Chapter 367 - As Horror Looks Out From Behind Your Eyes~ Full Of Wicked Desiiigns~

Me: "Aw man, I gotta keep adding to this, it's so much smaller than my usual!"

Also Me: looks at that juicy 2500 word count.

"Hmm. yeah nevermind, perfectionism go fuck yourself. "

Someday I'll start writing 5k word chapters, but for now, I think 2.5-3 is pretty well above average as is, and feels right more often than not, lol. Back again! And I'll be back some more tomorrow! And the day after! Ya bitch is grooving, and whether it's working on my editing, side projects, or my main productions, this week has been productive, even if it's meant slower new releases. Enjoy, babes! I love y'all, and am ever so grateful you're here with me on the journey.!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Me: "Aw man, I gotta keep adding to this, it's so much smaller than my usual!"

Also Me: looks at that juicy 2500 word count.

"Hmm. yeah nevermind, perfectionism go fuck yourself. "

Someday I'll start writing 5k word chapters, but for now, I think 2.5-3 is pretty well above average as is, and feels right more often than not, lol. Back again! And I'll be back some more tomorrow! And the day after! Ya bitch is grooving, and whether it's working on my editing, side projects, or my main productions, this week has been productive, even if it's meant slower new releases. Enjoy, babes! I love y'all, and am ever so grateful you're here with me on the journey.!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CITY ORDINANCE 211567

MCS 45326, SUBSECTION 13

ALL PERSONS HAVING EXPIRED OF LIFE, HAVING BEING DRAINED OF VITAL ANIMUS, OR NO LONGER POSSESSING A FUNCTIONAL SOUL MAY NOT

1. BEG

2. LOITER IN FRONT OF PLACES OF BUSINESS

3. ENGAGE IN DISRUPTIVE DEMONSTRATIONS WITHOUT A PERMIT

4. TRAVEL BEYOND THEIR CURRENT DISTRICT WITHOUT PROPER AUTHORIZATION

5. USE ONE’S OWN BODY PARTS TO CAUSE UNREST, DISRUPTION, STARTLE CITIZENS, OR ENGAGE IN UNPRODUCTIVE TOMFOOLERY

—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cooking is a lot more difficult nowadays. Comes with the territory of not having as much of a sense of smell, touch, taste, and… well, all the rest. She’s still able to sense Qi in things, sure, but that was always something tactile, biologically sourced, and it’s as muffled as the rest of her perception of the world outside its many Deaths. 

But it’s important. It matters. Raika hasn’t had nearly as much of an opportunity to practice it the last few months, considering the lack of easily-sourced ingredients from herself and the complexities of the ongoing situations, but she knows it’s fucking crucial. We Are What We Eat, after all- and even without that Truth, the times she’s spent doing something, anything other than preparing and building and planning and suffering for the future feels valuable to her.

She started cooking in earnest back in her cabin. All the way back in the third ring, when she spent those months in recovery after the events of Cragend. Making things for people, things she was uniquely suited to make, was… it felt different. Having people around the dinner table, listening to the banter, being part of a space… it mattered.

So she’s learned to make do with what she has.

Careful to place the two Gu jars she carries off to one side, securely, she makes her way to one of the pantries in the kitchen, pulling apart some of the seals she’s carved for preservation and sealing from the wood. It’s good practice, but more importantly, getting it wrong helped her to practice some of her understanding of Death.

Rot is just hungry decomposition, and rotting wheat is tasty tasty yeast. Turns out, a failed preservation seal can sometimes be just the thing some travel rations need to start fermenting a tiny bit, promoting a little new life.

Death is life, in that way. One only happens because of the other. And sometimes, both are pretty damn tasty.

Flour and water and eggs weren’t easy to find, but apparently there’s still some trade between places in the Fallen Kingdom, and Raika knows that at least the city of Viviae has living people in it still. Apparently, they’re plenty willing to send supplies for the Blessed Mortal, still not-a-corpse as he is, and she was more than happy to take advantage. 

The eggs crack, their yolks falling into the flour and quickly whisking together. From the death of the egg’s structural integrity, she tastes delicate shells, surrounding thin and luxurious membranes, holding precious possibilities that are-not. Another Death of a kind- an absence of a thing that might have been. She mixes these feelings into the forming dough, shaping it and then setting it aside for it to rise. 

With the time that takes, seeing as she has another body to handle getting the rest of her shit stored and organized, she spends her energies preparing the other ingredients. Sprigs of greenery grown in pots of Li Shu’s pale wood are carefully carved, their roots and stems kept intact as she takes sprigs, leaves, flowers and fruiting things whose names are only somewhat familiar and moves through them by feel. A sharp, stinging nettle of a life becomes a crackling spice in Death. A colorful, bright little stalk fades as she crushes it into powder, until gradually the colors turn and twist deeper into new shades, which compliment the spectrum she “senses” with the seeds she crushes and mixes in. 

