Chapter 478 – Youngest Child (Patreon)

Blugh. My desire to write for joy is mildly interfering with my desire to get further ahead in backlog in both my main stories, and is only helping me procrastinate away my editing time :sob:. And yet, I can't find myself all-sad: after all, here we are, and isn't it lovely?

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Beast-taming is a complex practice. 

For one thing, you don’t want them to get too smart. Bestial Cultivation focuses on direct consumption, physically, rather than spiritual consumption, so one must take careful care what to feed them. Not enough Qi and their cultivation stagnates, maybe even deviates entirely. Too much, they’re as liable to grow cancers as we are to grow heart demons. The wrong mixture of concepts and ingredients, and before you know it, their entire evolution drowns in itself, unable to combine or synergize properly within itself. It’s a miserable thing, and frankly, I consider it a genuine sign of the Will of the Heavens that any of them manage to do it in the wild at all.

Anyways. You don’t want them to get too smart, because then they’re people, and people are their own kind of trouble, and Beasts are trouble enough. You don’t want them too strong, because then they’ll keep challenging you all the time, and there’s risk even after you break them. And you don’t want them too dumb, neither, because then they’ll find a way to just eat fucking rocks and bash their own brains in or spend all day humping a goddamn tree. It’s complicated. And all of that doesn’t even touch on actually training them, connecting them to your own cultivation, learning how to use them or how they work. It’s complex as shit. Anyone who says otherwise is a stupid bastard with their head up their ass, and I do my best not to have to deal with people like that. Or feed them to my Beasts when I do.

So yeah, I don’t recommend it. Especially if you ain’t good at it to begin with. But it’s not the worst thing in the world neither. Worst thing in the world is when their dumbasses get smart enough to start being really stupid.

–Beast-Tamer Warrior Fung Jao, Rogue Cultivator, speaking to a half-eaten corpse.

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“Have you been feeling neglected?” Raika asks.

“No.”

“Do you feel like you’re understanding anything with this whole experience?”

“I’m understanding lots of things!”

“Do you feel like you’re understanding the things I want you to?”

“Nope!”

Raika grunts, though it’s more out of affection than frustration. “You do know that you can ask questions, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok. Do you know that I want you to ask questions?”

“Oh. Not really. Do I have to? Oh, that’s a question.”

Raika holds back a sigh. She’s been doing that a lot more since she had to start babysitting a bunch of adolescent / young superbeings. 

“I want you to ask questions that you want to ask.”

“Alright then.”

Chen Tai goes back to chewing on the same rock she’s been gnawing for the past fifteen hours.

After about seven more minutes of that, Raika’s patience runs out, and she lets out yet another sigh. She’s been doing that a lot lately too. 

“Chen Tai, why are you chewing on that rock?”

“It’s a good rock. Plus, you said I can’t do any of that cultivation stuff and things while I’m here, and I want my teeth to be sharper than before, so I gotta do it differently.”

“I could get you something to file your teeth with, if you want.”

“But then it wouldn’t be the rock I got.”

Sound logic. Wise, even, in its own way. 

And Chen Tai, like all of her kids, really does do pretty much everything in their own way.

Raika nods, taking another cutting from one of the nearby shrubs. It’s not a particularly impressive plant, nor does it have much in terms of any medicinal uses. It doesn’t taste like much either, though to her that’s still pretty relative– she can taste more in a single blade of grass than most people can in a whole meal. But it’s still not very impressive. 

Which is sort of the point. 

She adds the cutting to some of the others in her basket, hanging off her walking staff. A dozen or so different grasses, a few wildflowers, and the occasional berry make up the entirety of the contents, all of them pretty much bereft of any Qi at all, no more special than anything that can be found in a million different parts of the world. 

Which, again, is the point. 

The sound of teeth scraping on stone fills the clearing with a slow, scratchy backdrop as she wanders over to a tree, finding a nice little branch she can snip for some pretty leaves. 

Chen Tai is about a hundred feet long at the moment, somewhere in between feline and reptilian. Like a snake crossed with a house-cat crossed with something vaguely ape-like, she has dozens of long, almost-human arms crossed with paw-pads and claws and fur, which bristles and seems to change fluidly between hair and patterned scales. Her head is a massive pit of teeth, like a leech if it was fused with a lion’s maw, eyes crowding over the top of it as the skull it’s built into distends to fit the rock.

And it is, Raika admits, a pretty nice rock. Pretty big, made of some sort of granite, with bits of dirt still clinging to some of its lower half from where Chen Tai apparently just plucked it straight out of the earth. 

And judging by the pale marks left in it from hours of gnawing and sharpening, it’s doing its job. The Spirit Beast is seemingly entranced by the act of scraping her teeth against the tough material, leaving bits of enamel and powdered rock on the grass beneath her, mixing in with the drool leaking out of her maw to make a gross slurry on the ground. 

