Book One, Chapter 24 - Laws Are Threats, Instituted By The Ruling Power In A Given System-

aaaaaand that makes three! It's 1am- good night! I'm gonna go eat chicken and then go to bed. I'm getting less witty as I get more stressed and tired, but I am still beaming affection and appreciation to each and every one of you!

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In accordance with the will of the Emperor, those sects who have chosen wisely to cease their warring ways and join in the mercy and benevolence of the Empire must also obey the Empire’s Laws. Each edict of the Law has been written by the Emperor of Emperors personally, determining that which can and cannot be. Without the Law, the greater powers of the wilderness and the banditry of this world, now conquered and tamed, would be free once more to run amok, allowed to exist in injustice and torment our friends and family across the rings. Truly, the Emperor of Emperors is wise beyond wisdom, and powerful beyond power, and we give thanks to his arbiters of Law for their sacrifice in wielding the Empire’s sacred edicts.

-Primer on the benefits of Imperial Living, mandatory reading in all lower-level governmental education programs.

“So,” Qen Hou finally says, enunciating very slowly. “Just to be clear. You. Fought a Foundation realm cultivator. And won.”

Raika shrugs, feeling surprisingly nostalgic by how the weight of the manacles makes it harder to do so. “In my defense, he was a very shit fighter.”

“He was maybe a week in from his third mission,” Qen Hou replies, pinching the bridge of his nose. “He’s been a sect member for maybe a year and a half. He’s hardly what one would call a once-in-a-generation sword Saint. But he is a Foundational Realm cultivator and he’s a sect disciple and the only reason he’s still alive, or so I hear, is because Shiru Hei, mistress of the Indigo, high elder of the research division and on the council of elders, stopped you from somehow slitting his throat.”

“Hardly my fault,” she says, refusing to make eye contact, taking the time instead to look around the interior of the cell she’s in. It’s a bare thing, no bed or chamber pot, designed for cultivators and monsters more than mortals, though ironically the lack of hyper-dense Qi is sort of a relief. “Plus, he started it. And it’s hardly my fault he didn’t get cut on his own sword, is it?”

“That’s absolutely not the point, and you know it,” Qen Hou growls. “Even if he started it as you claim, which I doubt the elders will be inclined to agree with, I don’t know how you did it, and they’ll be a lot less friendly than I am about figuring it out.”

She sighs, finally turning to look at him. “He did start it,” she says, voice even and cold. “He saw me through a window and decided that he was allowed to kill me just because, and no one said a thing to stop him. But he’s ever so special and ever so worthy and ever so happy to hurt me to make himself feel and look good, and I’m this.”

She takes a moment. Takes a breath. Makes sure that the heat has drained from her voice before she speaks again.

“I beat him,” she says, and even with the pause she can’t help the snarl in the back of her throat, “because he was a lazy, worthless, violent piece of shit, who barely knew which end of the sword to cut with, and in spite of what has been made of me I am still Raika the Bloody, and I have torn apart far worse than him. If I had no arms at all, or one less leg, then he might have been a fucking challenge.”

Qen Hou gives her a look as if admitting that maybe, in less dire times, he might have laughed at that. As it is, he just breathes out a sigh.

“Three weeks. Three weeks unsupervised, and you do this.”

Another inhale. He holds it, meditates on it- lets it out.

“If… and I do mean if the elders give a shit about any part of a trial,” he murmurs, “I don’t think anyone is going to buy that. You’re crippled, Raika. You can’t even sense Qi. Those tattoos on you won’t convince anyone who knows the first thing about arrays- even I can tell they’re basically just a big containment spell, not something that can give you powers. Absolute idiot or not, and there’s some issues with you referring to a sect disciple as such if you get a trial, the simple and absolute fact of the matter is that he’s many times faster than you, many times stronger, and can use Purple Flame techniques. And if there hadn’t been a goddamn sect elder in your area, he would be dead. Which begs the question of why the fuck you were slitting his throat in the first place!”

“What was I supposed to do?” she snarls. “He was many times faster than me, many times stronger, and, you forgot, probably more than both added together in toughness. What’s a little old cripple to do, wrestle him down? Beat him unconscious? Bleed him slow? Wait for him to peacefully surrender after being humiliated?”

“I get that,” Qen Hou growls. “But what is your life in the face of the will of a cultivator, backed by a whole goddamn sect on their own property?”

