Chapter 176 - Thoughts On Consequence And Death (Patreon)

And we're back! Hello again! It's today! We get to see some of the after-effects of what's going on, and I always love some outside POV looking towards Raika, lol. I've been having a lot of fun writing lately, it's great!

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In the end, she decides not to take all of it back. The beast was worthy of a good death, and something it spoke about resonated with her.

To live is to eat, and to eat is to live. 

A bit simplistic, maybe, but there’s still merit to it. She fought the beast on matching terms, strength against strength, flesh against flesh, and, in that last moment, technique against technique. She’d won, fair and square, and if not for the fact it might compromise her allies and their base, she would have fought with all she had. She met it on its terms in battle, and now, as victor, she does the same.

She consumes two legs, one from the front pair, one from the back. Even dead, its Qi leaking out from it and making for an area of effect, its still incredibly difficult to pull apart. She has to use a mix of her Blacksteel and a lesser version of Pressurized Crimson Cut to slice through some of the thicker tendons, to pull apart some of the thickest cuts of meat.

And then… she eats.

It takes her from her remaining 7% Qi reserves almost back up to 18%.

That part surprises her, in a couple different ways. The sheer density of Qi in it… it seems excessive compared to the cultivators she’s tasted. Like there’s more in the body than there was in what left the body, the soul, the Dantian. Maybe that’s part of how bestial cultivation works. 

On the second part, it’s surprising how easily she can keep track of what’s there. She’ll have to add further to her “processor” submind- it makes it infinitely easier to keep track of little details, and further, to make them into something comprehensible. Rather than just an overwhelming flood of data, changed and added to by her synthesis of her senses, it’s something that translates into meaning, and the amount of detail is incredible.

If she wants to, she can access it directly, experience one to one all the minute changes and data its receiving… but it feels off. Like she shouldn’t be able to see all that. Like it pulls her away from being… human. And that’s fine, that’s normal at this point… but it’s just something to try to balance is all. 

So for now, this way is better. 18% Qi reserves, the surety of that knowledge transmitted directly from the sub-mind responsible for calculating their experience and processing it.

And the taste is divine.

Each bite of the meat is rich, the flesh itself tough and chewy but every bite bringing with it the flavor of crackling brightness and a thick, juicy energy. The taste runs down her throat, adding to the umami and almost spiced or pickled quality of each and every bite. It…

It’s a bit annoying. Maybe just a teensy bit worrying. This raw beast’s flesh, the flesh of something she killed, the flesh of something alive and full of Qi and intent and life… it’s better than anything she’s cooked so far. Even with her insanely enhanced senses, with her newfound dedication to enhancing her training in the kitchen… this raw fucking meat is one of the best things she’s ever eaten.

And, of course, it fits. Each leg on its own is larger than her current body, and yet even the bones and hooves, delightfully crunchy and with an added earthy paste for flavor, fit just fine in her stomach. She feels as full as she’s ever been… and yet she still doesn’t feel full. Like…

She could probably fit the whole fucking thing, if she really tried.

Heh. Phrasing.

Instead, she cuts it apart, doing her best to preserve what’s left of its organs and bone structure. It gets lighter as she cuts block after block of meat from its hide, leaving the “inedible” parts still on the bone and in the severed ribcage parts. The cuts on them are outright smooth, the heat from the hyper-compressed blood leaving a bit of heat still glowing on some of them.

Yeah. Supreme Body Art: Pressurized Crimson Cut is a resounding success all right.

About four hours after the death of the Boar, with the sun beginning to fall towards the southern horizon, she starts walking back towards town, wearing the remains of her robes. It’s the bare minimum to cover her “modesty”, really, and considering the bared Blacksteel prosthetic and that she’s carrying on her shoulders about eight or so tons of meat, bone and guts…

Yeah, her modesty is sort of the least of her concern. 

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Jin has been having a hell of a day.

I mean, really. It has been a real weird experience.

