Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

Sex is a meditative experience if done right.

There is a primal, animal need for contact bred into the mammalian experience. Every social creature in the world has a hunger for comfort, for connection, and from a young age, the idea of physical contact as a form of reassurance and a tool for chemical regulation have been ingrained bone-deep. In spite of all her changes, all the ways that she's trying to understand and transform what it means to think and be, she's not alien to what she was, nor does she want to be.

And besides- meditation is a useful tool.

Though, like all tools, it does on occasion need a bit of rest and care.

Slowly, she unfolds, bending flesh and tissue, heat and fluid, back and away from her meditation partner, who inhales with a long, slow gasp.

"Still alright?" Raika asks, forming a face, torso and hands to lightly touch Many-Grasping. She runs her hands over her priestess' body, checking for strain, tears in the tissue, lactic acid for stress. It's performative, really- she can sense all these things and more easily enough without the need for an avatar, but aftercare is important. That's an immediate and important lesson she's picked up, under some advice from the aforementioned priestess.

Many-Grasping manages a nod, though that seems to take up most of her energy in the process. Raika unbinds some of the cords and muscle groups holding her up, letting her beastkin companion slowly slump to the padded cushions that make up most of the floor.

"Maybe next time, we tap out just a bit sooner, hmm?"

Many-Grasping mostly just pants and curls up in a ball, but the language of Intent doesn't really need words, after all.

No. Was Fun. Good. In The Limits. You Can Tell.

"I can, but you know better than I do. Three fingers, three taps, and you take a breather, hmm?"

Many-Grasping inhales an exaggerated breath, and then blows it out with a whistle back at Raika's face.

Understood. Confirmed.

Judging by the lactic acid buildup, the caloric use, and the amount of time she's been awake, Raika decides that her first and most ardent devotee could use a bit of a longer break this time around. She lets Many-Grasping rest, pulling her avatar back into the walls of her Body and reassimilating the matter that makes it up. She's got things to check on, after all, and as fun and meditative as communion can be, every bit of focus helps.

She turns to the idea she had a few minutes ago, and begins to weave.

Raika can, at this point, describe herself as a four-tiered system, operating on a series of layers that only grow denser the closer one gets to their imagined center. She has the Mind, and all the brain-matter therein, which eventually blends into a spectrum with the Body, neural tissue and other organ groups directly controlled by both acting in concert. From there, the system expands further outwards, creating protective walls of tissue and, beyond them, subsidiary organ systems, like branches of a tree. Only at the very center of herself does the pattern deviate, the engine of her Inner World pumping out material and in raw resources in a constant flow. Like an inverted pyramid, reflected again into a sort of tree-like system.

Her focus drifts, from a near-human perspective back up into the whole of how she views the world. There are a few thousand brains, now, but most of them don't really count for as much as the original few hundred. Guided experiments in limited cognition, clusters of neurology that can respond to simple actions and follow pre-arranged paths, rather than full layers of consciousness. The originals, and the new ones designed to add to the "thinking" part of the arrangement, are clustered, with different batches thinking different thoughts at different times.

There are the management minds, those parts or versions of Raika that are in charge of keeping the clusters of her that she's launched into the world subtle, well-protected, and efficient. There are the research minds, headed by a sort of triune, three lobotomized brains acting in synch to examine alchemy, engineering and architecture. There's the long-form minds, each one dedicated to thinking about a different problem, reflecting on a different concern, and building plans around them.

This small piece of Raika rises up, moving towards the branches dedicated to research, taking them the new idea-

There. Three taps, three fingers.

In a moment, she's back in the chamber, worriedly looking in on-

"Oh. That… was much less rest than I thought you'd need."

Many-Grasping raises an eyebrow, an interesting look on the shape of her face, and gestures at the "supplies" around her.

Lots Of Material Here. Even Without Feeding, I Feed.

"Huh. I hadn't realized you'd advanced that fast. I really ought to make sure that I charge the right prices over in Morae-"

Want To See You.

She blinks, turning her attention back to the conversation. "...Like, which part? Cause I'm right here."

Want To See You.

"...Sure. Fuck it, right? I was basically going on a review anyways, might as well."

The room, previously a lushly padded sort of living space with some more interesting additions, folds and bends, the material of it reshaping until Many-Grasping is on a bit of a platform, the space in front of her shifted to be something faux-transparent. It has to be only a partial thing; literally seeing what's happening would basically just show a red wall of meat, moving by very fast, so some embellishment is required.

Some of her Mind shifts to accommodate, balancing the need for accuracy with a need for artistic flair, and before long, the bubble of space inside her is moving once again, traveling towards a junction that only partially exists.

The highlighted bones, muscle, tendons and modular frames of much of her internal biology are transformed, shifting out of the way of or into and around the bubble. The journey takes a few minutes- it's a lot longer and more complicated of a process to transfer an "unchanged" object through her body, than to transform / transfer her Body through itself. Her Priestess and her long, many-jointed limbs rest comfortably as they travel, vast, winding serpents of meat and interlocking pillars of bones, joints, and skeletal mechanisms rolling past as they travel through clusters of veins wide enough to swim in.

