Chapter 503 – Good Unhealthy Decisions Instead Of Bad For Once (Patreon)

The exchange has gone well. Repairs have been made to the exchanged asset. With the asset in command of the subject: Raika, we have some unexpected room to maneuver. Possibilities exist relating to negotiation that were not present in the subject’s original file, but the nature of her being as a dramatic Fate-modifier and divinatory chaos-nexus indicates this too may be a cover of some sort. I am honored to serve the Clan in this position, and will report back shortly.

–Primary Divinatory Asset #3, reporting to the Clan relating to current assignment

________________________________________________________

“Respectfully, master, this is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea,” Jin says. 

“As much as I hate agreeing with the little princeling, he has a very valid point, master,” Geng He agrees, his arms crossed as he glares at the ground before them. “It’s a trap. And if it isn’t, it’s a lie. And if it isn’t, it’s a bad idea.”

“Crazy to see how much you’ve grown!” Raika says with a smile, taking her hand off her staff to pat her eldest disciple on the back. “Back when we first met, you’d have done any number of bad ideas if it meant getting a little revenge. Or even just a little emotional catharsis, honestly. Veeeery trigger happy.”

“A lesson I learned well before I ever came to West Laketown,” Geng He asserts. “Not that this hasn’t been… informative in its own way, but the cost of idiocy is high, even if you recover from it.”

“You can always go back to the village. Work on that instead.”

Geng He gives a low growl, discontent more than angry. “Later. Wei Zin is better as a face for others, and the skills to match it. I would only interfere were I to try and support him now. The village doesn’t need muscle, it needs understanding.”

“And support, and healing, and maybe some memory erasures or something,” Raika grumbles to herself, still annoyed about it. “I should’ve put some visual blockers on the array. Something that blinds and deafens people if the conceptual weight around them gets too high. I focused too much on the practical.”

Jin gives a little hum of disagreement. “Without that array, there would be no village to heal, master.”

“And if I weren’t here, there’d be no danger to begin with,” she retorts. “My responsibility for my own choices is absolute. That’s the consequence for power.”

Jin, for once, doesn’t have a smart-alec answer for that, which is nice. She loves the kid, but it’s exhausting having to / getting to engage with him in any sort of debate. Instead, he just sits, patient and quiet, staring at the same point in the ground that Geng He has his eyes on. 

All three of them are sitting on a hill, overlooking a massive marble platform. 

And she does mean massive. 

It could fit all of West Laketown on it with room left over, and yet, it’s basically featureless. At least on the surface, it’s a perfectly clean, beautifully constructed flat plane, dug into the landscape directly. A single square of marble, beautifully and expertly shaped to be almost sharp enough to cut oneself on. 

Beneath the surface, it’s a far more ostentatious display. Five layers of array-circuits are spread between the ground beneath the marble and its top side, each one holding a few hundred thousand different formulas. Most of them are still beyond Raika’s expertise, but from what she can tell, they’re primarily focused on obfuscation and illusion, redirecting attention both literally and metaphysically away from the stone. The remaining circuits beyond that clear defensive attempt are more familiar, if only because she understands their variables so well. 

Spatial warping arrays, bridging the dimension’s contours from one angle to another. Designed to transport rare and extremely Qi-dense concepts and materials alike across theoretically infinite spaces. 

“I still don’t think it’s enough reason to expose ourselves like this,” Geng He complains, the only member of their trio still up on his feet rather than sitting in the grass. “If your array is most of the power you have access to right now, then we should be deeper into it, not here at the edge. Until your other aspects return to you–”

“Alright, now I know you’re not blabbing out your master’s secrets in the middle of a random field,” she interrupts. 

“...Apologies, master. I just mean that…”

“That you think this is a bad idea and disagree with it, yes. I know. And that’s fine. Thank you for coming to help anyways, it’s very sweet of you.”

He growls again, though there’s the slightest hint of a blush this time to go along with it. “I’m not as useful as Wei Zin or Chen Tai without an enemy. Here, there’s an enemy. That’s all that matters now.”

Mmh. He’s really stressing about not being able to find her during her little meeting. And probably annoyed that Jin managed it while he didn’t. Nevermind that they have such drastically different cultivation styles, that he’s known Raika for a lot less time than Jin has, or that she herself was keeping him away from it.

He can brood about it. One’s emotions are one’s emotions, and it’s valid to be torn up about the sudden intrusions. 

“We’re almost done,” Raika says. “We’ll be on our way back any minute now.”

“With a prisoner in tow,” Jin says. 