Two weeks ago, he was spending time on the streets of the sleepy little town of Wayun village, getting kicked at by half the store owners, pitied by most of the adults, and outright attacked by like half the kids. Sometimes people were nice enough to give him some food, or some spare pieces of clothing for the winter, but they usually didn’t stop their kids from roaming the streets after “Wayun’s rat”. 

Now they look at him with genuine fucking fear in their eyes. 

Not of him, not really, but of what he might say to those he’s with. Raika, to them, might still be some weird sage, born of a beastblood mutation maybe, but Li Shu couldn’t be more clearly a cultivator if she tried. The fancy robes, the feel of her Qi, the way she effortlessly commands others with her presence alone. All that, added to her ability to heal others? To literally levitate the tools of her trade around her? 

It’s one thing to know that cultivators exist. There are plenty of sects around, and on occasion, some pass through. Hells, the cultivator that Raika… that she killed? He’d visited town before. They’re in the territory of the sects, and thus the occasional patrol comes by.

But no one as strong as Li Shu. At least not in a long, long time, certainly longer than most of the villagers have been alive. And to have a rogue cultivator, with no sect emblem or clear markings, strong enough to heal half a village worth of wounded? She’s still in there, still tending to the wounded. It’s hard to know what to expect about that, especially since his new “master” seems to have the authority to summon said cultivator.

And Jin lived on the streets of Wayun almost his whole life.

He had parents once. He’s fairly certain. Not really a dad, but he remembers his mom. Always sick, always frail. For a while, people brought them food, when he was really little, but… that dried up eventually. And his mom got sick, and started sleeping more.

And then she didn’t wake up.

He shakes off the memory of her lying there, cold. Of how many days it took before anyone bothered to check on the smell.

He could say something. Tell Raika about it. Ask her to get some kind of justice for him. And the villagers know it.

But…

He’s pretty sure his master wouldn’t like that. Pretty sure that Li Shu, at the least, would look at him with disappointment. And in only two weeks, his life has changed so, so much.

So he doesn’t say anything.

He could try to reassure them, but he… well, he doesn’t really know how to do that. So he mostly just feels really, really awkward as people give him scared looks and offer him places to sit. Or things to snack on and eat. Or something comfy to wear so the cold doesn’t bother him. 

By the time his master returns, he’s wearing at least three scarves, a woolly robe and a thick pair of socks that he didn’t know how to say no to.

Raika, on the other hand, walks back into town wearing almost nothing.

There’s a sort of sash around her hips that covers her waist and the top of her thighs, some leftover bandages that cover just barely enough of her chest to not be visibly naked. It’s absolutely scandalous. She’s a muscled goliath at seven feet tall, eyes aglow, teeth bright against beautiful dark skin, a stream of red and gold braids trailing down her back- and she’s absolutely soaked in blood.

That tends to cut down on a lot of steamy looks. The rest of them seem to die down when they notice what she’s carrying.

As she crosses the threshold of the perimeter wall, walking past the half-repaired farm fields, most people just stand still and stare at the weight she’s holding.

Ten, maybe fifteen times her own size in butchered flesh rides on her shoulders. She looks almost funny, a tiny figure beneath a massive pile of cuts of meat, wrapped in some sort of weird ropes of gristle. He can see what remains of a skeleton balanced precariously atop it, with organs wrapped tight inside of it, resting atop the many, many cuts of meat that absolutely dwarf the woman carrying them.

The village is absolutely silent as Raika walks past the farms. Past the outlying buildings.

She stops in front of the village chief, who is visibly trembling at the shadow of the pile of meat towering over him.

“Do you have someplace I can put this?” she asks.

For a moment, the only sound in the village is the dripping of blood onto the ground.

“Um… there’s the granary,” Jin says hesitantly. “It’s… it might have room?”

The village chief blinks, looks over at him and seems to kickstart his brain back into action.

“Yes, we can- we can make room, it’s, it’s right this way, honored cultivator, if you’ll just-”

He watches as she walks away, near-naked and covered in the blood of a spirit beast that would have crippled the village for years as a whim, maybe. Most of the village just sort of watches her go.

Jin sits off to one side, staying still. Staying quiet. 

