Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

The manor is surrounded and empowered by all kinds of formations, runes and arrays, all of them considerably less complicated than Raika's used to but entirely doable. And, in spite of her many advancements, interfacing with Qi constructs is still tricky, at best. She can subvert an array, but not activate it, usually.

For anyone else, this might be an issue. She's found her own ways to deal with her supposed imprisonment, awaiting something that will be as much a trial as it is a meeting.

The quasi-lobotomy she's subjected herself to was designed for a specific purpose; to improve her focus, limiting her to a single portion of her variety of powers for the sake of improving said portion. As she is now, that's kind of just not happening, and so, the purpose is subverted. The limitation is meant to be a tool for training and mentality, not something designed to leave her trapped or powerless. She might not be able to freely use the rest of her skills, but they're still there, still in reach. She just… has to kind of stretch for them.

Back in the city-state of Singheart, she spread freely, as an infection does, self-aware tendrils and organs expanding into the infrastructure of the city in days. Here, now, it's taken a bit longer.

She sits in a room of the manor that she's been "given", its walls and furniture opulent and comfortable and completely out of place with the odd figure she presents. Her legs are crossed as if in meditation, her eyes closed, but the mass of neural architecture she wears in place of simple hair glows here, the colors of sunset and sunrise in long, sinewy braids flowing past her horns, down her back and sides to the floor. She barely breathes, her oxygenation taken over by her subconscious as her conscious mind expands, following the physical patterns of itself out from her- and into the veins she's spread across the sect.

Turns out, those formations? They track things like movement, and Qi, and Intent, though they treat that last one a bit differently here. They decorate the entirety of the sect, its walls, its compounds, its fields… but they're simple things at their core. Defenses against assault, intrusion, the acts of spells and humans and beasts.

Raika, especially this Raika, is none of the above.

On the way into the sect, sitting side-saddle on Bin Wei's flying sword, she was smoking a pipe. She watched the smoke blow away past them as they flew, and occasionally tapped out her bowl before refilling it. A bit rude, perhaps, to do so while flying over someone's home, but what's a little rudeness in the face of actually being clever for once?

She might not be able to go all the way down to the tiniest building blocks of life, at least not yet- but little fragments of bone? Droplets of blood? Teeny, tiny little seeds in all but name, scattered across the sect? That, she can very much do.

It took a few days for them to spread, and a few days more for her to manage to call to them through her muffled connection to her wider self. It was worth it, though. As long, hair-like braids of arcane neurology touch the ground, they make contact with tiny, hair-thin threads of brain matter, skin and keratin, and for just a little while, Raika remembers what it's like to be whole.

She is not human. She is not humanoid. Her enhanced organs and long limbs and beautiful skin and eyes and horns are not all of her.

Her mind dissolves, spread out across threads that encompass a city in and of itself, for that is what this sect is. Unlike the sects of her homeland, elevated on massive spires of earth and feeding off the Empire-run civilian centers below, acting as symbiotic organisms to each other, the Watchful Fields sect is self-sufficient. Those with power rule, true in the Empire as it is here, but it's clear that the factional nature of the Republic of Morae has developed in its own way, despite its similarities to the sects and government she's more familiar with. She can't form eyes or organs or effectively "teleport" through her flesh, like her full suite of powers would allow, but in this sort of meditative state, she's capable of experiencing through it, absorbing the experiences and senses in an almost dreamlike way.

She travels, her awareness drifting from place to place, and she learns.

Far, far at the edge of the city-state, and far out beyond that, too, there is farmland, budding and ripe with foods of all kinds, but first and foremost, rice, grains, and tubers, hearty things flush with nutrients and Qi. There are some smaller farms that focus on the production of trees and nuts, but they seem rare things, outnumbered by the hundreds of other farms that focus primarily on heartier and foundational crops. They're run almost universally by mortals, and here, most importantly, the mortals are old.

At least, by her standards they are. She has found a few, here or there, knocking on the door of the Qi-Gathering Realm, but for the most part they're true mortals, something that feels strange to her experience. In the Empire, even children could reach the Qi-Gathering realm with the right circumstances, and most people with a bit of luck or the slightest inclination to do so could reach the Foundational realm by their later decades. It was only true cultivators that would enter it in their teen years, sure, but it was still something that could be reached by just about anyone.

Here? Perhaps not in the Republic of Morae as a whole, but certainly in this sect, which she's seen no indication might be considered "abnormal", there's no one. It's not a rare mortal, surrounded by lesser Qi-Gathering realms, it's the singular leader of a community or exceptional talent that seems to have breached that barrier, surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of pure mortals. Even in this subconscious state, they don't even trigger her hunger pangs- there's no Qi to them, no flavor deeper than meat! It's all just incredibly delicate people, living incredibly delicate lives, where the slightest sickness or accident could kill them outright.

