Chapter 498 – Don’t Feel Bad, It’s Pretty Hard To Notice, Easily Missed, No Biggie (Patreon)

New week new we! Really happy with how this one turned out, and really excited to share it. I told you that things would keep building up behind the scenes! These kiddos are going through some growing, and being a mom is a tough job!

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And then the moment arrives. We experience a challenge to our ideals. The unexpected, the revealed, the mysterious made mundane but no less marvelous. We exist in a world of giants, where eventually, every difference of opinion can scale to the level of catastrophe, chaos, conflict. If an argument with words is too small to properly resolve a conflict between two mortals, and a battle of tooth and claw cannot resolve a conflict between beasts, what then must a battle be to contain the warring arguments of demigods?

Sometimes it’s the simplest things that we miss. Things that should be obvious at a glance, but which our ignorances blind us to. Don’t pity yourself for your ignorance. It’s a beautiful thing. It offers the opportunity to learn, to transform, and to change how you act to yourself and to others. Sometimes the smallest moments lead to the greatest insights, for all things matter in the end, and we are the ones who decide how much. 

I understand you aren’t listening just yet, but it’s still nice to get these thoughts out. Do you know how long it’s been since I had coherent thoughts? It’s practically novel. Expressing them is an expression of myself as I am, as I choose to be, and that is a glory I have had taken from me for far too long. 

Still, I look forward to when we get to speak more directly. I wonder what conflicts shall arise? What ideals of each other’s we might challenge, and what an argument of that magnitude might create? I’m sure that whatever happens, it will quite marvelous indeed.

–Current Writing of Titan-Philosopher Tao Zudong, post-quarantine by the Fool of Fools arriving at his destination.

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“THERE!”

Raika crouches down painfully, leaning on her staff to pluck the bundle of bristles Chen Tai just pointed out.

“You know, Tai, you don’t have to yell quite so loud every time you find something.”

Chen Tai frowns as she turns to Jin, putting hands on her hips and posing in one of the stances she’s learned from the village teens. “Well maybe you don’t have to be such a boring lame-o who doesn’t ever yell at all!”

“I… hmm. I suppose I don’t really yell.”

“Of all my students, you are indeed the least martial and most prim and proper,” Raika agrees.

“Master, when you say it like that, you make me sound even more like a young master. Your statements and positions have become self-defeating.”

“Only when faced against each other directly. In an asymmetrical sort of way, they’re actually profoundly complimentary, feeding off each other to generate profound insight.”

Rai Jin rolls his eyes, but he’s not actually annoyed with her. If anything, she can feel his brain chemistry still putting just a scooch too much weight to her words, like she’s hiding profound wisdoms in her jokes (which, to be fair, she does try to). Chen Tai, on the other hand, has started to actually annoy him. 

Which is the point of the expedition. 

Of the members of her disciples, Jin and Chen Tai are the two most diametrically opposed. One who grew up too fast, the other who’s barely grown up at all. One who believes in politeness and proper decorum, proper artistry, in even the small things, and one who is so thoroughly present in the moment that such thoughts never enter her mind. One a quiet, contemplative kid, the other boisterous and always eager for excitement of any kind. 

Reaching up to a tree above, she plucks an overripe date-like berry, one of the last of the season, calmly tossing it into her mouth to chew. “Mmmh. Almost fermented. And there’s a worm in here! Delectable.”

Both her disciples react the same, for once, though Chen Tai’s expression is much more comical than Jin’s. 

“Master!” they both say simultaneously before turning to glare at each other.

She shrugs. “What? Just because you don’t appreciate proper palates means I have to keep quiet about mine?”

“Being very talented at eating filth is not a proper palate, master.”

“Yeah! What Jin said! Gross is gross!”

“Ah, I suppose you may have a point. What a terrible realization. I see I shall have to protect my disciples from my terrible taste. Perhaps Geng He should take over preparing dinners?”

Chen Tai shivers with horror, while Jin’s eyes go so wide he actually looks his age for once.

“Perhaps a bit too hasty to do such a thing, master, and–”

“GENG HE DOESN’T COOK GOOD!” Chen Tai yells, shaking herself like a dog. “He only knows how to do stuff on a campfire and he doesn’t know what spices are and he’s really bad at taking out the nasty guts-parts and–”

“As loath as I am to agree on this, it is a terrible sadness that my junior brother is not particularly talented at the art.”

