Book One, Chapter 18 - New Year, Who Dis

Gaaah. It's so laaaaate. Glad I got two edited today but man this takes more time than I expected, literally every single time. Labor is labor.

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Six Months Later

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Strike.

Inhale. Exhale. 

Strike.

Inhale. Exhale.

Strike.

“Um… ma’am? Miss…?”

She turns and smiles politely at the poor little cook she’s requisitioned, turning her body away from where she was almost leaning against the wall. He blanches, and she commits herself to work on her polite expressions more.

“Yes?”

“Your… meals, ma’am…”

She takes the tall stack of dumplings by the string tied around their steamers, and gives a perfectly polite nod.

“Thank you.”

“You are… very welcome goodbye.”

And just like that, he’s gone back into the kitchens.

Raika inhales, long and slow, and lets the air out of her lungs for another ten breaths after.

She turns away from the indented doorframe she was practicing on, turning to walk slowly back towards the medical pavilion.

She gets to hold the dumplings with her stump as she goes, because of course no one else could be spared for this fucking job.

She still needs a cane to walk! And can’t put weight on one leg! And has only one goddamn hand! There’s like a million other uppity new servants half her age (adolescents. Ugh.) desperate to suck up in whatever way best pleases their “betters”, they should get one of them to run out in the summer heat for dumplings. Well. Summer warmth. Paleblossom is still a winter city, after all.

The kitchens feel like they’re halfway across the sect campus on a good day: by the time she gets there and back, the food is guaranteed to be cold, soggy, or some mix of both. The point is to keep her away, probably, but still, it’s just bad form, and a damn waste of food.

Still, she’s happy that she can get it back before it goes stale. In the time she’s been here, her work with Dink, ever a loyal partner, has enabled her to walk the length of the sect without needing to stop. It’s still a trek of hours; a good half-day in a straight line, honestly, which would take someone with two working legs maybe… two? Improvements nonetheless. Paleblossom isn’t that big a city, no matter how much attention that attack called onto it, or the number of imperial soldiers that flooded in not long after. Ergo, its sects aren’t exactly huge, sprawling things either. Her sect wasn’t much bigger; he Sect of Hungering Roots wasn’t exactly world-renowned, to say the least. Some sects, some that she’s even visited in her travels, are cities in and of themselves, towering on plateaus hundreds of feet above the ground, like elevated islands floating on an invisible sea above the world below.

Still, she hears the sect master of the Purple Flame something-something is on the cusp of the Divergent Paths, so who knows. Maybe someday soon it’ll take her whole days to walk from kitchens to the medical hall instead of a meager hour there and back.

She stops at one of the servant’s entrances to the pavilion, avoiding looking at the curvature of it above her. A massive dome of bright red, tinged with white and purple, decorated with dozens of additional buildings for lodgings, classrooms and treatment centers. She rests her head beside the doorway she’s permitted to use, a small portal of locked inscriptions and simple carpentry.

Inhale. Exhale.

Strike.

A single punch, delivered from mere inches away from the surface.

Just one. She was slow on the way back.

Still, she notes the way that her knuckles no longer bleed or break against the enchanted exterior.

Sighing, she unlocks the door and slips inside, slipping the shifting key back into her a pocket of her robes. Like any good medical pavilion, there are plenty of clear and open entryways to the outside, but any place that deals with resources needs a few spots for pure logistical support. In this case, the logistical support comes in the form of soggy dumplings, carried by someone who has no business walking so much and wasting so much food, damnit.

Raika adjusts her scarf, making sure it’s up to her nose. The more visible the scars on her face are, the more likely it is that they’ll send her off to deal with some random crap, and she could do without the hassle. They seem more uncomfortable with her physical defects than she expected, though there’s plenty of disgust for her state as someone without Qi as well. Frankly, she thinks it’s their own inadequacies at play; just about every healing technique she’s found in this place, or had explained to her, involves spiritual organs or Qi-infused reagents in some way. The few that don’t are for simple ailments, not in-depth reconstructive care. Now while this isn’t technically idiotic, since literally everything at all possesses Qi, and the chances of not having meridians and still being alive are miniscule, it’s still so… limited. Outside of medicinal elixirs (which can’t exceed a certain threshold lest they poison a Qi-deprived body), they have almost nothing to manipulate Qi in a body that can’t contribute to the process.

Seems like an oversight, honestly. Or maybe they’ve just never felt there was enough motivation to look into it.

But the background knowledge? Now that’s been interesting. 

