Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

One could cut the tension in the auction house with a knife. Hell, probably with a fork.

She forgot a fork. Fuck.

Ah well.

She plucks a piece of cake off the plate, luxuriating in the taste of soft, wet sweetness, plump and expertly baked to a level that she can't even picture- but can taste.

It is delicious. Like sweetened tea, like lavender honey mixed with jasmine citrus and some kind of… hmm, vanilla? Expertly blended all together, a gorgeous mix of subtle elements into a genuinely joyful yet calm medley of flavors.

Someone coughs awkwardly.

An aura crashes against the world, louder in every measure than the glut of Qi she dumped back at her viewing box.

She is not here. She is someplace else. Someplace that is a cliffside, and is a mountaintop, and is a beach, all looking out to the horizon, which has been tinged with the color of green.

There's still the cultivators in the audience, still the space around her- and yet it is gone, and yet it is impossible and alien, a new reality superimposed over the old. Across an unfathomable distance, miles and miles away and yet pressing its heat directly against her face, there is an island. It is a mountain in and of itself, a structure vast enough to hint at tectonic movements, and it colors the horizon in a vicious green, like an aurora of force tainting the sky-blue and sunset-red into a new shade.

The mountain is aflame, glowing with tongues of energy that are higher and vaster than any building mortal hands have ever constructed. Each flame is a thing of creation, an entity of incarnation- where it touches, matter freezes into form, sand shapes up and back into new forms like terra-cotta warriors and buildings. When the flame passes, the structures remain, solid and still, and yet in the movement of the island, they eventually crumble.

It is like looking at a vision of an apocalypse. It is like looking at another world.

Raika takes another bite of cake.

"Your patience with the proceedings has been eminently delightful," she says, speaking in spite of how the air in her lungs becomes marble, each particle frozen in place. When she leans, it cuts into her, as if static points of matter have simply manifested inside her body, relatively to the island.

"And as has been promised to you before," she says, her body healing and repairing itself around the damage, "we have only just begun. The height of our little auction, hosted oh-so-generously by the Dancing Clouds sect, has one final set to present to you, a bit cruder than the others- and yet, unique.

"I'm an unknown, I know. A total stranger to all but the most well-informed amongst you. It must be hard to place faith in the words of one like myself, but superior to faith in matters of finance is proof. And so, an offering."

She raises her free hand to one side, ignoring how it feels like it's gotten heavier, like it's being drawn towards that impossible, un-present horizon.

Her fingers curl around and cut into her own wrist.

From the wound, a drop of blood falls.

The horizon retreats, the shock of its wielder evident in the silence of his presence.

Her hand moves fast enough to blur, catching her own blood as it falls and holding it cupped in her palm.

Ironically, this was easier to make than the Qi stones. She just had to pull out of her reserves.

All the effort of removing the concepts from her cultivation system, the biological taint on the purity of Qi that comes from her self-poisoning, falls moot now. What drops into her palm from her vein is a thing potent enough that she can feel the cloth in her robes beginning to shift and roil as if alive. What she holds is potent enough that she can see hair beginning to grow in the stands, eyes brightening, lungs clearing, the wood that the cultivators are seated in chairs of creaking as they seek to grow again.

Qi density expressed through a medium. Blood so saturated in raw Qi, allowed to "ferment" in itself, until all that energy gains the flavor of crimson fluid, of pumping vitality, of hyper-dense nutrition and oxygenation. Her Qi saturation, expressed and condensed into a single droplet and presented before the crowd.

She smiles, and bleeds another drop into her palm.

Some of the cultivators in the audience are beginning to pull back, getting out of their seats- and some are coming forward instead, breathing in deeply, drinking in the energy bleeding freely from the crimson in her palm.

And then she closes her hand, re-absorbing the fluid.

"I do love to tease, but I apologize, honored guests. My containment for such resources is rather limited, as I'm sure you can imagine.

"That was no technique. No special method. No strange and distinct pathway of cultivation, which allows for illusion or containment. This is my blood, poured out for the eyes of those with means to see.

"As you can tell, I am, in fact, made of more than blood."

