Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

If you go up high enough, you can see the stars, even when the sun is out. They twinkle and crackle, like paper tearing at the edges forever and ever, bright against the backdrop of the void.

Raika watches all of them. Every one.

To implement full-scale observation in a 3D space, it is not enough to have viewing-points that swivel and turn to focus on things. To properly see everything around, all at once, takes having enough eyes that no movement is needed. No need to look here, or look there; she is already looking, already seeing, already prepared.

It only takes three-thousand, eight-hundred and seventy two eyes.

Supreme Body Art: Overclocking runs through a few hundred brains, each one of them allowed to burn out and die to teach the next generation what parts need highlighting and how best to maintain them. Hundreds of deaths by fever-madness and the splitting pain of perfect vision, each one as painful as the last- but she's mostly there now. Only a dozen burnouts a day, and decreasing. In return, having pushed alien biology past already alien limits, she sees everything.

From far enough above the earth that plants below look like painted miniatures, high enough that the clouds tickle a bit as they pass by above, Raika stares down at the world.

A modified application of Supreme Body Art: Gigant has to be used to sustain this particular form. She's used to having multiple points touching the ground, used to needing to compensate for her own movement, but this far up, she has to contend with weather patterns almost as much. Even still, veins and synapses have to be optimized, the machinery of her being pushed to allow for existence in a frame beyond humanoid scale.

Three-thousand, eight-hundred and seventy-two eyes stare out like leaves on branches, fractal antlers spawning out from a core central point and blooming with organs in every direction. She looks a bit like a sphere made of thorns from afar, emerging from a central point at the tip of a tower, high enough that she can see the curve of the world below her.

A full kilometer and a half of flesh, bone and Radiant Metal, growing directly upwards from the plateau she prepared. It was good exercise- enough of her purposefully-limited brains are studying things like physiks and architecture to make the whole thing a challenge and learning opportunity in one. Took a few tries, a few moments where the snapping of hyper-reinforced tendons echoed as she snapped and broke from the wind, but she got the hang of it.

The tower of her being glints orange, purple and white, hyper-thickened blood, keratinous plating and Radiant Metal making up the majority of her being. Vents in the sides inhale and exhale in a constant flow, pulling in enough oxygen to sustain her biology without needing to burn excessive Qi, and that same blood is pumped by hearts placed every few feet along her construction. From several points along the sides, long, thin filaments drift down towards the earth, hyper-sensitive to even the slightest scent particles drifting on the wind

She is growing.

It hurts.

She has always pushed herself, that much is true. It would be insulting to her own struggle to minimize it, and she has at least that much respect for herself… but it's not enough, is it? It's never enough.

The world is ending.

The beast of oblivion is a-coming, heralded by the growing fires of war, and there's very little she can do about it. All her power, all her near-suicidal levels of pushing herself, have come to this- she isn't strong enough.

She feels a little tremor from Dink, carried through one of her other selves. It swaps between them, providing support as it always has, but somehow, it can sense her even clearer than she can sense herselves. Always ready to respond to her, to give a note of reassurance.

It feels warm. To be seen, and to be known. She and Many-Grasping have their own dynamics, but what she has with Dink is older, deeper. There is a difference between being believed in, being worshipped, being seen… and being known. Dink provides the latter, in a way that feels safe.

And yet… she can't help but feel a hint of frustration at the note. The implication it carries, of… disharmony.

She needs to do more. She needs to be more.

It is one thing to be strong against the dangers of the world. It is another to be strong against the end of the world. She is, at this current moment, strong enough to face off against any Warrior Realm cultivator, and if not win, then most certainly survive. By the time the war starts, and it will be soon, this she knows, she will likely be able to punch a little higher, given the right circumstances.

It's not enough.

An Emperor Realm cultivator cannot stand against the Empire. They cannot protect everyone they could possibly care about, cannot ensure that everything that comes to pass does so only in the ways that make things better. The Pack, a collection of beings capable of transforming the world itself, beings apparently at least semi-equal to Many-Mouths, aren't enough to face the Empire, or even enough to guarantee victory over the Empire's Titans.

And all of these things are lesser than the end of the world. Than an oncoming death by a thousand cuts of reality itself.

She dives back into herself, her perspective shifting through veins of crimson-indigo and dancing deep, deep into the earth.

An update arrives as she "travels", filtered back in through a few hundred brains- a new location has been established. New territory to expand into. Where-

Ah. The Fallen Kingdom. That particular part of her has been struggling a bit- the same urges and ideals that bind them all are somewhat louder when there are so few ways to satisfy them. It's only reasonable- the "central" Raika struggles with feeling powerless, so it only makes sense that those parts of her made purposefully lesser would do the same. Still, she hasn't given up- every part of her is still every part of her, and they're not very good at giving up.

