Book One, Chapter 22 - Can’t Stop Me Now

I am... so tired.

I'm working with an editor!

She's really scary. In a good way!

I feel so behind, but also like I'm glad I'm doing this right. Still juggling a lot, still a big gamble, but fuck it, was useful changes, mindset stuff too, and I have the edits coming anyways. I am... desperate to reach the end of the book's first wave of big edits by the end of this week, and then at last get to do truly fresh content while I do the non-editing, non-writing portion of publication. See you soon!

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Sanity is overrated.

-Final words of the Sword Saint Kyu “Crush The Weak” Rin, moments before the event known as the Seventh Slaughter of the Final War

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An interesting fact about brains; there is very much a reason for why they don’t keep you aware of all the background things all the time. It’s like being reminded that you’re breathing, and then all of a sudden you can’t stop noticing it, but it’s worse, because the feeling doesn’t fade, and she can’t really control her heartbeat like she can her breath. Well, not easily, anyways. Every moment of every day, she feels her pulse, from sternum to skin. The vibration of it, the pulse of kinetic force and heat, feels like it’s hitting the surface of her as it travels through her body, and it’s only the third most annoying biological process she’s trapped with.

It sucks. It is the single most annoying thing Raika has ever experienced, like a little kid poking her every moment of every day, or like a tic that she can’t control. It makes her constantly aware of her entire body, and mixed with the constant sense of pins and needles, everything feels unbearably sensitive.

 She spends the first three nights straight in her new quarters awake, and it was only by gambling her way into a bottle of rice liquor that she finally managed to sleep on the fourth day. The longer she stays still, the worse it gets.

It wasn’t exactly a fair gamble. She bet one of the servants in the general quarters, a brash young man by the name of Hi Quo, that she could move more manure than him in six hours. She couldn’t walk afterwards, and he really didn’t think he had to try very hard, but the kid said that getting her a drink was the least he could do after a performance like that. In truth, it was just a relief to let the energy out, to move and make the itching and tingling and pulsing fade to the background for a bit, but a bet is a bet.

And, most importantly, it proved what she already thought; she can do more now.

It’s taken her a year, against all odds and involving multiple doses of self harm and one big dose of, admittedly, a fucked up dark ritual, but… it’s worth it. She has taken her first step back onto a path.

Her right leg still can’t hold much weight, but in a pinch, she can limp about without a cane for a few minutes, and with her weird new control of the details of her body, she can balance much better on her left alone if need be. Her back is still crooked, but markedly less so, a mix of having the strength and energy to stretch and forcefully realigning it bit by bit helping to straighten it out. There’s not much to be done about missing chunks, but the scar tissue is weirdly included in her overall modification, and doesn’t slow her down as much (or fight her when she has to move her jaw, which makes eating much easier now). 

Human-level strength. Average human, of her age, who has never cultivated. Even then, she’s still equivalent to a cripple, because she’s not in the Qi-Gathering realm. Living in a world where almost everyone can, in a pinch, burn through energy to lift twice their own weight over their head a few times a day, still leaves her well fucked in terms of averages.

But considering her body’s deformity and damage, to be at this level only a year after the violence that caused it… well. It’s not nothing.

It hurts, of course. She still aches just the same, sometimes more in cases where her newfound hyperawareness of her body highlights the pieces that have grown back wrong, but phantom pains are less of an issue without that same level of sensitivity to compare to the rest of her. It balances out, and in the end, she really doesn’t care about getting hurt, so long as she gets stronger for it or can fix it later. 

It hasn’t led to her making many friends in the servant’s quarters. It has led to a lot of rumors about what she’s been up to at night, or how she moves.

The sect is a wild place, haunted by its own imagery. The idea of fire permeates every building and structure, and while the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect isn’t the largest she’s seen, the number of structures it holds is impressive. Densely packed, multi-story architecture fills every inch of available space, with wide-open spaces filled with artificial gardens, courtyards, and areas for training interspaced throughout the claustrophobic structures. Everything is built of stone and hints of purple jade, and braziers, bonfires, and shrines decorate every building and corner, places to meditate, cultivate or work always highlighted by the sect’s signature belief system. It is, in almost every way that matters, a single large complex, a campus-sized conglomerate of intricately designed, highly-packed places for production and residence alongside vast spaces for specific purposes. 

Even still, there are untamed sections. Places kept purposefully wild, or some equivalent of curated wilderness- uneven parts of the sect’s plateau that form small, ridged mountains, or a spatially-altered space containing a full forest of blue-tinged leaves that melt away falling snow. 