She notes the care in his voice. The intentional inflections of his tone. The way his neurochemistry and cultivation and blood-flow all tell her so very much about what he’s feeling and what he’s trying to say. 

“With a prisoner in tow,” Raika says, her voice quiet. 

A few moments pass in silence before the arrays in the marble start to activate properly.

Raika notices a few microseconds before her disciples, supernatural senses attuned to the incoming impossibilities on deeper levels than the purely Qi-related. She starts standing up a moment before either of them knows it’s time to move, arriving to her full height at the exact moment that the stone begins to glow. 

Faster than a human eye can process, approximately thirty thousand different arcane formulae activate in sequence, opening and then pulling the laws of Space into the shape that their creator decided must be true. 

As Raika takes her first step forward, from one instant to another, there’s a man, suddenly kneeling in the exact center of the marble square. 

They built this entire thing just for him. In a day.

Technically they built it all for her, but it was for her to receive him, so. Yeah. All for one man’s arrival. All to bring someone from the first ring all the way out to the third, hundreds of thousands of miles away in an instant, through magics that obfuscate every single possible aspect of the transportation. Even Raika, for whom Space and Flesh are instinctively aligned, who’s spent subjective decades studying how she can warp both, the source of the teleportation is impossible to trace. 

The marble plaza’s arrays all power themselves off, internal batteries of Qi drained to exactly 0 by the effort they were designed to fulfill. 

And then there’s just a man kneeling on marble, head bowed, arms bound behind his back. 

Raika walks down off the hill, her bare feet transitioning from grass to cold stone, and crosses the mile or so it takes to reach the middle of the construction site. 

The man doesn’t look up. 

He seems sickly. Starved, perhaps, a rare condition for anyone in the Warrior Realm. Most technically don’t even need food, subsisting off of whatever their ideals of cultivation define their transformed forms. His hair is long and disheveled, greasy and covered in dried bits of his own blood. 

He is clad in simple robes, entirely off-white and slightly smudged with sweat and dirt. Barefoot, like her. Prisoner’s robes, fancy enough for a nice prison but still very clear in its design. 

Not that there was ever any doubt. Not with the metal stabbed through him. 

His hands are shackled with cuffs behind his back, but the cuffs have spikes inside them that stab into his wrists. They connect to a chain wrapped around his ankles, also speared into his body. There are old scars, another rarity on a cultivator in the Warrior Realm, where it looks like other spikes might have been put through him and then removed after a long time. 

He’s alive. Breathing. Misery has been sculpted into him, but he remains sane enough to know where he is.

Slowly, so as not to aggravate her bad leg, Raika goes down to one knee in front of him.

“Feng Gui?”

A little hitch in his breathing. Slow, unsteady, quiet. 

“...Yes, great one.”

Mmmh. Raika doesn’t like that. At all. 

“Don’t call me that.”

“Of course, senior.”

“I’m not your senior.”

“Apologies, honored one.”

“...mmh. Do you know who I am?”

His breathing is slow, but he responds quickly. It makes her think of an animal, beaten and tortured until it knows the right thing to say.

“You are the honorable Raika, who this hateful worm visited unlawful and unrighteous harm upon for his own selfish gains and without any sort of grounds, and who now rightfully holds my life in her hands.”

“Is your name Feng Gui?” she asks, ignoring most of what he just said.

“While this unworthy worm is not worthy of his family, his home, or his clan, he is indeed the one previously known as Feng Gui.”

Another trained response, so clean that it’s aggravating. She wonders if this is how the Fengs treat all of their prisoners, training them to act this way, or if they did a special job on this one. Or if he was already sort of like this? It’s been a long time since she saw him. 

She reaches down, leaning on her walking stick and cupping his chin in her hand. Slowly, she lifts his face.

It’s thinner. Haggard. There are scars around the eyes and mouth, like those of someone who has repeatedly dealt with razors in those orifices. His facial hair is gone, burned off, and his expression is totally different from the last time she saw him. 

But those eyes. She’d never forget those eyes. That particular shade of green, that specific shape of pupil. 

It’s him. 

Feng Gui. 

The last time she saw him, there was blood in her eyes. Her body was torn apart, her fate ripped away from her, her own insanity the only thing keeping her upright. 

His hand inside of her. His Qi, tearing apart her cultivation, her identity, the labor of a lifetime and the source of all she was. 

The end of one life. The beginning of another. 

The shape is the same. The color is the same. But the intellect, the will, the frustration and casual disregard, those are gone. They’ve hollowed him of it. 

