Book One, Chapter 20 - It Matters Not How Strait the Gate, How Charged with Punishments the Scroll

Wow! This chapter is under 2,000 words, but it feels... still right like this! Is nice. Some reworkings to fit a) time shenanigans and b) updated lore and understanding of characters! I'm considering some other changes to earlier chapters, but I gotta be careful- I'm already at 120k words for book 1, and ideally I want less, lol.

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Fucking flesh cultivators. If not for the Divisions, they’d have been wiped out millenia ago. No, I don’t care how fucking useful they are, it’s disgusting. It’s downright demonic, borderline Daemonic, and to just call it unorthodox is stupid. To call anything that the main governing body wields unorthodox is stupid. They treat them like it’s normal. I hear in the second ring they swap parts and change themselves just for fun. It’s disgusting. Fucking fleshies. What’s wrong with just being what you are?

-Last recorded public statement made by Fu Gao of the Shivering Rifts sect before his defeat and subsequent rearrangement in an honor duel.

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It takes another two weeks before Li Shu is finally convinced that everything is as it should be, that they’ve created the optimal circumstances in which this might be enacted. The time passes as it always has- cleaning, organizing, and caretaking of weird and dangerous places and people, all while avoiding notice from anyone important. The sect is massive, and just the medical pavilion is a campus in and of itself. Her crippling and position as a direct servant to a trial healer, not even a true sect member, makes her less than invisible, and she takes advantage to avoid other servants and cultivators both. She does “appropriate” a few additional medical texts in her time, but only the ones freely available to all sect members, the ones not likely to get Li Shu executed for having.

Qen Hou comes by, twice, to check in on Li Shu and her cultivation. In spite of his “helpfulness”, she’s more on guard against him than ever; besides the experiment, there’s the fact that he’s Li Shu’s sponsor, a fact that ties his face and merits to her success as a healer and, potentially, an actual member of the sect beyond her probation. Plus, he sometimes just… stares at Raika. Like he’s confused about something.

But eventually, Li Shu, having stolen enough hours and sleepless nights to keep ahead of her workload and edit Raika’s ideas for the procedure, finally decides that they’re ready.

So it is that Raika gets to strip nude in front of a pretty lady for the first time in over a year. If not for the pain and the context, it would almost be more funny than embarrassing.

Slowly, Li Shu starts to carve the runes, using a small scalpel and tattoo-needle to poke into her flesh until the requisite patterns of blood appear. Next, a series of acupuncture needles, treated in a series of stimulants, anti-coagulants, and more esoteric alchemy are inserted into key points, locking her muscles into place and her organs into receptive states. It’s a bit different to the original idea; they’ve added some revisions, creating a sequence rather than a singular cascade, and hopefully guiding the energy to different organ-groups rather than letting it move unimpeded.

Finally, the finishing touches. Two pills of Deepened Breath and one of Water Breathing, eaten thirty minutes before to allow for mortal digestion. Blackened Seeds and a Black Volt berry, to keep electricity twitching through her muscles and her heart beating, pumping blood as needed. Enough Inner Heat bulbs that she feels her body running an agonizing fever. Last but not least, Inner Moon mushrooms; small, dried, not enough to properly trip balls, but enough to, one hopes, “view the inner world and enact one’s will upon it”.

And then, skyclad, armed with only Dink, she lays herself onto the floor. The chamber around them, a room set aside for cultivation in Li Shu’s housing, is made of cold stone, and she shivers as the cold is fought back by her fever.

She takes a breath.

Inhale. Exhale.

And then, with a single, final Dink against her chest, just to feel the trembling in her flesh one last time, she crosses her arms over her chest, imagines holding that vibration as tightly as she can in her heart, and closes her eyes.

She doesn’t feel it when Li Shu completes the diagram, or places the final needles to open her fully to the energy in the room. The fever, the disorientation, the way her body feels wrong overwhelms everything, leaving it just… quiet.

She starts counting.

One minute. Two.

Ten minutes.

Fifteen.

Thirty minutes, and she should have felt something by now. Anything. At least the damn shrooms.

She opens her eyes, and sees only darkness.

Oh. Fair enough.

Not perfect dark. It’s kind of… pink. A very fleshy sort of color, weirdly flickering, like there’s light right on the other side.

She turns her head, trying to look around, but she can’t feel the movement, even as her eyes move. She does manage to look behind her, and there, again, is that same darkness, though this time the light seems to be coming from behind her, not in front, the darkness there deeper and more red.