And then… light. More than the illumination created by the chromatophores and puppeteered by her Mind, true light, flickering like candlelight and crackling like lightning.

It helps that that is, in fact, what they are.

Raika remains connected, very directly, with each and every one of her bodies. Her "training" bodies are no exception. In spite of the ways that she's limited her connections back to herself, such that they experience things more singularly than she "herself" does, their bodies are still a part of her Body. The same spatial alteration that she's found so useful, granted to her by the strange machinations of her Heart and its apparently Divine ability to interpret physics, makes each of them a sort of… funnel? Tunnel. Place? Window? Out from her larger and undifferentiated mass.

In short- what they experience, she experiences. What affects each of them, who are her, affects her as a whole.

One of her has been experiencing rather… intensely.

In front of Raika and her Priestess is a river of power.

Flame and Lightning and things between and beyond them slither and coil, shatter and flicker, crawl and burst through her in an ever-flowing stream, tracing along her body. Tunnels of Blacksteel and modified, insulating cabling of Radiant Metal directs it, keeps it from tearing through her body, but even as she watches, the pressure increases, a fresh wash of multi-hued Flame pressing at the barriers and burning through some of the flesh behind it. Through the breach, a trickle of electricity flashes by, disrupting the nerves of that cluster, and before long there's a cascading failure, the incoming energies dancing through her flesh and burning through her Body-

And then it shifts, rearranged and transformed, and the wasted material is "digested" back into Qi as the connection between this Raika and the rest of her is reinforced again.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

What Is That? Many-Grasping asks, pressing forward on her seat to stare into the hurricane of energies flowing in.

"One of my training bodies. Specifically, the one that I put in charge of comprehending Dao, starting with the ones I understand the least. We've been having an interesting time with that."

She uses her arm to broadly gesture at the space surrounding the "funnel", wherein dozens of brains are connected in a net, each one of them connecting back to the funnel and out to whatever's out beyond it. Even as they watch, one of the brains begins to flicker, the edges of it beginning to boil and-

A burst of Flame, a crackle of Lightning, and the centerpiece of that particular bunch of neural tissue collapses inwards, burning bright and with a dozen different hues of energy. The reaction begins to spread, every nerve and blood vessel connected to it beginning to catch fire and metastasis beyond-

With a flicker of will, a cage of Blacksteel forms around it, and it is unceremoniously fused to the massive funnel of energy and sent down the current towards her Inner World.

"That keeps happening. A few days ago, this part of me started just… doing stuff. Thinking in ways I can't really process. I would just fuse and figure it out, but considering that the brains I have in charge of interpreting what she's understood keep catching fire, I figured I could hold off for a while."

Is It A Danger?

"Maybe? She's out in the southern part of the Overgrowth, specifically going from Dao-heavy location to location. Every now and then I pick up on her moving on, but we designed it to be harder than usual to communicate, and her mind feels… well, it's still Me, but it's me the way that some of my Souls are me, you know? Not the same as this me. I think she's started figuring out some deeper comprehension stuff, and it's leaking back into me."

…Is It A Danger?

Raika shrugs. "Seems like she's having a pretty good time, honestly. And my Dao trees are growing like crazy. We'll see if we can better integrate the knowledge later- for now, transferring her comprehension and the things it does straight to where I can store it is working out ok. All the brains that catch fire? I can still feel them. They're still there, kind of. Their thoughts are just… strange. Bright, and burning, and…"

Many-Grasping waits a few seconds before turning back to her chosen God.

Raika is staring. Her eyes are glowing ever-so-slightly brighter.

Her Priestess reaches forward, a hand gently touching her arm, fuel and transformation ready to be made manifest-

Raika blinks, shaking her head forcefully.

"Sorry. Yes, it's dangerous. I am too. It isn't enough to overpower me, and it's fuel and food both. Besides, I'm working on a solution."

Curiosity.

"It's more interesting if I show you."

The bubble shifts, lifting away and out into her being.

Idly, she wonders how vast she's gotten. Almost immediately, three brains that she set up to track exactly that reach back out and inform her.

It's easier to grow large underwater than on land, since things float. Qi adds some dimensions to that, allowing further growth and scale so long as proper saturation levels or techniques are utilized. Still, the theoretical peak she can think of without using Qi might be… two hundred tons? Maybe?

She is currently rated at seventy-two times that weight.

Without flooding her body with Qi constantly, and infusing it into every fiber of her being, her Body would long ago have simply collapsed into mush under its own weight. Even still, the modular frameworks, the pillars of bone and architectural designs to distribute weight, and the pressurized systems in place throughout her form are essential to stop that collapse from happening anyways. Her blood is thicker than anything human, more sludge than liquid if exposed to the air- the difference between crimson and "indigo" blood, with additional chemistry and density. Even still, it flows like water, kept pressurized and flowing freely, violently, in veins the size of streams through her.

She has become vast.

And yet… always, the knife's edge. Balance.

