Chapter 216 - Ooooooh, WAR!!! (Patreon)

And we're back! Sorry for the delay, but the two-day break was exceptional for my mental health so actually I'm NOT sorry, haha! Now I can bring even greater content, and you! Can't! Stop me!

In seriousness, I'm doing a bit better! Life continues pressing but we keep marching, eh? Enjoy the chapter, and I'll see y'all tomorrow!

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Poor Jin, Li Shu thinks. The last time he was around this many wounded was all the way back when his village was attacked, barely a few months ago. And frankly, the sights in here are a lot worse. She’s not sure why else the kid would be so obviously flustered, staring off towards the floor back the way they came rather than focused.

And she does need him focused.

Cultivator wounds are easier and much harder to deal with than mortal wounds. On a still-living mortal, the issue is usually one of blood supply and internal trauma. Neither is easy to fix, but both can be repaired, especially with Qi and alchemical supplies. A healer specialized in mortal wounds is likely to be able to fix anything that has yet to kill said mortal, so long as they reach them in time. 

Cultivators don’t die so easily.

Some of the soldiers in the medical facility they find themselves in are sobbing, quietly, as healers do their best to reassemble what’s left of their heads. For most of them, either they’ll be able to rebuild what’s left, or there’s really nothing more to be done. For others, surgical beds are strapped together to allow for limbs and torsos pulped and severed nearly to mush, which will either heal when put back together- or they won't. Either way, the amount of medical expertise far exceeds stitching cuts or re-housing intestines- here, to repair a body requires on to rebuild or replace whole organ groups, whole sections of the respiratory, vascular and nervous systems., and that’s before factoring in the need to interpret or guess the ways in which cultivation may have altered said systems. The latter part, of course, is complicated additionally by the fact that most of the soldiers in question aren’t in a place to discuss the nuances of their cultivation journeys while their remains are scattered about the room, their minds dealing with more pain than the human mind was ever built to endure.

Even with infinite materials, not every body heals the same, not every cultivator’s Qi interacts with materials the same. And there’s never infinite time.

Every moment, another ten bodies are brought in from the front. 

Some of them die on the way to the tables. She sees mutagenic acid that starts to make her eyes hurt from looking at it across the room dissolving away a young man, sees someone screaming and full of winding short-life parasites that die even as they breed, sees something that gets carried back in bags.

It makes the suffering of those in the village look… almost childish by comparison.

It’s not a polite metaphor. Not an easy one. But when she sees other healers in red and white carving back together a woman whose bones are now outside her skin, it’s hard to compare to having to put intestines back in the right places and sew them up, or resetting bones and fixing punctured lungs. 

To bridge the gap, beyond simply knowledge and technique, come the tools.

Which, conveniently, makes for a useful excuse to distract Jin.

“Jin? Get us twenty more talismans, please, we’re running low on this end.”

Blinking, Jin wakes back up and bobs his head, immediately running off towards the rows of cabinets and alchemical tables in the back of the room, staffed by no less than a dozen other healers hard at work.

“Is it always this hard?” she asks the man she’s working beside.

The taller woman snorts, her impressive muscles bulging with strain at the amount of force she’s using to sew back together the arm of a cultivator. Li Shu takes up the stitching on the other side, her keratin needles having a much easier time penetrating the skin of the soldier, laying down the track for her fellow healer to pull tight. “Not every day, at least. Tough to go a week without an assault like this though.”

Li Shu turns to her, eyes wide. “Every week there’s something like this? There must be a hundred wounded here!”

“And another three hundred more dead too quick to be saved over on the front lines of the Wall, never mind the trenches. We only get the lucky ones.”

“Not feeling very lucky,” the man they’re sewing together manages to groan.

“Then more fool you! Here you are, being put back together by two jade beauties, and you can’t see what a fortuitous encounter your survival is? Some people have eyes, yet cannot see the mountain, my new sister!”

Li Shu chuckles despite herself, straining to keep the seams of her stitching tied properly. The cultivator is burning his Core even as they speak, medicine stimulating the process more fluidly towards healing, and the skin is trying to pull away. The body rarely knows the best ways to heal itself, having evolved from a process of blind grasping at ideas, and a cultivator is little better. Most cultivators, and cultivation techniques, focus more on speed of recovery or not getting hurt in the first place. 