She says nothing. Not one word. She just looks at him. 

Whatever it is he sees, it’s apparently not enough to get him to back down. He just shakes his head. “You’ve been nothing but gods-damned trouble since I brought you here, Raika,” he says, soft and quiet. “You’ve convinced what would have been an exceptional healer to start looking into materials far too advanced for her level, have apparently had fights with other servants, you’ve done nothing but cost me face from the moment I put my name on the line to bring you here. I thought maybe, just maybe, you’d be willing to listen, to accept that you have potential but that things take time. Instead, you’ve disrupted everything in a mad rush for power the likes of which get whoever is involved killed.”

She lets the silence fester. Then, raising an arm clad in manacles, she just… waves at the door down the hall. “Feel free,” she snarls, “to leave.”

There’s a moment where she can see another direction. How he might have decided to stay, if she’d said something different. A big part of her, a nasty part that wants to kick his fucking face in for acting like this, for being so fucking pretentious, tells her it’s a lie, that it’s idle naivety to believe that anyone would help right now. But… he’s here. He didn’t need to be, not properly; he might have brought her into the sect, given her her servant status, but for his defense here all he’d need to do was say “I don’t know” or “it was beneath my notice”. Some loss of face, but a lot less trouble than getting directly involved. 

 But he came here, to “understand what happened”.

So maybe it could have been something else.

But it’s already been said. And despite herself, despite the part that reminds her that not everything needs to be a fight, a part which has gotten much stronger since her broken cultivation, she can’t help but glare at him with as much heat as she can muster.

He doesn’t even give her a shake of the head, or a sigh. He just stands, formally, and leaves without another word.

And she waits in the dark, on the cold stone, arm weighed down by manacles meant for two wrists and legs shackled together, waiting for judgment.

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Like fucking everything cultivation related, it takes days. They don’t feed her for the first three, and she’s not sure if it’s a punishment, a precaution, or if the guards just… forgot they needed to do that. The walls hold enough condensation to lick the humidity off them. 

Vibrant, horrifyingly green eyes haunt her in fevered, hungry dreams, speaking only one word; “Worm.”

Eventually someone opens the door, the stone room they have her in opening soundlessly to the outside world. A single cultivator stands before her, eyes numb, like he doesn’t even see she’s there.

The smell of him is loud enough to hurt.

He picks her up, walking her forward at a pace that has her leg screaming in pain and her spine aching. They pass other chambers, each one another cube of perfect stone, each one with a door of heavy material festooned with enchantments and arrays, dull but smelling of alchemy and clear fluid. She hears moans from some of them as she passes, and one is leaking something dark and thick through the bottom of it.

The cultivator walking her forward doesn’t so much as glance at the other cells as they pass. He just keeps pushing her forward, one hand on her back to force her to keep pace.

They walk for almost twenty minutes. Down a half-dozen hallways of similar cells, more than half of them full. Up several flights of stairs before they reach a platform, which lifts them past several more floors.

So many of the rooms are full.

She’s gotten skinnier. Her body hurts.

It hurts less than it should, for how starved she’s been, and how hard she’s being pushed. The time alone has left her with nothing to do but think and feel and practice.

Fuck, she misses cultivation trances. They’re just not the same when one is stuck in a body like hers, to the point she’s starting to think that the trance might be an actual biological thing, like a connection to the brain letting one slip into better states of cultivation.

And then the platform halts, and she is standing in a massive room. Before she can get a proper look, she’s walked forward roughly, and then forced to kneel.

She lands on her knees, ignoring the agony in one of them, still in her dirty servant’s robes and the over-heavy manacles, before three figures that stink of power.

She doesn’t know them, not by face or wardrobe, but it’s not hard to tell they’re probably the elders. The entourage behind each of them is proof enough- lesser servants and even some cultivators in Disciple robes, watching the proceedings, taking notes or ready to serve in some other way.

One of the elders she recognizes, sitting on the left of the upraised semicircle of ornate desks and dias-es around her; she only got a glimpse of her, but the smell of incense and magma is plenty clear in the air, stretching from a slight, extraordinarily pale woman. Her skin is tainted slightly blue and her pupils are enlarged towards the edges of her eyes, like a bird of prey, with hair long and golden. She’s dressed in robes of pure white silk, seam and hem decorated and gilded with perfectly precise black letters and phrases, and they seem to shift under unseen currents. She doesn’t recognize what’s written, or what languages most of the lines are in, but this is the woman who stopped her, and thus the leader of the research division.

