the wall of her mind. Looming larger than these little phantoms of sleep deprivation and half-solid sanity.

She wasn’t always Raika the Bloody. At first she was just Raika.

It’s strange, the places your mind goes to after long enough deprived of sleep. Or maybe it’s the constant pain of being torn apart and stitched back together.

Blood on her hands. Blood on her face. Blood covering the green all around her, covering her clothes and skin and in her hair.

Bits of people.

Bits of Beasts.

She was a cultivator. She’s not anymore.

She was a sect disciple. Now she isn’t.

Still, the violence. Still, the pain. Still the death and the blood.

Raika the Bloody.

She looks the part right now, just like back then.

She hadn’t thought of them much, not for years. The nightmares, the guilt, they washed away with fresh violence over years and years. She let the memories rot as best she could.

But now? With no sleep? No walls? With barely any mind left to mind? 

They’re here. Standing, in the woods all around. No heartbeats, no smells, no sounds to them, but here nonetheless.

There’s one more. A bit younger, more of a mid-teen than the scarf-clad adults around him. 

The smell of tangerines. The stain.

She doesn’t look at him.

They don’t let her sleep. She’s afraid they’ll touch her.

Old guilt alongside the new, unburied and grown intertwined.

She is a little worried that she has been out here, alone in the woods, in pain and in danger and awake, for maybe longer than she should have been.

“Dink”, agrees Dink. But it doesn’t judge. It’s here. She’s not alone. It’s here.

And so are all the ghosts.

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Day 5

They’re not in waves anymore. Not really. More like… arena fights.

Before, it would be ambushes, the lone predator much less common than slapdash groups of four or five, all roaring and getting in each other’s way in a sort of rabid dash to try and taste her and kill her and eat her. The starved and the weak, perhaps, sensing an opportunity and acting desperate.

She has apparently disproven the usefulness of that behavior, because now they come in ones and twos at most.

Each one towers over the others she’d fought. A stag almost as tall as a house, its horns made of white crystals and its eyes dropping blood and ichor from swirling, alien pits, all five of its limbs and its long, beautiful tail moving with grace and purpose. Alongside it, a serpent almost a dozen yards long, as thick around as her entire body, its scales covered in soft down that she later discovered left miniscule poisonous hairs in her skin. A four-winged bird with three heads and plumage that emitted smoke like night. A fox seemingly made of water, fish and some badger-like rodents swimming through it, made up entirely of teeth and tusks. 

She survives each. They retreat now, sometimes, but more often than not she still tastes of them, and less and less often, they taste of her. She’s managed to balance it, her body and mind hypervigilant in corresponding and complimentary ways. Her physical reactions are three, maybe four times as fast as before, and her ability to process input and determine courses to take has grown to match it. 

The less they attack, the more she can taste them.

The fox tastes like a clear spring, like waking up on a cool, refreshing day, like diving into water until you’re not sure where it ends and you begin. The crow tastes like ash from a cigarette, like the night sky, like sitting around a campfire and marveling at the dark around the edges of it. The deer… she does not have words to articulate what that one felt like. The most that she can translate is the idea of looking out at a world and knowing it, and knowing where to walk, and knowing what shall be, but not being able to change anything. The concepts beside that, flavored vaguely of sparkling powder and velvet, she cannot even begin to communicate.

Her flesh is changing. Too much, and too fast. She can’t keep track of it anymore. Some changes she makes in the heat of battle, and only realizes after the fact or forgets about entirely. Others she thinks come from the flesh she consumes, her body without organs to process the Qi into a new form and its absorption simply assuming a shape similar to what it once was, requiring correction later. All throughout her, inside her, there is a feeling like a raging storm over a slowly filling lake, the Qi she naturally generates through chaos and self-destruction and the Qi designed to be absorbed mixing awkwardly alongside each other. She does her best to absorb as much of both as possible, her stomach somehow always digesting its contents into healing and growth, even as the storm inside her slowly saturates and harms and infuses. The lake keeps getting swept up in it, the destructive anarchy of it taking the well-digested energy and turning it to further frenetic needles inside her. She’s… weirdly grateful for that. It is hers, and it is her, in a sense, even as the newer energy alone remains more comfortable.