Jin rushes back over, his hands holding a cloth wrapped tightly around a few slips of paper. “Here. They said no more for at least an hour, supplies are low.”

“Understood. Place one talisman here, on the seam, it’s trying very hard to pull apart and we need to tell the body the right way to go.”

Jin nods, carefully unwrapping the bundle. It goes on the table of supplies next to their operating bed, where he picks up one of the last two talismans from the last batch. Quickly, he plants it on the arm where she indicates, and the glow of the improvised artifact begins to light up. 

In moments, threads of Qi, accented lightly with the jade powder of the ink on the talisman and the papers of it, weave into the veins and muscle of the arm, guiding them on where to go, closing the wound that the sutures hold together.

The moment it’s done, Li Shu plucks out the thread, pulling it free just as the wound finishes closing.

“Done on this side. Arm is reattached.”

“Good! Little one, another talisman here!”

Jin hurries over, and before long, the cut severing the soldier’s left ribs and clavicle from his body is pulled tight and erased. The soldier breathes a sigh of relief, looking on the verge of passing out-

Li Shu’s mentor slaps a pill into his mouth and punches his jaw to crack it between his teeth.

He nearly spits it out, and Li Shu has to scramble to slap his mouth closed, eyes wide at the sheer amount of Qi and the richness of the scent coming from the pill.

“Why would you make me chew it? That’s the worst way to eat them!”

Li Shu’s mentor snorts. “Complaining now that he’s healed! Fed by the pills of the vaunted Empire, costing a hundred gold each, and talismans to boot! What a remarkably bold cultivator you are, to nearly fall asleep and then complain at being woken by such luxury! Get up, we need this table for someone else less whiny. Go, go, the Wall doesn’t man itself!”

The soldier curses, the Qi already cycling through him, and gets up. He gives Li Shu and Jin a nod, pointedly ignoring his other healer, and in a moment, has rushed away. Arrays light up across the room to limit the effect of his passing as he sprints at near-sonic speed out of the clinic and back down the tunnel past where a constant stream of wounded pours in.

“Table open!” The tall healer yells, and within moments, there is another body on the table.

Well. Most of a body. There’s really not much below the waist anymore, and half the woman’s face is just… gone. She stares, catatonic, at the ceiling above.

“Ah, damn. They gave us a header. Not to worry soldier, we’ll have you fixed soon enough. Newbie, get me an infusion of water-breathing elixir and some blood-replacement elixir, type seven!”

Li Shu nods, turning to their table and procuring the ingredients in a heartbeat. Her keratin needles, all of the eighteen she’s not using for constant suturing, quickly pick up and maneuver the materials over to her, and the work begins again.

She catches Jin staring at the talismans, not looking at the soldier on their table. Good. Maybe he can learn talisman crafting. They’re like arrays, but you don’t need to build them into the environment and don’t hold as much power, but for a quickly-deployed array, there’s little more useful. Better he spends his time memorizing patterns and wondering than looking at the woman on the table as she begins to convulse, what’s left of her spine wriggling in the red mess as her partially-missing abdominal muscles try to help her spasm away the pain.

Fuck. Wherever Raika is, they’re clearly not going to be able to meet for a bit. If she’s half as busy as Li Shu is, there’s just going to be too much mess to properly ingratiate themselves into all this volunteer work.

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Words are… difficult. Words require so much processing power. The amount of neurons required to be actively functioning, actively connected and interwoven, to even begin to conceive of an alphabet numbers in the millions. That’s without going into understanding the connections between words, the associated concepts and patterns, and then there’s plain old memory required to hold it all. A living mind, nevermind one capable of producing a real and functional alphabet of phonetic and conceptual integration… it’s staggering how much it takes. 

Language, on the other hand, is much easier. 

Some languages are simple. Chemicals, bitterness and sweetness to repel and attract, to stimulate the idea of rot or an attractive meal or mate. Movement is easy too- run from one place to another, and in the movement, you’ve said something, about what you want, how you achieve it, so on and so forth.

