Chapter 504 – Consequences (I) (Patreon)

“Do you think she’s alright? And that person–”

“It’ll be fine. We can trust her.”

“Well duh. But… is she ok?”

“...No. No, I don’t think so.”

–Conversation between two disciples.

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The lake, and all its associated towns, are a mess. 

The manifestation of an Emperor / Monarch Realm cultivator, used to attempt to wound and devastate, isn’t something that just “goes away”, no more than the sudden appearance of a mountain range or a tsunami from underground would be. The fact that Raika has an array specifically designed to contain and isolate things means that only dozens of miles of Qi spaces have been totally fucked rather than hundreds, or even thousands. Within that space, though, there are profound changes to the world, deep and thematic and dangerous. 

The idea of drowning beneath a canopy of shadows has made it so every single bit of dirt, air, and water has a deficit of nutrients, crippling the long-term development of the countryside. Fish and algae alike have drowned in that darkness, newborns have starved and died, eggs will now never hatch. 

And for all that these villages have lived for at least two or three centuries in consistent harmony with this place, it’s so delicate. One bad harvest, one bad year for fishing, and dozens could die. Another after that, and whole villages would just… vanish. 

And the entire lake has just died. All of their fears, the blinding terror that one single bad year might ruin everything, just came true. Not just a bad year, an absolute void where there should have been food of any kind. 

Humans survive two weeks, three at the maximum, without food. Qi-Gathering Realm humanoids can stretch that to maybe four weeks, give or take some days. 

Four weeks is a long time. Four weeks is not the four decades it would take for this place to naturally recover.

In an instant, the Feng wiped out whole generations of hard work and murdered any future this land might have had for human habitation. A total annihilation of culture, well-being, climate, and ability to grow or even survive. 

And that was with less than five full seconds of his manifested Domain, while Raika was shielding everyone, and he called it off as soon as Tao Zudong showed up. Not with an attack, or a technique, or any real effort, even, just by standing there and not holding back what he thinks the world should be from leaking out of him. And with it, the death knell of a whole culture. 

In any other circumstances, there would be nothing to be done. Without any infectious Qi or malicious magic, the land would be cursed, salted, ruined. In these circumstances, under Raika’s care, it’ll be fixed in a day. Not a very good trade, ten seconds in comparison to a full day’s work, but hey, that’s life sometimes. It’s easier to break things than to fix them, easier to wipe them out than understand them. 

Pillar, returned from its sojourn down south now that Raika’s Flame has been given assistance about the diplomacy going on down there, helps. Between it and her Heart, Raika’s got both the instincts and the knowledge to find what’s gone missing, generate it, and replace it. Nothing to be done about all the dead animals, but she manifests snippets of herself through space to drink away any of the now-dead flora and replace it with near-identical copies. As for the fauna, they’re Flesh, even more traditionally than plants, and she can conceive of them as her Flesh, so a quick infusion of vitality, the addition of slow-release capsules of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients, and some slight amounts of Qi guarantee an unseasonal and productive breeding season all around. It won’t be perfect, but she can tweak it as she goes. 

The soil, water, and air are all a bit more difficult, but transmutation is second nature. Literally. Supreme Body Art: Transmutation allows her to transform herself into inanimate matter as easily as traditional biology, and after that it’s a matter of moving that transfused flesh into place. The earth, porous and aerated by her tendrils, fills with fresh fertilizer, while the water is blessed with new gases and nitrates.

In about twenty-five hours, Raika takes a land that’s dead already, and before it even knows it, has transformed it to be as perfectly alive as ever. Not quite as seamless as if it had happened naturally, but she can handle the disappointment if it means that everyone gets food to eat and that this part of the world doesn’t turn to a necrotic cesspool of rotting earth beneath nonexistent divine trees. 

Dealing with people is… harder. 

A lot of food abruptly either spoiled or became dramatically tasteless after the Feng’s manifestation, and fixing that is a delicate and time-consuming process. Regenerating the resources that allow nature to work as intended is one thing, to directly modify what’s come of that nature and already transformed is a bit more finicky. Most of the villages, then, are experiencing minor food shortages in the midst of major panic, with several people falling unconscious or still dazed from the experience of an Emperor Realm Domain manifesting. People will have dreams, visions and nightmares for years, probably, and Raika can feel people all across the lake suddenly experiencing breakthroughs in their realms, advancing one or even two steps higher towards or into the Foundational Realm and profoundly unprepared for it. Qi deviation is just about inevitable unless she acts, and so she has been, tweaking the Qi in the atmosphere and in people’s own bodies and suppressing some advancements outright.

And that’s just the surface layer panic. The people who fell unconscious? The people panicking? The people nearly about to start causing chaos, who are drinking to forget, or not cooking, or not farming or hunting or fishing or even speaking to each other?

It all teeters on the edge of a knife. 