How long has he been tortured for the crime of letting her exist? For the mistake of not killing someone cleanly? Has it been since she was recruited by Taurus? Since Cragend? Since the Breach? Years. To a centuries-old cultivator, not much time at all, but apparently, the Feng Clan’s techniques make up for that.

She stands up, sighing and letting her joints settle. “Alright then. Who wants to take him?”

“I shall bear the burden,” Geng He says immediately. 

“Ok, no need to be all dramatic. I give you explicit permission to use your cultivation for the purposes of floating this asshole with us.”

Geng He and Jin both pause at that, both looking at her at once. 

“Back… to the cabin?”

“No, no, no. I’m not keeping this fuck in my home. I’ve got a place prepared for him. Come on.”

Geng He and Jin both still seem on edge, which is fine. Good, even. Smart. Reasonable. Emotionally wise, even. 

She’s got a plan, though. Maybe even a good one. 

With a pull, the marble stone around them vanishes completely, pulled out of this part of existence and put someplace much less habitable for stone and complex arrays.

It’s a good plan, even. It’ll almost definitely work. Probably. She’s gotten way better at making plans than she used to be, and most of those plans worked out too.

________________________________________________________________

Setting up the prison was easy, all things told. Even in her mortal form, the expertise and understanding she’s gained from her life experiences as her other aspects doesn’t just go away. Even without needing to directly use her nearly unlimited amounts of available Qi and conceptual materials, she still has her enhanced senses, her comprehension of arrays, Dao, magic, Intent, so forth and so on. And the synergy between all of it, even without much power behind it, is still capable of doing a lot. 

“Ok,” she says to her disciples. “You can all go.”

All four of them seem… rather uncomfortable, to put it lightly. 

“With respect, master, I don’t think this is a good idea,” Wei Zin offers.

“Which is exactly what I said,” Geng He grumbles. 

“I also think it’s a bad idea!” Chen Tai says, raising her hand from where she’s crouched. 

Raika hums very slightly. “Chen Tai, how’re the woods? The fields, the lake, rivers?”

Chen Tai shrugs. “They’re weird, but I think it’ll be fine! The big canopy was only around for a little bit. A lot of stuff is a little bit dead, but not all the way dead. Everything’s tired now, too. Like there was no sun for a long time, and no rain. And some of the trees are a bit bigger than before!”

“Alright. I’ll factor that in. We can probably work with the village to add some fresh fertilizer and aeration, and I’ll go out to check the Qi flows in a bit. Wei Zin? How is the village?”

The grasslands prince crosses his arms before him, frowning. “Rattled. Badly rattled. Some of them are thinking of leaving, moving someplace else. East, North, and South Laketowns were affected too, and they’re doing even worse. We have a meeting with all of the village elders set up for later tomorrow to discuss everything that’s happened and what can be done.”

“No deaths?”

“None as of yet. But there are three old folks who have gone catatonic, and two children. People are waiting a bit. You should probably come take a look at them soon.”

Raika sighs, taking a very long inhale and a very long exhale. “Right. Right. I can help with that.”

“Now?”

“In a moment. I have to make sure that he’s safe to hold here for now.”

“You haven’t already?” Wei Zin asks a bit incredulously. 

“I did! But there’s making sure, then there’s making sure. For now, Wei Zin, please let people know that we can help and hear their concerns. Chen Tai, please make sure that there aren’t any nascent spirit beasts starting to form around here. Geng He, go with her, please. Jin–”

“I’m staying.”

“Maybe we should all stay, then,” Wei Zin says.

“No. You don’t have to do what I say, and you have permission to use your cultivations outside of town. But you are all leaving this room.”

“Master, I’m not leaving,” Jin insists. “I trust you, but I don’t think it’s good for you to be in here with him alone. I’ll stay.”

Raika looks at him. There’s a bit of a sadness in her eyes, then, which doesn’t go very far towards reassuring him. 

“I respect that, kid. But I’ve got a plan, and I need you out there. I’m going to modify the array so that you all have permission to use it, but you’re the expert here besides me. It’s not designed for it, but you should be able to find a way to use it to help calm the local Qi flows. I trust you with that.”

“And I trust you, mom, but–”

“But nothing. You pushed your luck much too hard, sitting at the table with me and them like that. Right now, I need you to listen to what I say.  I’ll be up in an hour. Go.”

And then she turns her back to the four of them, looking into the room she’s storing the Feng in. 