Some languages are so simple, they do not need a brain at all. They don’t even really need to be spoken by the sentient or the living.

The language of violence is one such means of communication. 

Raika, in Body and Soul, is very much enjoying the dialogue she’s partaking in.

It’s not going very well, but it’s a fun dialogue.

The bearded redhead and the man replete with crystals growing from their flesh are being particularly vocal. After losing about a third of their men to her, they seem to be bearing some kind of grudge. Which, fair. The well groomed one, his beard thick and luxurious, seems to primarily wield arrays, his hands carving runes into his surroundings faster than the living terrain can make them appear, a set of floating plates bearing dozens of minor arrays acting as a sort of shield and control center around him. He works fluidly in conjunction with his fellow platoon leader, who seems to be creating more and more crystal outcroppings wherever he touches.

They’re very difficult to eat. Dense, even with Blacksteel, but more than that, they grow, blocking up and tearing open wounds they create and making the terrain trickier, bit by bit. Between the two of them, they are doing wonderful work keeping the terrain advantage on the side of the soldiery.

This is helped by the fact that most of her focus is on the other two.

One of them, for example, has just punched her in the face hard enough to cave in her jawline.

The star-skinned one, a woman of slender proportions that rapidly become alien as she alters her size, hits hard. Every blow seems to be absorbed by the night sky of her flesh, and she just keeps growing larger, getting taller and less humanly proportioned as the transformation progresses. The lack of multiple arms is a big advantage for Raika, one she takes advantage of, but she’s a tenacious opponent who hits ike a truck and is only pushed back with serious effort.

And then, of course, there’s the lightning cultivator.

She can smell his Dao on him. Richer than the others, wrapped lovingly around a Truth, but he refuses to hit her with it. His Dao of Lightning has achieved four distinct colors- the gold of truth, the purple of mystery, and the green of growth, and the red of harm, making for a bouquet of flavors that keeps lingering just out of reach. He dashes in, trailing power, strikes at her, using a spear or sword artifact interchangeably, and dashes back out before she can properly retaliate, especially with all the other distractions.

Overall, it hasn’t been going well.

Her Reactor provides near-infinite transformation, but that only translates to regeneration while she’s controlling it, guiding said transformations into shapes she can use, and the hotter it burns, the harder it gets. Further, it’s become a target, now that her opponents have realized her head, spine and normal hearts aren’t really required for her to keep fighting, and she’s kept on her back feet (and tendrils and tail and spines) keeping it out of direct attacks.

Her enemies are tired, their ability to communicate through violence beginning to slow. They’re in the Nascent Soul realm, after all, and while none have manifested a Soul or Domain yet, it’s expensive to maintain such high-level techniques. Still, there are pieces of her scattered everywhere, more joining them as another blow from the star-skinned soldier knocks out her lower abdomen and a stab from the lightning cultivator severs the tendons of the leg holding up most of her weight. 

She’s tired. Losing. Every cut or bit of food she gets from them, they retreat from, recover, returning to press her harder. Her Body, in all its glory, is neither fast enough to match the lightning, strong enough to weather every blow, or capable enough to track all the ways that their footing and spacing is being manipulated.

The star-skinned cultivator rips a chunk of godflesh from the wall, quarts crystals growing from it like tumors, and slams it into Raika’s chest. The crystals erupt, growing a hundred times larger and forcefully pinning her to the wall, ripping through her exposed and now-unarmored wounds.

Not a heartbeat later, a flash of four-colored lightning so bright that she goes blind in three-hundred and fifteen eyes starts to dance through the crystals and into her body.

What a lovely day to face such heights, thinks the Soul.

Bad Meal Scary Hurt Kill Run, thinks the Body.

What the fuck is going on? Thinks the Mind as their skull, now discarded as a target, finally allows for a critical mass of brain matter to congeal.

Oh, hello, say two out of three parts of Raika, as a lightning strike lands in the center of an impossible valley inside of her.

All three parts of the whole look inwards at the scar gracing their Heart.

Alright. Change of plans.