Chapter 468 – Chew And Swallow (Patreon)

And with this, at last, arc 10 ends.

You might notice that there are a LOT of unresolved plot threads. Mostly unresolved plot threads, honestly. That is, at least in part, intentional. This arc was never really about the Jiang'Hu, about Morae, about the Feng or the preparation for the war to come. This part of the story was always, as it always has been, about Raika. About the champion sufferer, becoming more. About a deep look at what it means to be human, and how power is no substitute for love.

So. Here we are. I hope you all enjoy, because I sure did, and I hope that all those plot threads only add to the anticipation for arc 11, where we approach one step closer to the end of this fucking epic of a story (in a literal sense, cause this bitch has SO many words). See y'all again soon, babes.

________________________________________________________________

Hello again, me.

______________________________________________________________

In an instant, the glow of that bloody sunrise vanishes, covered by a flood of flesh and inverted nothingness, mirrored perfectly. An eclipse strikes that light-beyond-light, drowning its glow in every possible way, wrapping the entire mountain it rests upon. The city beneath it, and the sect, are blinded by that light and its sudden absence, by the sounds of the conflict above. 

It sounds like a musical note, refracted through a horizon’s worth of space.

And then it sounds like thunder.

A storm of blows strikes. A cascade of sound echoes as chunks of demi-divine flesh are erased, forcing air to rush into the empty space with a pop. A roiling spasm of violence as muscle and bone erupt, shatter, mutate, erupt again, an endless sequence of biological transcendence happening in a microsecond of violence. It sounds like a screaming sun, smothered and striking back, biting chunks out of existence using shadows and starlight and tribulation and sky and earth and armies. 

It lasts less than a minute, and in that time, the eardrums of millions are shattered into pulp. Organs vibrate with violence sufficiently potent to liquify them, and find themselves kept alive anyways, healed anyways. 

The Pain is absolute– and then gone. 

Left behind is something different. The Pain comes, and it goes, vanishing to nothing, erased by something unseen and unfelt, and where it was, there is a sort of peace, a sort of calm. 

Where there is a storm, there is devastation. Sound and light and harm. And then, it is past, because the storm is not forever, it is not just sound and light and harm, and where it has gone, there is soft soil, and nourished roots, and air cleaned of smoke and ash. 

It’s Not Just Pain.

And then the minute passes, and the world stops shaking for a moment as thousands of miles of terraformed biology suddenly go still. 

Because, suddenly, It’s Not Just Pain.

And the quiet is absolute. 

It’s so quiet that even Emperors bow their heads, turning to look down at the earth from where they stared at the heavens, wondering at the change. 

It’s so quiet that the thing in the sky, of a million limbs and all-consuming shadow, pauses in its hunger. 

It’s so quiet that swarms of beasts and soldiers alike pause where they stand. Some halt strikes that would have taken lives, stunned out of violence by the drastic change of atmosphere. Others stop running, panic turned to confusion and absence in the face of a world that’s changed so dramatically. 

A war in the sky, beneath the heavens and above the earth, comes to a cataclysmic, perfect, absolute end.

And then, in that silence, there is a sound.

It echoes. It comes from out of every ounce of flesh at once, where it has dug its roots into soil and stone and rivers and lakes and sky and air. It speaks something difficult, distinctive, and even to those whose eardrums have yet to regenerate, for whatever reason that they are regenerating, it comes crystal clear. 

Across all the Jiang’Hu, across the villages below and the sects above, from beast to man and back again, a sound is heard. 

DINK

And the sound is everywhere. 

It thrums, like a musical note, and it carries across the war. Everyone who hears it knows, in their depths, that it means something. It means so very, very much, but it is not meant for them.

It rings for an audience of one-that-is-many.

Atop the stillness of flesh, orbited by spider-limbs of nothingness, is a woman.

The woman that stands where the sun shined smiles. 

And exhales.

The land exhales with her. Everything that lives and everything that’s died exhales with her. From every shadow and every tree, every breeze and every beast, it all exhales.

It hits the Emperors first. They have the sharpest senses, the clearest perceptions, they taste the ripples in existence most immediately. Dozens of beings powerful enough to define whole civilizations for millenia all experience it together, at once, as the land they have ruled over for untold eons gets stronger.

The world exhales and out of that breath is a rush of power that rivals them all, all at once, undirected and undiluted and free.

The beasts are a second faster than most of the human cultivators, and they all go still, all at once. Some cultivators think to take the opportunity but the millisecond after, they feel it too. The mortals come last, as the Republic of Morae still has mortals, unlike the Empire, whose baseline is almost all in the Qi-Gathering Realm. They feel it as a sort of inner peace, a feeling of fullness and satisfaction and calm like they’ve never experienced.

Qi. 

Blinding amounts of it. 

Dizzying amounts of it.

Enough to drown a whole nation.

And then she inhales, breathing it in with a joy she’s rarely ever felt. 

And it fades, but not entirely. Some of it remains, brighter and stronger and louder than before. Even as she pulls it back to herself, it still saturates the world, paints it in beautiful colors, changes it to something more than what it was, more of itself. 

And then she exhales again, and the cycle repeats. 

It’s not a technique. Not any sort of attack or power, in and of itself. It’s just her breathing. 

Exhaling, filling the world entirely. Inhaling, cycling it back into herself and out of herself. 

Through a thousand thousand miles of home-grown meridians. 

Through a garden of impossible trees that are all limbs of a single thing that is not a tree at all. 

Into and out of a dozen Souls, which color existence. 

