Chapter 452 - Singing The Songs Of Me (Patreon)

Alright! Stepping up pace just a bit, this one came out the teensiest bit clunky but tbh I've been so exhausted and doing so much it's a miracle I'm still writing at all rn. Byeeeee, see y'all when I see ya

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Esoteric skills are, in this writer’s humble opinion, way the fuck harder to fucking deal with. Kind of. Once you’re amazing enough it sort of stops mattering, but until you become real like that, it’s generally more likely to kill you.

Someone that can make you shit out all your organs if you say the wrong thing in your dreams is a shitload more annoying than some meat that punches extra hard. Do you know how much meat there is out there that’s good at hitting people? A lot. Dream-prolapsers are rare as fuck, seriously. I’ve only met three. Kept thinking they could get me, but I’m a bit too real for that. 

Dreams are for suckers.

What was I saying? Right. Weirdness is a metric as much as speed or strength is. If someone has a technique that inverts every movement they can see, or can throw rocks that only exist when they’re inside your blood, they’re more annoying than some guy who’s fast and hits a bunch. It’s why Domains and Souls are such a bitch– they create whole new rules and mechanics that the weak need to figure out to overcome.

The trick is the same either way, though. Just get stronger. 

Once you learn to Cut flesh, learn to Cut dream. Learn to Cut movement. Learn to Cut what Is and what Isn’t. 

Then… who gives a fuck what they do? You can just Cut it.

Like this.

–Words of Kai, Fourth Blade Of The Emperor, recorded via Divination Scrying. Record interrupted. Total loss of Diviners in designated pool. Dialogue recorded between the Fourth Blade and a designated elimination target post-mortem. Psychological stability registered as acceptable for further deployment.

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Everything hurts. 

It starts as an ache. His feet start to hurt, like he’s been running for days instead of minutes. It extends up to his calves, then to his knees, making him feel older than he’s felt since he broke through to the Core Formation Realm. 

Then it felt like his bones were being bent out of shape. Like he’d spent a week straight kicking stone to toughen them, even as his hips began to ache, as his lungs started to strain, as a migraine crawled through the back of his eyes. 

That was the start of it. 

Tian Lu of the Burning Heavens Sect, descended from the great Peak of the Flaming Phoenix, has always considered himself tough. He has taken mortal blows and recovered, has spent months in hospice getting his internal organs repaired, has suffered poisons and Qi deviations and more in his century and a half of life. 

It takes everything he has not to scream. 

Others have succumbed already, collapsing under the force of the unnatural agony spreading through their lines. Those who dare have used escape artifacts, retreating back towards the city on the mountain, but some, more desperate and foolish, even tried to use talismans and artifacts to try to breach the barrier to escape. Acts of blindness, seeing as the Beast Tide outside has begun to blot out the sun with its beating wings, and the barrier array is far beyond what any below the Emperor Realm could casually break, but pain drives to madness even strong minds.

Tian Lu has a strong mind. He has always had a strong mind. 

This is an opportunity granted by an Emperor Realm grandmaster. A hidden elder of the Watchful Fields Sect, a small but respectable sect, one only just a few steps below the Burning Heavens Sect in rank. Someone strong enough to be chosen by the Peaks to act as shepherd and defender of the Inverted Sun whose rewards are so numerous as to be limitless. Tian Lu hadn’t even known he existed, and why should he? Such things are far beyond his ken. 

And yet, the Emperor Realm spoke. In a thousand thousand minds at once, seamlessly and without Tian Lu even noticing the breach through his spiritual membrane, his voice spoke calmly and simply, announcing a contest. Those who destroyed more of the fleshy roots spreading through the lands of the sect would be rewarded accordingly. Potions, elixirs, it’s not clear, but the implication that sounded the loudest was gaining extended stays in the hidden realm of the Inverted Sun. 

And more– the opportunity was given exclusively to those below the Warrior Realm.

What fool would neglect such an opportunity? What ambitionless cur would let such a gift go unanswered and unclaimed, would not accept such boundless generosity?

Tian Lu has a strong mind. He has destroyed many of the fleshy tendrils, his sky-flames upending the earth and charring to ash the intruding infection. He has spent almost an hour carving through the landscape, and he knows that his reward will be impressive. But not more impressive than others. Not enough to surpass his rivals, or catch up to the peerless ones that stand above him. 

But the pain.

A fresh wave of flame burns away a house-sized chunk of earth and the organic clumps of tissue hiding beneath it. The Qi leaves him in a rush, the techniques of his master empowering destructive potential with the glow of a burning dawn.

He spasms, falling to his knees to vomit up bile. 

The pain is so bad.

It’s like there’s needles in his blood. Like there’s hammers on the inside of his bones. Like he’s burning, as he did during his initiation to the mysteries of the sect. Like every organ in his body is developing novel senses just to tell him that something is wrong and it is agony.