Ten seconds of manifestation, through layers of an array strong enough to briefly hold back the Emperor of Emperors, and still, the lake and its surroundings would be a wasteland in a year at best. All for ten seconds of something that, at that level, isn’t even truly a technique.

And without that array? In those ten seconds, there would be nothing left of anything from horizon to horizon save infertile dirt beneath a nonexistent canopy.

War is coming. The Breach is bleeding, and there’s about a dozen knives coming to tear it open wider, Raika herself foremost of them. And if what she’s discovered in the south means what she thinks, then it might not be the only breach soon. There will be hundreds of Monarch Realm cultivators, Craft-users, living corpses and Beasts, all of them fighting at their full might, many of them for hours, more of them for days or weeks or months at a time. 

Her walking stick taps against the wooden floor of the hut as she enters, silently wandering past the distraught parents of the child on the bed. 

She told reality that they can’t see her, and slipped herself half-a-layer lower, so it’s true in two ways at once. 

Intent is Truth is Craft is cultivation is arrays is magic. Mind to energy to reality. The overlap allows room for… persuasion. 

She’s still figuring it out, but here, now, it’s more than enough. 

She steps to the child’s bedside, leaning on the staff. She has to kneel down to be in easy reach of the kid, leaning her staff on her shoulder and reaching forward with her good arm to touch the child’s forehead. 

Brains are complicated. They’re more complicated than anything else Raika has ever met, and even though there are systems almost as complicated that can do certain things better, the sheer depth of complexity in a living brain is… transcendent. She could spend another hundred years with all her own many brains working on the project, and still end up with little better than her current map. 

But the principles behind it? The tools and mechanisms that this incredibly complex thing uses and relies on? A bit simpler. She does still have a map, after all, and no matter how incomplete it still is, it’s accurate. 

Approximately two-hundred billion brain cells in one single brain. A half-dozen variants, some pulsing lightning-fast and in constant music, others holding a slower tempo, providing a backdrop. And the number of connections between those cells? Uncountable, even to Raika, even if each of her own brains took its own section. Pillar estimates trillions. And memory is distributed unevenly between whole tracts of them. All in a three-pound organ, variants of which exist in all of the hundreds of millions of organisms and ten-thousand or so humans around the lake. 

In this child, the damage is only semi-clear. There are some neurons burnt out entirely, killed by the sheer overload of witnessing a higher order of reality, while others are bloated, transformed by the information they carry. Parts of the brain have electrical activity high enough to almost cook the tissue, while others have gone almost dead. Repeated patterns of trauma and memory overlap, crippling the overall system and diverting all power to trying to process what they saw.

The little girl had been looking at the sky when it became green. 

Raika can literally taste her thoughts, and even still, there is no safety in the coming procedure. 

Still, she acts. 

She bends herself, comprehending Flesh and Biology in tandem and shaping the world according to those rules. She spends her neural tissue in waves, overheating and regenerating to process the changes she has to keep track of. With will alone, she shapes a child’s brain, replacing or removing damaged, misfiring cells, though not so many as to reshape the architecture. With higher, transcendent magics, she reshapes the Plasma and Electricity in the brain, redistributing it, easing the load on overwhelmed systems, balancing neurochemistry back towards a normal human baseline. 

And through it all, she holds two things to be true above reality’s own rules.

It’s Not Just Pain

We Can Be Better.

And with all that, still, most of the healing will be done by the brain itself. Magnificent organ. An impossibility, manifested through existence alone. 

But in under an hour, using a whole chunk of her skillset, she restores and calms the brain back into something resembling a functional organ.

A lot harder than growing more of her brains or modifying her neural tissue. That’s mostly a mix of brute-force, neural plasticity working as intended, and her own supernatural identity, shaping reality to her form instead of the inverse. Modifying someone else’s brain, especially a still-developing brain, especially a weirdly injured brain, is almost as complex as the operations she has to undertake to restore the environment. 

But she does it.

The child exhales, a sigh of relief from her sleeping form, and Raika lifts herself back up, walking past the still terrified parents back out into the village. A few minutes of walking later, she’s at the tall, wide house at the center of town, half meeting place, half town hall, half an elder’s home. 

She slips back to being fully on this part of the world and stops telling the world that no one can see her, and knocks on the door.

There’s a shuffling of steps from inside, and a familiar face pulls it open. 

La Gao. Uncle to West Laketown’s best fisherman, talented barbecuer, one-time-lay, a man who has lived all forty of his years here in his home and currently facing a lot all at once. 

He doesn’t meet her eyes, averting his gaze as soon as he sees that it’s her. 

“She’s back,” he calls over his shoulder, leaving the door open for her to come in as he turns away. 

