Book One, Chapter 30 - When Hearing Voices, Make Friends, Not Foes

Alright! As promised, we do have some edits tonight as well. Eat up my pretties! Was fun recharacterizing Taurus from my own initial ideas for him, while also trying to keep the spirit of the scene.

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We are, each of us, a world in and of ourselves. It is impossible to know every world of every person, not least because understanding a world, experiencing it, fundamentally changes. 

That’s why we have power. That’s why we can do what we can do.

Things without minds, without perception, experience the world as it is, or are a part of it that experiences nothing, not in the sense we use the word. That’s why only sapient things cultivate. Why enough Qi, in a singular place, becomes sapience of its own kind. Because we create our own worlds, and the friction between the world that is us and the world that is creates the energy and materials we use to change things.

It’s all madness. Without it, we are atoms adrift. With it, we are gods, consuming what greater insanities have created for us.

-”Path Of The Deathless”, primer on Cultivation of all forms, written by Sun “Murder The Heavens And Eat Their Thrones” Dailou, Burning Ambitions Made Flesh, The Screaming Sunlight Turned Sweet And Savory. Redacted by official Imperial Decree, held in perpetuity amongst the Divine Vaults.

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It takes her almost three weeks to relearn how to speak.

In that time, she is kept confined, her room far more secure than the general cell she was stuck in to begin with. Here, there are no bars, only a single, featureless door, its contours so smooth that when closed she literally cannot see it. The room is somehow pressurized, with new air only coming in in periodic hisses through vents that close with the same degree of precision as the door, and over every single surface she can smell a pervasive scent, like lightning and heat hiding in the metal. The formation stinks of a clinician’s station, sterilized by flame, with fine metallic powder rounding out the scent.

For the first few days, before her eyes grew back properly, she navigated the room by scent. She had plenty of time to get familiar with it.

Interestingly, she kept most of her scars. The sea of razor-slices from the weaponized construct, the marks of surgery which kept her alive, older marks earned in battle or in training- and, of course, the array formations of the ritual she and Li Shu undertook.. She doesn’t think she chose to keep them, specifically, but the notion of losing them is… rather more weighty than she’d like, so she decides she prefers it this way. 

She does not keep any burn scars, though. The only mark she keeps of her execution is a mangled point of paler flesh, shaped almost in a spiral, over her sternum where Shin Ren impaled her.

More than just the burns are gone. She woke up able to use her right leg fully again, the ruin of tendon and poorly regrown bone made into something new. That alone has her crying for a while when she realizes she can walk properly again.

Other things change too. Her heartbeat becomes smoother, a bit faster on average, a bit more efficient. Her lungs can hold their breath for minutes at a time, easily, before she needs to breathe again, and provide an ease of breath she hasn’t felt in… well over a year. The feeling she had, where her heartbeat was enforced and constant, has faded as her body has filled back out and healed to match the damage.

And there was so much damage.

Her limbs were like blackened sticks, barely more than bone and charred skin. Her torso had been emptied in part, the fire poking through holes in her defenses and hollowing parts of her out. Her entire surface had been unmade, turned to charcoal, and even after the burst of vitality she’d felt, the divine, burning taste that had let her move and act and survive, it had still taken days before she’d been able to move without the sound of crackling.

Whatever happened to her had not been regeneration. It hadn’t even been some sort of last ditch biological function, one final burst of adrenal ferocity and superhuman strength born from the pain. She had been gone, unmade, turned to pain and ash and ruin, turned to nothing, and still-

And still she had not let go.

She does not remember much of what happened in those moments, after the fire began. She believes, with all that she has left, that it’s for the best. There may be something crucial there, with however it felt and whatever she did, but the thought of actively looking past the fragmented flickers of pain and psychosis she can remember… 

She does not have a bed in this room, but she spent the first day or so after trying to remember curled in a corner, whimpering.

She did not like the weakness it might have shown to her captors, but… pain is pain. And even touching those memories had not left much in her.

But she had not let go. She knew that much. She had found something, had tasted something while she lay broken, and she had told, commanded, ordered, known herself in a way that had made her… do something, move towards it.

She remembers that part more easily than she’d like. The taste of it. She had bitten him, she’s certain. She had bitten him, or maybe his fire, or both, and it had tasted… divine. Like life, like heat, like sex and soft fruit and burning liquor and pure understanding and something like love, and like none of those things, and the memory makes her shiver because she swallowed it and sought more, and the memories end not long after.

She thinks she got a few more bites. It’s hazy.

It is not an issue of feeling like someone else had piloted her body, or that something monstrous had taken over in that instant of desperation. The part she still needs to… embrace, or understand, is that it just felt like her.

Then she’d woken up here, and three days later the pain had started to fade.

