Chapter 453 – The Songs Are Kinda Messy (Patreon)

Sorry it's late! Went to a wedding today and it was exhausting, I basically slept the whole afternoon and only got home at like 9 to start writing.

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More and more areas are going dark. A response to the Beast Tide is required, and the fact that it was brought about in some degree by these invaders demands reprisal. May the alliance be reaffirmed. 

Five Peaks. One Hand. All the world in its Palm.

-Missive transmitted through time to the moment when it needed to arrive

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The more she builds, the louder it gets. 

As she churns through the agonies of millions against the whims of an Emperor, she spreads. Thousands of miles of veins and arteries pump her blood through, biologies subverted as carriers and infection points to spread from further. By using her Dao of Space, she moves asynchronously, spreading across a mountain in one direction, only to vanish at its far end, spreading instead from a river a hundred miles away. The infected fauna only assist with that, dropping off “seeds” of her as they travel, emulating behaviors of plants she’s experienced as she’s spread and consumed. 

It takes more and more brains to manage all that territory. More and more Raikas to handle the burden. 

That’s without going into the expansion across her rival selves. 

Rival selves. Funny that that’s how the thought came about. 

The woman who was not Raika had bridges connected to other vistas in the sea of flesh she’s glimpsed. 

Some of them are putting up more of a struggle than others. She would dedicate more to taking them over and properly integrating them, but– 

Silence. An unexpected quiet. 

One more piece of her gone. Vanished as if it never were.

A moment later, a chunk of her spreading tendrils goes away. 

Not dead, because death is too real. Just gone, the trails they leave half-vanished, half-real, the Qi invested in them taken somewhere else. 

She doesn’t even catch a glimpse of him as he moves, because if she saw him, he’d be where she’s looking. 

He’s not quite faster than she is, though. 

If and when he strikes at her core, which, for all she knows, he’s already found, she’ll have to react, but in the meantime, he’s pruning off chunks of her rivals alongside chunks of her, and she can spread faster than he can cull without dedicating more of himself.

And for some reason, the Man Who Is Not There seems reluctant to do so. Or maybe he’s got some other idea in mind. 

It’s hard to look in that direction. The hate blinds her a bit, and she has so much else to do. She keeps building more tools, keeps circulating ever-increasing amounts of Qi and biomass, keeps refining plans, and otherwise lets him take his pieces.

She’s busy with other shit.

So much to do.

Maybe too much to do.

Reaching through the bridges to other parts of Her, now mutated to their own identities, has her fighting wars on multiple fronts. So many of the pieces refuse to even call her Raika, and the sheer discord of that drags more energy and willpower out of her. She carves into them, spreading and overtaking more and more pieces, but it’s not an even fight, just as it wasn’t with the first one. They fight back, reverse-colonize, build battlements and trenches into her being, and it hurts but that’s fine because it’s just Pain.

It’s Just Pain.

But it’s so gods-damned loud.

So many voices. So many different Raikas overlapping, so much input, so many conversations. Every time her focus slips, she feels herself sort of… dissolve? Melt? Into the flow of dialogue between her many selves, losing coherence as something “singular”. Every time it happens, she comes back, but it’s disorienting, and it feels like the sound of herselves gets a little messier every time. 

As she lets other Raikas focus on expansion, she–

Hmm.

The other Raikas. They’re… they’re also like her. 

Separate brains, yes, but also separate… clusters? Of focus. Roving awarenesses, like her gestalt is also starting to subdivide to better handle everything she’s working on.

It’s probably fine. Might even be a good time.

But it is very loud.

She turns her attention back to her primary task. 

The inverted sun shines, and the Beast Tide roils around its edges, held at bay by the magics of the powers within. 

The few beasts that are simply too far out are also spreading out, starting to diverge from the main tide and form smaller waves that spread out. They lay waste to the environment as they go, turning lush greenlands to mud and rocks to sand beneath the pressure of their presences, and Raika’s pretty sure they’ll be plenty of trouble for some other small sects or whatever is out in the Morae. She could find out, but there’s more interesting and important things to focus on. 

Within the Watchful Fields Sect’s protective dome, she continues her battle against the Emperor Realm cultivator, who seems fairly content to keep wiping out her attacks one by one. 

She can tell that her song of agony is having an effect, but she’s made sure to tune it to avoid killing anyone, so it hasn’t actually thinned out the defenders. By grasping their Flesh with her comprehension, she sees cultivators and crafters and doctors making painkillers of various kinds, keeping at least some of her enemies up and functioning, letting them keep pruning her growth. Too much longer and people may start to suffer heart failure, but she can just fix that.

The vines are a triviality at this point. She’s close enough that she can feel their Flesh, and so she can grasp it, and so it is hers. She could make herself just be them, and have them be her. 

But I shouldn’t.

There.

A brain is ripped out of the gestalt, put in front of a council of its peers as the rest of her focuses on the ongoing assault, making fresh bioweapons to toss at the mountain.

“Why did you say that?”

“It’s how we all feel,” she tells herself, “glaring” at the brains arrayed around her (metaphorically). “What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s wrong is that we’re holding back. We could destroy all of this! Force this Zhen to face us directly, to–”

“To what? Decide to fight us properly? The Man Who Is Not There is somewhere north of the Warrior Realm, and we don’t have any way of beating him yet. Compare it to a proper Emperor?”

“It’ll draw him out, then we can–”

“Kill a fucking city just because it’ll draw out a losing battle? What the fuck is wrong with you? With all of us? That’s not a good use at all, and it’s totally ignoring how we’re feeling. I don’t want to do this! There’s more experimentation, more blockages, more things to work on that don’t require us to keep wasting our energy going after the biggest prize right away.”