There are so many familiar faces around her. Lai Shu, here with her daughter, her son and her husband, all together at the far end of the hall. Bi Jao, the crotchety old man, past his prime but still kicking and who still took the time to come out here. Qin Jia, the skewer-seller who’s been running her stall the way her mother did, and her grandmother, and makes sizzling delicacies that everyone in town is familiar with. 

Maybe a hundred people packed into the central room of the building, all of them familiar faces. 

“The children are alright,” Raika tells him, trying to keep her tone north of cold and calm. “They should all wake up in the next few hours, or tomorrow at the latest. My disciples are looking over the forests and waters, and all of them are certain that things will be well within a week or so.”

“What exactly are they doing?” Asks Lai Mao, grandfather to Lai Shu and one of the older men of the village. “How are you and yours making sure things are alright? Everyone can see things are strange. The Lake is covered in dead fish, for hells’ sake.”

“My son Rai Jin is a priest,” Raika says, embellishing only slightly. “He grants peace to the dead and offers funerary rites, and is working to pull away the pall of death. My disciple Wei Zin is a man of the forests, and he and disciple Chen Tai are traveling the length and breadth of the hills, ensuring that no spirit beasts have been born of the calamity and ensuring that the woods are well. My disciple Geng He, who has joined you on many a fishing trip, has traveled to the center of the lake, informing me that while the loss of life is vast, there are many eggs and fresh harvests of algae below the upper layers of the lake, and that it will surely recover.”

“What happened?” says a voice. Not the same one as the elder, one that she doesn’t and doesn’t try to immediately identify. It is a voice that speaks for many, and she answers it to all. 

“A conflict with a higher-realm cultivator, one who has left now,” she tells them. “While he was brutish on arrival and intended harm, words were exchanged, and he has retreated beyond the horizon with promises not to return.”

“You spoke to him?” someone asks. 

“I did.”

“So he was here for you!”

“Yes.”

There are gasps, mumbles, outright growls from many different angles in the hall. Rage, confusion, fear, and the sort of smell that comes about when someone has their worst fears confirmed. 

It is not a surprise to many of them. 

“This is your fault!”

“You brought this on us! We sheltered you! Fed you! Shared our homes with you!”

“So more will come?”

“How could you?”

“You swore!”

She knows that last voice. La Ru. 

He had asked her, back before her kids arrived, if things would be well. She told him no one in the village would come to harm. 

He asked her if she promised it. 

“I Swear, On My Body And Mind, That No One Of The Lake Shall Be Harmed By My Son Or Those I Bring To This Place.”

Her words in reply. Words spoken with a voice that weighs heavy on reality, with Intent, with all the magic of her nature turned to it.

And then he asked if she wanted help building a house for her kids. 

No one has died. No physical harm has come to any of the villagers, no direct damage of any kind.

She didn’t bring the Feng to her, he was sent.

But she feels it now. Like chains digging into her, cutting into her, a promise broken in spirit if not in word.

Carefully, she goes to one knee, then the other. The sound of one of them creaking is audible even past the yelling, and a lot of the accusations and questions quiet. 

Her staff clacks as it touches the ground. 

Her forehead thuds down a moment later. 

She bows, every part of her body as low as she can get it, contorted into a perfect bow that presses her head to the ground before the village.

“I’m so sorry.”

The hall has grown quiet, though some still murmur, and some make sounds of shifting as they try to see what’s happening at the front. 

In almost six years of living in West Laketown, Raika hasn’t so much as bowed at the waist to anyone. She bows enough to be either polite or sincere, but no further. 

“I did not intend this. I will do all that I can to rectify it. I take responsibility for the harm brought about by my presence, and by my inability to properly respond to consequences of my actions. This lapse is unforgivable, and though I do not regret the actions that have brought it about, I profoundly regret the pain it has caused each and every one of you. If I could do it all again, I would change only my own ineptitude and my own foolishness.

“I apologize, from the bottom of my heart.”

She keeps her head pressed firmly to the dirt for one minute. Two. 

Eventually, people start talking. She blocks them all out. She listens to none of it. Not the sounds of people’s thoughts, not the taste of their emotions, not a word out of their mouths. She gives them all of the privacy she can offer, waiting for them. 

She sort of expected it would happen, but she’s still a bit surprised at the tears she can feel in the back of her eyes. 

She means every word of it. 

She’ll have to do so much more harm to ever achieve the change she wants. 

It is grief, shame, and simple pain, all in one. 

She keeps breathing, slow and steady. In for three, out for four. 

Eventually, the sounds of someone kneeling at her side bring her out of the self-imposed isolation. 

And then, a hand on her shoulder.

Warm. Trembling with microtremors of stress, fear, touched by animal sweat and adrenal release. 

But firm, and gentle. 

“Please lift your head,” comes a voice. 

Raika does. 

Lai Shu, holding Lai Mi in one arm and against her hip, gives Raika the saddest, kindest smile she has. 

“Please. Tell us what happened. Tell us what we can do.”