On the right side sits an older but masculine figure, body covered in almost as many scars as Raika. His arms are completely exposed, and he’s wearing nothing but what look like simple healer’s robes, colored white and red, beneath a long jacket made of interlaced red scales like those of a dragon. His beard is clipped and sharp, almost angular, but the pure white of his hair highlights rich dark skin and bright brown eyes. The elder of the medical pavilion, if she had to guess; she never ran into the man in question before, but it seems a solid bet, and he smells like a cleansing flame mixed with a sharpened welder’s torch.

Finally, opposite her, on yet another upraised dais and desk in the ornate red-and-purple decorated room of harsh, cold stone pillars and flooring, is an elder who looks borderline decrepit. If they were once human it seems unlikely; their body is shriveled like a dried raisin, any semblance of facial features replaced by cavernous wrinkles, the only exception being two eyes sculpted of what looks like red jade implanted in what must be empty sockets. They alone look dressed to match the room, with an ornate red-purple sash with intricately gilded scenes of all sorts of crimes, with voluminous and gaudy robes covering their form in layers of ceremonial garb. Unlike the others however, there’s a simple pendant around his neck, made entirely of imperial golden jade and pale white marble.. They smell of… of this room. Of a gavel. Of dark, cold iron and flame hot enough to purify sins.

They don’t introduce themselves to her. She doesn’t say anything to them. Instead, Shiru Hei, head of research division, elder and terrifying power in her own right just asks; “How did you do it?”

She almost laughs. Stops herself at the last moment. Delirium is no excuse for getting herself murdered outright.

Raika… doesn’t see much point in lying here. She has nothing to lie about, really, tons of eyewitnesses, and no real hidden trap cards of allies she knows of. So she decides to just… tell the truth.

“I used to be a cultivator,” she replies. “I fought more than my fair share of fights, and won more than others tended to. The outer sect disciple was… truly not a very good fighter.”

“Explain,” Shiru Hei commands, her words making the banners all around them tremble. Once again, Raika is glad for her relative Qi-blindness, even as she feels a strange queasiness and the smell intensifying. 

“He telegraphed every move,” Raika obediently explains. “Huge swings, wasted effort, terrible footwork and spatial awareness, all before the fact that he underestimated me from the beginning.”

“Lu Feren is not our greatest disciple,” rumbles a voice like a rockslide from the figure on her right, “but he is still in the middle tiers of the Foundational realm, while you are below even the Qi-Gathering realm. How were you able to even see his attacks?”

She shrugs, very unprofessionally. “I just could,” she answers, again being as honest as she can. “I couldn’t move faster than him, but I can move fast if I have to, and he moved very, very stupidly.”

“Do you know where you stand, worm?” Shiru Hei asks. Somehow, she makes “worm” a statement of fact and not an insult- which makes it all the more insulting. “Were you raised without manners? A wild wyrmling, a cultivator grown amidst dirt and trees, beyond the Emperor’s touch?”

Raika… shrugs again. She’s been doing that a lot lately. “Less that I have no manners, honored elder, and more that I do not know what purpose they might serve here. All of you possess power far beyond anything I had before I was made into what I am, and know it better than I can say here, and I can only imagine that you have already chosen my fate. The moment that- Lu Feren, was it?- chose to walk back into the kitchen and demand my death for being in the same room as his food was made, I figured I’d need to kill him and escape to survive. I have accomplished neither, so you’re likely to kill me. I’ll fight back however I can, tooth and claw,, but I don’t believe politeness is much of a gift to my arsenal here.”

“Ha!” roars the medical pavilion elder. “The audacity of this one! At least you do not fear death; it would be a pity to put in all this work and have this thing not know any bravery. Shiru, can I keep it?”

She stares daggers at him. “That is not for us to decide, honored brother Ren. It is up to the Judgment of the Flame to determine what is to be done with the worm. The Law must have its say- sect law has been broken, and we have been disrespected.”

Ah. Even worse; she’s not dealing with capricious little godlings, she’s dealing with capricious, curious godlings and a bureaucrat. Infinitely worse, truly.

