Book One, Chapter 36 - All-New, All-Tasty Me

Hello! Two chapters coming out rapid fire! We remain on pace for completion of book one by November 1st! Enjoy! It's really fun revisiting this early self-torture of Raika's, and playing with the thematics of imprisonment and such! I do think the lack of a central antagonist at this junction hurts the story a bit, so I am hoping to center the Purp sect a little bit more in the next few wordings, but it's pretty dang good overall anyways. Enjoy!

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“I’m not sure I’m doing it right. Is it supposed to hurt this bad?”

“The pain is your body telling you that you are removing it from the shape that the Heavens assigned to it. It is irrelevant to whether or not you are doing it right.”

“So… so I am doing it right?”

“No. You hit a nerve cluster in your spine. You’ll be paralyzed in minutes. Meditate on your failings for your next life.”

-Final recorded conversation between Elder Yáng Xīyuè of the Blazing Sword sect and one of her disciples (name removed posthumously).

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Raika stares at herself.

The small maze of  bathing rooms spreading about the edges of the main swimming pool all hold marvels of their own. Steam rooms, hot tubs, ice baths, showers, and rooms enchanted to hold out moisture full of makeup, mirrors and essential oils spread in repeating fractals, all spread out in some kind of pattern that she can’t quite figure out. And they vary, too- some rooms are large enough to fit over a dozen people at a given moment, while others are best suited to individuals.

Raika finds herself in one of the latter types. It has a table and chair, equipped with lotions and potions and delicate concoctions for beauty and youth and comfort and virility, but she stays standing, and hasn’t given them more than a passing glance. 

Raika stares at herself.

It is the first time she’s seen a mirror since… what, a few days before her fight with Lu Feren, the arrogant outer sect disciple? Not long after the ritual had faded into scarring on her skin. She hasn’t seen herself since then, not before the battle with Shin Ren, not before her imprisonment, and certainly not during.

She looks better.

But moreso than she expected, she looks different. Time plays a factor, but as she’s healed and changed herself, she’s started to shift her perception, assuming subconsciously that she’d be returning to who she was before she lost her cultivation. As she stares at herself in the mirror, she can’t help but marvel at how wrong she was.

She’s taller now. A couple inches at least, closer to 6’3 than the 5’11 she used to be. Her skin remains the same general tone, but it seems a bit brighter, more vibrant, and she’s been painted over by minute, precise slashes, concentrating on her arm, shoulder and chest but with some spread all over her body. She’s starved, thin, but not dying from it, ribs visible but not jutting out, the rest of her frame filled out with a lean, tense muscle. Her hair is shorn short on her head, her scalp healed from the burns but the process of growing her hair back taking its time, and a lot of her scars look older, standing out as pale ruins that have blended into their environments. Similarly, she’s surprised to see the missing chunk of her cheek has healed surprisingly well; it’s not fully back, you can still see some drastic scar tissue and a glimpse of teeth on the right side of her mouth, but where before there was a torn-open face exposing skull, now there’s… well, a face.

But it’s her eyes that catch her attention. 

They used to be brown.

What they are now isn’t golden, but it’s… close. There’s a paleness to it, a sharpness that doesn’t quite suit gold, and a glint of red behind it all that speaks of flecks of fire and ember. Her eyes look like a painter’s rendition of a pupil, made out in the colors of a sunset. They’re gorgeous.

She exhales, then laughs a bit at how she’s been gazing into her own eyes for a solid minute, completely nude in front of the mirror. She shakes her head and flicks herself on the forehead, the ingrained habit pulling double duty in recentering her and reminding her of what her next steps are.

Taurus seems like a fine enough fellow, and she’s not stupid enough to outright defy the Empire and her apparent recruitment, not just yet, but she’s had a life here. There are other, older debts and connections she intends to pursue once they’ve left this place, but Paleblossom city, despite all the torment it’s brought her, is something like home. There’s almost a half-dozen people she’d rather not leave behind, and a few things she plans to take with her.

It’s a bit embarrassing, but in spite of how much she’s been helped by so many, she can’t help but miss Dink, the poorly built little bastard.

Soon, she vows.

Still, there’s an issue; namely, the fact that she’s technically still a prisoner.

Oh sure, the cell is damn near the size of a mansion, but it’s still a cell. She doubts Taurus will just let her walk around unsupervised through the city, especially since the Purple Flame-something sect probably remains furious. More than even that, no matter how considerate or protective of his chosen few he seems to be, he’s still a stranger, working for the same institution that Feng Gui apparently works for (and wasn’t that a shock; not a hidden master at all, just a wandering demon). The less information they have on her, the better. And, if she’s being honest, there’s a big part of her that just aches at the thought of having someone watching and taking notes as she says goodbye to her people, or who might confiscate or track anything she takes with her. Raika’s not a private person, per se, but she is her own person, and she’s had more than enough of her autonomy and control taken from her.