It’s a perfectly square room, shaped like a very simple basement. In the center of it is a seemingly normal circle, and in the center of that is Feng Gui, now freed from his shackles and still just as docile.

Raika takes two steps forward, right to the edge of the circle, and sits in a cross-legged stance. She waits until she hears all four sets of footprints go up the stairs behind her. 

A moment later, there are no stairs. There’s just a wall, plain and unadorned.

She told it to be that way.

All of her senses wash over the Feng before her. Spatial, Conceptual, Dao-based, magical sensory organs, sight, sound, smell, even the taste of him in the air, the feel of him through the ground. She checks him for hidden arrays, bio-modifications, magical markers, and the sort of deeper ontological changes that might transform someone into a trap. She peels back the layers of reality one by one, examining his skin, blood, muscle, organs, bones, his shadow, his deeper meaning, traces of his spatial past, Qi flows, the shape of his meridians, the design of the Daos that are layered inside of him, intermixed with the core of his existence. 

And nothing. 

There’s a lot to him, of course. He’s in the Warrior Realm, even completely starved of Qi as he has been. His Soul inside of him is shaped predictably forest-ey, and it’s already generating fresh Qi to empower him even as its gravity is pulling in Qi from the environment. Feng Gui isn’t even cycling, it’s just the mechanics of being so high realm, of having such a powerful Soul and Domain that even unexpressed, their natures influence reality. 

But there’s no visible traps that she can find, no changes to what seems like his baseline state beyond the lingering after-effects of the torture he’s undergone. 

And it’s a lot of torture. 

His organs have signs of having been removed and put back in in the wrong order. Scars go all the way down to his bones, where shapes have been carved and erased, over and over. Some of his ligaments look to have been tied into complex little knots, over and over, such that they’re perpetually too short to move properly now. 

And the fire. 

Precise burns, some of them literally microscopic, filling every part of him. It must be agony to even exist, shapes of plasmic mutilation and frostbitten inverse-marks placed directly against or even inside some of his pain receptors. 

And all of this is just what’s left. A cultivator can heal back to a healthy form so long as they have time, Qi, and medicine. Someone with a fully formed Soul? A version of reality exists within them that demands existence be a certain way, and that almost always includes the cultivator’s perception of themselves, whole, healthy and idealized. 

You can hurt a higher-realm being a lot before they die. Especially if you have trained medics and tortures on hand. And the Feng Clan probably have people that make her Dao of Pain, and the almost-Truth that developed from it, look like brutish, amateur-hour type shit. 

Still, she checks, and double checks, and triple checks everything. No plots, no plans. 

And then, just to make sure, a hundred thousand miles away, Kai Ra opens wide the jaws of her Halo.

The shadow of the act transcends space and time. In an instant, the Halo is here, so large and so dense that all of the room bends towards it like bound to a higher gravity. The jaws are larger than a building, heavier than a mountain, its colors so deep and profound that they change the context of all other colors around them.

And it bites.

[TRANSCENDANT ART: DEVOUR WHAT MIGHT BE]

The probability of Feng Gui being a trap vanishes. The chances that someone will use him to track her, and the chances that he’ll escape, and the chances he might hurt her kids– all those possible futures are wrapped inside her jaws and devoured from half a world away. 

It’s expensive. The jaws dim, shrinking down to less than a third its previous size and a barely supernatural luster in the moment before it vanishes, because it was technically never “here”.

It’s a new technique, but not that new. Derived from [TRANSCENDANT ART: EAT OF THE FRUIT, GOLDEN AND RIPE], a technique she used to paracausally devour something that couldn’t exist with a mouth that didn’t exist either, it’s an advanced version of what her Halo can already do. 

A Domain is a spatial transformation. A Soul is an ontological transformation. A Halo is a temporal transformation. But the ability to transcend time, to devour it whole, is unique to her and the shape of her being, just as her ability to manifest a fragment of CHANGE, to shape life out of madness and power alone, or, as mentioned, to consume things that don’t exist and use it in ways that should be impossible. Each of her [TRANSCENDANT ARTS] is an impossibility, yes, but one derived from reality. 

Between it, her Supreme Body Art, her growing understanding of magic, her grasp of higher concepts… yeah, she’s a bad bitch. 

But overconfidence is a bigger bitch. 

Maybe it’s overkill to use it on a political gift of someone so far below her in power and well-being. That’s fine. She’d rather not risk it. 

And then at last, after all that, she lets out a tight breath, leaning back on her arm and letting her head loll back. 

“Fuuuucking hells, Gui. All this and I don’t even get to kill you. Want a smoke?”