Book One, Chapter 6 - Dead To The Rules, And We Hit The Ground Runnin

There we go, up to chapter 6. Not procrastinating today, damnit! Raaaah!

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With advances in medical, educational, and societal sciences, courtesy of the Division of Research, we have created a society which rewards the truly worthy, offering more resources to those who can grasp their futures among the Empire’s most valuable subjects. With higher rates of literacy, there are more researchers, artisans, and technicians than ever before in the history of the World, all who can contribute to the technological and cultural advancement of the Empire. Additionally, with the wilds tamed and better farming methods, more families are able to have more children, adding to the Empire’s essential work force and further allowing its improvement and expansion.

Before, where one might spend one’s entire life farming on a single patch of land, hunted by Spirit Beasts, bandits and rogue cultivators, now one can be a part of true communities, built to last, capable of providing for others as never before. We produce more food, more people, and better harvests of all kinds of resources than ever in history, further sustaining the Emperor of Emperor’s great works and helping to build a better world, where even the least of us can matter, can make themselves more, can contribute to the whole.

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

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Raika wakes literally delirious from pain. And hunger. Grief, of course. Terrible living conditions. Likely a solid amount of food poisoning and sickness.

In what is left of her mind, she holds strong to a few deeper, meaningful truths. 

Her old cultivation is lost.

She still has Qi.

She can’t circulate Qi, but it does kinda sorta move on its own sometimes- and even without her spiritual organs, it can be guided. That’s what formations are, and there are even things like natural formations, which don’t need fancy symbols and flags and materials and such.

So if she creates a pattern for her Qi to move to, or does anything to make it move at all, even if it’s not cultivation per se, it’ll change something, and maybe that’ll do something, and maybe from there she can do something else. 

Vague? Yes. A terrible and basically meaningless plan? Yes. She doesn’t hold it against herself; she’s sleep deprived, starving, and in a lot of pain. She also just ate a rat. It was not tasty.

A little over two months after she lost everything, she hits herself in the head with a tuning fork. It makes an awkward little “dink” sound.

No. 

She taps it again. 

“dink”

No. No no no.

Is it defective? Is it broken? Did the storeowner see someone he could scam and just go for it? Could she not tell? Even if she can’t “sense” things like she could before she can still see, even if it’s blurry and-

Oh gods. He gave her a broken tuning fork.

For sixteen fucking coppers? 

She hits herself in the forehead again, more out of anger and a need to do something other than break down and cry.

“Dink", says the off-key little tool.

For fucks sake. 

She’s gonna burn his shop down. Top to bottom, rafters to the fucking dirt. She can find a sharp rock or some sticks to make heat with, she has rags, it hasn’t rained recently; she can do it. She can only hobble, and her straw is wet, but she’s sure she can find a crack or seam in the wood to plant it in, and besides starving to death she doesn’t have anything better to do than try to stoke the flames until they burn his fucking shop down.

If she can walk tomorrow.

She’s had a few days where she couldn’t. This morning feels worse than most of those.

She wonders if she’ll be able to walk at all anymore very soon.

“Dink”, goes the shitty little piece of metal against her forehead.

She feels nauseous. She feels dizzy and weak, like the world is spinning. She’s angry and about to cry and she can’t afford to cry and she can taste the nasty rat coming back up and her hands are tingling and is she having a heart attack? That’s a thing mortals do, right? When their organs fail? Everything else is, why wouldn’t this!

“Dink”, goes the tuning fork, as hard as she physically can against her forehead. 

She begs. She pleads. She sobs out loud, and clutches the tuning fork as hard as she can, and she prays.

No one answers.

Tears in her eyes, a rage so vast it feels like it’s going to swallow her whole in her chest, a denial so delusional and determined that it overrides common sense and mingles intimately with despair and shame and need, and she hits her forehead as hard as she can. It’s more of a spasm than a strike, hard enough that she feels the bone beneath the skin, feels her hand cramp around the broken tool, and she almost screams.

Dink.

She feels her whole body shiver at the final act of force, and feels her chest aching and her lungs burning and her heart screaming, and then she’s unconscious and doesn’t feel anything at all.

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Raika wakes up again. 

This is, in and of itself, a bit of a surprise.

It’s much the same as most of her awakenings, which is a bit unexpected compared to how she felt earlier that same day. Or the day before. The sun is faint, and it’s hard to tell. Either way, in her new life, waking up has not been pleasant, each day slowly dragging her towards a worse one, only her struggles holding back that tide.

