Chapter 366 - You Try To Scream~, But Terror Takes The Sound Before You Make It

Goly gee! Got sidetracked and ended up losing just a BUNCH of time! Good news is it helped, so I'm off to sleepytime asap to keep up this whole trend of "sleeping well improves my life and health" thing I'm figuring out, and I'll be able to bring some of the energy I've been using for other things back to writing proper ol' narrative goodies. Missed ya! Mwa!

Also, the Thriller reference is a little stretched thin here, but just pretend it's everyone else trying to scream instead of Raika

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“There are two things which can always be relied on, for as long as men build buildings and speak to each other. One, that someone will come up with a set of rules ostensibly for the betterment of all. Two, that someone will come up with a way to use those rules to make something absolutely fucking unhinged and counter to all but their most basic principles. Whether or not either of these things is good is entirely dependent on who is involved.”

-Quote attributed to Nascent Soul Realm Sage, Ru Li, of the Empire’s Division Of Mortal Affairs

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She doesn’t bother waiting for the verdict. Either they’ll do what she wants, do what she wants but with caveats, or do something other than what she wants, and in every version, her next steps are pretty much the exact same. 

By the time they make it back to their manor, having taken the Centi-Croc Express to get there in moments rather than an hour or two of walking, she’s already back at work, taking in all of the different theories she’s been working with to start with the real shit. The challenge against the Bishops was fine and dandy, but it imposed restrictions aplenty, limiting the damage she could cause and the tools she could use. Now that her point is made and her stance delivered, she’s got other priorities, ones significantly less hampered by other people’s opinions of her.

Her method of politics might still involve violence, but it’s nowhere near as free with it as she wants to be. Needs to be.

Li Shu and Jin both depart immediately on their arrival, stepping off the Spirit Beast and moving towards their respective rooms. They’ve all already packed, but there’s always room for a final check, and Jin especially seems to have some attachment to the manor, taking his time moving to his destination. Good- they have a few hours, and he just underwent a life-or-death battle. Giving him some time to meditate on it, process it, and come back to her with any questions he might have or help he might need can only be beneficial to him.

Raika wishes that she had more time to give him. That she didn’t have to move so fast, rushing through everything. That she was still herself, in her fullness, able to keep him safe and connected to the other people he needs to grow. At his age, even at her worst, she was never alone. There were always other cultivators to train against, rivals and allies and friends and… well, at that age, in a sect, there wasn’t much else, especially not with how she was, but still. 

Jin has her, and Li Shu, and his ghosts. And an incoming war. 

She’s so fucking proud of him. For holding together, for still caring, for not being a broken wreck or a power-obsessed maniac. He’s a kid, and he’s a good kid. The fact that he’s either of those things deep down, considering all he’s gone through even before meeting her, is fucking incredible. 

Sure, he’s a little unconventional. Yeah, he definitely has shit he hasn’t had to deal with or confront yet. But she’s still stupid fucking proud of him, so that’s that. 

She’s so fucking scared of getting it wrong. It was easier when he was a whim, or a coping mechanism, or a student. Now… it’s a bit scarier.

She wouldn’t trade it, though. That’s pretty scary too.

Li Shu pauses at the doorway, turning back to look at Raika as she slides off of her Spirit Beast, holding onto her still-wounded Gu and leaving one body on its back for now. Beetle skitters off of Centi-Croc’s head, leaving his self-assigned post to land on Raika’s shoulder in a surprising little show of solidarity, and she severs some corpse-tissue (quickly replaced) for him to nibble on. 

“What do you think is most likely?” her friend asks. 

“I think they’ll go for it. That, or they’ll send in the cavalry and crush me, you, and the big scaly bastard here, and then take the kid.”

Beetle stomps against her, the sensation clear even through her dulled senses. “And Beetle,” she amends. “Though I’m pretty sure they’ll have to send in a whole other city to do that. Between you and me, I would hate to bet against the underdog.”

Li Shu nods politely at that, smiling a bit. “Of course. But do you really think they’ll try it? Aren’t the other Bishops going to stand against it, even a little?”

“I think that the likelihood of them pulling some fuck-shit goes up the weaker they think we are. A show of force, passive or not, makes it more expensive to fuck with us and more likely that I have something in mind to actually back up my threats, get the kid to the Martyr. The Bishops here, at least Seo En-Hyun and probably Lu Karai, will push back, but if they get orders, the most they’ll be able to do is stand aside rather than join in, if that. The stronger we are, and the stronger we appear-”

“The more likely it is they go for it.”

Raika clicks her tongue against her teeth, winking at Li Shu. “Yup. Which is why I’m hoping that project you were telling me about really is as exciting as you were making it out to be.”

Her friend smiles at that, bowing ever so slightly. “Well, I’m not really one to brag, and there’s still some kinks to work out, but… I think it’s going to be interesting.”

Raika shivers a bit at that, grinning wide. “Hearing you say it like that gets my engine purring, oh Honored Healer. Reminds me of the good old days of carving curses onto cripples and mad rituals in the woods, you little madwoman, you.”

