Book One, Chapter 21 - Jealous For I Fuck Severely and Thou Does Not?

Hello! Three in one day- yippeee! Actually makes it easier to think of what I'm doing and how, and I'm gonna hit the hay to keep up this positive shift in energy as best I can. I've got some thoughts about the chapter I added to the rewrite (chapter 15) and am considering replacing it (while keeping it as a funky lil interlude here in the patreon!) in favor of a chapter highlighting more about sect life pre-ritual for Raika. Feel free to send feedback if ya like!

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Demonic cultivation. A trite term, born from an age that saw no difference between a Daemon and a powerful blood or poison cultivator. We have since learned better. Even that which might still be considered morally uncouth has fallen properly into the hands of those who can best control it and use it for the greater good. Those who practice these arts unregulated are now known as something much more accurate than “demonic cultivators”. They are criminals.

-Speech given by an arbiter of Law, moments before delivering righteous Judgement on criminal elements escaping the Division of Altered Cultivation’s authority. Recorded for potential value as recruitment material for the Imperial Guard.

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“What in the blessed fuck!” Qen Hou exclaims, his voice literally booming from Qi-powered lungs and the enclosed space.

Raika looks at him and giggles, the fever and the pain loud enough to leave her brain half-cooked. “Hi Qen Hou,” she says. “Nice to see you! Sorry I’m the one naked and not Li Shu, but there’s a good reason, I promise.”

He and Li Shu immediately turn scarlet for a second, in what she can only describe as an exercise in mutual adorableness, in spite of Qen Hou’s… Qen Hou-ness. “That’s not what I mean!” he snarls. “What is this diagram? And why are you all carved up? You look like you’re practicing some kind of sacrificial art here. If you hadn’t woken up, I’d be taking Li Shu to the elders for judgment and to see if they could figure out what the hell this is!”

“It’s Li Shu being a genius, obviously,” Raika replies, rolling onto her side and getting up.

Oh. That’s new. Is that… is her skin moving? Tensing up alongside the muscles, maybe? Is her skin magic now? Oh, that would open up so many avenues (and require so much surgery, ugh…). Qen Hou and Li Shu both seem to take notice as Raika sits up, moving faster than either one of them has seen her do before.

Then, Raika discovers a minor issue; it hurts like fuck. Whatever is doing this, there is a layer of skin or outer flesh at least that is following her will very precisely and trying to help her stand how she wants to. The trouble is, she can’t do that anymore; even straightening her back this much has her spine screaming in pain, and the instinctive effort to unbend her leg all the way has her gasp, loud and sharp. The skin and muscle, still moving more loudly than before, pull at the tattoos, tug at the needles in her acupoints.

“Fuck,” she whispers. “Too soon. That’s… a lot.”

“So this is some idiotic attempt to heal yourself, is that it?” Qen Hou asks. “Li Shu, did she put you up to this? You give the cripple too much grace. You don’t need to just do what she asks!”

“I didn’t!” Li Shu says, a moment of heat in her tone. “If I hadn’t helped design the diagrams she’d be dead by now! Don’t treat me like a child, Qen Hou!”

“So you admit that you designed this diagram to… what, experiment on her? A medical diagram of this complexity isn’t something an outside healer can do on sect grounds, nevermind someone only here probationarily! This- this looks demonic. There’s no way you got permission to do this, much less alone, in your housing!”

“The elders can see everything, can’t they? That’s what everyone always says! If they can see everything, then they saw me do this and thought it was fine! And it worked, so-”

“That’s enough,” Raika says. Apparently she puts more than she expected into her voice, because to her surprise, both Qen Hou and Li Shu go quiet, both glaring at each other (with him also glaring at her from where he’s kneeling by Li Shu’s side). She doesn’t keep talking immediately; wiping sweat from her brow, she pins up her hair into a messy sort-of bun with one hand, leaving bloodied, scarred flesh entirely exposed. “I designed the diagram,” Raika eventually says. “Li Shu assisted, but only because I would have done it without her help if she didn’t.”

Qen Hou stands to his full height, stepping slowly and with barely contained rage towards her. “I should have you dragged before the elders,” he growls. “Better, I should just kill you here for dragging her into your mess. I took a risk bringing you here, I knew you were an issue but-.”

She smiles, looking up at him from the ground with an expression approaching serenity. The dwindling effects of the drugs do their part, but the heat in her is more than just fever. She knows, feels, that something is different, not just in how loud her body feels, or how her stomach roils hungrily. She tries to get up- and feels a spasm run through her body, dozens of muscle groups over-eager to respond, even as there’s a feeling like sandpaper inside her skin. Her legs shoot from being splayed out to being beneath her, the agony of her ruined knee screaming and yet somehow not impeding her movement. In another burst, she’s standing, and…

She’s always been tall. Her cultivation, focused on strength and physicality over esoteric concepts, heightened that. Even now, she’s tall enough while hunched to look him straight in the eye. Except… she doesn’t have to hunch quite as much.

She uses the volume of her biology, the way it creaks and moans and speaks to her so constantly, to find each point she needs. It’s as much an awareness as it is a sense of near-feral energy, the sensitivity of fever elevated to something stronger and yet more useful. She uses it to force her posture straight, enduring the pain, the squirming, creaking agony of her spine being forced to unbend, until she’s looking down on him by a good two inches. 

She brings her face close enough to his that he can smell the blood on her breath from a throat screamed ragged.

He glares at her, the scent of burning magnesium leaking from him alongside purple embers- but he doesn’t snap. Doesn’t lash out. He… hesitates.