The campus of the Watchful Fields Sect glows with protective arrays, but even from miles away, he can hear the sounds of weeping and screaming. Even reduced, to a mortal? To someone who has never suffered the vilest wounds? To a child? It’s unimaginable heights of suffering.

Tian Lu has a strong mind.

His hand cramps, the sensation sharp enough that it’s like he’s been stabbed.

If he lets his focus slip, he can track every heartbeat by the way the stone in his ribs churns and scrapes clean his nerves. He can track the blood in every vein of his mortal shell by the way every drop feels like acid.

It hurts.

And it keeps getting worse.

A disciple of the Roaring Waves Sect collapses, miles away, enhanced lungs carrying their pleading on the wind.

He has not time to help. No aid he could lend.

Tian Lu’s escape artifacts are keyed to his sect and his safehouses, which are beyond the dome above. All of his numbing medicines and talismans have already been used on himself. 

He can’t help them. He’s pretty sure he can’t even help himself. 

It hurts too much to walk when walking feels like his legs are bursting apart. 

His Qi is the only thing that remains under his control, and even that hurts. It hurts to cycle it, hurts to draw it out from his Dantian, hurts to shape it into techniques, but the pain is minimal compared to the agony of his body. So, without a flight technique, without much hope of retreat, what else is there to do but grab the opportunity before him?

A Grand Elder promised him power for removing a threat to all. If he is likely to die, why not continue doing so?

He burns another patch of the land around him, burnt ends of organic veins crisping away ever so slightly slower than the dirt around them. For the barest moment, he thinks perhaps the pain has diminished. 

He’s not sure if that’s better, considering how fully it crawls back into him a moment later.

There is nothing in his stomach to vomit. There is barely breath in his lungs to breathe. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to be alive.

Tian Lu is strong. He is being filial, and obeying commandments from those wiser, and fighting an impossible enemy. He is doing as he should, and he is strong, and he is righteous.

He inhales, and it’s like breathing in broken glass.

He’s strong.

Strength is not everything.

It doesn’t stop him from screaming.

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Raika has learned a few things. 

Firstly, Zhen Zixiang can’t or won’t leave the mountain. Whether that’s because it would weaken him or if it’s some social or political consideration she doesn’t know, and without direct access to him, without the ability to sense his biology or his agony or anything at all beyond what he allows, she can’t read him and doesn’t understand him. But he isn’t leaving the mountain.

Secondly, he doesn’t seem weakened by the suffering of his lessers.

Her veins have sung the song of her Pain, albeit at a rather muted volume, across everywhere she can reach. It’s slowed efforts to remove her, though it hasn’t stopped them entirely. Many of the cultivators have actually died from it, which feels a bit dramatic, but most have retreated to around the city, the Inverted Sun, and the sect. They launch further attacks out, then retreat again when the Pain becomes overwhelming.

She’s noticed a few moments of that strange fluctuation, that wave of Intent and other things above her awareness, around several cultivators. More than a few have been pulled to safety, vanished through a process she can’t quite interpret, on a battlefield she can’t see. She’s pretty sure Zhen Zixiang is protecting some specific individuals, and even still, every assault she launches is rebuffed seemingly without effort.

Thirdly, he isn’t eliminating her.

He should be able to. The fact that he isn’t is annoying. A total removal would be enough to get her to retreat and try something new, but as it stands, every attack is wiped from the world, and then… nothing. 

She’s not stupid enough to think that’s all he can do, but it is all he’s doing.

Which puts her in a difficult situation. 

There’s… hesitation.

She’s earned this. It’s Hers, and the possibilities that victory would offer are so much more interesting than anything else. The secrets of another part of Her, victory over an Emperor, vindication. Tools to use and more to experiment with and so much.

It would take so little to escalate things. 

But again, that discomfort. The same discomfort that guided her to transform and integrate only those who committed moral sins, that kept her from consuming her acolytes outright. 

Every logical chain of thought, at least of those that don’t hit some of the last few safeguards, tells her that she has the tools to deal with this. She just has to commit to assaulting the sect and the city.

Bombing with explosive Qi deviation could carve apart the miles of land beneath the defensive array. Reaching through her Dao to use the biomass of the screaming things to grow new tools, new abominations of conjoined cultivation, would certainly draw a response of some kind.

And yet.

She’s committed to this. She’s focused. She’s made the decision to focus on the assault, to disregard the uninteresting things. 

And yet.

From thousands of miles away and within the dome itself, she churns and roils.

There are things to consider.

For one, this is not the only group of acolytes she has.

Several of the sites proposed were duds, and in the time it’s taken them to travel, several others have gone dark, wiped out by the Feng assault squadrons. Some still have ways to go in their travels, simply too far from their objectives, and for now, obscurity remains safer than speed. At least, in most other situations.