Li Shu rolls her eyes, flicking one of the needles of her Sacrifice at Raika’s forehead- but notably not refuting her. She turns back around, Qi infusing her steps to push her towards her quarters and the laboratory therein. Raika knows, maybe better than anyone, that her perspective on what’s reasonable is… well-described as “incorrect”, and better described as “unhinged”, and her perspective on advancement is just as twisted. Even still, it doesn’t take a genius or a sage to notice that her friend’s progress is almost as fast as her own. Less of an exponential curve, but rather than the mad gambles Raika’s undertaken, Li Shu’s growth has been methodical, each step building on the previous. Her foundation is rock solid, and every new thing she’s designed or decided to do has drastically changed the scale she can play at.

She’s a Core Formation Realm cultivator, damaged Core or not. She’s a Witch in her second year of practicing the Craft. And yet, she actively participated in and defended against beings that are the necromantic equivalents of the Warrior Realm. The fact that they were being gentle barely even factors into that equation- the difference is astronomical, no matter how lightly they used their powers, and yet, Li Shu stood strong and actively helped to defeat their trials. 

Another Realm higher, another Sacrifice, a new concept absorbed into her original… Raika has some trouble picturing what that would look like, but she’s pretty sure the difference will be exponential rather than multiplicative.

Speaking of exponential, though…

She pats Centi-Croc on the side, conveying her needs through Intent, and the street-sized crocodilian snorts out an acknowledgement laden with its own understanding. It turns, and almost as soon as it has tensed its limbs it’s gone, the force of its departure rattling the wood of the manor but failing to shatter it like that kind of acceleration should. 

If she calculated right, she’s got a few minutes before it returns with what she’s asked for. In that time, she starts walking towards her own workshop, a far less organized affair than Li Shu’s own pristine laboratory.

Stepping over piles of scattered notes and the occasional mound of unused bones she forgot to clean up, she picks her way over to the tables lain out in the central space. One of them is covered in papers, much like the floor, though these have been marked thoroughly and preserved much more carefully than the rest; another is bare, covered only in bits of old stains from earlier experiments; and the last one holds a singular object, bands of enchanted metals and bone wrapped around it. 

Even looking at the thing on the table fills her with a sense of anticipation and dread in turn. For all that she is only a part of the original Raika, her experiences were still shared with herself, even if only subconsciously. Every memory from before her original placement in her current form is still there, sure, but a lot of what was going on with the other parts came through just the teensiest bit, too. Explorations of war, of Dao, of how to wield power in controlled ways, of calculation and architecture and theory, all digested and translated faintly down to her. 

The weapon on the table is a manifestation of each and every part of her she could manage. 

It also blew her head off the first time she picked it up. 

It took six hours to come back from that, and she only managed it because of her lessons with Seo En-Hyun on Dying without falling wholesale to the End. It took less than half that much time to return from the strongest Wraithfire that Seo En-Hyun hit her with. She couldn’t properly rebuild parts of herself for days after. 

It is, in all aspects, a weapon from out of her own heart. 

It looks like the world’s shittiest rifle. 

To be fair, most of the moment-to-moment crafting stuff went to other brains before it ever got to her. By the time she was spawning armories left and right, she had at least a few dozen brains to share the workload with.

The gun is mostly a long metal barrel, inlaid with carved patterns of azalea flowers (or at least, that’s what she intended to carve. They… don’t look very technically accurate). The barrel is made of Blacksteel, of course, but it is the only part formed from the material, an exception dark as midnight sky amongst the rest of the weapon. 

The stock is carved from pale white wood, sourced from Li Shu’s projects and juxtaposed violently with the pitch-black of the gunbarrel. Parts of it seem to indicate movement, as if, by looking at it, there are undercurrents of activity hard to notice from above. The grain of the wood seems almost like little worms, with Raika’s own work highlighting the features and making them look almost alive, a maggot-pile of ivory against the darker wood of the table. 

For the trigger, the chamber, and the hammer, she used something a bit harder to source.

She was sent to the Fallen Kingdom lobotomized, true enough. Unable to access the vast majority of her power or resources. 

And yet, just like she arrived with Blacksteel, she arrived with a few other treats. 

Things she’s already used, for the most part. The worms, her Spirit Beasts, of course, Dink, obviously (still sleeping, even now recovering from saving her life)- but when that connection was broken and all her resources were ejected out of her connection to her Heart, something came with them.

The trigger, chamber and hammer all glimmer with the sunrise-orange of Radiant Metal.

It’s still a pretty uninspired name. Frankly, she’s pretty sure she can do better, especially since she’s figured out a bit more of how it works. 

It Changes. 

Not as much without access to Qi, access to her Heart and the Souls within or her multitude of minds, but it very much still Changes. At a surface layer, it responds to metallurgy by copying the properties of whatever metal she’s using the process of, but it didn’t take too-too long to figure out what’s beneath that.

It Changes because she thinks it should. Because it thinks it should. It responds to its context.

And Raika was learning Intent, the language of perfect meaning in imperfect context, well before she split her minds into sub-bodies. 

She isn’t completely, perfectly, totally sure of what they do now. She knows, though, that it complements the gun rather well. 