So priority one; whether or not she decides to come back, she needs to find a way to escape. Either this palace they’re in or, more indirectly, the observation on her while she’s out and about, if they let her do so with an escort. The number one priority in that plan, then, is to discover exactly what tools she has at her disposal.

Raika bows her head and closes her eyes, letting herself breathe deep. First things first; she can do so a lot more cleanly than before, her ribs clearly realigned and no longer pressing on her lungs. What’s more, she can fit more air; she draws in breath, and then keeps drawing it in, well past when her chest should be forced to expand.

She practices holding her breath, and makes it to about eleven incredibly boring minutes before she feels it start to ache.

Next, her heartbeat. When she saw Yun Ka she felt a rush from it, pulsing into her blood and flooding her with a sort of strange energy. She focuses on the organ, wielding far more control over it than before, and starts to… flex it, like a muscle. She can vary the beats, increase their intensity, change its rhythms, even slow it if she wants to. It seems tougher, too, its default heartbeat sending much more powerful rushes of blood through her body, and increasing it even slightly leaves her a little giddy from the rush of oxygen and strength that floods her, the clarity and speed of perception that flashes into her mind.

Other muscles are easier to test. She can balance on either foot easily, her knee reshaped so any lingering scars and damage are a minor background soreness rather than a limiter, and when she picks up the metal frame of one of the mirrors in the room, it takes what feels like minimal force to press her fingers into it, slowly warping and flattening it until its filigreed art is turned to shiny, smooth surfaces.

She can’t say she doesn’t sense Qi now. She might not be able to touch it, or experience it with the wholly unique sense that those with spiritual organs can, but her sense of smell has only grown sharper as she’s changed.  The things she “saw” in Taurus’ scent and the fact she picked up on the undercurrent beneath Kaena’s are a clear enough sign of that. But there’s also that constant tingling in her body, ever-shifting, ever reflecting back and forth. The pain of Qi deviation remains, running through her body in sharp, controlled bursts due to the ritual carved into her, but it too has gotten quieter, either as her body continues adapting or as she’s drained her original supply and other “infusions”.

She frowns at that. Is that a good thing? While there’s definitely a limit, as early experiments with Dink proved, the discordant tingling (the Qi deviation / poisoning, in effect) has been instrumental in her “cultivation” to get stronger. The entire point of the ritual was to absorb a big burst of Qi directly into her physical body and then keep it there- once it’s run out, does she know what to do next? Qi doesn’t vanish, but if she absorbs all of it, will she have to redo the ritual to be able to absorb and contain more? And the pain of it, the quantities… she’s not sure. There might be some merit to smoothing it out, but… it feels like it might be slower, even if it’s still acting the same overall.

She focuses on her heartbeat again. On the rhythm of it. She lets the world fall to the wayside, the warmth of the bath house comfortable enough that she doesn’t feel a need to block out sensation entirely. Say what you will about isolation, but beyond the madness it causes, it can very much help with mental focus if you’re careful about it, and lack of trance-state from meridian cultivation or not, Raika has gotten very good at sitting still and thinking hard.

She pumps her heart, a bit harder.

Slows down its beat, but pulses again, harder.

Slows it down more, until her mind starts working in flashes, pulses of blood determining wakefulness and a drifting lightheadedness.

She focuses on the tingling. How it changes with each heartbeat, with the shifting of muscle and blood. She’s noticed nuances in it before, patterns she’s not really sure about yet, mechanics to it all… she just doesn’t have the tools to understand it yet, but she knows they’re there. Where her blood slows and pools, the tingling starts to feel wrong, like bending an arm the wrong way, then begins to fade. Where her blood rushes and bursts, the tingling increases dramatically in effect, starts to hurt, but doesn’t quite seem to twist and feel like when it’s still. 

She has a thought.

It’ll take effort, but she’s no stranger to that.

It’ll take a lot of fine control, but she needs to learn that anyway.

She just needs to find someplace she’s not being watched, first.

There’s been a pervasive, background discomfort that’s started to slowly build since she woke up. Taurus, otherwise known as Runemaster Boriah, likely has any number of tools to properly examine and spy on the clearly strange and probably troublesome people he seems to have authority over, and the room they gave her is her number one guess as to where most of them have been planted. Whether or not the discomfort is her instincts trying to confirm her theory or just building paranoia is unclear, but it’s way too likely for her to feel comfortable there, even if it wasn’t a gilded cage.

Now, she could spend a few days finding the right spot to potentially hide out in this sprawling maze of luxury. There may be some forgotten closet or corner somewhere, and she might be able to inhabit it without being noticed. A lot of effort for a lot of maybes.

Or… she can try a little trick. 

Kaena has used a flower to flood an area with Qi. Not nearly enough to obfuscate someone’s Qi or presence, of course… unless they don’t really have a Qi signature.

