Chapter 71 - Two Truths And A Liar (Patreon)

Your guess who the better liar is, Raika with her imaginary friends or her newest bud and his self delusion. Took a break yesterday, as y'all saw, and I think it was the right call, cause this one came out foine as hell.

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The sound of gunfire and chaos fades into the background behind her, until the darkness of the tunnel is all-encompassing. Her jaw aches as the idea she stored in the idea of a tooth calls to its like, and she can feel a sort of synchronicity in the feeling inside her heart. The wound refuses to close, and even if she could fully remove one of the only two organs she’s almost certain she still needs, now is not the time or place to do so. She carves out chunks of dead tissue around it, surrounding the perforated heart with living flesh and sealing the hole in her chest, but she can feel that its beat is still irregular, hard to manage and harder to support.

That’s something she’ll need to fix later, too. For all the benefits her transformation brought her, it seems… almost malformed? A lot of muscle groups are copied directly from creatures not meant for her frame, and she doesn’t even know what half her organs do at this point, but most of the biggest flaws remained. Only one heart, a brain that can’t handle its newfound senses properly, and for every improvement like her subdermal armor, there’s the fact that it’s not really good enough yet. It’s easy to assume that she’d somehow managed to be reborn into a better body, and maybe if she was starting her cultivation journey that would be true, but as it is, it just feels frustrating to realize just how little her transformation really boosted her.

Her ability to control her flesh, and the quality of the materials she’s made of; these are the only two changes she can confidently say are true upgrades. All the rest needs a fuckload of improvement.

No, she thinks, not bitter at all about surviving a lethal wound to the heart, not me.

Dink trembles in her hand, her mind shifting to remove the associated sound from its name now that she’s heard what it can really do. She sighs.

“I hear you,” she whispers. “I’m still right to be pissed, though.”

A lesser vibration this time. Not necessarily agreement, but closer, maybe. She’s not really sure how much of her understanding is something new to Dink’s nature, and how much is her making assumptions, but it’s still nice to have someone to talk to, here in the dark.

But, even as the dark remains, the things it hides change.

She emerges from the tunnel into a massive, sprawling room that crawls down, further into the earth. It’s like a cylinder of earth was excavated out within the mountain, pieces of black metal growing like crystals in the dark and supporting the ceiling above and the tunnels and rooms that branch from here. She can sense the tunnels, almost enjoying how little her eyesight has to work with here, tracking instead by how the sound bounces off things around her. She can still see a bit, but only the most reflective things, and less and less as she’s gone deeper. It’s nice to have one of her senses finally not be overwhelming.

Many of the rooms look almost residential as she passes them by, and she stops to look into the third one she walks past. It sits empty like all the rest, but when she notices what’s inside, she forces herself not to focus on any one element too long.

Black steel spikes growing from the walls. A little hole, like a burrow, with hints of piss and sweat, repressed by the cold Truth all around, just large enough for an adult humanoid to lie in. A small bundle in the corner, ruined robes and notes of blood on the floor, acting as a sort of nest for a little wooden whistle.

She stops looking.

You don’t store corpses like this. This is not practicality.

She remembers the faint scent of still-living Qi she felt from the thing that tried to kill her, its limbs grasping, bound and stitched back together into something deadlier. In that moment, when the strange machine inside it had broken, it had smelled, if incredibly faint, distinctly human.

She refuses to let the thought anchor itself in her. They are not alive. They are corpses. And if there’s something left in them, then she sure as hell doesn’t have the knowledge or ability to rescue or heal them, not with how they’ve been altered. Until she sees proof otherwise, she refuses to let herself think about the mass of swarming undead she tore through on the way in.

Some things need to be done. And sometimes, bad choices are the choices you get, and doing nothing is a worst choice than many.

She picks up the pace, not stopping to look into any of the other rooms.

She doesn’t make it all the way down to the bottom of the pit. She doesn’t need to. A whiff of quiet, like the sensation of crispness on a cold day, where you body is reacting even without a smell, wafts out of one of the tunnels about halfway down. It looks similar to all the others, but the orientation of the spikes of metal jutting from it, growing from it, seem to spiral and wander a bit differently, heading out instead of in.

She follows it further, keeping Dink in her hand, the string she wears it on wrapped around her wrist.

“I don’t think I like the quiet,” she whispers to it. “Funny, considering how fucking loud everything is nowadays. I can hear my blood moving, but even still this place is too quiet. What do you think, bud?”

A tremble, so slight it might well be in her imagination.

“Yeah. Figures. You’re made for sound, anyways. Made yourself for sound, if those notes you pulled off are any indication.”