Sunrise-crimson and sunset-orange glimmer out of ivory and obsidian, highlighting the monochrome of the weapon even as they cut through it. 

Slowly, she places her Gu on the uncluttered table, taking Beetle off her shoulder to join the lesser creature. She sees the worm-like body center its too-human eyes on the little insect, twenty-foot wings twitching where they curled around the body- until Beetle stamps authoritatively towards the newcomer, establishing the pecking order and chain of command with his usual forceful certainty.

She inhales. Exhales. 

Old habits. 

Her corpse-flesh hand reaches over and presses a rune on the bindings, the ethereal light of their enchantments fading quickly.

Before they’re even done deactivating, she watches them crack, chip, shatter, disintegrating faster and faster until a fine sand of metal fillings coats the table. A low hum fills the chamber, making some of the papers tremble and shift in their placements, and the table beneath the gun starts to shift, a depression forming where it lays.

Something she said to the Bishops rings in her head.

“ It takes a master to make a masterpiece. It takes time, tools, and the simplest novice to make something altogether messier. Surely I wouldn’t have spent the moments you missed, the hints you failed to catch, to craft something messy, amateurish, poorly understood… and perhaps dangerous. Unless, perhaps, you think I truly am so arrogant? So… mad?” 

It was a silly question. Obviously she’s mad enough. 

She reaches over and picks up the gun.

A hundred kilometers away, her other body collapses, holding two jars in its hands and gritting her teeth. She gnashes, writhes, digging her knees into the soil and her forehead down into the dirt hard enough to feel the impact through dead neurons and stiffened tissue. 

She flails, reacts, responds- because to do so with the body holding the gun would be bad. 

It hurts.

It Hurts.

The gun is death and life-from-death and radiant Change and everything she has ever learned or been turned to violence. It is weeks and months and years of theory compounded, theory and hypothesis and random fucking guessing, a gamble and a certainty, and it Hurts.

It doesn’t care that her nerves are dead. It does not care that the pain it was born from is in her past, that no part of it, logically speaking, should cause harm simply by holding it- and yet it Hurts. 

Raika consumed cultivators and weapons and tools and gained the Dao of Flame. The Dao of the Gun, of the Blade, equally devoured. Dao normally takes years, decades, centuries to develop, save for in the most unique of minds or impossible of experiences.

By the time she hit thirty, Raika had a half-dozen Daos that she consumed and added to- and one that she made herself. A tree in the garden of her Heart, built of flesh and organ, of skin and bone, of mind and pulsing vitality. She learned of the physicality of Flesh the long way round, over and over, intimately. 

It is the part of her life she has experienced and understood second-most. 

Before the Flesh, before she was even aware it was something she could study, there was Pain.

The Pain of losing her ideals to her sect. The Pain of being alone. The Pain of being lonely. The Pain of failure, of losing, of being broken, of having her very soul and identity violated and her life and purpose taken away from her. The Pain of missing limbs and broken bones and the cold and starvation and shame and flame and mutilation. The Pain of grief.

All before she ever left Paleblossom City.

She’s studied further since then.

It only took a realization for it to come together. A moment of revelation as she was working, as she was digging through everything she’d learned and everything she’d ever experienced to build the dangerous kinds of things she needs to move forward. 

She looked at what she understood, what she had to offer, and there it was. 

Pain. 

Slowly, she pushes her mind into the weapon. She wraps herself around every agony she infused into its structure, through every rune and array and spell she built into it, every material she shaped it from. She moves through the Intent that even now echoes back and forth, over and over, through every inch of it.

This Is A Weapon Made Of Pain, she says back to her, And It Is Made To Share It.

She’s pretty sure she can’t make a gun that kills everything. She can’t build something to breach the Wall single-handedly or assassinate the Emperor or kill every millenia-old corpse that comes after her. Fuck, she can’t even make a weapon that she’s sure will kill the End approaching her, clad in forest-green and wielding a Soul that is a knife that is the tool that unmade her.

But she is completely and absolutely aware of the fact that she can make them hurt.

And  it’s a lot easier to kill something hurting.

As she takes the gun into herself, and pushes her will into its structure, it calms. Moment by moment, second by second, it calms, and even as she dedicates a portion of her mind to permanently manage it, it continues to thrum with barely restrained power. A single slip-up, the slightest moment of distraction, and it will do as it is made to do, whether she wants it to or not.

So she won’t slip up. 

She won’t fail. She can’t.

It takes a few minutes, but eventually, her other body rises from the earth and her main body lifts the rifle up, forming a stretch of corpse-skin to act as a strap and hang it over her shoulder. It tingles there, a constant reminder of every drop of suffering she’s comprehended- but it is hers. It is Hers, and that still matters, no matter how damaged the Truth, no matter how reduced the wielder.

She exhales, realizing she’s been holding her breath. 

Then, at last, she turns back to Beetle, currently planted on the head of her winged Gu, and smiles. 

“Don’t suppose you’ll help me gather all the rest of this shit? I promised my student noodles, and I’m pretty sure a bunch of crazy dead guys are gonna come knocking anytime now. A good noodle-bowl takes time, you know.”