Closer, past the wider farming communities of the sect, she starts to find structures and areas that remind her of trading centers or small towns, where the produce is sold (and taxed to the sect, of course) and specialty workers hawk their wares. The Republic seems to work on the same basis as the Empire when it comes to selling and buying- money. She's noticed, though, that some use small scrolls, stamped with the marks of the Watchful Fields sect- a form of limited currency, like merit points but for a whole society. They're more valuable than the coinage she sees, but likely would be worthless outside of the sect's territory, which she finds… uncomfortable. She's seen no highways or major roads, no real transit to other sites (at least, not in the week and change she's been here), but she can't imagine it would be easy for people to leave and settle somewhere else, and those with their savings trapped in the sect's limited currency likely can't spent it anywhere else, further trapping them.

Might be it's her anti-authority biases coming out, but the system feels flawed, and in an intentional sort of way. Still, the people seem used to it, trading it interchangeably for goods and services. The closer her senses travel back to the "city", the louder the scent and taste of Qi becomes, the farms closer in smelling richer, the number of Qi-Gathering leaders and special talents increasing by just a bit. Eventually, farmland is replaced almost entirely by grasses, gardens and smaller structures, one and two-story buildings that cluster together. Interspaced between them are living arrangements that smell more strongly of Qi, though never far past the initial steps of cultivation, and there she finds the scent of herbs, spices, medicinal plants and cultivation aids. It's clear that those with "talent" are moved in towards the city, and given more Qi-intensive tasks compared to the others.

Eventually, the "sect" proper begins. Hundreds of houses for servants, washing houses, bath houses, market squares and centers of commerce, healers and more- but always, the closer you go, the more Qi has to be involved. It's a caste society, drawn up in clear lines of segregation- the closer you get to the sect's compound, the more versed in Qi you have to be. She sees no schools, no sections that bridge that divide- a few miles out, there's blacksmiths for common creations and tools and weapons, and closer in, there's one, maybe two such smiths, working almost exclusively with enchanted and Qi-infused materials.

And, at last, the final compound.

Low walls ring miles of territory, an expansive city-within-a-city, filled with thousands. Servants trek in and out, but the farms and living quarters here are kept only to those fully in the Qi-Gathering realm, who tend cultivation aids and have wildlife preserves to tend to, always working. There are halls for fighting, for making pills and alchemical reagents, for learning the healing arts, and yet again, it's clearly divided. The outer disciples live in small but expensive homes, each with their own Qi-gathering formations, and cycle through chores and tasks for the other groups. The inner disciples, which she so recently wrecked, do the same things, but with more Qi, and more of a focus on politics, learning, and fighting.

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And the core disciples…

Well. She hasn't quite expanded through the entire city-state, but she's got glimpses, here and there.

They… they don't move.

They sit. They gather Qi. They learn. And almost universally, they stay in expansive, expensive manors, just like hers, and do… nothing. Just meditate.

And they smell.

All the cultivators smell, but most of the core cultivators smell worse. That stink she noticed on the way in? Vaguely unpleasant, vaguely biological? They have it in spades. She's never smelled anything like it before, but it's there, like something rancid. It's spoiled milk and rotten mulch and shit and vomit and…

Well. Ok. There's… hmm.

Thing is, she doesn't actually mind those smells. She doesn't like them, but with her new digestive system, with the way her hunger pangs trigger first and foremost on Qi-saturated materials… she doesn't hate them. Also wouldn't really want any of them for a meal, but she's gotten used to the idea of eating some weird stuff, and if you eat a whole body at once, it's going to have some nasty stuff inside of it, and she… hasn't super minded.

She's pretty sure she can digest almost literally anything, at this point. And most "spoiled" or "nasty" scents are there to stop you from eating things you can't digest, and considering she's part landmass, part dream-logic environment, and part ever-shifting bio-mutant that is kinda-sorta learning to do plant things eventually, that's a very short list.

And yet, the scent smells bad. Even with the fact that she could consume raw garbage and rotten corpses and get something out of it, this seems… different. Almost like there's Intent imbued into the scent itself, something communicating beyond context that it's bad.

This, in particular, is what she's focused on tonight. The wider socio-political examinations are fascinating, and information she's sure she's already got some brains working on and figuring out in more detail, but this is a mystery. The scent is something she has no context for, hasn't met before… and tonight, there's an opportunity.

The scent is particularly "ripe" in one of the core disciples she's managed to sneak in to see. Limited as she is, she can't use her senses to hear a name directly, or to properly scan the room she's in, but she knows that she's grown some of the fibers of her being towards the scent, and she can feel the body heat and voices of someone. They're sitting, meditating, and slowly, she mimics the act, pushing all of her disparate focus to a single point over the course of what might be minutes and might be hours.