Her body hurts, limbs the most, face still sucks, etc, and she’s still plenty hungry (though she didn’t barf up the rat, so that probably helps), but she feels… average. A bit more awake, a bit less shaky, almost like when she had rations she could still dip into when she was too hungry. Raika, the formerly-Bloody, currently crippled, wakes up feeling, for the first time in months, like she isn’t holding back death by the skin of her teeth and the edges of ragged, bloody fingernails.

Maybe it’s the meat. Rotten or not, rat-based or not, it’s the first meal with flesh to it she’s had in a good while. She stretches a bit, feeling out her body, and-

She’s sore. Like, really sore, like just took a nap after lifting some weights or going for a run around the sect. It’s a familiar feeling- she was always more inclined to refine her body than her more esoteric techniques, and exercise is an old friend, good for meditating, unwinding, and winding up sometimes. She was never a body cultivator per-se, a lack of resources and manuals holding her back, but it still suited her better than the plant-like philosophies and techniques of the Hungering Roots sect.  It’s a waste to neglect one’s foundational flesh, and the feeling of burn in her muscles isn’t alien to her. 

This feels like that, but different. Like she actually used her body for the first time in so long, like she did stretches and pushed in the right places.

It hurts differently than normal, true, but everything hurts, and feeling different is better than feeling worse, so… overall a win, probably.

Did it work? Did something happen?

She thinks back to her last conscious moments, to the agony burning in her, the pain of sheer tension in her body as she willed things to go to her will.

She’s not sure. Could be that yes?

Or it could be a delusion. What are the chances, really, that after months of trying, she figured something out that no one else could? She’s never been a genius or prodigy, no one special, no one capable of uncovering the world’s mysteries.

The alternative to believing that she accomplished something, even if only the barest, tiniest possible change, is rotting in an alley with no hope at all. So… Raika figures it’s probably pretty reasonable to ignore the doubtful little bitch in her brain and just keep going. Do what seems right. Only makes sense; forward or death and all that.

Part of her tries to remind the whole that she is absolutely misusing that philosophy and really should listen before wasting time or doing something truly stupid. That part is, obviously, an idiot and a coward, and can’t possibly be correct because, as mentioned, it’s an idiot and a coward, and since it isn’t helping anyways, should eminently be ignored.

She uses the wall, pulling herself up, then leaning on it, then climbing a bit more, then leaning, until she’s made it to her feet. On a slightly higher indent where a brick used to be lies a scarf, to cover her face; a blanket, thin and threadbare, to sit upon; and a small wooden bowl, likely once used to hold soup, repurposed to hold coins. She collects all three into a small bundle and takes them in hand, carefully placing her crutch under her ruined side, and, deciding to trust the only voice in her head that doesn’t think she’s going to die like this, makes sure that the tuning fork is included in the bundle.

The sun is a bit past the horizon when she sets up, so it’s definitely the day after she got the tuning fork. It still takes her the better part of an hour to get to her destination, wearing her blanket as a sort of sling to carry her bowl and with the shawl already covering the lesser half of her face. Still early for most people, especially in the winter. It’s better to arrive early, get the morning risers when there’s not as much of a crowd to hide among and guilt them into donating. Come midday she’ll move around the corner two streets down, where market-goers are a bit more populous flowing into and out of the more affluent areas, and by evening, she’ll come back this way to catch stragglers. Efficient, no, but considering she can only hobble so far, it’s the best she’s come up with. With her blanket lain, scarf and shawl covering the most nauseating parts of her face, and her bent, stiff leg and half-missing arm on full display, she sets the bowl in front of her, leans her crutch against the wall, and takes out her tuning fork.

Sitting as upright as she can, stretching broken tendons and ruined muscle into something like a proper posture, she raises it up to herself.

Focus.

Breathe in deep.

Exhale slow.

Inhale.

Exhale.

She feels the tension of her body. The tightness, the flaws, the parts that work and the ones that done- everything. 

“Dink,” says her tuning fork as she taps it against her forehead.

Hard to tell, but she might be a bit more tired. It’s important to be able to tell; sensing a downturn in her energy may mean the difference between a collapse in the backstreets or making it back to relative shelter before she falls. Even still, no matter how carefully she measures and watches how tired she feels, there isn’t anything conclusive. Maybe it’ll be a bad day where she starts trembling, or falls apart, or simply sleeps where she falls, maybe it won’t.

“Dink”, the tuning fork agrees. Important to be careful, it wisely offers.

“Hush,” she tells it, voice a painful rasp. “I don’t need a sycophant, little nugget. If I need someone to agree with me I’ll ask, hmm?”