His master is a monster among monsters. He knows this. He’s seen her morning spars with Uncle Qen Hou and Big Brother Hao Nera, how they deform the hillsides with every blow. How those same blows just… heal over, the land itself wriggling back into place like it’s alive. He’s seen how the muscle and bones beneath her skin shift and flow, how they seem to twitch and crawl into slightly different positions rather than move normally when she’s not paying attention.

But… he’s never seen anything like what she just did. The sight of her, carrying a hundred times her body weight in gutted spirit beast like it’s nothing…

It almost makes him forget about the schoolhouse where the wounded sit.

As she walks away, and all eyes follow her or refocus on him, wondering about what his master might need from him, what their relationship entails for the village… he keeps staring at the schoolhouse. 

Li Shu’s Qi still saturates it. He knows that if he goes inside, he’ll be able to see the still healing bodies, those who are limp now that the pain has stopped. There are so many in there that would have died, who are now stitched together, pulled back into life. The stench of blood and shit, once overwhelming right alongside the screams of the wounded, is very nearly blanketed out by the vague scent of something lightly medicinal. 

But Jin isn’t looking into the schoolhouse. Not really.

He’s looking at the people standing just outside of it. Wandering in and out. Some of them walk, some of them limp… the worst of them crawl. 

They look pale. Blood loss, maybe. Dark skin, light skin, green and blue and brown eyes, feathered or furred ears… but they look pale.

Some of them have holes through their bodies, showing space clear through them. Others have broken limbs. Others still are just… ruined. Broken apart into pieces. 

They’re dead. Of that much, he is certain.

They are dead, and they are still moving.

And yet… they’re fading. 

Even as he watches, they’re dissolving away. Every time they move there’s this sort of steam or mist just falling off of them, dissolving like steam off their bodies. Some of them are literally half-formed, weird empty spaces in between joints and bits of their organs as that weird steam drifts away from them. In the hours since they started emerging, they’ve mostly wandered around the schoolhouse, aimlessly as if confused. Some of them drifted over towards the farms, like they’re trying to reenact some part of their lives… or deaths. 

They haven’t seen him. Every time they look his way, he turns his gaze from them. He’s… he’s afraid. Afraid of what’ll happen if they take notice of him, if they start to walk over. Of what’ll happen if they touch him.

Afraid, above all else, that the steam they emit will connect. Will bind and reweave them together into something like that thing he saw under the light of the Cold Sun, across the little lake. That whirling, ashen abomination of crawling faces and agony that spoke to his master.

He couldn’t hear its words, couldn’t understand what came from those crawling, ashen mouths… but that sound. That aching, quiet hiss that was almost words, but never quite. His master had clearly heard them, had replied to what they said as if it was somehow normal to talk to a thing like that. The thought of seeing something that cold, that impossibly pained and vast and sad…

He watches the dead as they wander, and tracks carefully to see how their steam drifts. 

It’s… it’s almost hypnotic.

He only comes back to himself when am almost painfully hot hand lands on his shoulder, a touch of something wet.

“You good, kid?” His master asks.

He nods, quiet.

She looks over at the schoolhouse. At the malformed, empty-eyed specters that are even now slowly breaking apart under the weight of light breezes and sunlight. Then she looks back down at him.

“It’s been a long day. Ready to go home?”

He nods, and blushes a bit as he tries to hide how much those words mean and how casually she uses them.

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Raika looks down at the kid, then back at the just visible bits of steam and color that drift around Li Shu’s scent and the taste of iron in the air. She can sense them ok, even see their outlines with her synesthesia active, but the kid…

The Cold Sun’s avatar, or whatever the hell that thing was, had spoken of a new window. She’ll have to talk to Li Shu about it later.

In the meantime, she goes to take the kid back towards the cabin- and blinks in surprise. Hee breaks from her side towards the schoolhouse and the dead still dissipating from it.

“May you find peace,” the kid whispers as he bows at the waist.

She quirks an eyebrow at him, and he blushes a bit, but…

She bows too, a bit more shallowly, towards the schoolhouse.

“Now come on, kid. Lets get you back home.”