Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

The Cathedral smells of meat, and for once, it isn't Raika's fault.

She can smell it from down the street, smell it from across the city, smell it crawling out from where it sits- because it does not hide. Even human-level senses could provide that scent, of refrigerated flesh, of preservational chemicals and herbs and incense all wrapped around the cold and kept-cold dead.

Three days since they entered the city. Three days of preparation and design and establishment, step by step, one by one.

They've given her a manor. Again. The sense of humor and irony that travels through the connection she has to the rest of her informs her, at least in broad terms, of what's been going with her "counterpart" in the Republic of Morae.

Apparently, a part of being a diplomat is being put in fancy houses you don't want where people can watch you.

She can't negate the benefits of it in terms of her allies, though. Li Shu's workshop, the one that was set up for her before they even needed to ask, is full of medical texts, covered in tables for dissection, with medical implements and tools and example formations. They even offered her arcane artifacts- arrays, not formations. Mechanical things of stone and bone and Qi woven as circuits, into patterns of cold metal, silver and unoxidized, each of them bleeding power, contained carefully by seals. Jin has stuck close to Raika, something she's encouraged, but even he's had things prepared for him. She checked the entire place thoroughly, running her worms and Beetle's skills for hours to check in each and room and each and every wall, but she placed extra care with him.

Whatever they've hidden, they've done it well. She's found plenty of suspicious looking things, arrays and detailed devices she can't properly identify, but there's got to be more she isn't seeing. That's fine, and she's spent some time "dealing" with that, but the things around Jin's rooms (or at least, the rooms assigned to him?) are… notable.

Corpses.

In the walls.

They gave her a room to put him in, a room almost nicer than her own, a room with a massive bed and side chambers, places for servants, fucking concubine quarters, for fucks sake. It's a manor within a manor, semi-isolated, proper quarters for a young master.

And there are corpses in the walls. In all the walls.

Not just his room, not just the meditation areas, not just the fucking courtyard they gave him, in all of them. Every wall and every floor and every ceiling, at least one in each, and in some, a lot more.

She's not sure if he's noticed them. If he has, he hasn't brought it up. But the way he looks at the buildings, sometimes? The way he prefers to sleep in "her" part of it, rather than his own? It doesn't seem entirely a case of insecurity over their new environment.

She doesn't mind, and what's more, she's taken steps to give them some small amount of security. She might not have the biological freedoms that the rest of her does, but the rest of her is here, and she does. Planting a few seeds of flesh here and there was enough for her to grow through just about the entire building. Hair-thin fibers of sensory nerves, bits of skin and neural tissue are all that really fit without drawing attention, but it's more than enough for her to subconsciously track the entire building as if it were part of her own body.

The fact that her body has so many corpses in it is… well, weirdly comforting, in a way. Though she can usually interact with the corpses she can touch.

These are… cold. Cold in a way that nerves and skin and the faintest hint of blood aren't enough to overcome.

And now? A few days into their visit? She walks somewhere colder.

They invited her, after all.

The Cathedral sits like a beast upon its hoard. A great alabaster thing, austere and towering, planted at the hill atop the city, looking down from on high through many black eyes, out at the world it rules.

And from it, like a scent trail, like a glow on the horizon, there is the smell of death and meat.

In the courtyard, a black hearse reaches its destination. Horses with seven legs and two heads, made entirely of bone and flesh which never lived at all, clatter to a stop, heaving breaths in perfect silence. They exhale smoke of grey and blue, like alchemical reactions, venting the heat and cold buildup out of themselves.

The door opens, and her ever-gracious host steps out, waving a golden hand, metacarpals glistening.

She steps past it, ignoring the outstretched "palm" as she does. She might be here at their pleasure, as a "diplomat" and all, but she's chosen death over bowing to another's whims before. She has a lot more things relying on her now, a lot more people… but that part of her remains, stone-deep.

Bishop Lu Karai takes it in stride. If he's bothered by her actions, she doesn't have any real way to see it, not without macro-level body language or Intent, neither of which he seems to "indulge" in. No heartbeat, no neurons, no hormones or biochemistry or microexpressions she can track that can give her anything to read him by. And his aura…

Cold. Cold and golden, ripe with the smell of wax.

It's like being mortal again. No super-senses capable of reading the nature of others, no deep and profound insights into their cultivation or powers. Either his smell really is that sterile, that inhuman, or he's bound it up in some way, found a way to make it subtle.

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Or, the most likely possibility; whatever it is that he's become, she does not have the senses or the context with which to understand it.

Yet.

The doors are towering things. If there is one thing that the Fallen Kingdom loves most (other than dead stuff), it would seem to be very large buildings. The Cathedral is nearly the size of the Cragend's arena, larger, maybe. It might not be quite so far above the rest of the city, built from the ground rather than atop the basalt pillars of the former, but its scale…

A city within a city, covered and ensconced within stone and beatific architecture. Reeking of death.

The doors are larger than some buildings, two massive faces of alabaster. They are carved with reliefs that look like skulls, open and singing up to a carved rendition of a geometric thing above, a sun that is made of an infinity of right angles and strange shapes and which shines down upon a world of corpses, lain to rest and arranged in positions of prayer.

They lie open, and beyond them comes the smell.

Raika sighs, stepping forward towards it.

