Chapter 86 - In The Den Of Old Monsters (Patreon)

Yes it's 2am! I know! myeh. Got some bad comments on RR again so I vented by letting myself enjoy videogames too long, and then came back and enjoyed letting the writing flow for a while. I really, really want a day off where I can spend more time writing and just flow with it... ugh. Soon. Ah well, enjoy! I promised I'd bring the lad back more often / more relevantly, and I intend to foil him more directly with Raika as we go. Much love!

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Shin Ren is pretty sure he’s dead.

There’s literally no other reasonable explanation as to why he would possibly hurt this bad. He’s dead. Gotta be. Someone made a clerical error and reincarnated him as a larva, and then he got eaten, and now he’s dead again.

He’s in and out for days. The only real way to tell is by the heat of the sunlight, bearing down on the world, and the pain of night when it leaves and he is left aching with cold. If there is any one mercy to the experience, it is that he does not dream. He’s not left to boil and cook between the uncaring sky and visions and voices that haunt him. Instead, all he experiences, for days upon days, is pain and silence.

Like with all things, eventually this ends.

The pain is sharp, as it always is, but for the first time in time that he can’t track, there’s more to it. Or rather, more than just the pain.

The sound of footsteps.

It’s enough to start to drag him back. Footsteps mean people. They could also mean more from his hallucinations, but even that would indicate something new occurring, and so the priority is to understand that change.

He realizes he still has a head, and that he can turn it, and does so.

He realizes that his eyes are closed, and goes to open them.

They’re stuck. At first it feels like it might just be the stickiness of sleep, but as he tugs with his eyelids he understands its more than that. Something is wrapped around his face, tight enough that he can’t budge it on his own. On instinct he circulates some of his Qi, lets it bubble and grow-

Immediately he spasms, wracked with agony. The Qi is yanked away from his control, spiraling into the two whirlpools that parasitize his pool, the leftover bits that escape somehow magnified and altered into something he can’t use, too chaotic, too disharmonized. By the time what’s left of it reaches the meridians he’d tried to bring them to, to strengthen and heal himself, it’s deviated so far from the ideal of the Purple Flame and all its glory that it just flows on, uncontrolled, back to his Dantian.

And he is left screaming from the effort, because he is burned.

He recognizes the pain now, more aware and more accustomed to it. He’s been burned plenty, it’s inherent to the training of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect, and the pain is familiar but never this vast before. For a moment it feels like he’s drowning in it.

Something cold touches him, streams and trickles of it flowing down his forehead, and even as it magnifies the pain in the rest of him with the juxtaposition he experiences a brief, agonizing moment of peace. The pain fades from his face at the touch of the liquid, cold and cool, and it’s like being pulled from the mire for just a moment.

It fades almost as fast as it appeared, his own body heat and the nature of thermodynamics conspiring against him to warm the water and let the pain flow back, ready and eager and biting and snarling and-

Another moment of pressure. Something scented with leaves and herbs, with ground roots that are surely a fine powder but grate against his flesh, but cold enough that he shivers. There is such a bliss in that second. To be in pain, in agony, so total and complete and overpowering… and then to be free of it. He almost giggles after he gasps at its touch.

Someone speaks. He can hear the words, but can’t understand them, wouldn’t be able to process them if he could. There is just the pain, and the blissful moment where he is released from it. It’s almost like a trance, a cycle of sorts from which, even as he feels trapped, he feels grateful for, because it means that he is awake. He is alive. And the pain stops, sometimes.

Shin Ren’s first day awake passes in that fugue, and ends only when at last he is exhausted by the pain, and falls back into dreamless sleep.

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Shin Ren’s third day, he manages to sit up.

The meditation helped. It’s a bit of a ridiculous thought, but having the structure helped. Retreating into himself, experiencing that cyclical flow, the cold always returns, and the heat comes right after it. Whatever healing remedies are mixed into it are surely doing their part, but the state he slipped into helped.

After a while, with every moment that the burns returned, haunting him with the ruin of damaged nerves and the terror of what he must look like, what he must have lost, he began to work. He began to focus, and think, and try everything he could to not just experience the pain, to distract himself and guide himself. The cold, cool touch of bliss would come, and he’d pause, rest, feel free and breathe- but such things always end far too quick, and the pain of his untouched flesh and the warming waters would cooperate to bring him back to ruin. To madness.

He does not hear or experience his visions, the hallucinations that drove him here, but their origins haunt him nonetheless. If there was ever doubt before that he cradles heart demons, there is none now, for the symptoms are textbook. His own Qi, drawn into an altered state by the demons of his mind, responding to his emotions and mental state by clumping together and changing their patterns. Near his heart and his liver meridians, there are whirlpools, pieces of his own life-force and energy turned into sinks where Qi is drawn in, but left unused, growing stagnant and pulling in more. There is some argument to the supposed sentience of heart demons, but without his imagined tormentors to speak on their behalf, he sees little evidence of it. They simply sit, two tumorous masses of power, hungrily drawing from any energy that moves near them.

So he spends his time, what little of it he can focus for, ensuring that he does not move energy near them.

It goes against much of his training, and feels deeply unnatural to do, but eventually he masters diverting the flow of his Qi out of certain channels. They are not independent, each meridian and channel possessing up to a dozen branching pathways to flow energy into and through, and the patterns one does this in are what determines much of one’s cultivation technique and direction. Some patterns draw out more energy, others refine Qi in minute distinctions, and the more esoteric patterns are what allow one to grow in their cultivation at a rate that can keep up with their demands, and what help shape a student into their master’s way, be they from a Sect or the Empire. To cut off a direction to his heart and the entirety of his liver from his circulation is ridiculous, compromises his cultivation and direction, and means that he has at best limited ability to improve their function.