She refocuses.

Dink.

She senses the next fight. Only two of them this time. She swallows her friend and tells herself, very firmly, that she is alone in these woods save for it.

There are no ghosts.

There are only heartbeats she can now always discern, and the feeling and sound of wind and air against bodies she cannot see, and the very real sense of the pressure of them. 

Whatever the beasts use to camouflage from mortal (and inhuman, alien, mutated–) senses, it seems instinctive, as is the disguising of their Qi, but there are still details. After this long, she’s learned what to notice. An artificial stillness, a surprising lack of presence, indicates Beasts as much as the opposite. They still have pressure, too, which is much more noticeable after all her experience with it. Perhaps that’s how normal cultivators track them, but Raika senses it only carefully, as the air itself becomes heavier, as the ground stirs and trembles, as winds start to move differently and more violently, as her blood and the air in her lungs start to tremble.

She gets to her feet, her body holding more old scars than new, all of them faded into as much of a stylistic choice or skin coloration as proof of old harm. She breathes in, and out, and her breath stirs leaves on the far side of the trees around her. She moves her heart again, and almost without needing input, it begins to thunder like a hammer against iron.

She has her teeth bared and flesh ready when they arrive, and amidst summoned lightning and blades of flesh-grown steel, she moves.

Her ghosts watch.

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The Final Day

It is almost here. Almost upon her. She can feel it. 

She is alone. She does not remember where the village is. The mountain is always on the horizon, somewhere. She rips and tears and is torn apart and remakes herself and sometimes she remakes herself differently and she worries she does it wrong but it keeps her alive and she has no time so it does not matter.

The breaks are longer, the time between beasts greater, but every fight is long.

The beasts come closer each time, and she does not have room to be torn apart, because if she lets it happen now she will be unmade.

She thinks she lost a leg, but she still has both, so maybe not. She knows she lost an eye, but she expected that one back. 

Her bag is empty of leftover flesh. There is no room for error, if there ever was, and more and more it is like a dance. Some of her partners she allows a bite, allows them to conquer her for a moment if only to be able to breathe, and some of them walk away after that. Others seem only to become hungrier, more desperate, and she has had to tear her way out of throats and stomachs, ripping open those who try to consume her whole.

She has changed. Something has changed. She’s too dizzy to remember.

The storm is inside her and it is not a storm, a storm is rain and wind and cold but hers is razors and fire and lightning without thunder, cutting through her and wearing her down and slowly eating her as she eats it. She is in her fire and it is in her and it is a storm, and it / she will not let her die. She will be perfect, she will be alive, she will be her own, or she will be nothing.

And she refuses to be nothing.

It is as she stands, skin of vibrant russet soaked crimson, bits and pieces of something that was once alive and is now hungry and thrumming with something like sunlight coating her, that she sees a familiar face.

It has changed in the time since she last saw it. Its flesh remains bulging, overgrown, but it has grown to match it, gaining a good foot and a half of height on all fours from when she last saw it. Its skin, still covered in a perfect projection of needles, has grown duller, darker, thicker, and the needles themselves sparkle and glisten in the light of dusk, like crystal or pearl. Its eyes, no longer empty, are like sunken pits with droplets of magma at the bottom.

She remembers how much of herself was left in its paw as it wandered off, and wonders if she truly is such a magical meal, to make of a thing like it was a thing like it is.

Or maybe it’s been eating. Maybe some of the Beasts that ran from her did not make it far.

Intestines and pulped viscera slide off her. She looks at the Spirit Beast, and, slowly, kneels into the crater she has made of her last opponent's chest cavity.

She plucks its heart like a fruit, and takes a bite. 

It tastes of sunlight and burning flesh, and it matches her like joy does sunshine.

The beast waits for her to finish her meal. It waits until the heart and the lungs and a good few pounds of flesh are gone.

The moment is so close.

It is only when she steps clear of the body that the beast moves into the clearing they have chosen.

Whatever hold it has on its camouflage, it releases it, and she smells it again. Like falling stone from impossible height, like meat laid out on a cutting board of pearl and fine wood. It has changed since she last smelled it, and she can’t help but wonder if it’s weird to feel a little proud of it.

