Chapter 451 – A Perchance Antagonistic Initiation To A Social Interaction (Patreon)

Hello, loves! I have some slight worries about this part of the arc, some concerns about potential slips as it gets greasier, but I'm pretty sure it's going flavor-deep so I'm not hating on it all the way. We'll see how it turns out when I pull it all together at the end, and / or how I'll fix it some distant kindle day! In the meantime, enjoy the return to a deepdive on Raika's psychology being zesty

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Realms of power in the Divergent Paths are a bitch and a half. Every realm advancement pushes things in a generally multiplicative path, but the highest reaches go even further. 

Exponential is perhaps an exaggeration, but there are some distinct patterns that can be seen if and when all things are equalized. Given identical conditions and an inability to retreat, as well as active conflict between relevant parties, then, to generalize, there are understandings of what it would take to more or less guarantee a successful cross-realm victory in battle. Five well-trained and well-equipped mortals could kill someone in the Qi-Gathering Realm. Ten Qi-Gathering Realm fighters of mediocre talent would slay someone in the Foundational Realm. Thirty Foundational Realm fighters would take down a Core Formation cultivator. Core Formation to Nascent Soul gets a bit conflicted, but generally speak, a ‘guaranteed’ victory would come from perhaps eighty or so individuals in Core Formation.

All of this is blatantly reductive, of course. Differences in environment, context, personal histories, mindsets, and more all make this supposed pattern more or less fictitious, but some fictions can be useful for understanding. 

It breaks down rather severely once one steps beyond the mortal realms, however. 

A Warrior Realm cultivator might take a hundred Core Formation experts to kill, or they might take a thousand. The qualitative and quantitative differences both simply unmake any possibility of fairness or consistent patterns, and that’s without factoring in things like Truth and Dao, which are, if not essential, then certainly fundamental to reaching this level of one’s path. Add in the artifacts and experiences, the unique manifestations of Soul, the levels of design and consistency in their being, the nuances that one accumulates to reach such heights, and the illusion of consistent patterns comes apart. I have even met a Warrior Realm cultivator I would say effectively could not be killed by those beneath him in realm or comprehension, though he was a rare exception to many conventional norms. I have met some that could be defeated but not slain, others that could be crushed by forces conventionally understood to be far beneath them due to not designing themselves around violence.

Consider, then, the scope between a Warrior and a Monarch. 

A Warrior can kill a village, a squadron, perhaps, if exceptional enough and given time, slaughter a city whole.

A single word from a Monarch’s might kill millions. 

Very few monarchs in the world have not had some degree of an army of warriors at their beck and call– and beneath them. 

–”Simplified Understandings Of The Heights”, by Warrior-Scholar Quian Dai-Yu

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“I’m not here to fight you,” Raika says, moderately honestly. 

“I find that almost entirely irrelevant, shade. You have invaded sovereign territory, without so much as announcing yourself, in an attempt to take something that belongs to me.”

Anger. A sharp flash, incandescent and hateful.

“It does not belong to you.”

“It was left in my hands by the death of that which made the shade before me. It was hard fought in the avenues of political and social warfare, arranged amongst dozens of powers that eclipse even me, and which is held by my strength over those beneath me. Found, gifted, fought for, and claimed– what is that, if not ownership?”

He takes a slow sip of his tea, smiling softly. “Your claim to it is stronger than most, ghostly flesh, but stronger than most does not mean strong. And I am an old Daoist, dear– when I find something valuable, I take it. If it is nailed down, I take the nails too, and if I am caught with it, I demand payment for the effort of tearing it up from the foundations.”

She’s literally rearranged the organs of people she likes more than this Zexian fucker. 

Still, she doesn’t attack. There is a difference between thinking uniquely and thinking badly, and she’s certainly not thinking so badly that she doesn’t recognize the facts here. 

Fact the first: she doesn’t know where she is, how she was taken there, or what this space is.