Most of the past few months have consisted of ferrying books, sterilizing equipment, going for food, and other general menial and unenviable tasks. She’s gotten good enough at the mind-numbing work to sneak a few books in here and there, especially when people want her somewhere out of the way. It’s hard to read past all the technical lingo, and she was never the best at her letters, but the pictures alone make the exercise worth it. Who knew a body had quite so many veins? Or that a nervous system (fun name, that) was so intricate.

Qen Hou kept to his word, at least; things are better here. Better food, better clothing, and an actual room: four walls, a bed, a small desk. She even got some kind of special accommodation, or Li Shu did, at least. She’s at the very furthest edge of the servant’s quarters for the pavilion, closest to Li Shu’s room so as to act as her official aide. Even without that, it’s a marked improvement over her old alcove and literal hole-in-the-wall. It’s not even the most notable change, either. The smells of everyone’s Qi comes across much louder in the sect (which had her sneezing for days when she first arrived), and when she has time to focus on the vibrations and flow of her body, she’s noticed a much sharper tingling sensation. She did end up shitting blood from the intensity, once or twice, but that’s just the cost of doing business. She’s pioneering a whole new concept in the pursuit of ascension, here; what’s some potentially lethal internal damage gonna do? Dissuade her? Fat chance.

She unceremoniously dumps the tall box of dumplings at the nearest clean table she can find, a small surface meant for tea or something similarly useful, which has instead been overtaken by stacks of books. It, like every other table in this part of the pavilion, is surrounded on all sides by massive, sprawling surfaces of wood, most of them completely covered in ink stains, medical texts being written or read, and more than a few stray scalpels (a lot of the researchers use them to sharpen charcoal for detail-work). Only the presence of dozens of young-faced figures clad in the pavilion’s white, red and purple colors keeps it from seeming like some abandoned archive.

“Soup’s on, honored cultivator’s,” she says, her rasp replaced by something deep and hoarse but recognizably human. “Enjoy it while it’s wet.”

“Wouldn’t be wet if you didn’t take so long,” grumbles one of the medical students. Shi Qou, probably; he likes to complain. She glares daggers at him and, resting her cane on the table, gestures at her… everything.

“Perhaps if an honored cultivator wished for faster dumplings, he should find the wisdom not to send cripples out in the heat, or perhaps gain the insight needed to make firm the lame and cane-ridden,” she says, voice (by her standards) saccharine sweet. “If an honored cultivator finds these things only just free from their reach, then perhaps they can simply enjoy their dumplings and refrain from disturbing such a lovely afternoon.”

There are some chuckles around the room, and Shi Qou blushes just a bit, rolling his eyes and making his way over to, indeed, enjoy his damn dumplings. More than a few others follow, grabbing one or two buns apiece before migrating back to their papery dens. From the bags under some of their eyes, she is pretty sure they’ve been awake for a few days on end, something tough enough to wear down even cultivators. Sure, cultivators can use Qi to alleviate fatigue, and generally experience less as they progress, but mental fatigue still accumulates over time; going without sleep isn’t harmful for longer, but it does have an effect.

Well, she admires the dedication, even if it seems a bit excessive.

As she walks away, she marvels once again at what they let her get away with. Having no cultivation whatsoever and performing every task assigned (if rather slowly), she’s become a non-threat, just barely above a non-entity. It’s done wonders for her wit; before, she had to watch everything she said, lest she be struck, censured, or just left out when dividing rewards or supplies to sect disciples. Here, she doesn’t get any meaningful supplies anyways, and who would honor duel a cripple? She does miss the duels, admittedly; an insult so bad your opponent has no choice but to fight you or cry themselves to sleep is one of the best parts of life. Still, it’s nice to be able to joke and poke fun at herself and others without it being a life or death struggle.

She’s got plenty of those to keep her hands full as is.

She Dinks quietly as she walks. She keeps the rhythm constant, providing a meditative background to anyone listening (and they’re all cultivators, so everybody is listening, all the fucking time), alternating between her hip, sternum, and forehead, making sure to feel out the aches each impact riles up. The sensation of the impact traveling through her is at this point comforting, an old, annoying friend keeping pace with her as she walks, in time with her heartbeat and the aches of her body.

And the parts that no longer ache.

It’s been slow going, but Li Shu really did make her a pet project. The girl seems genuinely convinced that she can somehow repair at least Raika’s body, if not her meridians and dantian, and considering the evidence, they’re succeeding. 