“Go ahead,” she hisses. “You’d probably win. You could probably burn me alive before I do anything. I couldn’t stop you. Is that what you’d like? For things to be ever so calm and peaceful, with me gone? You said it yourself- it was a risk, bringing me here, tying me to you. Here’s the payoff. I’m not dead yet. I’m onto something. Something that can get you some merits, even, if it makes it to the right elder. I know how cultivators like you get about those. This doesn’t make me a liability, it makes me and your precious healer-to-be more valuable. Kill me now, all you’ll have done is run away, hide from someone who isn’t even a threat because you’re too scared to commit to the path outside the perfect little illusion you’ve been taught. 

But… more than that, you officious fuck. All that effort to be a good person, all that time you spent outside the sect wandering a mortal city, all that work to find whatever you’re looking for that might make you special… wasted. Because if you kill me?”

She leans in further, until his face is parallel to hers and she can whisper ever so quietly in his ear.

 “You know she’ll never speak to you again.”

He grabs her by the throat before she can blink, lifting her entirely off the ground, her entire weight on her neck. His arm doesn’t tremble and no sign of strain enters his eyes; at his level, with her weighing maybe a hundred-and-fifty pounds even after all the sect meals, she must weigh no more than a handful of grapes to him, especially with the heat of his cultivation burning through his meridians.

She refuses to break eye contact, grabbing his wrist as hard as she can and using it, just a bit, to hold herself up. Enough that she can breathe, even as the skin around her throat starts to warm, the heat of the mania and fever slowly getting replaced by the sensation of burning. They stay like that for a while, maybe twenty seconds, Li Shu clenching her fists and looking ready to jump between them but as aware as they are that doing so wouldn’t actually resolve the moment, would only force Qen Hou’s hand one way or the other.

Raika smiles. Good girl.

Qen Hou sees the smile, and his hesitation rises, his hand wavering just a bit. She’s right, and he fucking knows it, and he hates it. She just smiles a bit wider.

Her legs are tingly. And her chest. And her head? She’s really not sure what kind of temperature she’s running right now, or how badly that fresh load of Qi is fucking up her insides, but it’s doing something.

Just as she’s getting lightheaded enough to get worried, even past the fear-neutering effects of the meditative drugs, he lets her go. She collapses, all her efforts to stand up left abandoned as she spasms lightly against the cold of the stone floor against her skin. She coughs, her own hand coming up to touch at the burn marks- polite things, clearable with ointment, but louder than any screaming her body could ever try to make.

She couldn’t stop him. Not the way she wanted to. And he could have snapped her neck or burned out her throat if she was off the mark even a little.

He just grunts, in either disgust or bravado disguising embarrassment, and she can’t help but laugh through the coughs, drops of red flecking her lips.

“Choking, young master? Yet again,” she croaks, “people pay good money for that sort of thing. I can’t just keep giving out freebies like this.”

“Be silent, worm,” he hisses. “You’ve dragged a prominent healer’s apprentice, who’s caught the eye of the medical pavilion elder, into your degeneracy and madness long enough. Your threats and blind attempts at provoking me, at controlling me, are insulting, and end here. You’ll be moved to proper servant’s quarters immediately, and I’ll personally make sure you’re worked hard enough you won’t have time to sleep, much less think of your deranged dark rituals.”

“Hardly a dark ritual,” she croaks. “I made up like half of it, and the other half was math and drugs. So dramatic.”

His Qi flares, and by its mere weight she’s sent skidding backwards, acupuncture needles tearing out of her as she slides across the floor to thud against the far wall. She hisses, refusing to cry out, but it hardly matters- he doesn’t even look back at her as he stalks out of the room. Li Shu is a little bit in front of the doorway, and he stops before her, giving her the opportunity to move out of his way. She doesn’t, for a moment, almost looking like she wants to say something… but she backs down. He leaves as soon as she steps away.

She looks on the verge of tears.

Raika doesn’t care.

She doesn’t even care about how she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about how Li Shu feels, or about how Qen Hou plans to punish her, or if the elders do know what’s happened and will complicate matters, or anything else in between, because she can feel something, has felt it ever since she woke up.

Her heartbeat. Every note of it, every single time. It doesn’t fade into the background, or slip into her subconscious; she can hear every thump of the muscle, every pulse of blood through her body visible and present in her mind. And with each beat, with each rush of blood, with every pulse of flesh and trembling vibration it causes, she feels it growing, ever so slightly, over and over; that same tingling sensation from every time she’s given herself a Qi deviation, where the strange energy pulses and trembles and chaotically rumbles through her body without meridians to guide it or properly digest it. She feels that mist of Qi she’s kept picturing vibrating, her heartbeat adding to it again and again until it rings like a musical note, like a lake of fog softly screaming a single orchestral note in unified pain.

It can’t escape. She doesn’t even feel her skin prickle from it, it’s all internal, like permanent sensation of pins and needles in her liver and her back teeth and her feet all at once and everywhere in between.

Oh yeah. That dark ritual did something all right.

She only notices that Li Shu has been trying to say something, possibly for a while, when a wave of orchid-and-needle scented Qi washes against her, and when she hears the younger woman gasp.

“I can’t sense you,” Li Shu says, quietly. “I can feel that there is Qi, that you’re here, but… I can’t sense inside you anymore. I can’t feel what’s happening. It’s like… the energy just glides over you, goes right past.”

Raika looks at her with a grin so feral it would look more at home on a wolf than a human. 

“It’s a start.”