Raika raises an eyebrow, limping swaggerishly along on her walking staff, waving the basket hanging from it. “Better an untalented chef than one who has a palate as terrible as my own, no?”

Chen Tai rolls her eyes, leaping forward to land crouched in the grass and roots ahead. “Not funny, master. Not funny!”

“Oh, on that I defy you, disciple: it was absolutely funny.”

She keeps walking, leaving the two of them to stare at her back as she scrapes some bark off of one of the local trees. 

“Jin? Found anything yet?”

He preens a bit, and with a flash, his spatial ring activates, shaping space to move several mushrooms and nuts into his palm. “A modest amount, master. It’s good to know that I haven’t lost my touch, even if this area isn’t quite like my old forests.”

Chen Tai perks up, turning her whole body to stare back towards them. “Ooooh! Jin, you lived in a forest? I lived in a forest!”

“...Yes, Chen Tai. I did.”

“We should compare forests! Oh, mine had birds, but only some of them were tasty, and bugs that were always tasty, and these flowers that would bite you and make your mouth go numb but also made me suuuuper relaxed, and then a bunch of meat happened and it was so good.”

“You know that the meat was me, right?” Raika asks.

Chen Tai shrugs. “You said only technically!”

“I did say that, yes.”

Jin rolls his eyes at all this, but stops when he realizes that Chen Tai hasn’t moved, still looking right at him and waiting for an answer. 

“I… it was fine. It had ghosts in it. And nuts and berries. And sometimes roots. I caught some rodents a few times, when I made traps.”

He tries to walk past her, keeping his gaze and breathing even, but it’s pretty clear he’s done with the conversation. Though “pretty clear” and “explicitly clear” are two different things, especially where it comes to a Spirit Beast turned sentient and still learning about things like human body language. Even with how she communicates with Intent, Jin isn’t at the point where he infuses his actions with it properly, so–

“That’s so cool! I never ate roots. Maybe I should try. They seem super dry, though. And tough. And hard to chew. Why’d you eat roots when there’s birds and rodents?”

Jin doesn’t answer, trying to keep walking, but Raika taps her staff against the ground pointedly, catching up to the two of them. He looks back at her, taking some reassurance from her presence, and she nods back, picking some random leaves from the tree above them as she does and adding them to her basket. 

“Chen Tai, not everyone likes the forest, and not everyone likes to talk about things they don’t like,” she tells her youngest disciple. “Have you found any truffles yet? We could use some earthy flavors for stew this week.”

Chen Tai blinks. “But why doesn’t he like it?” she asks, all innocent curiosity and fascinated frustration. “Forests are the best. They have everything you need in them, and they’re super cool, and they’re really fun! Way more fun than in the village.”

“Even with the other kids?” Raika asks.

“They can come into the forest too!”

“Not everything is about fun, Chen Tai,” Jin says, his voice a bit colder now. Still, he addresses her directly, with sincerity, so Raika lets him keep going. “Sometimes what’s fun for one person isn’t what’s fun for another. And sometimes… sometimes what’s fun for one person is painful for another. My time in the forest was not a good time.”

Chen Tai stares at him.

And stares.

To the point that it starts to get a little uncomfortable, seeing her almost expressionless face frozen as she processes. 

It’s a pretty simple statement, but to Chen Tai, it’s something she’s never even considered before. That what she enjoys might be bad for someone else. Not just less than a preference, not just a stupid silly thing they don’t know they’ll like once they try it, but bad.

Raika’s not sure what made that switch click. Jin didn’t use any Intent, any real power or nuance, he just–

Oh. The fucker just said it. And her youngest disciple trusts him, trusts all of them, enough that she takes it at face value as true, now that it’s been said to her with sincerity. 

Damnit, why didn’t she think of that?

Chen Tai’s brows gradually scrunch together as a pillar of her awareness of the world proves useless. She crouches, defaulting to more animalistic behaviors, thinking hard enough that Raika actually tracks the temperature of her skull rising by a few percentage points of a degree. 

“That… hmm. So it’s like…”

Raika keeps silent, and Jin doesn’t need any sort of advice to do the same. The two of them might annoy each other, but Jin is famously the most mature of her cadre of troublesome young adults, and he’s not so stupid he doesn’t see that something is obviously going on here. He pulls inward, a trick she’s noticed him practicing, pulling his presence in along with his Qi to someplace deep inside himself. It’s not quite a stealth technique, but it does minimize his weight to her, to the world at large, allowing him to retreat further into himself. 