He's… not young. He looks young, but he isn't. She can taste, distantly, the ways that his body is shaped, as if fighting between what it's designed to be and what it's choosing to be. Such is cultivation, true- but here, she can taste differences. A liver, aged and damaged too much for skin that pale and smooth. Hair that is long and lustrous, a deep black, but, in small places, hints at pale white. Muscles that creak and groan in specific instances, specific points and joints, but which are supple and vibrant elsewhere.

And he reeks.

His eyes are closed, that much she can tell. The details come in flashes, but they're there; he's breathing unevenly, as if practicing a sort of rhythm, and his Qi cycles constantly, flaring up on occasion and pushing through again. He's… maaaaybe Core Formation realm? The stink makes it a bit hard to tell. There's something about the way his Qi moves through his meridians…

She waits, patiently. She watches. She endures the rank-ass stink.

And then, eventually, sometime in the night, something changes.

His Qi flares, bursting up in volume and intensity, as if pushing against something, and she can finally sense his Core, a bright and burning star, much brighter than she expected for the amount of Qi she can sense- and there it is. He's cycling wildly, pushing hard, straining his channels on purpose and forcing his body to adapt to it. It's like watching someone experience a breakthrough in their cultivation, but wilder, more desperate and more powerful at once, and-

There. On his skin, beading up to the surface. The stink.

His core flares and dies, flares and dies, always glowing throughout its actions, and every time it does, Qi washes out through his body, shoving itself violently through his spiritual veins and into his body, saturating it. He screams, a cry of pain, but refuses to open his eyes, even as they begin to bleed, even as his skin begins to-

That's not blood.

For one thing, it's black. An abyssal black, deeper than oil, deeper than night, pushed out of his body as the saturation of his Qi increases. His cultivation is used as almost a bludgeon against his own body, bringing back memories of her own, even more violent first attempts at cultivating without organs, and as it pushes into his body, it pushes something else out. It oozes out of him, black-on-black, like charcoal and rot and shadow and shit, like the byproduct of every chemical reaction and biological function, and in moments it coats his skin, his hair, his clothes, even the floor around him.

She's not sure how long it lasts… but eventually, he gasps, inhales, coughs, vomits, and then falls to one side, breathing shallowly.

The smell in the room is… incredible. It's so bad it comes back around, the sheer intensity of it evolving into something beyond rankness, beyond dangerous. To her synesthesia, her ability to "taste" Qi, it's almost blank, even as its Intent saturates the space- it is powerless, and yet also dangerous?

Is that…

A distant memory clicks into place. A conversation she had, months ago, inside her inner world.

That's the price. You get to eat and sleep without the Heavens or the gods feeding you little visions and dreams, you get to not have to sweat out impurities every time you cycle, you get to enjoy a world where you never have to really learn anything important about yourselves, and we get to do whatever we want with all of you.

…are these the Impurities? This… mass, this strange slime-thing?

She scans over the body of the limp cultivator, examining him, and-

He's gotten younger.

His body is ill-defined, almost alien compared to how it was before the cycle began. It's still notably human, but there are changes, exceptions- he's changed, in a way she hasn't seen happen in the Core Formation realm before. His body is pristine, despite what it just went through, like it's been shaped to some sort of ideal, and all the rest has been forcefully shoved out.

Is it an impurity on its own? Or is it a matter of perspective, Intent imbued into something neutral until it becomes… this?

Curious and fascinated and frustratingly tempted, she reaches out, the fibers of this strand of her creeping towards the edge of the blackened slime, and-

"Master?"

She blinks, interrupted from her concentration. Her senses expand out, tracking who-

Ah. Aria. Higher chances that it's something important, then.

"Come in."

The cultivator, formerly of the Crashing Rainfall sect, currently of an indeterminate cult-ish sort of thing, enters, bowing as she does. She remains much as she did when they first met- a young woman, short haired, her skin a pale blue and dotted with shards of pottery that mimic her form, the whole of her wrapped in a vine that is imbued with the scent of her cultivation. In the time since her quasi-imprisonment and later recruitment by Raika (and boy does it not sound great when she says it like that), she's grown a bit, the porcelain on her body growing in size and gaming little patterns, artistically painted scenes that seem to shift slightly here and there.

"Greetings, Master Raika."

"Once was enough, please don't call me that."

She just nods, though Raika is absolutely certain she's going to do it again. Too proper for her own good, this girl.

"As you say. I have come to inform you that there are visitors to the manor. Your… contact, amongst the staff, is currently entertaining them, alongside Ko. They seemed the type that might get along better with him than with me."

She sighs, regathering her wits. The intensity of the vision is still sharp in her mind, still ready to call her back, but… priorities. She can find someone else later, or maybe even ask Aria, now that she knows what to ask.

Her braids reform and shrink, becoming lower-back length instead of the floor, and she gets up, stretching as she does, forming clothes out of her flesh for at least the illusion of decency.

"Alright then. Show me whose ass I'm kicking tonight."