She looks around at the tunnel all around them, crawling with metal and spikes and growth like an impossible organ or vein or throat. She thinks of the distant echo of gunshots, still ongoing minutes after she left them, still telling her that Taran is alive at least.

“Long way from Paleblossom to here,” she whispers to Dink. “Funny how that works. Two years and I haven’t even been home, but somehow that city I rotted in for a while is the thread I get to follow, all the way down in the dark.”

“It is funny, though,” she says. “Talking like this. I think I need to get laid more often. Sure seems to have me thinking a bit more, at least. More awake.”

The thought brings to her the smell of tangerines and a glimpse of faces covered in delicate masks and scarves.

“Yeah,” she says.

They say nothing, because they’re not here.

But she talked to a tuning fork. She can talk to them too.

“I wonder where we’d be,” she says, walking down a tunnel that grows ever sharper, ever more metallic. “If I hadn’t been so sure I could beat the world, if I wasn’t so sure things were simple and kinder than I knew they were. I think he regrets killing you. I think he regretted it the minute it happened, if I’m being honest. He doesn’t seem the type to enjoy it.”

Tangerines shift to open field, for just a moment. A place for growing things.

“I know,” she whispers. “Still killed you. I’m still going to kill him for it. But if you taught me anything it’s that things ripple. I help a kid, he becomes a cultivator, I visit him, he gets killed and I turn myself into this. I kill my enemy, and those who aid me are left in the cold. Or cut open under glass, like the snake.”

Tangerines again. He hadn’t had many notes to his scent yet, and she hadn’t been very good with her new senses yet.

“Glad you approve. Still killing him. Just want the ripples to be in my palm, this time, and not in the river. Make sense?”

It doesn’t, not as much as she’d like. But it rings true anyways. Patience and opportunity. Growth, always. She has to grow stronger. She has to grow wiser. She has to know more and do more, outside this little corner of the world.

She sees a bit of light up ahead, and Dink trembles in her hand, very slightly.

“Good talk,” she says to the boy who isn’t there and his escort.

She exits the tunnel in silence.

The room she finds is bright, comparatively. Small candles, glowing with pale light in the quiet, provide a small part of the illumination. It’s so faint, but if she listens close, she can hear the metal growing in here. There are tables strewn about, old blood uncleaned from some of them, straps and pieces of sharpened obsidian steel and pliers and all sorts of things for installing tools into flesh. Beyond them, in the further corners, she sees a larger space, more open, spread about on it hundreds of pieces of black metal, like sharpened puzzles made to be slotted together into gears and razors and things she doesn’t understand.

And at the center of the room is the skull.

It is carved of sunstone, that she can tell. What exactly was used to carve perfect geometry into the strange and smooth contours of a skull, she’s not sure. Hard to tell what kind of skull it even is, really; at first she thinks it’s human, then beastkin, then not human at all, then entirely human again. Cyclops and wolf and raccoon and bird and dragon and human again. It doesn’t change, it can’t, but she can, so it changes its perspective in her. And all around it, a halo of metal, growing from the earth.

And, to her right, packing a bag hurriedly, dressed in dirty, bedraggled robes and a messy topknot and with a rusted Jian on his hip, is a cultivator.

She takes another step into the room, and his head jumps up like a startled animal to look at her.

“Oh!!!” he says, high pitched and surprised. “Hello!”

She doesn’t say anything. Just looks at him. Pale, disheveled, eyes of grey and white.

“You’re here to take me home, then?” he asks.

She tilts her head. “How do you mean?” she asks.

“You’re, uh, you’re with them, right? The Divisions? The Empire?”

She nods, though it hurts her a bit.

“Well, uh, I’m… I’m ready to go, then?” he says, eyes furtive, hand on the overstuffed satchel now on his hip.

“Where would you be going?” she asks.

“Back to the Research Division?” he asks, confused. “I mean, you saw my work, right? It’s not- I mean obviously it’s unfinished, but the proof of concept alone is worth its weight in gold.”

“What concept?” she asks.

“Great,” he mutters, "they sent a bruiser." He sighs, then collects himself. “Well, obviously my tests were successful! The launch on that little city were botched, obviously, not really my finest work, I got too drawn into making it look good, but I learned from it. I mean, I’m connected to them, I can feel that there’s at least two left still giving a lot of trouble to your friends. I admit, I might have been overzealous in my defense, but honored junior, how could this senior do less? I didn’t recognize you all! The robes, yes, the robes reminded me. I found a novel way to utilize cold sunstone, an inherently inert material, an endothermic Truth of existence, of Heaven’s will. Who else but the honorable Altered Cultivation Division to escort me back?”

“How did you do that?” she asks. Patient and ready.