"Your eagerness does you credit, Reverend. A pity that your young charge could not join us this lovely day! What an honor it would have been, to show such a young talent to the heart of our little church."

"There'll be other opportunities. He's still adjusting- you understand."

"Of course. Blessed though he may be, it would be a disservice to push him too far and too fast. It is rare enough that we see someone on his side of mortality with such an affinity. I credit you with his development, personally- with the amount of death saturating him, you'd think the boy would have gone through a hundred possessions, and yet, not a mark of soul damage on him!"

"You flatter me with your praise, Bishop."

He laughs at that, the sound clicking against his spine, and she neglects to join him.

Lu Karai is… distressingly jovial, and far too friendly to be comfortable with, even if, as far as she can tell, he seems sincere. He drops information casually, leaving out the great secrets of cultivating Death as if they were no more than passing asides, but never pries too deeply in return.

Like that little tidbit- apparently, being possessed by Echoes is a step in learning the ways of Death. She wouldn't say he's… never been possessed, considering the semi-shade that follows him, but if she had to guess, his natural affinity and her Blacksteel had more to do with his growth.

Well. That, and where she dragged him through.

And by the time she's done thinking those thoughts, the shadows of the archway have reached them. With another step, they pass through.

The Church of Burrowing Saints is an alien thing. There are too many right angles to things, as if it were designed by someone obsessed with both fractals and bones at once. It is a brutalist blend of sharp-edged pillars, perfectly smooth cylinders and overprecise spheres, all juxtaposed with skulls that decorate everything, and the shapes of full skeletons arranged like puzzles around the rest.

And everywhere, in near-perfect silence, there is movement.

The smell of preservative chemicals and dead meat nearly overwhelm her then, hitting her like a freight train. The wafting intensity of the smell on the outside can't be matched by the inside, the cold, still air saturated with it entirely. The central chamber past the doors is a lobby, its back walls missing to show a colossal space, empty as a cavern- but filled with pews.

And on each step of each part of each pew, there are people, praying.

The prayer is what's causing the smell.

She can see thousands of bodies just from the doorway. There may be thousands more around the edges, in the chamber proper, and each of them is kneeling against the pew in front of them. Each of those aforementioned pews has a slight indent where the praying churchgoers kneel, like they've been there so long that the material has deformed…

And yet it is moving.

Like from inside a crustracean's shell, the indent has cracks, and from those cracks come long, insectile limbs. They are tipped with syringes, scalpels, runic tools, incense holders, chisels and more, and they extend out to wrap around the bodies of each churchgoer.

Every being in the chamber is perfectly, deathly still. They have no heartbeats she can sense, do not breathe in any way she can track, and yet it is not dissection. Vivisection of a thousand-thousand corpses fills the first chamber of the cathedral with the sound of whispering prayer, sending the smell of death and modification out through windows and doors into the world beyond.

Bishop Lu Karai waves a hand, making a sign on his forehead, his ribcage, his shoulders, and his throat, and bows at the entrance.

"Blessed be the Saints. Blessed be the digging. Blessed be the death we preserve, and that which is yet born from it."

She just stares.

There are arrays here. Built into the walls, designed into the bones and reliefs and pillars, beneath the surface. The alien brutalism disguises, or perhaps enhances, strings of spells and effects encoded into stone and Qi, into magic and Death, and it radiates, somehow kept almost contained by the church's outer walls. She doesn't need to squint, not here. Jin's ghosts are on full display, and they glow, almost as if alight.

Each and every Echo is bound to someone praying. They waft up from them, like liquid smoke flowing upwards, but pinned in place by the eternal vivisection. She can see the nails that bind them, fuse them to the flesh below, and she sees them flickering, dancing through scenes of lives lived, emotions felt.

Life beyond death. Kept in place by surgery eternal, kept "alive" by magics she does not understand, but which permeate this entire edifice.

She takes a breath. Slow and deep.

Behind her eyes, down a thread of life that should not be, a hundred brains dig deep and begin to memorize. A great and terrible Pillar of Mind offers crystals of salt and metal and silicon, upon which it carves a dizzying array of memory into being, recording each and every sight and thought and the shapes of the magic they hold.

She walks forward.

The pews are arranged symmetrically in hexagonal sequences, spread in clusters throughout a space more than a mile wide. They're arranged, concentrically, around a central podium, far enough away that it looks a bit vague to her senses… but there is a direct pathway to it.

"Beautiful, is it not?" The Bishop asks, his skeletal feet making an interestingly hollow clacking sound along the ground as he walks. "The process was perfected millenia ago, and since then, we have added thousands of faithful to the ranks of those praying here."

"...to what purpose?" she asks, looking around the cavernous space. "Everything I see here, while impressive, seems…"

"I can understand it would be confusing to one not initiated into our order. Such must seem as madness, even to one as steeped in death and life as you, but to all things, an order. The Death, long-since embedded into flesh which was mortal, is brought higher, enhanced and infused with new elements and ritual foundations. In turn, by remaining here, it saturates the space, infusing it and empowering the rituals undertaken."

"Does it… hurt?"

He laughs at that, that same sound of empty air somehow rattling off of lungless ribs. "All faith is painful, dear Reverend. To choose that pain, then, is the noblest form of prayer.

"Now, come along. The other Bishops and I are eager to discuss with you the news you have brought."