She sets oil on a high heat, letting the diced spices, bulbs and herbs begin to simmer within it. A few crushed nuts go in last, bringing out a fragrance even her deadened senses can still experience, and she turns back to the pantry, opening up a better sealed chamber.

She lifts out a hunk of meat bigger than her entire body combined, pulling it off its hook and laying it out on a table. With her prosthetic hand, she arcs out a slender claw, honing it with her Intent and the Daos she’s experienced; her first cut is so fine that the meat doesn’t even separate at first. 

Cut by cut, she carves the fat off, putting it into its own pan and sensing the stored energy die a Death of release, transforming into another kind of oil for her to use. Of the remaining pieces, she carefully severs chunk after chunk, shaping them into disks and thinly cut slices. Some stay on the bone, while most end up into well-carved steaks and artfully cut nuggets of meat.

By the time she’s done feeling the ways she doesn’t add to the meat’s Death, carefully preserving it again and again until it’s the way she wants it to be, the oils have started tingling to her new sense. Transformation from life into Death into inert materials and then back into a new kind of Death, infusing together in a harmonious blend of monochrome colors and flickering, crackling textures. She takes the pan off the fire, placing it to one side, and pulls the dough back together.

The rest of the steps come quickly. Knead, shape, cut into thick noodles. Cook the meat in its own fat, then use that same material with a drop of the infused oils to flavor the pan. Into that, she tosses diced root vegetables, bulbs and more nuts, fruits whose lives turn to sparkling static and preserved vitality into something she’s learned to identify as sweetness. Lastly, she places the noodles into boiling water, feeling the way that the yeast’s new life in the rot is unmade once again into a different kind of… “flavor”. 

Bones left to boil are enhanced, her grasp on Death drawing out the changes it causes until the liquid is rich and bright. The broth goes into bowls, the noodles blended in it from out of the water now they’re firm, the cooked ingredients (meat and flora alike) joining after. As a finishing touch, she takes a last few eggs, ripening their Deaths into something not-quite inert, still soft on the inside, and adds with them a few last pieces of greenery.

By the time she’s set the plates on the table, her audience has already been watching with rapt attention for a little while.

Li Shu has a soft little smile on her face, one reminiscent of a different time. That same small wonder and kindness she showed a cripple, someone she thought inherently worthy of help, mixed with the soft pains of being apart from her lovers for so long.

Jin’s look is easier to read, if only because she knows him. The kid really is good at schooling his expressions, has been since she first met him, but what was a simple survival trick has only gotten more refined with practice and masters willing to school him. Even still, she can see clear enough the way he has to focus his aura, hold it tight to himself. She can hear, her sense for Death clearer than her eardrums, the way that his cultivation’s whispers turn from cold and calculating voices to something warmer and more companionable. 

She used to cook for him every day. Food when he woke, after he trained, before he got ready to rest each night. Now he can cultivate, things are different, his physical needs reduced, but the memory of a safe place, warm food, and being cared for… 

Well. She can’t really recall an equivalent time, except vague glimpses of a few moments when she was very young. Even then, nowhere near that certain or that consistent. Still, she doesn’t need to have experienced it from his eyes to know that, to a kid with no family, who grew up sleeping on the streets and in the woods, it meant… a lot.

It’s taken practice to get it right, being unable to taste or smell or even see properly. It’s taken time she probably could have used for something a bit more practical.

Fuck that, though. She sees the way the people she cares about react, quiet or not. 

Three bowls, each larger than a human head, land on the table, piled high with ingredients of all kinds. The bones and a leftover chunk of meat, still larger than her body by a solid margin, sit on a sill to one side, where a wall used to be but which now looks to the manor’s exterior. A rimmed plate, wider than most normal tables, is placed on another end of the table, where Beetle happily hops into a wriggling plate of rich, plump maggots. 

“Well?” she asks, looking at the rest of the guests at her table. “Gonna let the bug have all the fun?”

Almost immediately the sounds of slurping noodles and crispy ingredients being eaten fills the room, expansive though the dining hall may be. Jin in particular practically inhales his food for the first few bites before he slows down, finally starting to savor things, while Li Shu eats at a constant pace, chewing every bite thoroughly.

A slight rush of air throws some wind through the room as the bones and meat on the sill vanish, echoed by the pattering of too-large, too-scaled paws. Beetle stomps happily, gnoshing on the delightfully wriggly play-pen she’s made for him, and from behind it, her first Gu wriggles in its wing-cocoon, waddling close but awaiting permission before nibbling on some of the plump little bugs in turn.  

