Book One, Chapter 28 - The First Forging

Man oh man. I definitely don't have room to add much more. I definitely want to add more. Agony and torment.

The chapter is improved, though. And it already started good.

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The very purpose of the Division of Altered Cultivation is to find that which does not fit the conventional knowledge of the world and work to understand it. In spite of millenia of progress, in spite of conquest and advancement and evolution, there is still much about the world we don’t know, and more yet we have not come to master. The Empire benefits, as do all in its embrace, by acknowledging that which is not yet within easy access, and by acting to bridge that gap.

-Runemaster Boriah, Researcher of the Division of Altered Cultivation

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He may not have meant to light her on fire.

He did seem to pack a respectable amount of power into the technique. By scent alone, she thinks that it would probably have charred a mortal-level being to ash pretty much instantly. Something more on par for a Foundational-tier entity, like Raika proved herself to be in that fight? Maybe one or two seconds of pain and the flame would have them dead.

Raika spends the first four seconds or so writhing in silence. Then enough blood falls out of her lung and throat that she can start screaming.

What’s most interesting, she discovers in the part of her that is very, very far away, is that you really can’t compare pain after a certain threshold. If someone ever asks if it’s worse to be burned alive or turned to mincemeat as you’re gradually broken apart piece by piece, firstly she would tell them it’s a bit rude to ask, but also it’s a dumb question, because they hurt totally differently. Pain signals have way more nuance than people think, and even in the face of death, she’d be hard pressed to say whether any one kind of pain holds perfect supremacy over the others.

That being said, fire is definitely top three. Minimum.

Also, while you can’t compare any one pain to another above a certain threshold, it turns out that this, this moment, now, while her fat liquifies and her flesh burns and her nerves scream like wind chimes in a storm, is definitely the most pains she’s ever felt, all over that same threshold together.

She’s still alive.

This small part of Raika tries to remind the rest of her of this wonderful (horrible, agonizing) miracle, but they’re too busy ş̴͚̞͘c̶̢̈͑r̸͎̹̃̍̾ḙ̵̻̉̽a̶̤͗m̸̥̩̹̍̓ȋ̶̙͍̚n̷̲̻̉̐ͅg̶͈̳̈́, so the small part shuts up real quick.

Ten seconds. She is still squirming and making noises, and the small part of her that is outside herself and outside the pain reckons that maybe the audience isn’t having much fun with this whole thing anymore, and Shin Ren, clearly distressed, is raising his spear to end her suffering. She can’t really see, anymore, her eyes are melting, but it makes sense, and she can kinda smell him coming closer, feel the vibration as she spasms and writhes and slithers on the floor in the worst pains imaginable.

Fuck that guy! Where does he get off, killing her like he’s doing her a favor? After he set her on fire! The nerve.

Some small piece of Raika is actually distracted from the pain, looking at that thought in genuine disbelief. Why wouldn’t they want to die? Why wouldn’t it be a favor?

Because, the tiny part says like it’s obvious, Raika is Her own. Her death is Hers, and she is, even now, holding it by the throat, instants away.

A good argument, Raika thinks. If this thing in so many pieces can call itself that anymore.

She’s stopped squirming, which seems to have made Shin Ren hesitate. His smell is stopped, standing there behind the scent of pork and screaming.

Everything is black. She can’t see, or breathe, or hear, or feel anything other than the burning, burning, b̴̰̏ù̴̮r̶͚̒ń̴̫i̵̫͘ṅ̸̳ḡ̴͈- and she doesn’t like that.

So, since she can’t move her legs or arm or body or mind or self or anything but pain pain pain and she doesn’t like that, she uses the only tool she’s been able to truly rely on.

She bites down. 

There’s something to be said about pattern recognition in a mind that is so thoroughly in ruins that it does not know it still has a name.

 She feels her teeth, caked in dried blood and baked solid, falling out of her head from the heat, bite into the fire. She feels one of them add its own flavor of pain to everything, a note of Cold.

Chew and swallow.

She’s not screaming. There’s no air to scream with.

Bite.

Swallow.

Bite again.

She’s still alive. She’s still alive. She sobs, the sound broken and ruined and barely audible over the crackling that hasn’t yet made it past all her skin and muscles, which has charred her wounds shut, which has consumed more than half of her but not all of her. The shadow that is here and not here and not fire so not important aims its spear, hearing the sob for the agony it is, for the thing he’s condemned this writhing ruin to-

And then her stomach stops growling.

One note. One single voice, raised over a chorus. A pain so constant for so long she almost forgot it was there, and which now has shrunk.

And then her heart beats, and there is a whole new pain and it is a better pain. She feels her throat, burnt and screaming like all of her is screaming and aching and she is nothing she is in the fire she is in the ruin it is all gone it is all broken and molten and ash-

And her heart beats again, and the tingling brings her back again. The tingling that is not pain, when everything is pain, when her mind has nothing else but the pain and then there’s something else. And the fire crackles, and her flesh does not burn as it should, as a person would, as a cultivator would, because she changed it she did something it hurts so much, why does her skin hurt oh yes the fire the fire-

Beat, says her heart, louder than Dink was and oh how she misses Dink, how she misses JiaJia and the cold and her hovel and her old scavenging route, and oh how it hurts to be here, to be now, when she could let go and be there-

Beat, says her heart, and, bereft of sanity, bereft of anything to do, Raika bites and swallows again, and this time the tingling is stronger, brighter, filling more of a shell that is broken and bled out and ruined.

And her stomach feels warm.

And even still, she hurts.

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There is silence. 