“We don’t have time for that!” She roars at herself, exhausted and furious. “While we’re wasting time iterating and finding what ideas work and what don’t, in isolation no less, we’ll be hunted to nothing, and the Fengs might escape!”

“Wha– isolation? Where does that come from? What, we wipe out a city or we hide in a hole? That’s not–”

“And fucking frankly, who cares about the neural blocks? That’s a secondary priority. It can wait!”

That sends a ripple through her. Voices coming up, dialogue emerging and rippling against the consensus.

“It is!” she yells, holding tight to the majority of herselves, keeping herself herself. “We have time to deal with them later. We’re wasting resources looking for memories that have nothing to do with getting stronger! Nothing to do with our techniques or useful information! We have time to heal and fix things and learn after we’re not in a fight for our lives!”

“Who’s Jin?”

A moment of silence, held tight by an adrenal cold.

Fear.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Then why would she say it?”

“She wasn’t Raika!”

“We aren’t either! She’s dead!”

“All the more reason to abandon the neural blocks and not worry about some random fucking kid!”

Loud.

In unison, a thousand brains say the same thought:

“Kid?”

“Focus!” she snarls, feeling her grasp of gestalt-self flickering. “We have too much to deal with. We can drop this fucking sun if we need to, but we can’t stop focusing on getting stronger and on building what we need to. We can focus on the Beast Tide if we have to, dig through them for inspiration.”

“Why did you say he was a kid?”

“Why did you say he was a kid?”

“Why did you say he was a kid?”

Brains flicker in and out of functionality. One of the nastiest safeguards she’s ever seen wipes out whole swathes of her as she approaches the thought of this “Jin” figure, which only prompts some of her to try to think around it, where she finds other blocks, just as vicious, wrapped around names that–

Raika sighs. 

A quarter of her functioning brains across all gestalts melt into unformed sludge, flowing like liquid until they’re reabsorbed into flesh. 

“Focus. We have shit to do.”

“It hurts.”

She “turns” to the brain that had the same thought they’ve all been having, non-stop, since she woke up. 

“It hurts all the time.”

Raika takes the part of herself brave enough to say what they’re all thinking, pulling her focus in on it.

“It’s just Pain.”

Something in her recoils at the thought. 

But the offending brain-matter is excised, and what’s left of her is either busy enough or focused enough to keep working. 

Fuck it. 

A fresh wave of bio-engineered superflesh erupts around the mountain of the Inverted Sun and the city that has grown from harvesting it. She emerges out of herself, out of blood-mist and veins and hidden caches of meat, writhing up out of the ground like a moat of snakes larger than buildings. 

Rather than slash or bludgeon or igniting the air with the force of her movement, she turns the underside of the tendrils to the mountainside, opening the mouths trapped within.

This Flesh is tougher, more powerful, denser. Drawn from deep inside her core biology, where Qi saturation is at its peak, where Flesh transcends the conventional laws of Heaven to become more of what it already is, recursive and transformative. 

Across the tendrils are hundreds of mouths. They open as one, and the first of the weapons she’s been developing roars forth.

The bombs were half-designed. Explosive convulsions of Qi. 

The mouths, hardened to impossible durability, hold up to the pressure of the force she starts emitting, allowing far more force, concentrated down to razor points.

Supreme Body Art: Fluid-Jet

Hundreds of beams of hyper-condensed blood and hyper-reactive, chaotic Qi all strike as one, painting the atmosphere of the dome crimson. What little plants remain across the domain spasm into crimson mutation, igniting with the force of their metabolisms. Voices already hoarse from agony rise ever-higher, healed and transformed constantly by over-exposure to high-concept Qi. 

The mountain’s exterior stone starts to melt even as it begins to grow veins and muscle fiber and cellular blood. The shape of the pillar, which extends past the clouds, warps under the force of the beams. 

And then there is a room. 

It is a nothing-room, which exists only when perceived and only as perceived. Within it is a man, who is a fragment of someone else’s imagination, who stands against her. 

The room is the size of the world, and the size of a room. She is, at once, a roiling mountain of biomass larger than the sect below and also small enough to fit in the theoretical chamber. 

Thus, the man is small enough to fit in the theoretical chamber and also stand equal to her in scale. 

In his hand is a fan, held gently. The patterns painted upon it shift endlessly, showing a profound variety of grasslands and trees and crops, all flowing in myriad patterns and colors, and all beneath a shining Blue sky. 

He waves his fan, and a flash of near-black mahogany pushes against her technique. 

Formless Dance, First Step: Clear The Board

A splash of red colors his fan, and her attack is no more. 

But his room is outside the mountain now. She didn’t have to touch the stone to be summoned and unmade. 

What exactly that means, she’s not sure, but she’s figuring out more of how his powers and Truths function, which is what matters. And she’s fairly certain that the room, without as clear of a boundary to its shape, can be pushed.

She roils through space, reaching out past herself, summoning more Flesh that is Space that is Pain into existence. She traces a shape that isn’t real, beginning to wrap herself around it.

She opens. The sound of skittering limbs echoes down cavernous tunnels only pretending to be mouths, preparing to disgorge hordes of sharp-edged things into the world. 

The dome surrounding the mountain and the land and the atmosphere therein trembles, and suddenly, there is a third person in the room.

Hoofbeats, in the pattern of tapping fingers.

Blessed Saint Of Many Touches alights on a place that is nowhere, smiling from atop his mutated, centauric form, transmitting his name and existence with his arrival.