Fact the second: she doesn’t know how she was found, and received no warning whatsoever before being ripped into this place.

Fact the third: she still can’t sense this man.

His presence, what little of it exists, seems to follow no pattern she’s experienced before. The only time she seems to be able to perceive him is if she sort of guesses what’s real, or what he is, or what he looks like, and then, instantly, he fits into that shape. If she guesses wrong, nothing happens– but she guesses that he’s the type to drink a cup of tea arrogantly, and he’s doing that.

Things she gets right come into being, but things she doesn’t know remain impossible to determine. His strength, his location, his true presence, it’s all ephemeral, nonexistent. 

She keeps guessing, but the shape of him remains elusive, hard to determine. She doesn’t even know the color of his eyes. 

The unknown is intimidating, but so is the fact that he’s acted in ways above and beyond what she’s ever experienced. 

There’s a Warrior Realm Feng in her guts being digested, and she didn’t hesitate to try her luck against him and two others at once. She doesn’t feel her luck would endure very well against the Grand Elder.

“That’s a good instinct,” he says, giving the little tea sculptures on his tray a wash in the beverage before pouring himself another cup. 

Can he–

“No, I can’t read your mind. Well. I could. It takes a bit of work, especially considering your state of being, but it hardly seems worth it. An ant may not understand the elephant, but its shadow incites predictable reactions more often than not.”

“Most people who call me an ant have found themselves very wrong in the end.”

He chuckles. “Just a metaphor, oh ghost. You’re hardly an ant, and I’m no elephant, but it’s good that you can recognize your circumstances.”

“So you’re that far above me, are you?”

“If I weren’t, you would have torn me apart already.”

She frowns at that. “That’s a rude assumption to make. Even if I did, I usually put people back together after.”

“Oh? Is that what I sense from within you, then? All the people you’ve put back together?”

A shot of cold runs through her. 

He might not be able to read her mind, but the way he’s talking implies a lot more than that. Can he sense her interior? No one has been able to do that without touching her directly, not through the resistance her tissues have to Qi or the saturation she’s imbued into parts of it.

Is he touching her right now? Are his senses so superior to what she’s experienced before that he can see within her without needing to? Is he just guessing? Another metaphor, some mind game?

Her mind itches in frustration and the first hints of fear she’s felt since the Man Who Is Not There.

“I can’t say what you sense in me,” she says instead, working overtime to try and pick good words. “I know what I am, and that’s enough.”

“For you, perhaps. But still, you have invaded my domain, entered territory that you have no claim over, unannounced, and done so with the clear intent of theft against me and mine. So I’m afraid you are not truly enough for me at all. In another day, perhaps, but with this tide bearing down on our doors, which I’m sure has nothing to do with you… well.”

She waits for him to continue.

He sips his tea instead.

She keeps waiting.

They go through a full minute that way. Then ten. Then a few more. 

“Your tea is getting cold,” says Zhen Zixiang, sipping at his own still-steaming brew.

“I don’t like tea.”

He makes a face at that. “Come now, ghost. There’s being a beast and there’s being uncultured. Everyone likes tea.”

“I prefer juice. Or blood.”

The grimace deepens. “Are you a child, or a dog?”

“I am me.”

He shakes his head at that, putting his cup down. “Very well then. I’m afraid I don’t hold enough kindness in my heart to procure for you a juice to replace a fine beverage. As for blood…”

“Offering yours?”

He snorts, as if the very idea is funny. Notably, she doesn’t sense any blood in him, though whether that’s because he’s blocking her senses somehow or she didn’t guess correctly or he just doesn’t have any, she doesn’t know. 

“If you will not accept your funerary offering, ghost, your final rites will have one less mercy in them. I believe the tea would be to your satisfaction.”

“I’m not going to die here,” she tells him.

“You’ve died twice since we started talking, oh ghost.”