It’s gotten pretty gross at this point. Sixteen hours of gnawing and drooling will do that. 

“Is there a specific reason that you’re sharpening your teeth?” she eventually asks, once she’s filled her basket up a bit further. 

“Cause that’s what you do when you don’t have anything else to do.”

“Why do you feel like you have nothing else to do?”

That finally gets Chen Tai to stop gnawing for a bit, turning to face Raika. Not directly, not entirely, not in this form; when she’s like this, she’s got instincts that are louder than in her more humanoid form, and eye-contact is a bit taboo. Still, she’s shifted her gaze and her attention to her master.

“Can’t eat. Nothing to hunt. Nothing to fight. Nothing to fuck. So I’m gnawing.”

“Are there no other things you can do?”

Chen Tai goes to answer quickly, but she stops herself, actively taking a moment to process. It’s funny how expressive she is, how clearly her mannerisms carry over between humanoid and beastly forms. Her brows furrow, her head tilts, some of her hand-paws do little curling motions around their wrist-joints.

“I guess there are.”

“Do you not want to do them?” 

“I don’t know. I guess I just didn’t think about it.”

The sentence only loops back to her after she’s said it, seeming to surprise her. She furrows her brow again, then gets a sad puppy-dog look in her eyes at the confession. 

“Sorry, master. I know I’m supposed to be thinking about stuff.”

Raika shrugs. “Only if you want to.”

“But…”

Raika lets her take her time, giving her space to think it all out. In the meantime, she collects another little bit of green scrap, nearing the limits her basket can carry. She takes a piece of grass, this time slipping it between her teeth and starting to nibble on one end of it, letting the rest dangle like straw from her mouth. 

“What if I don’t want to?” Chen Tai eventually asks. 

“Then you don’t have to. So long as you’re not hurting the people here, or this place, or using your cultivation, you’re free while you’re here. I just want you to understand that those are not, in fact, the only options you have.”

“...Can you tell me some of them?”

“You can learn to cook. You can learn to paint. You can sleep. You can swim. You can talk to people, read, fish, dance, try new foods, play. You can stare at the sky, or count the plants, or dig a big hole, make a den of some kind, make friends.”

“Those are a lot of things.”

“More than four, at least.”

“More than four.”

Chen Tai goes back to gnawing some more. 

“I knew some of those.”

“I know you did.”

“How come they didn’t show up when I was thinking?”

Raika shrugs, leaning back against a tree as she keeps chewing her blade of grass. “You ain’t practiced it enough yet. You’ve practiced thinking about at least three of those four things that they come up easy, familiar, but the other stuff isn’t as common. Even if you know it, even if you’ve done it, if you’re not thinking it, loud and clear, then it doesn’t get thought.”

“What do you mean three out of four?”

Of course that’s what she focused on. Raika’s mistake for using numbers. They’re new to Chen Tai and apparently, she loves them. 

“I mean… I just sort of figured that you’re not really very old, so. You know. Probably more hunting, fighting, and eating than fucking.”

“I’m not a baby! I’m old!”

“Aren’t you, like, fifteen?”

“Only in the softskin years. To a Spirit Beast I’m old! Well. I’m grown, anyways. Some of the members of the Pack are, like, really old.”

“Ok. Well. I… do we have to have a talk? About, like, safety?”

Chen Tai seems very confused at that. “We’re… talking now? Safety about what?”

Raika closes her eyes. She pinches the bridge of her nose.

She lets out a long sigh. 

The burden of having kids. 

Chen Tai might not be hers by birth, but then again, neither is Jin, nor Wei Zin, nor even Geng He, though he’s a bit more of a fucked up nephew than a child direct, at least in her eyes. But, just like Geng He, Chen Tai is her responsibility directly. 

When the original Raika broke, she left behind pieces. Some of those pieces could think. Others could not. 

Way back when, she’d started stashing chunks of herself throughout the Overgrowth as she traveled. They would work as condensed batteries of flesh and Qi that she could secure without having to carry that weight everywhere as she walked, and allowed her to create whole new dynamos of power generation and heat regulation. 

When the old Raika broke, those didn’t just disappear. They took root where she kept them, and most of them bloomed. 

Hardly a fucking surprise, then, that some enterprising, lucky, or particularly strong Spirit Beasts found them and started eating. 

Chen Tai was the youngest of the beasts, by a long shot. A lucky one, too. She’d found a spot so hidden that no one else had found it yet, a heavy one, and she ate well. She went from a little thing, a decade-long in the work of surviving, and became a thing of thriving appetite. She’s right, too. For a Spirit Beast, ten years is a long time. The world is not particularly kind or safe for those who live by the laws of teeth and claw, and a decade is a good long time beneath that law indeed.

Before Raika, she’d been a scavenger, a survivor, successful by the metrics of the biomes she wandered in but a good few centuries, at least, from being anything impressive, and that’s if she made it that long. But after nearly a year of gorging herself, she’d changed. 