Removed from the medical pavilion and Li Shu’s orbit, she takes to exploring all of it to find the right spot for her purposes.

At first, her reputation as the personal aide (or experiment) of a would-be healer from outside the sect dissuaded would-be bullies. Over the course of a few days, when no reprisals came for minor slights against the “cursed cripple” (like spitting in her food, tripping her as she walks, hiding thumb tacks in her bed, etc), they started getting bolder.

Then the other servants noticed that one of them didn’t make it back to the dorms late one night, and found out the following day that he had been hospitalized with life threatening wounds. Raika, that same night, appeared to work wrapped in barely scabbed wounds and a series of visible bruises up and down her body.

That’s when the rumors really started. People wondering whether Raika had some hidden benefactor, even in her crippled state, were quickly dismissed; no patron out there would be so generous as to support someone with no value and leave them unsupervised amongst normal servants. New whispers arose that she was an experimental subject left to the servants to see what it would do, and that idea picked up steam for a while when someone saw her bathing and took note of the scarification from her ritual. Still, no matter how slightly off she might seem to Qi senses, she still has no Qi, no supernatural properties to note, and as no consequences arrived for the common cruelty, the theories began to shift. Then came the rumors that she was somehow blackmailing Li Shu into defending her, maybe for being a failed subject, which got dismissed later when people realized how ridiculous that would be; she’s not even a real servant or mortal, she’s a cripple. No one would care if she was killed, much less if she was harmed in a way that let her live, so why would a cultivator and healer in training care?

She gets assigned tasks on occasion. She gets harassed on occasion. She eats meals in the servant’s hall, completes her assignments, and then vanishes for the rest of the day on occasion. It’s a good rhythm. Allows her space to try things out and explore, even without her closest ally.

But she doesn’t have permission to leave the sect anymore. Not a special servant like before. She’s trapped, even with all the slack they leave in her chains.

Then, three weeks into her new pattern, it changes.

Hi Qou, the same one she gambled with, alongside a lovely young woman with sharp, aquiline features, slender, feline ears and cat-like pupils, and another young man, larger than the next two put together and shaved from head to toe, sit down next to Raika. Three trays of simple fruits, spirit rice, and warm porridge surround her on three sides, and she prepares to bolt.

“So,” Hi Qou had started, “I hear you’ve got some hidden monster looking out for you, cripple. Is it that cute healer? I hear she’s got all sorts of strange ideas.”

He says the word cripple without much heat behind it, more a frank analysis than an insult. She immediately prefers him to most of the people she’s met in the purple-whatever sect for it. Still, she just shakes her head. “Not her,” she says simply.

“So there is someone! How in the hell did you get such luck?” he asks, leaning forward, ready to mock her answer.

She pauses. Thinks for a moment, looking to her left at the mountain of a young man and the mild mutant across the table. Could be they’re outsiders, too, looking to stop being so by mocking the bigger loser. Could be they’re just another gang of assholes. She shrugs internally; why not fuck with them?

“Well,” she says, her voice edging from ragged to husky with time; “back when I still had all my organs I was famed as the greatest lover in the northeastern Empire, capable of bringing to blind unconsciousness even the greatest of cultivators. They came far and wide to spasm at my touch. It would seem, perhaps, that my talents remain unaffected by my weakening.”

Three sets of eyes stare at her, wide eyed, unable to come up with a response fast enough before she gets up from the table. She lets them fill in their own details around the lie.

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That rumor never really catches on, but she hears it once or twice before it vanishes, so she considers the whole thing a pretty wild success for something with so little thought behind it.

Still, even with the rampant curiosity and general air of mystique she cultivates, the second time she beat someone into the medical pavilion and managed to walk away, things get a bit quieter. She’s left mostly unbothered, physically at least, for a few days after that. Still, even as she’s given more space, she’s watched all the more, and she’s certain that there are just as many rumors and conversations about her as before, just at a further distance. She figured, sooner than later, someone would find out where she was going at night. Not like she cared to sneak out, or that she could even if she tried- she still has to limp everywhere, for one.

It’s on one of those aforementioned jaunts, on a day where assignments never quite made it to her, that she’s interrupted next.

“What are you doing?” asks a young woman with catlike eyes and tall, fuzzy black ears.

Raika does not respond right away, finishing her rep. Three more hits, each one leaving the post vibrating with the force, land squarely in the center of a circle that’s been dug into the material. Only when she’s done does she stop and turn to look at her fellow servant, finally letting the outside world back in and kicking herself for not noticing the smell. The almost-stranger smells... like a mix of yuzu and sharp cat claws, bitter and earthy at once.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” she asks.