She shifts part of her perception to her "territories", expanding her perspective out to the thin threads that she's spread through miles and miles of the world. Certain areas stand out more prominently- Singheart, in particular, has been thoroughly parasitized, with miles of veins and nerves dug into its walls, its soil, its environment. She can sense the footsteps on her "skin", feel the lives of thousands moving about, taste their day-to-day lives. If she pushes her attention that way more directly, she can see them, Synesthesia pushing her senses to accept sound as color, taste as smell, sight as touch.

Sizzling meat on a hundred-hundred grills and stovetops. Open stalls of food and drink. Woven grasses and blankets, rugs and leathers, the smell of the process of them coming through just as clear as the finished products. The smell of books, cracked open in the sunlight, gleaming in the way that light does when reflected off Singheart's crystalline center. The laughter of children, the gossiping of people at home and among friends, the worried mutterings of those who drink and wonder about what is to come. She can taste greater beings in the city; Chu Ari, Ro Aian, Kina, and the others she barely knows; the rainbow-made flesh, the man that is a tiger that is a man, a mass of centipedes and spiders, a person with eyes like sunrise and skin like nightfall, their flesh pulsing to the tune of birdcall and growing wood. Many of them do not know her, and many of them would challenge her if given the chance. Some of them might even be trouble.

So she has not given them that chance, has ruled and expanded from the shadows in the quiet. She has become as much a part of the city as the roots of the trees she grows through, and from her blood and flesh, from the avatar of herself that has taken on training Wei Zin, she does her best to protect them. Beasts find their paths meandering just a bit further away from the city's fruits and population centers, and those same fruits and homes find themselves slightly better protected from the elements, slightly more flush with vitality.

She could spend a decade there, probably. Learn how to manage a city, how to control without ruling, how to best care for farms, how to best care for people. She could spend years just optimizing the pathways through the city, improving her grasp of urban planning and architecture, training her arrays and formations on bettering and protecting someplace rather than by crippling herself and throwing herself to the wolves.

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Training her students. Making sure that Jin has a place he can learn to call home. Building roots to portal back to the Empire, reach out to her contacts, use the people of Singheart to send letters back to her allies.

She turns away.

There's no time.

She needs to be more.

She's planted clusters, here and there. Always miles apart from each other, always either buried into the earth or inside someplace hollow and secret. They exude heat, and a lot of it, if she isn't careful- each pod is the size of a small house, or perhaps a shed, and being much, much larger on the inside has its upsides and downsides.

Upsides: she has so much more room than she should to play with. Building "Dragon Veins", her modified form of physical meridians, takes up a lot of space. If she spread herself out, she'd easily rival the size of a city off of just those alone, reinforced veins filled with hyper-saturated, Qi-enriched blood, flowing and cycling to increase her reserves. Each cluster works as a supply-point, generating more energy and material resources she can pull from to further fuel her growth, with some specialized for Blacksteel, for blood, bone, bile, whatever's needed.

It's much too slow to be exponential, but it's a bit past the linear growth stage. Part of what keeps it from going further?

Besides material constraints, there are downsides.

Downsides: it's visible, it makes for potential avenues for someone to attack her through, and, perhaps most importantly, it generates heat. Which ties into the other two, conveniently.

Biology emits heat. Energy emits heat. Biology, generating energy, generating more biology? A lot of heat. It wasn't really an issue when she first started out, or at least not in the way it is currently. Her temperature, since she unlocked her Truths and began applying them to her body, has been hot enough that she steams in casual temperature if she's not trying to hide it. Growing larger than a building magnified that, easily. If not for how Qi saturation alters and strengthens materials, she'd have exceeded what a human body can endure without heatstroke and death years ago.

Now, she's found the upper limit for that fact. Her body has absorbed enough Qi that absorbing any more is a struggle, her current methods granting diminishing returns, and the heat she's producing has started to outpace that. Her body warping to fit more inside of itself than it should means that the surface area of her body doesn't match its contents.

Simply put? So much of her is so deep inside that the heat she generates has nowhere to go. It has to travel through too much material to reach the skin, and ends up literally boiling her blood if she's not careful.

Her blood, at its current level of saturation, can rest in an open furnace without so much as bubbling.

On the plus side, manipulating metals inside her body is way easier nowadays.

So- approximately the size of a small shed, with high amounts of bloodflow circulating constantly against the outer skin, which is designed to have open space between the armor and skin layers. Add too many, too fast, without bothering to optimize, and hey! She catches fire and her organs shut down.