But it also means that he can use his Qi again.

It’s not perfect. Both of his demons are placed much too well for that, both draining him ever so slightly ever so constantly, even draining the ambient Qi around him, the excess falling back into his system and destabilizing him. But as he warps the pattern he uses, leaves them as quiet as he can, he gradually starts to be able to move his Qi where he needs it to be, and infuse his will through it and into his flesh.

On the third day since awakening, Shin Ren manages to strengthen his body enough to sit up.

He does it as the visitor arrives, the footsteps that herald the cool release. The movement is agony, but not a new agony, not the deeper hell from his Qi deviating to his demons, so much hungrier than ever. He sits up, and the pain, for just a moment, does not overwhelm him.

It rises back like a tide the moment that the thrill of victory leaves him, the instant that new challenges arrive, but he holds onto the moment in the storm. And then, after more words in a language he doesn’t speak, there comes again the cool touch of medicine and blessed, blessed cold.

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On the seventh day from his awakening, Shin Ren uncovers his eyes.

He regained movement a day ago. Managed to sit up straight the day before that. His sense of touch is… off, even with the aid of medicine and Qi healing both. He’s not a healer, but to guide one’s own body to an ideal state is natural for any cultivator, it should only be for major damages, lingering wounds, curses and poisons that he should need a healer versed in cultivation.

And yet, his demons nestle in him. And yet, the scars do not fade. And yet, beneath the bandages on his hands, he can feel very, very little. Pressure, yes, he can tell when he’s touching something, but texture eludes him.

But that’s fine. He doesn’t need the details yet. He just needs to see.

He reaches to his face, arms stiff, the skin unnaturally tight, and touches. A thick pad of gauze sits over his eyes, and on his face, little more than his mouth is uncovered.

He’s been trying, for days, to heal his eyes. To sense what is wrong with them, and try to fix it with his limited circulation, his limited knowledge, his limited view on what his ideal state might be.

He tugs at the bandages, and they fall away, pulling slightly at the bandages around them with the stickiness of sweat.

The light is blinding, and for a while he thinks he has failed. He spends his time there, struggling, blinking and squinting and letting his eyes readjust, riding the wave of the pain and disorientation… until eventually it begins to clear. Until it’s not just chaos and sensitivity, but shapes and colors that he begins to see.

He is white. Like an embalmed mummy, wrapped in perfect satin, he is almost picturesque.

Everything he can see of himself is covered in gauze, bandages, lotions. What little is exposed to the air is often red, healed over but different than before, or still carrying the scars of the burns. He looks thin to his eyes, not emaciated but drained, lesser.

That’s hardly a surprise. He is lesser.

He turns his head slowly, fighting the tightness and the pain in his neck. To the right, nothing but a wall, red-brown sandstone, partially worn smooth enough to almost look artistic, like a gem made from simple stone. To his left, the cave he is in opens a bit.

There is a hole in the roof, angled so that sunlight comes in through the small tunnel and reflects from the far wall, lighting the room from how smooth and reflective the stone here is. It illuminates a small, almost quaint space; there is a desk in one corner, carved from stone as well, laden with papers, diagrams, scrolls, ink and parchment and more. Across from it, on the wall behind his head, he finds a bookcase, stretching to the ceiling a good ten feet above and just as full of literature and writings. There is a carpet in the middle of the room, an ornate rug with intricate detailing, the weave of it so fine that when his eyes unfocus, it looks like a painting, detailing an overhead view of some sort of pastoral scene, trees, farmlands and their crops waving in the wind.

Behind the carpet, a good dozen feet away, there is a man sitting in a chair, facing Shin Ren.

Behind him, there is a door, seemingly made of stone just like every other piece of furniture he’s seen so far, including the bed he’s lying in. The chair also seems to be made of stone, though of a different make than all the rest, seeming not to have been carved smooth and molded into form within the room itself. Its made of a dark slate-grey stone, standing out amidst the warm brown, yellow and orange of the stone around them.

The man in the chair is wearing long, flowing robes, light and thin but reaching to the ground and almost pooling there. They’re colored an off-white, like they used to be purer but have been worn down by time, sunlight and wear, and stand juxtaposed with the man who wears them. His skin is so dark its closer to black, his eyes bright brown pools like rich loam looking out from rich, vibrant flesh that radiates warmth. His hair is white, shorn close to his scalp, but he does not look old: if anything, he only looks a few years older than Shin Ren, somewhere in his mid twenties, early thirties at the oldest possible end of the spectrum. He does not seem particularly muscled, but he exudes an aura of vitality, of one who has worked beneath the sun and who has grown hearty from it rather than burned.

He smiles, lips closed, as Shin Ren sees him. Shin Ren isn’t sure how long he’s been there, waiting. He can’t sense anything from him, not a drop of Qi, but it’s hard to sense anything at all through the pain, even if he’s mastered it enough to remain aware through its peaks and valleys.

Moving slowly, keeping his hands visible, the man waves, the movement causing a ripple around one of a few silver bands he wears on his fingers. A piece of parchment appears in his hand, covered in small markings and some sort of pattern, and he presses it to his throat.

“It is good to see you awake, young friend,” says a voice that does not sound like the language Shin Ren heard before. “I think we have much to discuss.”