“It looks like you’re punching a hole into a wooden post,,” replies her nighttime watcher.

“Congratulations,” Raika says. “I am glad my senior sibling has such potent powers of observation.”

The stranger steps closer from the edge of the clearing. The forest, spatially warped and carefully controlled though it is, has several “wild” spirit beasts in it, of a low enough level to be an “appropriate” challenge for young cultivators. Almost no one approaches it without preparation or a good reason, least of all servants, which is what’s made it the perfect place to get the peace and quiet she prefers. Still, there are pathways through it, and she recognizes the one that the inquisitive beastkin has followed her through.

 “My name is Maen,” the cat-eyed woman tells her. “You’re Raika, right?”

Raika shrugs. “You can call me just “the cripple” if you want. I’ll know who you mean.”

Maen doesn’t really respond to that, except to wince very slightly. She instead turns back to the post behind Raika, one of several in the clearing, alongside patterns drawn in the dirt around her. “Why are you out at night hitting a post, Raika?” she asks. “Given your health, doesn’t it cause you pain, or make your body worse?”

Raika shrugs (and that, too, is much easier than before, which is a fucking joy). “Not as much pain or hurt as lying in bed doing nothing,” she says. “Besides, it reminds me from where I came from. I started out with exercises like this, forever ago.”

Maen cocks her head. “You mean you weren’t born a- I mean, you weren’t born with all that?” she asks, like the thought never occurred to them. 

Raika huffs a laugh, sweating even in the night air, and takes a second to wipe off her forehead. “No,” she eventually responds. “I was a cultivator. Made it higher than most of these outer sect disciples we run into around here. All the way into the Core Formation realm, actually.”

Maen’s eyes go wide, a surprisingly bright display considering how visible they are in the night darkness. “Wow…I can’t imagine being that strong. Most of us here are here for the pay, but even the brash ones who want to become cultivators don’t usually aim that high. Maybe Hi Qou, but it’s hard to tell when he’s being serious.”

Raika shrugs again. “Anyone who plans on starting cultivation to stop at some point isn’t gonna do very well at it,” she says. “Supposed to be a life-long thing. I mean, it was for me, and I had barely any talent at all for it.”

“You were Core Formation realm!” Maen says, tilting their head quizzically. “How is that no talent?”

She laughs. “A prodigy reaches the Core Formation Realm in a half a decade. A genius makes their way through to its end in less than twice that time. Took me almost twenty years to reach Core Formation, and I started at seven. Besides, you’re talking like Core Formation is something impressive. I hear half the soldiers on the Wall are in the Nascent Soul realm, nevermind the really big names out there. We have Warrior-Realm experts and Emperors wandering around; what’s Core Formation compared to those heights?”

She can’t help but let a note of bitterness slip into her voice at that. 

Maen seems to think for a bit, but eventually nods. “Well, I doubt I’m ever even getting to Foundation Stage,” she says. “My family has never had any good cultivators.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Raika replies, shaking her head. “Try it if you want. Don’t if you don’t want. Do what suits you, and if you do it long enough, you’ll do it well.”

Maen laughs. “Very wise, for a cripple,” they say.

Raika shrugs, restarting her set, putting herself into a stance and pulling back her arm to resume striking the post. “Hard to be a cripple. Easy to think about being… whatever else.”

Maen seems about to say something, but… decides not to. She instead watches Raika go through two more sets, then wanders off, back towards the servant’s quarters.

The sound of knuckles striking wood echoes for another few hours, until, with a crack, the post at last shatters. Raika takes it, and the three others she’s gone through today, and puts them into the obstacle course section of the clearing before returning to the servant’s quarters for the night. 

She can do more than before. So she’s going to do more. Even as her body tells her, in agonizing detail, about every single injury and iota of pain, she won’t stop. Even as she feels herself getting closer and closer to exhaustion, over and over, she won’t stop. She knows it, deep in her bones. She refuses anything else.

She does not think about the fact that she is trapped. She does not think about the bloody struggles against those that would try to take from someone so beneath them. She does not think about JiaJia, who must be missing her, or Li Shu, who must be worried, or anyone that isn’t in front of her right now.

When she’s stronger, then she can fix all of that. Until then, she’s just as powerless as she’s ever been,

She can do more. So she’s going to do more. So she’s going to be more.

The rest is… nothing.