Will it be enough? Who’s to say. Will it be more convenient than trying to dig out a bunch of esoteric spying techniques for days? Absolutely.

Life’s little pleasures.

It doesn’t take more than a few moments walking between different rooms for her to find one that has one of the flowers in it. They each seem to have similar but slightly different sets of bathing accouterments, as if prepared for different guests or simply for the sake of variety, but she elects not to wonder about it too hard.

She sits in a pool, dug into the ground, letting the bubbling, disturbingly and divinely hot water flow around her and leave her almost sweating. She tears a petal off and lets it float on the water, holding her breath to keep that rush of vitality from infusing her like before, and closes her eyes, hoping that she’s strange enough and the flower’s Qi is enough of a distraction for her to be mostly hidden.

And then, she starts altering her bloodflow.

It’s daunting. Every minor change she makes she has to memorize and make sure she can undo, lest she start creating blood clots or somehow let part of her body necrotize. She might not be great at book learning, but months and months of drawing diagrams and learning about the dangers of even the slightest change to a body have her well aware of potential dangers. As she shifts in the water, the heat high enough to be a bit painful and certainly designed for someone of higher cultivation, she starts guiding waves of movement through her body, altering her heartbeat and her veins to slow down and speed up different sections. 

In some parts she concentrates the feeling of unnatural tingling in her flesh through one cluster of veins in one solid burst, the surrounding vessels slowed and strained to the point of agony. In others, she accumulates tiny pools of blood in still muscle and veins, the sensation deeply uncomfortable, but ready to rush back when called by a heartbeat she’s magnified until she can almost physically hear it.

Piece by piece, she pushes and pulls, feeling bits of sharp pain and numbness in turn and trying to identify the differences in sensation. 

It takes a while. 

But she does it.

Eventually, when she can feel two large, distinct masses of energy, straining at the properties of her flesh to burst out, roiling and churning like bundles of razor blades moving through her, she reorganizes their pathways, and with one more roiling, burning, overclocked heartbeat, collapses them both against each other in the middle of her heart.

Two different tidal waves of blood surge into her heart at once. The sensation she associates with Qi (a violent burning sensation, sharper than any blade she’s felt) comes flooding in, washing past more traditional tingling and agonies.

Ah, Raika thinks; so that’s what having a heart attack feels like.

Her whole body spasms from where she’d been sitting, like she’s been stabbed by a hot poker. Surveillance is the last thing on her mind, but if anyone is watching, they’re definitely going to notice that. The warm, wet tears she feels start to come along are probably pretty noticeable too, hotter than her eyes should be, and she can’t help but smell and taste copper both as her whole body clenches and rebels against the pain. She’s crying blood, juddering and shaking like she’s having a seizure.

But she’s been hurt worse. Say what you will about Shin Ren, but he knows how to burn someone so it hurts. 

 She forces herself to stay awake, to keep the spasming as restrained as she can (she only knocks a few things into the water!). She’s grateful for the hot water and the size of the pool, as she’s more floating as she leans back than she is slamming her head into tile as hard as she can, even as scalding hot water splashes on her face. 

She does not let herself breathe.

She does not let her heart stop beating.

Whatever she’s doing to herself, whatever this level of control she’s using over this minute but potent internal reservoir, it’s clear her body isn’t designed for it. Her body is, ideally, designed to absorb Qi organically once it’s been processed by a Dantian, not to coexist with explosive scraps of it in entirely different systems.

Her body, however, is an idiot and a coward, like most flesh tends to be, and she has the control to tell it to shut the hells up and listen. 

She forces her heart to beat again, opening her blood vessels back to normal as she does, and the stagnant blood rushes in. It hits the roiling spark, the waves of little razors crashing against each other, and it’s like all that sudden violence and pain and unbearable heat is blasted apart. Where before there was a single ball of unbearable harm, now a thousand comets of pain and sharpness and heat and roiling, chaotic trembling shoot out to every part of her body, guided by her blood, dragged apart heartbeat by heartbeat. Her body wears away at the newfound core of agony in her, like a glacier pulled apart by the waves, washing again and again against it and taking its sanded-down fragments to every part of her body.

Raika doesn’t know how long she floats in the bubbling water, forcing her heart to keep beating. She’s fairly certain she lost control of her breathing at some point, as minute flutters of the cool, refreshing vitality of the unnamed flowers trickling into her and soothing the raging fire. They might even be reducing the effectiveness of whatever she did alongside its strength, but she can’t find it in herself to be disappointed, not right now. 

All she thinks of is keeping her heart pumping, and making sure she doesn’t slip under the water and drown.

While she has no idea how long she stays floating there (a lot longer than twelve minutes, that’s for sure), she knows one thing for absolute certainty.

She really, really misses Dink.