And she’d eaten enough of Raika that she’d changed into something… well. Raika hadn’t been very human for a good while before she broke, and none of what was left over was human at all, but apparently it was close enough to give the lucky beast an instinctive grasp on how to shape herself towards that end of things. And it was more than enough to teach her how to think. 

One thing Raika never lacked was brain matter. A mind, sure, that’s been an iffy proposition, but neurology? That, she’s had in spades for a long, long time.

So. A Spirit Beast, much too powerful for her age and experience, freshly burdened with full sapience, all because of Raika and the consequences of her own being, with no one to look after her save the Pack. Which are at war, and also a bunch of incredibly, distinctly, profoundly mad beasts.

And Many-Mouths, for all its proximity to divinity, for all its power and competence and empathy, is not human, and would not have raised her as more than another beloved predator in an ecosystem full of them. 

“I’m asking if you know about where babies come from, kid,” Raika says, swallowing what’s left of her grass. 

“...from… moms?”

“Tht is entirely correct. Sometimes. Sometimes they come from dads, and sometimes they come from stuff that’s neither, and sometimes they come from some weird shit, but mostly moms, yeah. Do you know how someone becomes a mom?”

Raika lets Chen Tai think, long and slow and hard about it. It’s not hard to tell, even to her, that Raika wants some kind of specific answer. It’s sort of entertaining, being able to see the way that her thoughts spin, smell the scent of churning neurons as she forms connections bit by bit. 

“By… fucking?”

“Most commonly, yes.”

“Oh.”

Chen Tai goes back to gnawing for a bit, but her brain is much too active to be just gnawing, now. Raika lets her think some more. 

“I’m not sure I want to be a mom yet.”

“Ok. That makes sense.”

“So… does that mean I can never…?”

Raika snorts. “Not necessarily. But that’s a longer conversation. One I’m happy to have, after we figure out the other stuff. Like the fact that there’s more to do here than eat, fight, fuck, and gnaw on rocks.”

“Ok. Some of that stuff you said seems… nice. I had a pretty good time when we went fishing.”

She smiles. “I’m glad to hear that. I think you might have been the only one that time that really enjoyed it.”

“Big brother Jin was having fun!”

“He was having fun looking at the lake more than fishing, I think, but yeah. Yeah, I guess he was.”

Chen Tai goes back to gnawing. 

“Why are you getting all those little plant-bits?” she asks eventually. “They’re not even tasty. Or special. Or anything, they’re just green! Except the purple bits. And the white bits. And the brown bits.”

“Yeah, they’re not special,” Raika says, shrugging. “At least no more than anything else. That’s why I’m collecting them. I want to understand them better. Why they’re not special. What makes one thing different than another thing, and why that happened. And after all that, I’m thinking I’ll try my hand at making something new out of them, see just how special something can be if you give it a little love, a little time, a little of what it wants and a little of what it needs.”

Chen Tai stops gnawing on her boulder entirely, then. Her dozen eyes crinkle, the fur on her face shifting to reptilian, ridged scales and then back again, changing colors each time. 

“Am I the little green bits?”

Raika laughs at that, hard. A sharp bark that makes her cough, because her throat is still rough and she’s kept it that way, but what a laugh.

“Kind of!” she says, choking it out as her laughter dies down. “Sort of. But also, not really! You’re pretty damn special. So’s Geng He, and Jin, and Wei Zin, too. You’re all special, but there’s special, and there’s scary, and the world’s full of big and scary things that eat special things as often as grass.”

“So… I’m like the little green bits. But bigger. And different.”

“Yup.”

Chen Tai seems to wait. Think. Process. 

Then she nods, firmly. 

“Ok. That makes sense. That’s why I’m here, right? Because you’re trying to give things I want and need. That’s why you keep pushing me to think about things, so I can know what I want and need.”

Raika smiles, slow and wide. “Yeah. Yeah, kid, that’s exactly right.”

“And you think that not using my cultivation, or eating, or fighting, or fucking, is important for me. For all of us.”

“Ok, I never said y’all couldn’t eat, fuck or fight. Just so long as you’re doing it safely. Or at least a little less intensely than normal.” 

“Oh! Huh. I didn’t know that.”

Raika snorts. To her that was obvious to begin with, but apparently not clear enough. But! It’s better that Chen Tai figure it out now than her never figure it out at all.

“So I can do those things. But you think I should know that there’s more than those things, which I already knew, but I have to know it in a thinking way. Because that way it’s more important, and I can know it better, and that way I understand things.”

“...Yeah, that sounds pretty much like it.”

“Hmm. Ok. Can I go see the colorful stuff in town?”

“Not yet. You have to wait a few more days, so they’ll have it ready. It’s not done yet.”

“Oh. Ok. Will it be fun when it’s done?”

“I sure as shit think so, kid. If there’s one thing softskins are good at, it’s throwing a party, and that’s what a festival is all about.”