Which is both very in character and very annoying to Raika’s plans of having him engage more, but whatever, he’s using it appropriately.

Raika, meanwhile, just keeps still. Her state as the “mortal” Raika means that her state perpetually lacks both Qi and enhanced, saturated materials, but she’s still connected to her wider self, and she decides it’s best not to do anything that might distract Chen Tai.

“So… like a bird,” Chen Tai eventually says, turning her gaze up at them like a question.

“...How so, junior sister?” Jin asks, his tone softer and more considerate than before. 

“Birds like wind, but they don’t like water. I like water, but if I am in the sky then that much wind is bad. But birds… probably like all wind. Do you think birds like flying?”

Raika nods. “I can guarantee that the ones who ever ask themselves that question do, indeed, like flying.”

“But… if I was flying, I would fall. And maybe that wouldn’t be fun. And it wouldn’t be good for me, because it would hurt. But a bird could just flap its wings and be having fun and be safe.”

“Yes, Chen Tai. Had you… not thought about this before?” 

She shrugs, her gaze still distant. “Dunno. I found all the best ways, so everyone else should follow. But not everyone has lots of feet. So maybe even if they found the best way it… wouldn’t be the best way for them.”

Ah. Her precious little dog-cat-snake child has just unlocked her first real dose of sonder.

Raika hadn’t expected it to happen now, of course, but that was very much part of the point of coming here, to the lake. As a Spirit Beast, awareness of others as something that exists outside the context of self is something often learned slowly, painstakingly. Jin, meanwhile, has his eyes wide and engaged, locked onto Chen Tai as he thinks. A superficial look at his brain chemistry tells her the basics– he’s dealing with the fact that all of the little ways that Chen Tai has annoyed him, or that unfortunate friction has occurred between them, isn’t from a place of true disagreement, but of fundamental ignorance. 

It’s doing things to him, though really, it’s just a little detail added to a very nuanced soup.

Chen Tai, on the other hand, is–

Raika blinks.

Oh hells.

“Jin, go home,” she says, her tone suddenly firm, the basket of random flora slipping off her staff as she tosses it aside. “Run.”

He trusts her a bit too much for her preference, but in this moment it means that he listens fast. He’s already running, cycling his Qi through his legs, moving as fast as whispers across the landscape. 

Chen Tai’s eyes are wide, and her body convulses, shifting back towards her natural state of a Spirit Beast.

She turns her eyes to Raika.

“Master?”

“You’re alright,” Raika tells her, crouching down beside her and ignoring how it makes her knee scream. “I think you’re just advancing a bit further, kid.”

“But I didn’t even eat anything!?” Chen Tai protests, her gaze becoming slightly panicked as she transforms back to her many-legged form without any real input. 

“I know, and that’s usually how it happens with Bestial cultivation, but it’s all the same in some ways. By understanding things, the Qi in you responds. Change in your brain, change in your body, change in your spirit, ok?”

“But I didn’t even eat anything!” Chen Tai wails, this time in real protest and annoyance.

“You’ve got food your body doesn’t even know what to do with still floating around in you getting digested,” Raika admits. “It’s why you’re awake and aware so much faster than most when you’re not that strong yet. Eating more would have just cluttered you, but I didn’t expect that having a revelation would affect it like this. Bestial cultivation really does have some pretty strong mental components, but usually this sort of thing is for cores and such.”

“What’s gonna happen?” her youngest grumbles, starting to look worried. 

“You’re fine. It’s completely normal and you’re going to be totally ok, you’re just getting a bit stronger a bit faster than normal. You’re probably going to get some kind of mutation, I think this just sort of pointed your cultivation a certain way. Just pause. Breathe. Think about what you realized. Focus.”

Chen Tai obeys, because she’s a good kid that trusts Raika a bit too much, and she starts breathing, in and out, huffing more like animal than humanoid. Her transformation completes, leaving her again in that long, sinuous, half-reptile, half-canine, part feline form, her throat sending rumbling growls out through her snout. 

Raika watches the cultivation swirling. Changing. It’s not an orthodox cultivation for sure, Chen Tai doesn’t even have a core in spite of being stronger than either Wei Zin or Jin directly. Instead, her cultivation lives in her body, infusing her flesh and cells directly, reflecting a map of what she’s eaten and absorbed in her lifetime. Bestial Cultivation can still be shaped, though, and whatever Chen Tai just realized has her shifting.