She tries to go forward and finds herself doing so, disembodied as she “moves”. She can feel herself glide formlessly forward, slipping through and following the pathways of curves of what can only be muscle and hallways of white ivory. She finds a strange bubble, like a weird lake of grey, suspended in a sea of red and clear ooze. She finds a strange thing that squirms and squirts and seems like it’s trying to talk but keeps choking on that red liquid, going “blup-squelch, blup-squelch”, over and over. She finds a long, winding hallway, wrapped around itself endlessly. She finds twists and points in the ivory walkways where there are jagged edges, cracks in the material and strange bends that don’t seem right. She wanders about for… she’s not sure how long, until she finds another wall that seems bright, only to find herself unable to push past it. 

It’s not a true trance. Not familiar. The Inner Moon mushrooms nonetheless make it feel entirely normal, dissolving confusion and concern away under whatever emotions the phases of the moon aligned them to. In this case, focus and calm.

She turns to go back the way she came, and comes face to face with someone else in here.

In the dark, with the red and the quiet and the absence of fear, she faces something that has been following her.

It does not look like her. It doesn’t even look like she used to look when she was whole. In the dark of blood and bone, it’s barely visible, more a hint of something than a real shape. A shadow in a world of shadow and glistening meat, sharp and half-hidden, and if not for how close it was to catching  up to her is she able to see it.

That and its eye. 

It is not carved like an eye. It looks like a cube and a snowflake somehow fused together in shape, a cold, pale fractal, but it is where an eye would be in a human head, and it is looking at her, and it is cold.

It tastes like marble and sharp cuts and quiet.

For a moment, she remembers an eye in the sky, behind a thing that is not a moon, which was Nothing and which saw her.

Are you hungry? it asks, in a voice that is not a voice.

Yes, Raika replies, in a voice that is a voice but is not.

Do you wish to sup on flesh and home, until the hearth is cold, and the void is satisfied?

She frowns at that, faceless and without form. No, she says. The void is never satisfied. It is the void.

You are never satisfied.

I would not be satisfied with the void, she retorts.

The shadow shivers in the dark. It is closer than before, and sharper.

Do you wish to be the greatest of them all? It asks, eye gleaming whiter than snow.

Yes.

Do you wish to unmake what your hands can reach?

Raika frowns again. Well that’s just vague.

Another shiver. Or a… flicker. Like flame bending behind a shape, making the shadow misshapen.

Do you wish to know the Truth? Perfect and infinite and Final?

What truth? She asks. 

The shadow grows, its eye brighter than light, its contours darker than nothingness. 

Past life. Past time. Past death. Past meaning. There is a greater End, and it is Forever and All and Always.

ALL THINGS END.

The red is gone. That other light is gone. There is only the dark and that pale thing at its heart, looking out at everything that belongs to it.

Raika scoffs. Well duh.

This time, the eye actually blinks. A true flicker, there-and-not.

It is the Truth.

Not the whole truth, she replies.

It moves forward, its presence overwhelming the sense of the meat around her, of the faint heat thrumming through her, of the distant ringing sound of a tuning fork and a tingling sensation that may be agony, each more notable by their sudden absence.

IT IS THE TRUTH, the wisp of greater majesty proclaims, its words absolute, reverberating in perfect silence.

It is your Truth, Raika says, refusing to move backwards in this not-space. It is the truth from which you come, the Truth which I glimpsed, but it is not the Truth. Things end, but that’s not all. If something is impossible, it is my privilege to make it possible. If I am told I must die, it is my joy to live as long as I choose, even if that be forever. If I am told that at the end of all things is defeat, the end of all things can beg from between teeth. Fuck you and the weird rock you rode in on. 

It rears back, or perhaps just diminishes, as she accepts and undoes it. It’s more than a denial, except there can be no denial. It is, this is, reality is, it ENDS, and this meaningless speck will / must / cannot not understand its place beneath Truth and-

Raika snarls, every iota of her consciousness in this timeless moment standing completely together. She is the cripple, and the wide-eyed child, and the warrior, and the madwoman, and she stares at this thing, and she finds a Truth all her own.

I Am Me, she snarls, her thoughts a roar of fire and churning flesh and gnashing blades and whirling eyes and hungry mouths and screaming stars and crying oceans, reaching through time and space out of all she is, And I Am Mine.

And the wisp is something tiny, something miniscule, barely a fucking opinion, and she is, for a brief, eternal instant, infinite.

She bites down, and the eye cracks, and shatters, and is shifted to fit in her jaw, fitting the shape of a tooth. A back molar, to be precise, loud and cold against the scar tissue of her half-ruined face.

And then Raika is screaming, because she is awake and her skin is on fire and everything hurts and she can feel her gods-damned heartbeat screaming right next to her own voice, and then she is laughing, because she is alive, and all she feels, for a moment, is victory so fucking glorious it makes ambrosia taste like cheap beer, and she can feel, more than ever before, that something is different.

Raika opens her eyes, locking onto two startled sets in the room, and laughs harder than she’s laughed in years.