From the miles of clustered veins and muscles, she slams an arm against the not-floor, the impact rattling walls that don’t exist. 

“I am me.”

“And yet I am watching the you that you used to be die an ugly death, over and over. Aneurysms, seizures, strokes, rippling through you. Ugly ways to die. How does it feel to you? Is there choking? Confusion? Is it an instantaneous dark, a seamless transition, or is one of you dying now, wondering at the meaningless noises, trying to understand that another you has overtaken the role you once held?”

The limb grows claws, meter-long sickle-things that scrape against the surface beneath her, carving a furrow straight through the tea table and the cup atop it. 

“Mmh. Do you grieve yourself? Or is that beyond you, oh ghost?”

“If you know so much, why don’t you tell me, old beast?”

Grand Elder Zhen Zixiang smiles, his head gently tilted to one side. Hazy and indeterminate as he is, he looks like a sage, seated peacefully upon a lotus-lake, utterly at ease. 

“I told you, beast. You rejected your tea, and so mercy is reduced in our little encounter. Are you ready?”

“I… I don’t want to fight you.”

“I admire your restraint, beast. I also am sorry to say that such an alternative was never in question.”

Her veins unfurl an inch-wide little gap in their clustered patterns, just wide enough for a spike of biosteel to be launched fast enough to cause the air around it to turn to plasma.

Grand Elder Zhen Zixiang waves a hand, like waving a fan. 

Outside the mountain, a chunk of the farmland of the Watchful Fields Sect explodes into bloody mist. 

Amidst screams of confusion and fear, between the clumps of earth collapsing back towards the ground, fresh tissues form from out of the blood, turning crimson clouds into structural frameworks in an instant. Within seconds, miles of infrastructure has developed, bone and muscle and metal and cartilage all blending into tentacles the size of hills, blades the size of houses, which throw themselves at the distant mountain.

There are cries of alarm. Several cultivations spike, many of them powerful enough to slow her down, but something ephemeral drifts through the air and they all hold back. As thousands of lesser demigods throw themselves out of her path, using escape techniques and artifacts to move away from the gargantuan limbs assaulting the mountain, no one tries to stop her.

A dozen of the river-sized tendrils strike at the mountain proper by curling in on themselves, their bulk broad enough to cause whirlwinds around them and drag clouds down close, and then whipping full-force against the stone. At the same time, thousands of spikes of bone, droplets of blood, and disguised bits of flesh are launched from them, cones of violence covering the buildings on the mountain, the sect below, and even the screaming sun above.

The first flechette of bone touches the mountain, and suddenly, she is in a room.

There is no tea this time. Just a man, seated patiently, though his head is tilted in curiosity.

“Not a little beast at all, are you? How have you made such things with so little Qi?”

She’s already striking at him, tens of thousands of tons of mass accelerating at impossible speeds to crush him and carve him apart and tear open the space around him. 

He waves a hand, and again, she’s nothing.

Miles away, dozens of minds converse, referring to her internal landscape of herself to pull in more minds.

“How is he doing that?” One of her asks as fresh biology is spun up and launched at the obstacle before them, uncaring of the chaos it causes or the damage it causes. 

“How is he reading us?” Asks another, which is quickly replaced as her physical location stops somehow. 

“He mentioned a domain. Did he mean it seriously? A Domain? Maybe there’s a rule he’s established.”

“What? If someone reaches the mountain, they get thrown into a nowhere-room?”

“There’s no sensation, no flavor. His Soul is obscured, and without tasting his cultivation, I don’t know how to figure out his Domain.”

“Warrior Realm? No, can’t be. The others held back when he did… something.”

“Something with Qi? We can sense it, but not the normal way. If it’s something subtle enough, designed to be hard to interpret–”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s–”

A stretch of terrain completely distinct from the mass of flesh exploding from out of the mountain’s base suddenly gets unmade. This time, however, it’s extinguished by a sudden burst of growth, golden stalks of wheat and rice stalks suddenly manifesting across miles and drinking her flesh out of existence. 