“For a member of the research pavilion, you’re never any fun,” the elder, apparently just called Ren, says. “No sense of adventure. This mortal apparently would have killed a cultivator that has at least survived the beasts of the tamed wilds. I’m sure there’s more we can learn here.”

“And the rumors of your new favorite plaything’s ritual has nothing to do with this?” Shiru Hei asks, eyebrow cocked. 

“Of course it does!” Elder Ren retorts. “For all we know, this one’s a medical marvel! At the very least it would be a waste to cremate it wholesale when there’s a good dissection to be had. Medical progress and research are brothers in arms, after all!”

“And yet here I must deal with you yet again,” Shiru Hei sighs. “You. Worm. Did the healer called Li Shu do anything to alter your body somehow?”

“Not really,” Raika replies. “That was mostly all me. Had an idea I wanted to try out. She just made sure I didn’t die when she found me.”

Not technically a lie. Not technically a lie. Focus on that. No telling what they’ll do to Li Shu if they decide that she’s at fault for creating a forbidden technique, or put responsibility on her for this. It’s Raika’s idea. Li Shu’s the genius that made it work. She’s not responsible. She focuses on that.

“Yes, we examined the ritual to the best of her recollections,” Elder Ren sighs, like rocks grinding together. “Seems more like a curse than an enhancement, if you ask me. Totally blocks off outside Qi and all Qi release without damaging the skin! I can picture some idiot on the battlefield stepping on the wrong patch of ground and discovering the only way to vent or recharge their Qi is to rip off all their skin and run like mad out of the circle. And yet, both the illustrious Qen Hou and the nascent talent of Li Shu seem about ready to plant their futures on the foundation that you were somehow improved by the ritual.”

“A little,” Raika admits. “Not much. Helped me modify my Qi a bit, what little is left; it is mostly trapped inside me now, and I pulled in enough for Qi deviation. Then, I survived anyways. Now it’s stuck with me.”

“And this is some sort of… defense against Qi techniques? Against pressure and killing intent?” Shiru Hei asks, leaning forward a bit.

“Maybe,” Raika admits. “If the defender is ok with being unable to absorb Qi through their skin or meridians for possibly the rest of their lives, you might be able to see it that way.”

“And you claim you invented this?” Shiru Hei asks.

“Yes,” she replies, in full honesty this time.

A pregnant pause fills the silence, and then… a sigh. “What a pity, then,” Elder Shiru Hei mumbles. “I applaud you for using that spark of creativity before you passed from this world, Raika,” she hums. “I’m sure it will contribute in some small way to the research division’s direction. In the end, though, you did attack one of our outer disciples, and even with his expelling from our sect, there’s simply no reason to allow a thing like you to continue to sully our sect and make us lose face.” 

The “I’m sure you understand” is implied, and unspoken, and bullshit either way.

Raika just nods. “How are you gonna do it?” she asks.

Shiru Hei doesn’t acknowledge her words- in fact, she’s already turned away, her gaze disinterested as some of her servants bring forth a fresh set of papers to put in front of her. She sighs, adopting an air of more casual ambivalence as the more “official” proceedings wrap up. “Ren, you want to do the honors? You mentioned a dissection, right? Try to keep the mess in your storage, I’m not helping you clean this time and you’re making your disciples nervous with all the blood splatter lately.”

“Alright, alright, always so picky,” Elder Ren huffs, eyes beginning to glow a disturbing, dark violet sort of color. The smell of a purifying flame wielded by a will for construction fills the room (yeah, those are definitely getting more abstract), and she braces herself. He rises from the chair he’s been sitting in and Raika tenses, tries to get one leg under her, tries to prepare to move-

And the sound of a gavel hitting wood rings in the room.

Immediately the elders are silent, their gazes turned inhumanly fast and impossibly still, to face the previously silent member of the trial.

A face so ancient that the wrinkles move like waves as it opens its mouth. It hisses, like an exhale from a chest too tired to really speak or a tongue too dry to use, but the words come to Raika like lances, like something sharp and hot and bright and stabbed into her memory of this moment, forever.

“Trial by combat,” it brands into the minds of those present. “To death or defeat.”

The next thing she has the presence of mind to notice is the ongoing screaming match being directed between the elders, towards the withered old thing which spoke without words and burned into mind and thought and will. 

Her whole body shudders in a moment of relief.

And then she buries it down, and grins, shark-like and hungry, at the idea of going down swinging.