“Dink”, it shoots back, making her blink.

“Well good,” she hisses with as much dignity as she can. “I like a bit of backbone in my inanimate objects. Keep it up.”

“Dink,” it goes against her forehead.

And she’s out like a light.

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She wakes up for the second time in the same day to the sun beating down on her as violently as it can. For early autumn, that’s still rather considerable, and it’s another lovely piece of the puzzle she got to ignore before becoming mortal again. Used to be it was winter winds and summer burns that did anything, while now a bad breeze has her shivering all day.

Point being, Raika thinks, is that it’s midday, and she hasn’t moved from her morning / evening spot. The last thing she remembers is getting some well-earned flak from her tuning fork, hitting her forehead again with it, and waking up again.

Her bowl is empty, but that doesn’t mean anything really. Kids and urchins both take what they can grab if they think you won’t notice or can’t chase them, and in her state, she couldn’t do either.

So. 

The tuning fork does something, then.

That, or she’s so weak that sitting upright while tapping her forehead is enough to knock her unconscious. Luckily, this opinion is held by a part of her that is an idiot and a coward, and can be disregarded because it’s not being helpful.

She feels… maybe a bit worse than before. Like rather than exercise herself and then rest, she just exercised again, without proper recovery. Perhaps the tuning fork is doing something, and once she finds a good rhythm for it, she can create a solid, healthy balance of rest and “tuning”. 

A fascinating idea, she agrees. One that sounds like it would take a very long time and probably never really get her to where she needs to be.

“What do you think, Dink?” she rasps.

“Dink,” the tuning fork chastises her as it taps her forehead.

“Yeah, well, what do you know, you’re a fancy rock,” she rasps back.

She goes to hit it again, and then pauses.

Maybe she shouldn’t be pushing herself like this, genuinely.

Maybe she should be pushing herself harder.

Drawing in Qi has risks. Pulling in Qi flavored by concepts that don’t match one’s cultivation or biological predispositions can create issues, and sometimes it can lead to imbalances that cause sickness or even death in larger quantities.

In a normal, healthy cultivator, that’s manageable, something that can be purged or “digested” into a form one can use through meditation and cycling it through one’s spiritual organs. But if, say, there were someone who can’t really sense the balance of Qi in their body, or control where in one’s self it is, then even minute amounts of impure or damaging Qi can cause harm or imbalances in one’s cultivation.

However, consider- she can’t be drawing in energy in an amount where she has to care about that. In this little corner of a wider city, amidst rats, rotting brickwork and garbage, most of the easily available concepts to flavor Qi aren’t exactly ideal, and with enough of it, it could cause serious harm, but “enough of it” is an operative word. She has no cultivation to destabilize, her body is already fucked, and if it kills her, then it kills her. But it won’t, because the alternative is bullshit.

If the tuning fork is causing an effect (and obviously it is, for sure) then she’s going to keep using it. She can’t know any better, so this has to be the right way, because the alternatives are things that are not going to happen. If her Qi is moving at all, it’s minute, and if she’s absorbing any, it’s practically nonexistent, and if it isn’t either of those things, then it doesn’t matter, and it does matter because she says it does, so worrying about quality or type of Qi is fucking irrelevant.

Sure. That feels right.

She breathes as deep as her lungs can take. Holds it for a moment, then lets it go. Repeats the pattern a few times, to build a rhythm. And then, counter to what she’s used to, she exhales as hard as she can, making sure her lungs are well and truly empty…

And hits her forehead with the tuning fork.

She doesn’t feel anything. Whatever it’s doing, she can’t perceive it, crippled as she is.

But even if she can’t see it, she can still try, and hope, and demand to the universe that this work.

She pictures the vibration moving in her bones, in her blood, in the empty spaces without air she holds. She pictures it making her insides tremble, pictures the dribbles and dew of what’s left of her Qi humming in tune with the poorly formed device. Finally, she pictures the vibrations magnifying it, letting the droplets slowly, ever so slowly, shiver. She imagines them moving through her body in slow, agonizing currents, occasionally touching each other, bouncing off, and just… wiggling in place as much as she can make them. It’s vague, unaided by the sort of trance that one can access through cultivation and natural organs, but she holds it in a vice grip, hard enough that her head starts to ache.

And then she breathes in once. Out once. In again, and then out, with as much totality as she can muster.

And does it again.

“Dink”.

By the time night falls and she’s managed to crawl back to her alcove, she’s done it eight more times, and she can’t stop smiling past the taste of copper in the back of her throat.