Chapter 207 - Bad Habits, New Places (Patreon)

We're kinda-sorta back, babes. Still messy and getting an early sleep tonight but this chapter was halfway finished already, so I figured I'd get back to work at least a little bit. Me, bad at taking breaks? Never heard of her.

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She’s hungry.

All the time.

Her hunger was never a huge concern, not something that felt overwhelming, but it was only ever really sated when she consumed Qi. Preferably, Qi infusing something still wriggling and wet. But since the Heart leaped into her body, that’s changed.

She’s hungry.

Eating regular food is fine. The taste is still something she treasures, something that allows her to indulge in sensation in a way that she hasn’t been able to in most other ways. The tracts she’s making in her body with the help of the Heart are also a factor in minimizing her needs, but they’re not quite what she needs.

Previously, her method of generating Qi was to smash her bloodflow against itself, shaping her veins to allow her to survive the process, and the friction between the scraps of Qi a living body naturally attracts and generates made said Qi begin to grow. Her Dragon Veins, while similar in theory, are a direct upgrade in almost every way, and actually eliminate parts of the process. With the Heart’s help, she has an instinctive understanding of how Qi flows work to add to her technical knowledge and her experience with the faux-formation she’s enforced in her body. Looping patterns, like mazes and diagrams, have been snuck in between some of her organs and muscle groups, isolated veins entirely bare of blood wrapped into miniaturized formation patterns. By running her blood, full of forcefully-crafted Qi, through these new patterns, the blood leaves, but the Qi remains, attracted to the new patterns they’re forming.

It’s increased the speed at which she can generate Qi by almost three times over, each new formation granting her an almost 50% increase- but she’s losing it almost as fast.

The Heart is hungry too.

She can recover her energy in hours now rather than days, which opens a lot more possibilities, but a lot of her capacity is going straight into feeding her new passenger. What’s left allows her to use her transformations and regeneration without worrying about losing her energy, excepting some truly dangerous or drawn-out battles.

But she’s still hungry.

And she doesn’t know why.

When her stomach began to grumble, when her Body began to tell her that something’s needed, she went out hunting. This far out towards the 4th ring and the fortress-cities, spirit beasts are uncommon, but not nonexistent, and her senses can sniff out trails days or sometimes even weeks old. Their flesh is… more? More filling, at least, and the Qi in them is a nice addition, her stomach quieting by a bit as she ate.

But she never feels sated. Not really. 

Even Qi-rich flesh still feels like it’s lacking something, like she’s eating plain dough. Filling, but it isn’t giving her what she needs.

The last time she felt completely satisfied was after fighting and eating that boar, but it’s hard to know if even that would be enough now, with her system changed.

Li Shu’s worked with her to consolidate her gains, and it’s left her in the best shape she’s ever been in. Every bone and tendon structure has been reinforced with pistons, biological hydraulics and enhanced materials, every muscle group has near-perfect overlap and hidden structures she can unfold, projectile spines and twitch-enhanced hormone dispensers prepared, and her senses are as aligned as they’ve ever been. Nowadays, she only really turns her synesthesia-brain off once or twice a day, if that, keeping her senses pushed out to their maximum extent at all times and gradually getting used to them, despite the occasional little note of internal bleeding. 

None of that even counts on her more esoteric transformations.

Blacksteel, Reactor, and Heart.

Her Reactor is still mostly inert, the core of her new energy system kept quiet until she needs it. What it’ll mean when she does activate it, especially so close to a fortress city, is unknown. For now? Stealth.

Her Blacksteel continues to change, bit by bit. What was once angular obsidian has turned more and more into something that reflects its name; its edges have smoothed, while its points and blades have only sharpened further. Rather than angular shards arranged in myriad shapes, her weapon of choice has begun to incorporate a slightly more organic look, emulating claws and thorns over geometry. The angles are still off, far too sharp, but her prosthetic arm actually looks like an arm now, rather than an avant-garde sculpture.

Now it’s just a surrealist sculpture. Go figure. 