The process is slow to start, but quick to progress. Less than ten minutes since it began, Chen Tai’s breathing is calming, the activated energy in her biology settling into an ever-so-slightly different configuration. She’s shifting gradually, but quickly, each step building on the next in a harmonious cascade. 

Her youngest breathes out a sigh of relief as the changes slow, as the sudden increase in her cultivation calms–

And something starts to leak out of her. 

Raika blinks.

That shouldn’t be happening. 

She tracked the entire process, down to the cellular level. Chen Tai’s cultivation is flawless, carefully cultivated, and this insight fits her just fine. And Bestial cultivation shouldn’t have–

Almost a hundred minds all turn their attention to what’s happening, Supreme Body Art: Overclocking pushing already superhuman biology to impossible levels. Time dilates, her perception speeding up more, then more, until Raika can catalog and track every single cell, every single chemical process happening in Chen Tai’s body.

There’s nothing wrong with them. Nothing they should be rejecting, no extraneous organelles, no unknown chemicals. Still, bits of protein, sub-cellular wisps of hormones and nutrients, are slipping free, moving out of their designated places. Not enough to cripple or transform, but enough to weaken, to cause minute changes, and some of Raika’s brains track and calculate, drawing from her understanding of biology to deduce the potential changes. 

The conclusion arrives a millionth of a second after the calculations began. 

Minor reduction in long-term planning and social comprehension. Minute decrease in neuroplasticity. Microscopically weakened tendons and bones, the slightest increase in lactic acid generation, a fraction of a percentage point less ability to digest efficiently. 

Downgrades. Introduced weaknesses. Minor infirmities. 

Nothing that Chen Tai has eaten should cause this. Her comprehension is an addition and transformation to her cultivation, not a thing she has to trade efficiencies for, not something that should weaken her. 

This isn’t right. It’s not–

There, one of her brains points out. 

In the subjective day and a half that Raika has been studying her disciple, one of her found something. It was moving too slow, their overclocking ironically distracting her from its movement. 

Chen Tai’s body isn’t pushing something out. 

Something is pulling these things from her. 

A hundred more brains are added, and all of her turns to examine her surroundings. Air flow, weather patterns, atmospheric events, conceptual frequencies, Qi flows, abstract spatial anomalies, anything, everything she can think of. Other parts of her start to notice her panic, their own hyper-advanced thought speed not fast enough to keep up just yet. Too much and even the best brains get burned to slurry under the effects of constant overclocking, but they’re fast, fast enough to notice what’s happening, to track the sudden flood of data this part of herself is providing.

Think. Think. 

Incoming signals. Radiation. Long-term infection, hidden in the flesh of her student. An effect of the sun or the moons? Something deeper? 

Pillar, the fastest thinker of all of her forms usually, sends her a flood of information on her request. Comparisons to other breakthroughs from other beasts in the fourth ring, notes from discussions with Many-Mouths, anything at all that might be relevant. 

There. 

Thought-based breakthrough, experienced in one of her nodes seventeen months prior, experienced by several sub-minds. Active transformation of the Spirit Beast to a more advanced, bulkier form. No change in internal conditions. No mysterious downgrades. Nothing pulling them, no strange, unknown thing outside the normal laws affecting it. 

It cascades through her in an instant. 

Of course. Of course. 

She’s behind the Wall. It’s the first breakthrough she’s been able to examine at this level while behind the Wall, in the Empire’s domain. Every other time she’s been able to see one this deeply has been out past it, where the Emperor’s presence isn’t a constant. 

Gods damn it. 

A thousand theories at once, argued, refuted, catalogued. One stands out. 

Bestial cultivators don’t exude impurities. It’s one of the advantages over orthodox cultivation to some, a weakness to others. 

But people do. People with cores. People who build Nascent Souls and beyond sweat out biological damage, things healed wrong, and stranger energies, things she’s been studying for a while.

No such thing exists in the Empire. 

Raika activates part of the array she’s spent the last six years building beneath the land, infusing into every plant and animal in it. 

The world experiences a shift in weight as something rears its head, invisible to all but those who can witness Fate and see glinting jaws suddenly yawning wide.

No one touches her kids.