Beyond Singheart and the clusters, she has smaller spread-patterns, manifesting as small veins that snake through terrain, small enough to have to worry about worms and local insects. She has to spend a not-inconsiderable amount of Qi repairing and relocating them whenever some enterprising forager gets a taste, but it's worth it. She has… so many parts of her Mind just cataloging the world, experiencing it bit by bit.

Droplets of dew. Light from above, drifting through strange canopies. Alien songs, sung by plants, animals, and things beyond both. The taste of strange rivers, and stranger earth, making terrains that she can barely recognize as part of her world.

The Overgrowth truly looks like a place that has spread for millions of years, ruled by minds she can barely picture, let alone comprehend. Evolving and changing, following currents of Qi so vast that they reshape the world around them, shifting and mixing so slowly she can barely perceive the grandest of them, like tectonic plates.

It's beautiful.

It's beyond anything she knows, and she could spend a thousand years, a hundred thousand, just… walking. Exploring. Tasting new things, seeing new sights, feeling new feelings. Meeting new people. Finding places, each and every one unique.

The world is… beautiful.

And it's ending.

And she isn't enough to save it.

So still, she grows.

Still, she spreads.

Still, she rises.

Even though it hurts.

And it hurts.

It hurts so much that she forgets sometimes, but… it's probably been since her time in the third ring, since her time at the house with Qen Hou, Li Shu, Hao Nera and Jin. Or… maybe since the fortress city, not long after.

That's how long it's been since she started hurting again.

Growing? It hurts. People forget, but there is a reason teenagers ache, that babies cry for no reason- it hurts to grow. It hurts when bones develop, when muscles are pulled to larger sizes than they're used to, when tendons and ligaments stretch.

She's been through worse, of course. She survived being burned to death, being torn apart, tearing herself apart for months and months at a time just to improve herself, she survived her mind being eaten and her soul being torn into pieces. She's used to pain.

But every now and then, she remembers that it hurts.

If you get rid of the pain, you get rid of the signals that the body uses to tell you things. One needs to learn it, master it, to tell the difference between a break and a sprain, a stomach wound and a punctured spleen. She can only do so much without it- so she's kept it, because she needs to do more.

Her body nears melting-point every moment of every day. Her biology stretches and transforms in ways that she can logically understand, but her Body knows only instinct, the ways it was designed to be rather than what she wants to make of it. Her avatars fight and break and heal and break again. She carves symbols into her bones with a scalpel made of herself. Every now and then she gets something wrong, and everything that is alive in her just screams.

She's used to it. She can take it. She is hundreds of brains, miles on miles of functioning biology. She meditates, she dissociates, she breathes, in and out, In and Out.

But sometimes, if she lets herself remember, it hurts.

But if she stops hurting, then she can't do as much. And she's already not doing enough.

The world is ending, after all.

She focuses her mind on the newest branch of her being, planted in a city of the dead. With her full powers and senses unbound, she can see and experience so much more, and she finds herself in an alabaster place, ivory and bone, gravestone and stone that is Cold.

Bodies.

So many, many bodies. They saturate the world itself, a million-million deaths, kept preserved, kept from ENDING.

Dead, but not gone.

No longer alive, but still capable of motion, of change, of transformation into something… else.

She spreads, and she finds herself smiling, in the place of herself that she is, without teeth or eyes or face.

It's not just a city. She spreads, and she sees the patterns, the same ones she feels every day.

Veins. Arteries. Squared away, built at right angles, up and down hillsides- but still familiar.

She spreads through the city, the city whose Death burns through the tendrils of her being even as she regenerates and spreads, which rejects her very being. She expands, feeling parts of herself die, unable to maintain her Body there without anchors, without expanding enough to be noticed, and as she grows, she traces the body of the city of Godsfall, at the edge of the fourth ring.

It's shaped like death.

It is shaped like something which has died.

It's shaped like a corpse, buried deep and large enough to cover a hundred hills, colonized by coral and bone in the shape of a city in the shape of a grave, with a Cathedral for an empty heart.

The world is so vast. So beautiful.

It's all going to die. It's all going to END.

And everyone she loves with it.

So she can't stop. She keeps growing. She refocuses herself on the tower of her being, returning her attention to the place prepared for her beside the central pearl of Many-Mouths, surrounded and guarded by Divine Beasts.

And she learns.

And she grows.

And she hurts.

She can do more.

She has to do more.

Vengeance demands it. Retribution demands it. War demands it.

She thinks of the people by her side, growing so well, so much better than she ever can.

They would hate her for thinking it… but they demand it to.

So she has to.

Even if it hurts.