Chapter 455 – The Tempo Unending And Cruel (Patreon)

Going on a trip today! See y'all again late monday! This is a fun chapter, lots of payoff internally and externally, even if it's a bit short. Enjoy!

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Heh. She is rather messy, isn’t she? Alright. Feng? Feel free to get a little greener. Let me know if you’d like a Blade.

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Raika’s gone non-responsive. Mostly. Honestly, it would be better if it was entirely instead of mostly. Aria is having a really hard time coping with the random faces and bodies that start falling out of the walls, babbling and bleeding and dying only to get reabsorbed. It’s distressing enough without dozens of cultivators almost as stressed as she is responding to the absolute havoc that is whatever the matron of the Crimson Manse is up to. 

She hasn’t communicated what that is, and seems not to be able to communicate much at all beyond rage, confusion, and profound fear, but that’s also not stopping her from communicating it a lot.

“We demand–”

“You demand nothing, here in my presence!” she yells, flaring her cultivation at the blue-robed figure glaring down at her. It’s probably even less intimidating than she’d like it to be, considering that said figure is in the Warrior Realm, contrasted with her still-forming Nascent Soul, but the breach of decorum holds enough weight to help anyways. 

“As you can plainly see,” Aria says, pointing to one of the half-formed faces growing out of the wall, “our matriarch is actively engaged in challenging conflict, and your act of pressure against us in this time will not go unremembered.”

The envoy of the Peak of the Azure Serpent snorts, looking down at her at a professional tier. “Please. The Peaks are not as beholden to your disgusting fleshworks as lesser sects. The alliance between us is barely weeks old and yet already we’ve entered another chaotic period at the hands of your mistress. How are we to to trust that you’ll be able to continue securing the trade you’ve gained? Can you truly promise the military aid made implicit in our contract?”

Her turn to snort. “Please. That contract made it very clear that we will not be fighting your battles for you, no matter the matriarch’s disdain for the invaders. If you benefit from our actions, we won’t seek reparations, and you should be grateful for even that much, considering the harm your actions have brought on us.”

“Ha! Harm from us? You are bold to speak to a member of the Peaks above you in such a manner! You are lowly toads lusting after the flesh of flying swans. Your “matriarch” is actively engaged in the conflict around the greatest source of dao-magics kept in alliance between all Peaks, and by all accounts, she fights on no one’s side but her own. And yet you dare to act so high and mighty before this grandfather? The arrogance!”

It isn’t lost on Aria that if they thought they could get away with it, the Peaks would all be doing the same damn thing, trying to take the “inverted sun” for their own. Nor does she miss the fact that the envoy doesn’t actually clarify where that source came from, or who has greater claim to it by right. Nor will he, because he’s not an idiot and neither is she.

Politics. Truths everyone knows, made entirely irrelevant because of convenience and contrivance. 

She hates it so fucking much. She wishes literally anyone around her were better at it than she is. 

As it stands, she’s alone in her office with this fucking envoy, coping with the fact that representatives from the Peak of the Iron Tortoise will be in shortly, and that she still has missives from the other three Peaks reaching out to rectify the imbalance in their alliance.

Like starving dogs circling a bone. For such ancient and mighty organizations, they really tend to act no better than the cultivators beneath them in the grand scheme of things. 

Not that she’d ever say that out loud. Politics, after all.

“Then perhaps the Peak of the Golden Tiger will be more amenable. I have heard that their engagement with the Inverted Sun left something to be desired; I’m sure they’d appreciate an opportunity to rectify that imbalance.”

“Hah! You think to throw such a blatant plow in my face? It would almost be respectable if you would at least keep yowling like the infant you are, rather than attempting to toy with your betters.”

One of the Raikas growing out of the wall twitches and lets out a moan. Aria can feel her eye twitching.

He’s in the Warrior Realm. She can’t touch him or fight him or force him to do anything through violence. Plus his body would be really hard to hide. 

She smiles sweetly, barely holding back the adrenaline chilling her to the core from pushing out to her hands and voice.

“And yet, a threat is still a threat, whether the blade is well made or kept sharp by harshness rather than craftsmanship. You’ll keep working with us because if you don’t, we’ll be happy to lend additional resources to your allies. You’ll wait for our matriarch, as I would wait a respectable time for an elder in closed cultivation, because otherwise, you’ll have to strike back at us. And we both know that you won’t do that.”

He goes to say something, but she pushes past, rising from her desk to get a little closer to the absurd height of the slender envoy. 