As for the Heart…

She can still visit that no-place inside herself. Deep, deep down, behind the meat, behind even her stomach, strangely expansive as it is, but connected to it all. She can trace connections out from the dream landscape into almost any part of her body, but tracking it back leads her to nothing but more of her own body. Between feeding it her Qi-rich blood more directly and its sharing of its instincts, it’s allowed the first version of her Dragon Veins, as she’s calling them. Their frameworks hold Qi startlingly well, allowing her to create the aforementioned natural formations in miniature inside herself, making her old system of violently churning her blood obsolete. Or half-obsolete, anyways. The blood is still useful to carry that Qi, since she can’t command it or touch it directly, and the Dragon Vein clusters are still distant and disconnected, which is fine. It is only a first attempt, after all. 

It’s more than she’s ever had, and yet… it still doesn’t feel like enough. It never feels like enough. She can still go further, and there are simply so many parts of her that are woefully lacking, so many new tools she knows she can still acquire and learn. 

Time and place.

She watches Jin carefully. He’s started circulating his Qi as he walks, something which took her well over a year to learn how to do, and she’s being very careful with her new student.

The fortress city looms over them, and if ever there was a place that might rattle his focus, it is this.

There are two-hundred and thirty four total fortress cities, with four of them standing above the rest. North, South, East and West each hold their own bastions, a four fortresses that dwarf their fellows and are the anchors of mankind against the wild, as-of-yet untrained lands of the fourth ring. Two-hundred and thirty of the fortress cities are just that, fortresses the size of cities. They make up the interior of a mountain, or cover an entire ridge, or, as can be shown before her, alter the entire landscape for miles into a maze of twisting fortifications and prepared violence.

They stand on cobbled marble, looking up at the gatehouse uncreatively named Gatehouse East-North-East 10, and look up at what could only be a castle.

Five stories tall, and three times as wide, the gatehouse looks similar to an old tori gate, a style that fell out of fashion a few millenia prior but whose ruins still stand proud. Pointed arches stab at the sky like horns over the top of the gate proper, the austere black, white, gold and jade of Imperial manufacture dwarfing the blue of the sky above and the many colors of the people below.

And what people there are. 

Pale, ebony, vibrant russet, tan mahogany, rich earth, and many more shades make up the “pure-blooded” humans that she can see, but there are oh so many more here. Some giant-kin stand taller than even she is, their skin every color from sky-blue to wine-red, towering over humans and beast-blood both. The latter have every possible feature, from scales, to feathers, to furs, to paws or tails or even vestigial wings in more than a few cases. She even notices a few goblinoids, their kind an absolute rarity, many of them crawling and scaling over boxes of wares and emitting a fungal scent that ripples in patterns of communication as they flick sail-sized ears at each other and click their teeth.

There are some who walk by with mismatched patterns, surgeries and replacements making their marks visible. Some wear machinery that reminds her of Yun Ka, while others decorate themselves like nobility and rich merchants, and some wear nothing but rags. Refugees, warriors, merchants and more mill about, passing in and out of the fortress city in the tens of thousands all around.

And so many of them smell so, so good.

Every flavor of Qi and more than she can even name, like finding new colors through her tongue. Musk, fear, arousal, frustration, contentment, sweat, blood, and fragrances stranger and more exotic mingle in the air, and they mesh with the feelings of hormones and emotions dancing alongside varying levels of cultivation.

None of them smell as rich or as fulfilling as the boar might be, none smell like just what she needs… but she’s so, so hungry.

All the time. 

All the more so when surrounded by all this food.

All these people.

She focuses on Jin and Li Shu.

Li Shu has fallen into her role, her anxiety managed, her posture upright and walking with her healer’s colors on clear display. Even in all this mess, a path clears for her, Raika’s height and baggage mixing with the inherent respect afforded healers to let them through. She’s doing great.

Jin, on the other hand, is easier to focus on. There’s so much going on there, and honestly, she can’t help but feel a little jealous.

Surrounded by all this life, all these other Qi signatures, all this hustle and bustle, he keeps his focus.

Say what you will about the brat, but he is singularly dedicated. He has thrown himself into cultivation whole-heartedly, unafraid to ask questions and even less afraid to force himself to focus for hours on even minor changes. Sensing his Qi through his skin, she can “see” it moving through his body, shifting through his meridians.