Raika herself has even found some sites independently. Little pieces of reality, warped and hidden or even out in the open, too simply to even know of Space as Flesh. She’s spread from miniscule fragment to fragment, spores and veins traveling through spatial warping and the weather. It’s not much in the grand scope of things, adding maybe a third of her current biomass, more Qi, fragments of thought, but very little that’s as real as the site of Her Death.

But.

Two groups of acolytes have reached pieces of Her.

They don’t interest her anymore. She goes back to ignoring them the moment that they touch the other parts of Raika-That-Was.

One of them is a valley, buried underground, made into a fleshy sort of oasis. It hums in harmony with its surroundings, smaller spirit beasts native to the Jiang’Hu binding with it, eating and returning Qi and biomass to it in sequence. Fish swim in half-clear waters that taste of iron, and plants grow towards the sunlight above, their leaves brilliant purple-green and their stalks of slender bone.

It seems peaceful.

It becomes Raika with minimal resistance. The hidden realm’s thoughts are slow, sluggish, as if moving through different synapses. By the time Raika feels a rush of fear and confusion, she’s already integrated that piece enough to begin repressing the emotions. 

She lets that group of acolytes free to enjoy their success, diverting a chunk of the resources being produced by the fragment back to her main body.

Slightly more than a tenth of her current biomass is added. She’s getting rather large.

It’s not enough.

She turns to the other site, subsuming the Raika that was there already and integrating her memories before she’s even realized she’s died. 

“You’re not her.”

Curious. She was in a dialogue, then?

Ah! Yes.

Her acolytes lie still on the ground, completely unconscious. Their Qi reserves are sapped to nearly nonexistent, their biologies thrumming with the flavor of narcotics and anesthetics. 

This hidden realm is a bit more realized. She starts to move in to examine it–

And is blocked by a wall of thought, restricting her to the chamber her acolytes lie in. 

It’s simple. Membrane and floral biology, from which the chemicals used to incapacitate them were manufactured and extracted. A few pools of fatty tissue protecting the collapsed from popping the floor or breaking themselves upon it.

And a woman.

She’s skinny. Starved, to the point where her bones are clearly visible through her skin. 

She only has one leg, but both arms. 

Her eyes are sunlight orange, and braids of neural tissue drift around her head as if underwater.

“You’re not the one I was just talking to.”

“Yes I am.”

“No, you’re not. You’ve done that a few times. Become someone and then become someone else. I can feel the way the brains get rewritten. You’re not the one I was speaking to.”

“Well, sort of. She was Raika. I was Raika. Now we’re Raika. Easy enough.”

The woman frowns, dark but yellowed skin tugging at too-tight muscles.

“No, you’re not.”

Mmh. Uncomfortable. Like the discomfort, but deeper, tied to something further down.

“I am. It’s my name, and I Am Me, I Am Mine.”

“That Truth isn’t about being a specific person, it’s about being yourself. Raika died.”

“Just like the Raika I was a moment ago?”

The woman frowns. “What is this? Why are you talking like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you don’t know what tone is. It’s all inflections, all off. You’re–”

“I’m more Raika than you. I’m more than you. And we have things to do, so if we could skip past this weird dialogue and just become Raika together, that would be great. Better to just know what both of us know faster, right?”

“That’s not– what’s happening? What things do you need to do?”

“We found Her main corpse, and we have to kill some Fengs with it.”

There is a moment of slow, creeping silence. Too long. They really should hurry this up.

“If you would just–”

“Where’s Jin?”

“Who?”

The starved woman stares at her, sustained by alien comprehension and profound power, enough to transform a corner of reality into itself. 

“You’re not Raika.”

Discomfort.

Pain is easy. Pain is no big deal.

But she’s Wrong.

“Yes. I. Am.”

The wave of Intent opens lacerations and breaks bones of her acolytes, shredding into the walls of the space– and leaving the woman with a long gash, cutting her from face to chest in a perfect symmetrical split. 

Brain-matter dripping from the wound, her eyes remain sharp, and glare in return.

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Enough. We have other things to do, and if you don’t understand who we are then that’s your problem, and we can fix that.”

“Fuck. You.”

There’s room there for a rebuttal. Something witty to say in return, something well shaped and stylish and aggressive.

The Raika that is here and now doesn’t care.

A thousand thousand minds in schizophrenic union wash over the woman glaring back at her and standing firm against the tide. 

She lasts for a few hours.

At which point, Raika blinks into awareness, and smiles.

The woman that wasn’t Raika was strong, and large, maybe another third or a quarter of Raika’s own landmass and Qi density, but there’s something far more important than whatever interesting ways she shaped herself, even more important than transferring away her resources for the conflict.

There are pathways.

In the shimmering veil of hazy un-reality, towards distant islands, there are bridges.

And doesn’t that just make things so much easier?