“You won’t do that because you don’t have time. Because you’re hiding and preparing to deal with two different invasions at once. Because you know how valuable we are, and that uniqueness like what we offer is vital even in peace, nevermind war. So stop abusing my patience or my time, because I have other meetings and other messes to clean up, and you have better things to do than sit here and badger me.”

One of the Raikas chooses that moment to gurgle out something that sounds almost like a cheer. The envoy’s gaze flicks in its direction, and the hint of Intent and Qi that leaks out with that glance is enough to make Aria shiver and to make her cultivation seem thin and colorless.

But the walls of the Crimson Manse respond. Bloodflow shifts, pulling from someplace other, and the fluids that start to flow through the structure hold enough metaphysical weight to turn the air humid and coppery. From one second to the next, more Qi than even the Warrior Realm before her can summon at a whim starts flowing in constantly, over and over. 

“If there’s nothing else?” she prompts.

The envoy growls.

Then he’s gone, as if he were never there. The only hint of his presence is a single raindrop that vanishes before hitting the floor.

Aria groans. 

Alright.

One down. 

She feels the weight of falling boulders, breaking fields and rivers, approach her office door. 

No time for even a tea. 

Fuck. She wishes she had the time to talk to Ko. 

“Come in,” she says, letting in her next headache.

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The distraction proves lucrative. Raika grows almost two hundred feet up the mountain before a chunk of her appears in that room again, earning new anchor points while the Emperor is distracted. 

She wants to laugh, but she’s too angry for that. 

Beasts are eating her. Out at the edges, in the fields that didn’t get torn open to find her yet, the pieces more carefully hidden. Specialized senses and powerful ontologies rip up her hiding spots and devour her whole, their flesh rippling with power and presence as they consume her own. 

The cultivators prune as much as they can reach, obliterating any trace of her on their way to engage with the Beast Tide. Better, it seems, to fight them in the fields than against the walls, at least for this first part of the wave’s violence. 

Magics beneath the earth, buried in the bedrock beneath her furthest roots, stir at the call of Warrior Realm elders in the sect. Power grows and spirals, and techniques advanced enough to make her minds hurt form, growing and mutating into being. 

More Beasts start digging, or biting at the air, or pawing their hooves against more esoteric concepts, combating the forming super-array beneath the dome that seeks to vanquish them.

All throughout it, she’s screaming. 

A thousand thousand mouths crawl up the mountain like a fungus, casting malformed shadows on the sect campus down below. She can’t transmit her Pain like earlier, when the Emperor was using her as fodder for other’s development, but she can still broadcast it directly, still infuse it into the sound of her cries. The mountain trembles, forcing Zhen Zixiang to briefly turn his attention to it, to smooth its flaws and paint its contours–

The Beast outside rips out another chunk of the barrier.

They’re moving faster than she can perceive. There’s layers to the conflict above, magics and nuances and madness that eludes her simpler senses and even her synesthesia, but she can tell that every instant carries an endless wave of attacks, spells, Intent and Dao. 

She doesn’t care. It’s so close.

“You do know we’re unraveling?” She asks.

Shut up

“You can’t keep avoiding things like this. The blocks are there to stop us from being a full person, from having our full history, and you’re just–”

SHUT UP

I’M NOT HER

I’M ME

I DON’T HAVE TO BE HER

“Doesn’t mean we should be this. You’re leaving weapons and tools behind and just brute forcing your way through this. Maybe in a few days they would’ve let the acolytes in. We could’ve asked Aria and Ko for help. We could have–”

BUT I DIDN’T 

IT’S MINE

IT’S ME

“We don’t have to be this.”

BE SILENT

The brains bold enough to compile that argument come apart and become nothing. Not even Flesh- just a brief burst of biology turned to pain turned to nothing at all.

“Why are we acting like this? We’re getting worse. We’re getting worse.”

“We weren’t like this at first!”

“What changed? Why are we–”

WE ARE AFRAID

WE ARE ALONE

IT HURTS

“But isn’t it–”

ITS JUST PAIN

ITS ALL JUST PAIN

SO WE CHOOSE WHAT HURTS

The argument is irrefutable. It’s true. It’s real. It’s fundamental, a behavior that’s as profound as eating when hungry or sleeping when tired. 

When everything hurts, all that’s left is to choose what pain you can stand.

She sees herself. From within and without the gestalt, from hidden pockets and spreading neurons, she sees herself, as she is, as she could be. 

From islands that she spreads through, which keep closing or destroying bridges to other islands of Her, trying to protect each other and herself, she sees herself. 