Currently, there are no channels for Qi to move through and connect to her biology. Thus the act of medicinal Qi manipulation, a process used to generate specific patterns of Qi movements to connect to damaged portions of a body in a specific way, are less than useless. There’s nowhere to make said patterns, and no spiritual organs to process them the “proper” way, and any amount of Qi of a high enough density will just poison and kill her as her body rejects it. In short; to heal Raika the classical cultivator way, one would have to either use a powerful Dao, an embodied and empowered concept, or, somehow, perfectly recreate all of the hundreds of millions of effects that the dispersed Qi and medicines placed in the meridians would normally accomplish while avoiding Qi deviation while directing those effects to the damaged sections. Not exactly easy.

Which, Raika and Li Shu both agree, is not the same as impossible.

Li Shu actually has healed some of the biological damage, though. The big breakthrough there came from a minor technique, one she found in a more obscure text designed around plants. 

Using medicinal Qi and meridians is basically following a “blueprint” of an ideal self and using Qi to convince reality it’s currently more real than any other version. Without that “ontological blueprint”, Qi healing wouldn’t do much, and since most plants usually don’t have meridians but can heal from most anything, the writer of the manual came up with an idea; by re-damaging the damaged area, then stimulating them with small puffs of ambient Qi that the plants feed on, one can re-start the healing process in the hopes of doing it better the second time. It’s not an infinitely applicable thing, particularly gruesome or dangerous on a more complex organism, and obviously carries the risks that come with damaging something in an already broken area over and over.

Still, Li Shu is a prodigy without peer and definitely the best medical genius around, so Raika thinks she’s onto something. Enough, at least, that she’s been willing to volunteer to go under the knife more than once.

It’s not every day you get a chance to get a pretty lady all up in your insides; it would be foolish not to treasure the opportunity.

As it is, scar tissue doesn’t seem to re-heal as desired, and only minimal ambient Qi can be used, but her knee has almost twice the mobility it used to have, and Raika kept a lot of the bone chips and poorly grown tendons as dried ingredients she wears in a little bottle. Still can’t put much weight on the damn thing, but it at least bends to almost half as far as it used to. Makes it much easier to lie down or sit as needed.

For this alone, she’d owe Li Shu, never mind the new accommodations. Then again, she is basically letting herself be used as a medical dummy, no matter how obsessively Li Shu checks her notes, or promises to be gentle, or takes only the tiniest risks, or confers with Raika before every little thing.

If this is what being a medical marvel means, well… she’s had worse relationships. And the girl really is adorable.

She knows it’s not going to lead anywhere familiar. Even if she didn’t have a face half-missing and a body all mangled up, Li Shu is… well, a little young. Raika’s never asked, but maybe somewhere around two decades? A bit less? Nevermind the lack of that particular kind of chemistry. She’s lucky that the young healer has the kindness to still see her as a person, rather than a servant or a thing, but their relationship remains one of friends second, doctor and subject first. 

And beyond any of those factors, there’s still the… state she’s in. From twisted spine, to missing pieces of her face, to her more recent collection of burns and criss-crossing white patterns of razor blade scars, she’s… rugged. And all that’s before you even factor in the entire missing arm, or the fact one leg is half misshapen and useless. She was never “girly”, never wanted to be, but who out there is genuinely free of any desire to be attractive, to be looked at and not have someone look away? 

Li Shu, despite everything, tends to look away when Raika’s scarf is lowered.

It might be getting to her more than she’s letting herself think.

Dink, agrees the tiny metallic traitor. 

“Oh, well, any more profound insights you’d like to share, ya little shit?”

 Dink, it goes, very noticeably not saying anything this time, like a wuss.

Still, it’s good to have a partner, someone to help. And someone to cover for her when she steps out to the lower city. Carrying supplies down to Rui Ka’s clinic on behalf of Li Shu and bringing back little things on request has given her just enough freedom to take time, on occasion, to visit Paleblossom proper. She never gets more than a few hours at a time, but it’s nice, being away from the sect, getting to see her would-be apprentice. Yeah, he’s an idiot and a little shit, but damn if she doesn’t miss him. Frankly, his cultivation is coming along well enough that she’s starting to think maybe he’ll get poached by one of the other sects if he gets noticed. Middle Qi-Gathering realm at… whatever his age is isn’t something to sneeze at, especially without special resources.

She’ll have to make sure she can keep helping him.

So it is that when she enters her room to the sight of Li Shu looking stressed, anxious near the verge of tears, and standing in front of a design drawn in chalk that is half medical diagram and half Qi formation, she doesn’t panic.

“Greetings, Honored healer,” she says with a bow. “How goes this particular radical misuse of healing pavilion materials? Coming along well?”