Through the hearts and minds and beings of two and eight others, bound to her as avatars and representatives and prisoners and organs. 

Inhale.

Exhale.

It tastes like smoke.

It tastes like ash.

It tastes like the grave. 

It tastes like all the things that blossom and grow and feed and become from those things.

It tastes like every horror, revisited upon itself, turned and transformed into something new. 

She breathes. 

She’s alive. 

She’s whole. 

She is herself, and she is real.

So she turns her attention to the monsters above and below.

Above her are Emperors. Above them is an Apex Beast. Beneath her are hundreds of Warriors and Divine Beasts, hungry and blooded, and all of them are looking at her as she breathes, as they feel her flood the world and take from it to give back more. 

Eyes of all sorts of power stare at her. 

Emperors, smaller than the Emperor she knows as the Emperor, descend, slowly, wary of her. 

Even that thing in the sky, mindless and hungry as she feels it be, holds itself back. Lets its shadow diffuse against the arrays and powers pushing against it, holding territory rather than advancing (though never retreating).

Would she win?

If she had to fight them. If she had to kill them all. Would she win? Would she be able to pay the cost?

She laughs, and it is a quiet little huff, and yet, everyone in her grasp feels it.

“No more,” she tells them, and everyone hears her.

She sees them. She sees them all. 

At the head of the powerful above her, standing together at their respective Peaks, are nine Emperors. She knows their names. She’s heard their names. Across a million minds spread through or near just about every city in the Jiang’Hu, she’s heard them spoken, whispered in hushed prayers, written into old manuscripts and missives, things she ignored because she was too focused. 

The True Immortal Steel Lion, Killer Of A Thousand Armies, Xiao Fu of the Peak of the Golden Tiger, is the one that comes forward.

She sees death in his eyes. The killing intent. The violence of him, and why the others let him step forward first. 

“Who are you?” he asks.

No honorifics. No dancing around the subject, no complex social dances. She wants to laugh again. She wants to laugh a lot, because it’s just so fucking lovely to be. 

“I am Raika,” she tells him. 

“What do you want?”

She smiles. 

Inhale. Exhale. 

She sees them all, all around. Bin Wei, Rai Aria, Rai Ko, Yu Guanyu, Geng He, Dai Yuhan, Zhen Zixiang, and millions more, and she knows them. She knows their names, their beings, the way their heartbeats sound, the way their breath tastes, what they mean to each other. 

“I want things to be better.”

She wants to laugh. The way they all tense up. They way each of them somehow becomes more wary, more willing to commit violence, at the sound of someone saying she wants things to be better.

It’s an intimidating idea. An intimidating idea, from an intimidating woman. 

“I want everyone who’s ever been hurt to be healed. I want everyone who’s ever wanted to be strong to be strong. I want everyone who wants to explore to explore, and always, always, to have a home to come back to. I want the bad things to stop being so bad and the good things to be better. I want everyone that wants peace to have peace.”

“You think you have a right to that?” Asks the steel Emperor before her, his every edge cold and sharp. Off of him, the light of the Peaks reflects, using him and armoring him at once. 

He’s so small. Such a vast thing, so very enormous, and yet so very human. So very, pathetically warped by the very things he intended to cast aside. 

So very small. And she can’t even blame him, can she? She can’t blame any of them. She was even smaller. She’s still so small, in so many ways. 

But she doesn’t just hurt anymore. And in the loveliness of that, so much seems possible. 

She can be better.

Behind her is a pillar. Growing out of the mountain and out of her, flickering in and out of existence, as real as she is and yet so far away. It is wrapped in the metal of death and the thrumming pulse of life, connected, physically and directly, to an effigy of war, broken open. And it whispers to her, with the voice of someone she once knew, and once hated, and now trusts.

We Can Be Better.

There are tears in her eyes. But still, she wants to laugh. 

In her hand is a knife. She holds it loosely, gently, because there is no handle, only a blade, and the blade is a flower, delicate and blooming.

My Death Above, My Soul Below.

In her eyes, there is smoldering heat, and out of her tears drip fires of every hue. 

Flame, distant yet so very close, spreading, always, yet once more her.

What Burns, Becomes.

A new one, that. Something to explore. What a laugh, that is. What joy. 

And at her core? In her Heart, her inverse shadow, her very self, recompiling and regenerating and re-remembering herself even now?

We Are What We Eat.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

I Can Change.

It’s Not Just Pain.

So very much. So very much. So very vast, so many goddamn perspectives and pieces, still distant, but once more connected. 

She wants to laugh. 

“No one has a right to anything,” she tells him, and she says it with joy. “We are born, and we die. We exist in a world made of cast-aside dreams from Heavens that see us as nothing, because to them, we are nothing. No one has a right to anything. There is only us. Only each other. Only what we can make. What we can take. What we can give each other.

“And It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way.”

The words are soft, but they’re real. They bloom, a flower growing from a stalk, and that stalk is It’s Not Just Pain, and it’s roots are I Can Change. 

It escapes her, at last. A laugh, soft and true, that feels like relief. 

And, at last, she is one. At last, she is herself. Whatever that is. Whatever that becomes. And she knows what is True.

Madness, maybe. But who said sanity ever had to be the order of things? 

If it is kinder, or wiser, or better, then why not MADNESS?

Yes. She would win.

But why should she have to, if there can be something better? 

She looks at the thing of metal and divinity in front of her. At the other gods of this land that stand behind him in a mutualistic symbiosis of consumption and mutually assured destruction. At the beast behind them, which knows barely anything more than hunger. 

“So get on board. Or get the fuck out of the way.”