The heartbeat went first, and she had screamed and cried and beat at her chest with what strength she had left, terrified it was going away, that her heart was somehow leaving her to die, abandoning her to silence. 

It did not, and eventually, she figured out why.

It is not just skin and muscle that moves strangely anymore. She can feel every vein, every part of her that her blood flows through, and she can stop it moving as easily as she can decide that it simply is moving, her will superseding biological demands or the need for a heart. Before, she could sense her heartbeat out to her skin, but now the muscles and bone around it feel denser, dense enough to muffle the constant beating. 

Raika spends weeks learning to move her body without it moving on its own, and without it moving out of sync with itself. She has to spend a long, long time meditating, forcing herself to remember her time at the medical pavilion and the medical diagrams there, the training years before that in the Hungering Roots sect which demanded she know every part of herself, going on daily runs and practicing kata to learn how to fight. It inspires her, and despite the limiting quarters, the glow of perfectly smooth and enchanted stone that leaves the chamber without shadow, she does eventually get enough coordination to start doing basic exercises.

For the first time in what must be now well past a year, she does not tire at the simple act of getting up and sitting down. Squats, pushups, stances, punches (as best as she can, one-armed as she still is), and short jogs from one part of the room to the other, supported by endless meditation, round out most of what she does all day and night (which, in this particular prison, might as well not exist).

The experience of relearning her limits after her transformation helps keep her from going mad from the ever-present glow and the nonexistent schedule.

And by three weeks, she’s managed to recreate a facsimile of instinctive responses, and better overall mobility than she’s had in… possibly even before her cultivation, actually, if she’s going purely by flexibility and control. It’s fascinating how her body moves, and while it’s far from perfect, the fact she can use all of it, that she can access her own body and move it as she wills truly for the first time in so long, almost makes up for the isolation.

Yeah, meditation still isn’t a trance state anymore, and trapped in a room without shadow, without doors or windows or anything but the occasional “hiss” of entering air has been… difficult. So Raika considers it both a strike of luck as much as a note of frustration when she realizes she has to relearn how to talk, the strange process that let her regenerate and alter her body after the devastation she suffered replacing the charred ruin that had been her throat. Without anyone to talk to, she hadn’t noticed the change, and the sounds she’d made exercising or in the throes of nightmares had been instinctive enough to not need fine control over her voice.

So it is that, bored out of her mind and starting to get genuinely worried about how long she’s been in here, she finally manages to say something.

“The worm wriggled like a bouncing butter baby~” she manages, after a few hours of refining moving her vocal cords on purpose rather than instinctively. It’s like being learning to write with one’s off-hand- she thinks the damage to the nerves erased a lot of muscle memory. More surprising than the inevitable success of hard work, though, is the way her voice sounds.

She does not remember it being that husky, or that melodious. She doesn’t sound very “feminine” in the sense that it’s harmonious and high pitched, but there’s an inherently attractive quality, at least to her ears, about the voice that emerges from her throat. It’s still recognizably her own, but it seems fully healed, no longer raspy or barely above a croak, and yet smoother and slightly deeper than it was back when she was healthy. She sounds like she could be a singer, and at the sound of her words she can already kind of picture a smoky ambiance, on stage surrounded by dangerous types in a place half luxurious and half deadly.

She snorts at the mental image, then laughs at the snort, then laughs at her laugh, all sounding so different now.

“Fuck you!” she yells happily. “Took my cultivation and I still ended up sexier than ever!”

“Interesting choice for your first coherent sentence,” says a voice from right behind her.

Even with conscious control of nearly every muscle in her body, she startles so bad she jumps almost three feet in the air from a seated lotus position and flails her limbs in every direction before landing and whirling around.

There’s no one there. The wall is unbroken, the smell of sterilized metal wrapped about chemical ashes still just as pervasive as ever, the entire room still completely seamless and impossibly vague.

“Who said that?” she asks in her new voice.

“I did,” says the voice.

“Ah. Fuck. This again.” Raika mumbles, relaxing out of her stance and pinching the bridge of her nose. “Thought we were past this.”

“Oh?” the voice asks. “Whatever do you mean?”

“You don’t have a smell. You’re not my first hallucination, pal, but yet again- no scent. You know, the whole fail-state for closed door cultivation. Stay too awake all alone for too long, you come out crazy. It was nice at first, but you’re late to the party- my brain stopped tricking me with the likes of you last week. No good if I can just see through it.”

The voice laughs softly, like a rumble of falling stones. Whoever she’s hallucinating, they’re big. “I’m afraid I’m quite real, Raika the Bloody. I apologize for the isolation. You seemed conscious enough, but trauma responses can be difficult to differentiate from inhuman, non-sapient instinct or instructions. We weren’t sure you could still speak, or we’d have reached out this way a bit sooner.”