“Oh, it’s actually, I admit, a bit of a blessing from the Heavens!” he says with a manic smile. “See, on its own, shaped as it is, it remains inert, perfectly formed, takes tremendous effort to reshape it, but as it turns out, the more you help it pretend to be alive, the more you can do with it.”

He gestures at the skull that is every skull, the crown of black metal growing from it and infesting the entire underground, sweeps an arm around the tables. “Convince it to function with the Truths closest to death, which isn’t what cold sunstone is but is close, like mold or decay, and you can trick it into changing things, when usually it’s an unchanger of things, yes… Keeps them stable and then makes them nothing, but if you trick it, yes if you overcome and use proper technique, proper cultivation and intellect, it does something new. That’s the metal, see? It’s growing from it, because the world is convinced that a dead thing should have other things grow from it, even though cold sunstone doesn’t grow anything at all, but it’s close enough to death that you can trick it and-”

“Did you carve the skull?” She asks.

“Me?” He says, genuinely confused. “Oh no, no, some old artifact, an ancient treasure left by someone much grander than I, but I figured out how to use it, see? You trick the metal into thinking it’s mold and all of a sudden it can be everywhere, and it thinks it can survive the sunstone now so it does. Use the metal as a dampener, then put something that changes against something that never changes, and you can harvest the difference, use it to do all sorts of things. Toughens them, yes, but keeps them moving beyond all ends, and can spread the effects if you do it right-”

“Who’s ‘them’?” she asks.

“Who? Oh. Mortals. You know. Sort of what they’re for. Everyone has to be useful, and what’s more useful, farming instead of cultivating, or furthering a new form of energy, a new paradigm? Renewal, perpetual metal for the empire and something to hold back even death! With a trick! My trick! And so… so that’s why you’re here. To take me home. I have my notes, I can bring them, and they’ll know I was useful. I tricked the Heavens. Me. They’ll know I’m useful, now. They’ll let me stay this time.”

She doesn’t listen to the rest of his story.

For all his frail appearance, he’s in the Core Formation realm. Used to be that shit was a big deal to her. Inner sect disciples only. Nowadays, it seems every government employee she meets is around there.

Still. Hole in her heart or no, she has some Qi left. Her reformed stomach gurgles at the reminder, and she’ll have to figure that out later, but it’s fine for now. She has enough.

She moves faster than he can see, unprepared to cycle his Qi or use his cultivation. She can move fast all the time; things like him have to burn their energy to do it. She may be weaker overall, bereft of hidden skills, but she has that advantage. He isn’t prepared to stop her when she grabs him by the throat and crushes the back of his head against the skull.

He doesn’t die on the first hit. The scent of sweat and desperation and sudden fear mix with the scent of cold, of sharpened quills and ink gone rancid and dead things opened and left rotting, a discordant smell that can’t be healthy for him anyways, but she doesn’t let him get off a technique, slamming him down a second time. Third. Fourth.

She hears something crack on the fifth impact, and he manages a scream past her grip, hands flying up, launching Qi in a wild, unbidden burst.

She holds Dink in front of her like a holy symbol. Though quiet, it does ring, one more time. A clear note, a note that sounds kind of like the breaking of rock or sound a living thing makes when it is hit, and it’s not perfect but it’s enough and the technique dissipates before it can really form, washing painlessly off her skin, so dense and Qi-saturated she can barely feel it try to crawl into her.

She slams him down a sixth time, and then his skull is broken and the skull of all skulls is wedged in him.

For a moment, the room goes silent again.

She looks at the corpse of the corpse-smith. Nameless to her, except the title he claimed making all of his useful tools.

The skull looks back through the burst, bloody holes where his eyes were before they popped out, and for a moment, it sees her.

She sees it back.

It reaches out to her, to the thing she bit off and replaced a missing tooth with. Like calls to like, and the specter of a Truth she beat reaches back to the perfect dead thing before her. Her toothache is worse than ever.

But.

I Am Me. I Am Mine.

And then, right behind it, crashing into her like a flood, clicking into place like it was always there.

I Can Change.

And toothaches are pretty common when you have new ones growing in.

Facing the black metal and the empty, yawning sockets of that empty, holy artifact of Nothing, of End, subverted to cruelty, she smiles. And then her jaw shifts, and black teeth, fangs of rending and ruin grown from holy end meeting the bite that kills, emerge from behind her first set of teeth.

She can change. And if changing a rock into a skull, with enough Truth and Qi, is enough to grow this strange substance all around… well, she has Truth, and she has Qi. What luck, then, that she kept a little piece of nothing for herself. A dream of perfect, final death, changed inside her until she can grow something from it.

From the ghost of a Truth and a secret stolen from a dead monster, she grows teeth of black metal, and smiles at the dead man and his perfectly dead skull.

Opportunity, at last.