She tastes the way each ingredient ended. How their Deaths blend together into something else, its depths as intricate as any other piece of spellcraft she’s seen here, if much less controlled. 

She can’t help it. She tries to inhale, to smell it, to taste it. 

It’s not the same. But it’s something. That… matters. 

She grins, slamming down her own bowl before any of the others with a grin. “The undefeated champion continues her unending reign! The Heavens shall crumble, the Wall shall fall, and the Beasts of the earth shall turn humble before my greatness is ever surpassed!”

Li Shu just rolls her eyes, still working her way through her bowl, but Jin gives out a sigh, setting down a bowl only a little more full than hers. “Master, it is hardly a fair competition, every time! Your mouth is like three times the size of mine. How can this lowly disciple compete with such an advantage?”

“Oh, I have to be fair, do I? As life so often is? Hmph. You’ve still got a lot to learn, kid! Maybe after you hit your growth spurt, you’ll have a large enough mouth to fit all that sass.”

“Ah, so that must be why yours is so wide, Master.”

She laughs, throwing her head back with the movement. “Correct once again! My disciple’s wisdom is without equal, the little shit.”

“How is he a little shit for being right, Raika?” Li Shu asks, smiling. She sets her own bowl down right after, having taken Jin’s lapse in attention to finish her own bowl before he can.

“Being right is the absolute best way to be a little shit, honored healer. How do you think I’m so good at it?”

Jin laughs at that, and she congratulates herself for managing to break through his mask. She winks at him, then nudges her head towards Li Shu’s bowl.

“Ah- big sis Li Shu! That’s- we stopped to… ugh.”

“And so the disciple learns yet another lesson! All things are tied in cultivation, kid, and if you’re slacking, someone’s going to beat you to the goal. But! Just like cultivation, of any and all kinds, there shall always be more opportunities!” 

With a flourish, she takes the bowls away, including Jin’s remaining broth, and swoops over to the kitchen. Supernatural speed has her back at the table in two seconds, if that, with three brand new bowls filled to the brim and beyond. 

“Come on, fuckers! We’re about to go to war, and then to a fucking bigger war after that- we’re going to eat till there’s nothing left in this shithole!”

Jin’s grin and Li Shu’s bright-eyed giggle are all the answers she needs. Three bowls down, a shitload more to go- and she absolutely intends to make good on that promise.

Once again, Raika centers herself around a table of her family, malformed and messy and perfect. A building-sized Spirit Beasts munches on too-strong bones through her window, her Beetle chowing down on its food (and, magnanimous leader as it is, tossing some to her newborn Gu), her kid and one of her best friends eating a meal she’s prepared alongside her. 

Once again, she’s in two places at once.

Once again, she aims down the barrel of a gun.

She’s eating with her family. She’s preparing, in the back of her mind, the refined versions of the notes she’s collected, running through scenarios of how best to use the resources she has. She’s three kilometers away, on top of a hill, staring down the sights of her rifle, which holds every part of who she is now, turned to violence. 

She’s staring at the wave of dust coming over the horizon, and feeling the impossible weight of Death it hides as an army approaches. 

She smiles. 

She got them moving, as she intended. She insulted them violently enough that they did exactly as she wanted them to do. She never expected them to play fair, obviously, and this is well within the range of possibilities. They were never going to give her time to prep an army in turn, were never going to give her time to make good on her threats. She asked for war games, and they were always going to “play” in whatever way meant that she couldn’t win, whatever way that her insult would be most punished. 

But that was always obvious. That was always the plan. 

It got them moving, after all. 

As she crouches, slow and quiet, she feels the buzzing of the gun in her hands. She feels the slow, inexorable way that her Deaths taint the world, reshaping it into a blooming hillside of ivory and obsidian azaleas. She feels way that they feed into and feed from the spells she’s carved into her bones, into the earth around her, into her prosthetic, which feeds and is fed upon in turn. 

An imperfect dynamo of Death, prepared for a moment just like this. An ongoing evolution of all she’s created, refined, prepared. 

She’s still got things in the works, obviously. The Gu jars still pickling, the development the one that’s spawned still has to undertake, the possibility of more bodies, more knowledge, more spellcrafting and more refined arrays. 

But it’s a start.

She catches sight of something moving through the dust, mechanical and methodical, echoing against her arcane sense even from here. Carefully, she lines it up with sights on her gun.

Blacksteel. Changing, Radiant metal.  Wood that life-from Death. Intent. Dao upon Dao upon Dao, half-remembered, half-created, and crowned by one above all.

Feeling every Death and every PAIN she’s ever experienced, feeling every ounce of power she has available, she takes a fragment of her prosthetic and loads it into the chamber.

And pulls the trigger.