She squints at a random wall. “Yeah, quite real,” she grumbles. “That’s definitely what someone who isn’t a hallucination would say. Mmmh-hmm.”

Again, that soft, rumbling laugh. “Would telling you my name help you understand a bit better? I’m quite famous in these parts, or so I hear. Don’t visit much anymore, but I was influential in the local area over the course of the last few decades. Helped create the cell you’re currently in, as a matter of fact.” 

She doesn’t respond, but apparently her malfunctioning brain takes that as assent.

“Is the name Runemaster Boriah one that you’re familiar with? And if not, then perhaps… Taurus, Mountain-Strider?” the voice asks.

Raika gasps at the name, taking a step back from her chosen wall in shock. She raises a trembling hand to her mouth, slowly, eyes wide, and-

“Nah,” she replies, dropping the act. “Never heard of you. And those are kinda shit names.”

“Well, we can’t always choose the names given to us, hmm?” the voice replies. “Besides, despite their many faults, I would say my family chose my given name fairly well.”

“Boriah?” she asks, a little incredulous. “Who names their kid Boriah? Did they want you to be bullied by every kid in town, or were they just bad at naming baby hallucinations?” She pauses at that. “Wait, am I bad at naming baby hallucinations?”

“Still not a hallucination. And no, not Boriah, you can thank the Emperor for that one, even if only indirectly. Taurus. A bit overly familiar, but the current circumstances do indicate that you’re not one for conventional behavior.”

“Taurus?” she asks. “Now you’re going to tell me you just happen to be hung like a bull. I’m not falling for it, three times was enough. I’m nowhere near drunk enough for you to try and pull that shit anyways, hallucination or not.”

There’s a moment of incredulous silence, the entire cell going dead quiet with the exception of Raika’s heart and the occasional inhale and exhale.

“-that’s enough, if you would.” the voice suddenly says, as if coming in from being cut off. “Otherwise, I swear to the Emperor, I’ll do… something.” It pauses, as if realizing it can be heard again, a soft grumbling followed by a huff as the voice tries to recenter itself. “That is not what I meant, and yes, it’s my actual name. Yours is Raika, correct?”

“Ah, all professional now,” she hums. “Say hi to all the other voices, hmm? They can come out and talk anytime, I am wildly bored in here. The nightmares only count for so much entertainment after the first two weeks.”

The voice (Taurus) sighs. “Hmm. Well. If you’re a construct or trained corpse, you’re the cheekiest one I’ve ever met,” it says. “Your situation is… not untenable, but, I assume, rather uncomfortable for you. I designed the cell you’re in, and I know its limitations, and judging by your currently demonstrated capabilities and a generous, multiplicative estimation of what you might be able to do, the only way you’re getting out of there is with permission. Now that we know you can talk, we’re going to be sending someone in to see you soon. Be aware that if you attack them, they won’t be in danger, but you very much will be. This cell can do more than just block Qi and hide its doorways.”

Raika pauses.

Has she noticed something that might lead her to think that someone would be visiting her soon? It seems a leap to assume that she’ll go from vocal hallucinations to a full on false vision after just leaving that cycle, but not impossible, especially considering the trauma before she woke up here (which she still is avoiding touching as much as possible). Still, it seems unlikely, and she stops and starts examining herself. 

Part of the advantage of increased awareness and control of so much of her body’s functions (though she’s blessedly still ignorant to most organs) is, well, increased awareness of changes to said body. She focuses, slowly centering herself and honing in on her ears.

“Say something again,” she says to the air, eyes closed.

There is a pause, but after a few moments; “Check check, one two three.”

She feels the minute, shifting vibration inside the membranes of her ears, beating tiny, perfect notes against her skin and skull.

She nods. “Ok,” she says. “Sorry, sir Taurus, that I mocked the size of your cock. If you’re real, I’m sure its plenty impressive, and I’m pretty at least what I’m hearing is real, so congrats. So long as whoever you send in doesn’t attack or try to kill me, I promise not to attack them.”

There’s an awkward cough, and she thinks she can detect some kind of… howling? In the background of the voice, but he replies after a beat; “Your cooperation is much appreciated. We have a lot of questions, but you’re in no immediate danger. We look forward to seeing how things progress.”

Somewhere between an hour or six later (very hard to tell in here, especially with how little she’s been hungry lately) she hears a hiss of pressured air as the wall behind her reveals a door, gliding seamlessly open. Behind it stands someone she immediately recognizes, features haggard, like they haven’t been sleeping much.

“You really are just the worst headache I’ve ever had,” Qen Hou sighs as he steps into her prison, the door behind him closing so perfectly it’s like it was never there at all.