Elsewhere, the surface layer of several farms is cut finely enough to rise into the air, cleanly severed from her tissues below. A millisecond later, all of her in the area evaporates as if made of water before a violent sun.

She’s covering the entirety of the Watchful Fields Sect’s territory, all of the land in the defensive dome, but it’s only going to last her a few minutes at most. All of the forces she detected holding back earlier are moving, attacking her, uprooting even the best-hidden pieces of her. 

Even lesser cultivators are getting in on it, squadrons of sect disciples of a myriad of different loyalties dashing out from the Watchful Fields Sect’s main campus and the strange superstructure built into the mountain beneath the screaming sun that used to be Her.

“Not arrogant enough to fight us on his own, then.”

“Full offensive? We can overwhelm them.”

“Can we overwhelm him? I doubt he’s doing everything he can. Are there others like him? Where even is he? Can we meet him outside that space he creates?”

“Why isn’t he riding out? Attacking us directly? He doesn’t see all of us at once– why not? How can we use that?”

She doesn’t bother with tracking her acolytes. Any thoughts of watching for casualties or the lives of mortals goes away, left behind in the face of such a clear obstacle.

Dozens of minds speak over each other, each one adding thoughts half-thought by the others already, a cacophony of planning as miles of territory are torn apart. She’s uprooted across the landscape, even as she digs tendrils down deeper. Without using her stronger materials, which take time to make and draw from her main body, she can’t move fast enough or defend adequately against the attacks against her.

“It’s kind of like a puzzle,” one Raika says.

“It is pretty interesting, actually.”

“I don’t care how interesting it is. It’s right there.”

Several Raikas turn their metaphorical heads to stare at the one of her that just said that.

“Don’t tell me you don’t feel it,” says this Raika, one of the newer iterations. “It’s right there, and it’s ours. It’s US. It should be ours, and he wants to stand in the way? The powerful just taking? He’s evergreen as the others. He’s just like them. They’re all alike. She’s there and it’s our Pain and we’ve earned that. It’s more interesting to have than to keep beating against when they are taking it from us.”

“I… well it is right in the middle of the Beast Tide. Maybe we–”

Dozens of Raikas turn, trying to find the one of them that had that thought. 

From one extreme to another. Neither one feels entirely centered, entirely like the majority. 

“Even if we don’t overpower them, we have to do something.”

Agreement, at last.

“Pain, maybe? If they can handle being beneath Her for so long, they can handle a little added stress.”

“The cultivators can. Can the mortals?”

“Do I care?”

Genuine curiosity. 

Profound discomfort. 

No time to rectify them. Almost half of her has been uprooted, the land beneath the dome of the array turned to toiled muck and chaotic mess rather than the well-organized fields of farmland or the rolling green hills. She only has so much time, and every fresh wave of landscape-shaping flesh she throws at the mountain gets waved away like it’s nothing.

Like she’s nothing. 

Those words he’d said. The words that killed her. They’d poked at something, at many somethings, things still hidden away and defended and useless. 

He cast her aside. Like the Fengs did. Like the Empire did. Like the world did. Like everyone does who isn’t trying to get something from her. 

Too many connecting threads, weaving between the forts in her mind to paint a picture that she hates. 

The newer voices are louder. 

It’s petulant, one of her says. She can do better, says another.

Obviously she can do better. That’s what she’s doing.

She doesn’t launch another wave of flesh at the mountain. It wouldn’t do anything more than tell her enemy more about her, and she has other things to focus on.

If the hidden-master grand-elder wants to outsource the work to his juniors, if he thinks that she’s weak enough that he can suppress her so easily, she’ll let him keep thinking that– but she’ll make him pay for it.

Rising out of flesh and blood and bone, as she abandons whatever little subtlety remains and resumes her exponential growth, she begins to sing.