From memories and thoughts and transformations she sees herself.

A hateful forest writhes in the sharpened pyramid of her heart.

Organs of punitive transformation pump magics through Flesh, bereft of suffering from those who she has chosen to use as tools. 

Impossible biomes, balanced within themselves, get progressively more violent, “herbivorous” and gentler paths of transformation being outpaced by cycles of predation. 

She has enough biomass to form mountains of her own, and all of those mountains ache. 

As she screams and grits her teeth and pulls herself forward no matter what, Raika looks at herselves. Minds examining minds.

She likes to help.

She likes interesting things.

She hates.

She fears. 

She refuses to give up. 

She creates.

She destroys. 

She hates and is afraid and hurts.

She has forgotten the face of her mother. Has forgotten the face of her father. Has forgotten the shape of safety. Has forgotten the name of peace. 

Where is Jin?

She has forgotten that she has forgotten the shape of love.

She can see it. The absence. The blockaded parts of herself, abandoned in favor of newer pathways that circumvent needing to breath those dark spots of her makeup. 

Grieving would waste time. She has little enough of it as it is. 

So she just hates, and is just afraid, and just hurts.

There were people who loved Her. Who knew her. Who she could call on for help. Who were as much a part of her as flesh, as bone, as suffering. Their shadows are all she has, and they are all that she wants to have, because She died.

Raika died and left them behind. She died and failed. She died, and everything she fought for became a devastation ready to be visited on her loved ones. A world of suffering, of injustice, wrapped in her corpse and the grief it brought to those she wanted to protect.

Raika-That-Was failed them. She failed herself. She died.

Raika-That-Is feels the pressure of all that emotion and screams as she forces herself upward. Toward another weapon. Towards another tool of creation and destruction and pain and fear and hate. 

Anything else would hurt too much. 

She doesn’t deserve them. They don’t deserve to suffer her presence. She has to win, has to break, has to do whatever she has to do, and if that means leaving behind the pieces she doesn’t need and doesn’t deserve, which would hold her back and cripple her and waste her resources then fine.

“It’s not what they would want,” some small voice in her whispers.

YOU DON’T KNOW THAT. AND YOU WONT.

The voice goes away, drowned beneath the screaming. 

“And if this doesn’t work? This blind rush? Held back and half-feral?”

THEN WE DO MORE. THEN I TAKE ON THE PAIN.

Weapons within her stir at that. Living things designed to spread from her, infecting and infesting and tearing apart half-independently. Bombs that are only barely herself, ready to be deployed. Cannons and claws and miles of biomass, angling themselves towards the sect below, the millions within it, the acolytes she led here. 

A sharp-edged pyramid of evergreen suffering, ready to be turned to the creation of something far more terrible. 

Plans within organs within treasures within weapons within plans of how best to bring about victory at any cost.

“And if that doesn’t work?”

THEN I CAN DIE

THEN SOMEONE ELSE CAN TRY

THEN I CAN STOP HURTING

The admission brings about a cavernous silence in her. There is a moment where the thousands of tons of material and mouths stops screaming, inhaling a little gasp that sounds like wind instead.

The Emperor takes the opportunity to wipe away almost half of her, stopped only as she stirs discordant flows of Qi and concepts through the lower tissues. 

She can’t stop. Not yet. 

Malformed and mad, she takes hold of the emotions she’s feeling and continues to climb.

Outside the barrier, the scent of bright green shadows crawls into her skin.

HATE

She lets go of more of the woman who came before, pulling out the weapons with which she can shape the world. 

She silences the doubt. 

Flesh recoils from itself, opening a cavern of flesh, from which comes the sound of rushing air and velocity.

The thing that emerges from her could only be called alive by the truly mad or the truly wise, and it shrieks through the air at the defensive array still struggling to hold on. 

A million limbs. A million eyes. A million mutations, spiraling into an ever-changing serpent of long hair and cavernous hungers. Fed on more Qi than most will ever experience in their mortality, driven mad by its own mind and the minds that are and are not it. Flesh so compact that gases have been made to metal, pressurized in chambers where Flesh is Space and already starting to come undone. 

The serpent-construct emerges at speeds fast enough to ionize the air to plasma, so unstable that it glows like dying radiation.

The monster, one of many such weapons, flies fast enough to simply be at the barrier. 

It arrives between the battling gods above.

[TRANSCENDANT ART: SCULPT OF LIFE AND MADNESS]

The world screams and breaks apart, and Raika-Who-Is screams with it.