The smoke-and-whispers scented energy is sluggish, slower than it usually is, but he is walking and cultivating at the same time. He’s reaching the end of Qi Gathering realm. Considering he had a bit of Qi already, and had as much as four people tutoring him at once to some degree, it’s not an inhuman talent, but it’s an impressive one nonetheless. Seven months to just above mortal to nearly the height of Qi-Gathering realm, his dantian nearly full. Rather than have him only spend Qi when he wants to strengthen himself, Raika has been pushing him to circulate it, even if his body can’t absorb much yet. His pattern is… well it’s their best guess, not having a proper cultivation method to offer him, but Raika’s pretty sure she’s managed to point him to all the junctions and patterns that seem to increase his Qi and flavor rather than decrease it.

His scent. Not his flavor, his scent.

Fuck, but she is hungry.

One of her minds is on the subject almost constantly, on the lookout for anything that looks like it might scratch the new need and simultaneously pushing down the thoughts that hunger brings. Between her multiple layers of sensory processing and her sub-minds dedicated to tracking whatever details she assigns, she’s keeping an eye on it, even though the headaches have been near-constant.

Can’t afford to slip. Not until they’re past the city. Not until she can start to grow properly.

She sighs, pushing down her thoughts again. She keeps that one sub-mind analyzing, always, but otherwise, there’s no benefit to keeping herself hyper-aware of her hunger. Better to limit the feeling and reduce its weight until they’re past the issues ahead.

And, after almost an hour of waiting, they’re at the first threshold.

A checkpoint.

Dozens of cultivators stand in small circles under the arch of the gatehouse’s main door, leading into the maze of city-fortifications beyond. She can see and sense tens of thousands more people already back there, their bodies and Qi signatures lighting up for miles into the twisting buildings and thoroughfares. There’s no reason that they can’t go through.

They step to the front of their respective line, into the circle that one of the Imperial soldiers stands in, and the noise of the crowd suddenly becomes muted as they pass into an array.

The soldier isn’t dressed nearly as ornately as the ones that she saw in her time as part of the Division of Altered Cultivation. They had golden exo-suits, dripping with Qi, glowing with enchantments and arrays and artifacts. The soldier in front of her is dressed more like, well, a soldier, though she can smell Qi of Core Formation realm depth to him. Slate-grey armor and simple off-white armor makes up his uniform, a seal of gold and jade on his chestplate marking him as a true Imperial Soldier, the minor artifact glittering with Qi. He smiles tiredly as they step forward to him, nodding his head.

“Greetings, travelers. What is your business with Gatehouse East-North-East 10?”

Li Shu clears her throat, shifting in place and squaring her shoulders. “This one is the lowly Li Shu, a healer of some training and little renown. I have come with my assistants on part of a pilgrimage to improve my skills by dedicating myself to the holy task of assisting in maintaining the Empire’s safety and stability. I come here to provide what healing I can to the soldiers of this great fortress.”

The soldier smiles, as if it’s all perfectly reasonable but still a nice surprise. “I commend your spirit. Do you have the requisite training proving your rank and vocation?”

Li Shu shakes her head. “I was trained by a mortal, and continued to pursue the healing arts when I began to cultivate. It is my hope that I can provide even the slightest assistance to my superiors in the healing arts, even if I do not have an official rank.”

He waves a hand. “No need for all that. It’s rare that someone has the guts and the willpower to come and offer their services to a true bastion of the Empire. Once you enter, you can apply to be tested for your level of skill in any of the Control Pavilions. However, to enter, there is a cost. You’ll need to pay three gold coins for yourself and each of your companions.”

Raika can’t help herself and snorts in amusement.

The guard’s gaze swivels to her, but she keeps her face entirely passive, and he just shakes his head.

“And you should be more careful with your servant. I know giant-kin can be rough to handle, but she really should know to show the proper respect.”

Li Shu bows deeply. “Of course, senior. She is an ally I met more recently, and so has not had the time to properly learn how to act around cultivators. I promise to ensure her behavior in the future.”

With the guard mollified and the entry fee paid (exorbitant and unreasonable as it may be, selling their goods before leaving and their earlier misadventures secured funding enough that they’re still fairly safe), Raika, Li Shu and Jin walk past the gates, into a city of war.

It smells of people, metal, and, far off in the distance, carried on the wind… of blood.

She is so, so hungry.