It huffs at her, something like a word or a question.

She does not remember how to speak. She huffs back.

She is not camouflaged, so she cannot undo some trick that disguises her Qi. Instead, she moves her heart into its proper, more violent rhythm, and lets out a long, slow breath. She can smell herself. Like heat, like blood, like fear and like joy and like wrath, the scent of her fills the arena.

She is a storm in flesh, about to be torn apart by fiery winds and lightning made of steel.

She is a mad, mad thing without scent to which the weight of the ambient Qi around them bends, even if she cannot see it.

She is mortal and flesh and possibility.

And the Spirit Beast does not back down.

It launches itself at her. She launches herself in turn.

Her skin blocks the first swipe, tough enough that even its enhanced quills can no longer pierce so easily, but when it swipes it still leaves a scarlet paintjob of torn-open flesh. When ripped away, a bed of needles even only a millimeter deep still hurts, and still opens her up for more damage. This thing, through luck or evolution or cultivation or however the Heavens a Spirit Beast grows, is perfectly suited to ruin all it touches, to turn it to meat on a plate and to crush all beneath its weight.

Raika does not care.

She is full to the brim. She has reshaped flesh like putty for days just to survive. She has seen and felt and tasted the shape of a hundred life forms so alien they may as well be from other worlds.

And the moment is almost here.

It tears her apart, unwrapping her like a parcel, skinning her with every blow.

She punches it, so hard that its bones creak beneath its hide, that its fur is broken and flattened or left in her muscle to be torn away. 

It roars, and she does not. She takes the opportunity to rip out two of its teeth, then breaks one of the digits on its paw, then stands firm as the other limb carves off her face and most of her upper chest.

She’s blind for a moment, but her eye comes back quicker, full of blood and coloring the world crimson, but it’s enough.

The moment is almost here.

She breaks its ribs. It rips off the outer layer of muscle on her arm. She tears chunks out of it as it pulverises her, as it brutalizes her flesh, until both are missing pieces, until both are gushing crimson onto the forest floor.

The moment is so close.

In a burst of blood and viscera and bone and something almost like fire, like napalm, that glows and ripples and is hot to the touch and ignites in strange colors on all it touches, she thrusts the stub of her left arm into its chest.

It blooms.

It is not an arm. It is not a limb. From the remains of what was, she makes a tree. A branching, snaking, series of vines, of bones tough as metal, of flesh which grows and regrows and regrows, of blood that glows with fire and magic and sheer fucking will, and it exists and it is possible because it is her, it is hers, and she can shape it so.

Sword and hand both.

I Am Me. I Am Mine.

The words are in her mind, louder than anything, as loud as her own existence, as loud as she can make it.

The bear groans, its heart pierced. 

The fight is over. Two monsters, not quite equally matched, one overturned by a single, explosive instant of madness and transformation.

The moment is here.

Its flesh melts. It lets out a long, mournful wail, long and slow and quiet now, impaled on a dozen impossible branches, and she mirrors it. It hurts. She’s torn apart, as badly or worse than at any earlier point, her intestines spilling, her heart open to the air. It is dead. She is dying, or maybe being reborn. Either way, they wail, together, low and quiet as she cries and it dies and everything in her shudders at feeling that death so close.

All around her, her ghosts watch.

Behind her, JiaJia watches. And she is proud. And she is ashamed. And she is afraid.

And the moment is here.

Her flesh begins to melt, the impossible heat and pressure and static and glow inside her reaching a breaking point, far beyond her body’s abilities to absorb or use no matter how much she harms herself. She reaches a tipping point and crashes past it, and she falls, and the beast falls with her, and together, her, the beast, and the blood of that which they fought upon all die and melt and begin to become.

There is a sense of pressure. A smell, like wind and mountains and giant, endless plains beneath the tread of impossible weight. The world bends to the pressure of something impossible and vast and alive.

The last thing she sees is the sun, setting behind the mountain. Six of its many limbs seem to circle it or emerge from it, like halos or tendrils of flame against a perfect black.

And then she is gone.