The flames die down. The body is not moving. The flesh is charred into a corpse of obsidian and charcoal. Shin Ren stands there, face haunted, the stadium dead silent. Whatever it was, whatever she was, if his purpose was to give a good end to a meaningless death, he has failed entirely, an attempt to let her vanish in a final flash of heat backfiring into one of the worst tortures he’s ever enacted on another living being. Already he can hear the silence dying and the whispers starting, the horror in their voices. Some may not care, but only the most callous, and even those may hesitate to end a worthy opponent like he just did. The Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect may understand the beauty, the power, and the truth of fire, but to use that truth as a tool for base torment is… beneath them, at least. Surely they’re better than this. Surely this… Rai Ka deserved more than to end like that.

In the end, he couldn’t even bring himself to end her suffering, for fear she might survive the blow, only to suffer even more.

She was stronger than he thought. Not just her ability to deal with her wounds, to move the way she did even without Qi. Her flesh was tougher than it should have been.

He can move faster than a mortal can blink. He can feel a breeze from a hundred meters away. He should… he should have been able to tell.

He shouldn’t have let the burning happen to her.

The thought feels loud and raw in a way he can’t stomach.

He turns away. He can’t look anymore.

It strikes the moment his back is turned.

He barely senses it coming. Enhanced abilities tell him of a crackling of charcoal, of wind on his back, of the sound of a step, but they’re so fast, so unexpected, that it almost goes unnoticed. It feels like a ripple in the Qi around them, like the slightest shift in currents, but it does not feel like a person. It almost feels like a Qi technique, though the comparison is hard to be certain of, so fast does it move, like an animated puppet or enchanted mannequin, energy made to pretend to be alive for the sake of moving something which cannot. Whatever this thing is, disregarding the fact it should be dead and still doesn’t feel like a living beast would, it feels like an empty shape, held up by the barest ripple.

Which makes it all the more horrifying when it jabs a limb, missing a hand, a sharp stump of bone all that remains, six inches into his stomach.

He didn’t move in time to block, the instant of hesitation too much for even his training and instincts and ingrained techniques to overcome.

She can’t be alive, he thinks. She can’t be alive.

And he hears it. Feels it, vibrating through the shard shoved through skin and muscle, beneath that charred outer shell that so thoroughly covered it.

A heartbeat.

He is at the peak of the Core Formation realm. His Qi, his cultivation method, his techniques and knowledge all stand on the cusp of joining together into a core, a new form of his Dantian that would allow him to finally fundamentally begin building his inner Soul and step closer to the realm of immortals.. He can run hundreds of miles in a day, leap over great buildings, crush stone to powder in his hands. He suffers no Qi deviations, and has rarely felt the touch of a bottleneck.

He should be faster than this ruined thing that stares at him with eyeless, burnt sockets of flesh. He should be strong enough, durable enough, that it can only break itself against him. But before he has time to move, before he has done more than step back and begun to move his spear into position, it has stabbed him four more times.

Unthinking, he blasts a wave of flame and aura around himself, detonating like a bomb that makes the colosseum echo and makes the weakest of the disciples clutch their ears in agony. The thing is launched halfway across the arena again as he staggers, clutching at his bleeding stomach, cycling his Qi to boost his toughness and natural regeneration. A blast like that should have obliterated the abomination.

He hears the sound of chewing.

Shin Ren looks up and stares, silent and bleeding, as the thing tears off a chunk of his fire like it’s a hunk of meat off fresh kill and swallows it whole.

It turns its empty head, faceless, burnt, turned to midnight-black char, and looks at him.

Shin Ren, proud son of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect, member of the Imperial Soldiers’ Academy for Divine Ascendence, young master of the Shin family and youngest man in Paleblossom city to reach the heights of the cusp of the Nascent Soul realm, turns to retreat.

He needs distance. The elders will want to interfere, considering this. He doesn’t know what this thing is, but it’s not human, that much is clear. A weapon, disguised and sent into the sect? No, doesn’t make sense. A mutation perhaps? A rare descendant of a demonic line, somehow stable enough to have lived this long without detection or self destruction?

And then he hits the edge of the arena and is stopped.

“To Death or Defeat,” whispers the voice of an impossible thing on a throne above the arena. He feels it, branded his mind, placed there the moment he became a part of this trial.

He tries to protest. He tries to say something. Turning, he looks at his uncle, at Elder Ren, sees the man staring at him, gaze heated, straining against himself to not interfere.

It wouldn’t matter.

The Judge of the sect has spoken, and the Emperor’s will is absolute. Placed into each sect allied with the empire, to ensure that none could defy its edicts without permission, without divine rule, without word from a Judge.

To Death or Defeat.

He turns to look at the thing charging at him, heedless of the fact its legs should not work, its flesh shouldn’t flex, its bones should be kindling. It sprints at him, mindless, like an animal, and in the cracks of it, where the charcoal shell has broken, he can still see fire and blood and pulsing, beating heartbeats. It does not burn the beautiful purple or magenta or pink or violet of his own powers, those blessed by a true Dao and powerful Qi; it burns like sunlight. Like radiation.

It has regrown one of its eyes. It should not be able to do that, but it has regrown one of its eyes. As he looks into it, he comes to a decision.

It burns him. It shames him. It feels wrong. 

He feels wrong. Like he’s looking at something that shouldn’t be. Like he’s backed into a corner, like he’s not powerful enough to be free of this shame.

“I surrender,” he whispers.

The arena is briefly awash in pure white flame, its barest edge tinged purple, as the elders of the sect descend.