They leave the part of her that is infectious comprehension, conscious and spreading Plasma. They pass the part of her that is machine and metal, Blacksteel outcroppings growing constantly and necessitating pruning and quarantining as she drinks in the deaths of a war and causes plenty herself. They pass the areas where she examines herself, cataloguing every failed transformation, every malformed idea and mutation. The ways that her Body fails, and the ways that she fails it, re-enacted and rebuilt and studied a thousand times a thousand times a day.

She has become so vast. She could open a maw and vomit flesh and likely wipe out any number of lesser cultivators. She's rapidly approaching a point where she knows she simply cannot be hurt by anyone below a certain level, not in any real way.

As she travels through her being, a form and existence that is too vast for this single brain to comprehend with any real ease, she wonders when it will be enough.

The idle thought lashes across neurons like a dose of something strange, and three thousand brains idly send back the same thought, the same ingrained instinct.

Don't think about it.

One brain responds instead with a question.

What is enough?

She wonders.

The bubble strikes a membrane, and melts beyond it, and beyond the second and third and fourth after that, each of them floating in blood cooled by sending it through sections near the "surface" and brought back here. After the fourth, they enter something like a wind tunnel, hundreds of thousands of lungs and systems like lungs blasting cooled air through it and out to somewhere else, somewhere with heat that is almost palpable.

And then… they arrive.

It is a tower.

It is a mountain.

It is a machine, and it is her. It is flesh, and it is madness, and it is an alien thing that cannot not be Raika.

Many-Grasping gingerly reaches a hand to the image before her, touching it with a reverence reserved for objects of worship and the things from which they are born.

The Pillar stands there, exuding enough heat to char the lungs, to crisp the skin, to ignite the driest part of a living thing. Oxygen flows through, cooled by refrigerated blood and cycles of wind to just below the point of ignition, and feeds the obelisk at the center of the chamber as it glistens and pulses and dreams. Flesh melts and reforms like wax, adapted to the heat and recycled constantly to preserve the structural integrity of the space. Radiant Metal contains and insulates and defends bulging, tumorous masses of neural tissue, layered over itself so thickly that a human could swim for minutes to enter one side and leave the other.

…What is it? The Priestess asks.

"Me," answers the Monster.

"I call it Pillar. It's… an experiment. As I am, in spite of everything, I still think like a human, or something close to it. Having so many minds helps to compensate, but I decided, around the time I figured out I could make minds that are just like machines, responding to certain instructions with certain outputs and nothing else, that I needed to experiment. Pillar is a part of myself I have let run wild, and grow as it chooses."

It? Not She?

"Gender is… finicky. I've fucked you with enough cocks and played with enough hormones to know that it's more a choice than a solid state. Pillar doesn't think in those parameters. It's started thinking in crystals, if you can picture that. Little things of salt and metal that holds its shape, so it can think the same thoughts again, perfectly. Once it, and I, and we, and I, have figured out how to reshape the rest of us to those sorts of standards, we should be able to absorb the comprehension a lot more directly. Among other positives."

Like What? Asks the Priestess, a hand reaching out to touch Raika's.

"...In theory, it won't hurt."

There is silence. A bubble of quiet inside of a titan.

"I'm pretty used to it by now, but it still hurts. When I first started doing… this, the Qi in my blood felt like glass shards in my veins. I've gotten so much tougher, but I have so much more Qi, too. Whole formations, spread across everywhere I've walked, pumping life and energy and pain back into me.

"You can get rid of the nerves, but then you lose fine control. Comprehension of self, my Truth, only works where I'm looking. Conscious or subconscious, I have to know what I'm thinking of, which part of me is changing, before I can notice it go wrong. So the pain is necessary. So I don't poison myself, or break apart. It's a guide. I can almost see by it nowadays. Did you know that? Like, if you've never seen before, then having eyes would just be chaos and confusion and input, but when you use that sense enough, you start to be able to see. I can do that with pain too now. Track distances and shapes and colors."

Her Priestess says nothing.

"I can't tell them about it. Li Shu will take time out of her studies, try to assist me with it, and she's… she's too slow. They're all too slow. They're growing so fast, faster than we all thought we could grow, but it's not fast enough. I need to do more."

She regrets the words as they leave her lips. They're true, and they're real, and part of them is already seeing them as both weakness and test, something by which to measure the not-quite-stranger beside and inside her.

And then…

When Will It Be Enough?

Raika smiles, a sharp thing that tugs at her cheeks, like it's forced somehow.

"That's the question, isn't it? The rub. At what point can I stop. At what point is it enough."

She can do more. Again and again, that thought. She can do more.

"When I've gotten revenge for what's been done to me. When I get revenge for what's been done to my friends. When I get revenge for the world. When the bad people are dead or dying, broken and bloody like us.

"When I can't do any more, then, maybe, it'll be enough."

Silence again.

And then… touch. Of something beside her, outside herself, something she can't control. Someone who is real, and here, anchor and enabler in one.

Intimacy can be meditative, if done right.

Meditation can be an escape, if done right.