She bows, rising only to take one last bite of cake before tossing the empty plate onto the stage behind her. Wiping a hint of frosting and sugar off the side of her lip, she grins wide, showing off dozens of teeth, sharp and alien and hungry.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"My spit. My skin. My meat. My bones. My livers and lungs and hearts. My blood and bile, my cunt. All of me, saturated in at least that much vitality, at least that much Qi, uniquely suited to life itself. The sorts of alchemical treasures that any pill artificer would kill for. Drink a drop, given willingly, and if you manage to contain it? Control it? You could improve your physique by realms. You could increase your lifespan by centuries. Enough vitality in the material alone to bring a corpse-to-be back to life."

Her words echo in the room. She can hear the bated breath, the heartbeats responding to the intensity in the room. She's never felt closer to a fight without threatening someone, and she can't help but smile like a child, full of honest joy.

And then it morphs to a smirk.

"But! There's a catch.

"See, I don't have any need for Qi stones. I don't have cultivation as you would understand it. I don't need riches, because I don't need for gold or stones. The bidding today will be a special event! A dynamic experience!"

"Offer to me what you value. Offer to me your treasures, your techniques, your lands. Offer me your secrets. Offer unto to me whatever you hold precious, whatever form it may take, so long as it matters. And if it's something interesting enough, you get your reward. Whatever I offer, whatever you ask.

"Or. You can fight me."

She spreads her arms wide, her smile still bright, her eyes like stars in the firmament. "Fight me. Come up on stage, and beat me down. No holds barred, if you like- if you're willing to take the consequences it might bring. And if you manage to hurt me, force me to regenerate, then you get the rewards."

She moves, her hand extending and growing claws- and severs her other arm, letting it flop unceremoniously to the ground. Notably, it does not emit the same blinding aura as the blood from before.

"Can't carve it out of me. Can't take from me anything that I don't freely offer. But if you manage to push me to the point of regeneration, then whatever whisper or flower or pretty pebble you offer, I'll take as the winning bid."

She bows, her severed arm already regrowing, the arm she removed from the earlier version regenerating beneath the skin- and then rises up, looking out to the audience. With a flick of the wrist, the blood returns to her palm, once more irradiating the space around her.

"So come one, come all! Mercenaries, sects, those who have just begun and those who have run for a thousand years! Let's start the bidding!"

At first, the only thing in the chamber that moves is the air, held in by bated breath, stirred to activity by what she holds in the palm of her hand.

She lets her eyes wander, searching, searching…

There.

The great sects won't move first. Not for an unknown, not for an uncouth, vulgar display. They'll let someone else try it first, some lesser sect who will have to stomach the cost of proving her veracity, one way or another.

She has a different idea.

She looks into the crowd, and finds the person she's looking for.

She's not sure if they're a man or woman. They're out of place in the crowd, covered in thin reptilian scales and with small, nubby horns on their head. A beastkin, someone with some sort of ancestry- she smells no bestial cultivation on them that would explain the form. They're alone, amidst the other loose cultivators. Isolated. Weak.

She looks directly at them, and as quietly as she can, sends out just the smallest wave of Intent.

Ask.

Ask me, she whispers.

Their eyes lock, and a second goes by… and then the figure finds their courage, and takes a step forward.

They don't pull from a spatial ring, or from some artifact. Instead, the androgynous figure steps forward, wincing a bit at the intensity of the pressure being transmitted by the sects and greater cultivators. The cultivator reaches down to their waist, pulling a sash from around their hips. It is beautifully woven, carefully detailed, and in its fibers, Raika can see hidden words, encoded by the threading. Their kanji-lines make the shape of traveling warriors and great beasts, of mighty demons being fought by glittering stars.

It holds no Qi. It was made by no cultivator. This is a mortal's weaving, and the passion and time the project must have taken ooze out of every stitch.

"This… was my mother's gift to me," the scaled cultivator says. "When I told her I was leaving my village on the steppes of the Azure Dragon Peaks, she spent three weeks straight preparing it. Every day and night, forgoing eating and sleeping to ensure it was done on time, even as she used it being unfinished to beg me to wait a little longer. I have not seen her in many years now.

"I do not have anything that could equal the value of your blood, honored one- but for the price you ask, this is what I hold most valuable."

Raika waits. Just a few seconds as the cultivator kneels, offering the sash up to her. Just long enough that, arguably, someone might have had time to bid.

And then she kneels in turn, and gently lifts the sash from the cultivator's hands.

She opens her palm, even as she wills her blood, which Is Her, to calm itself. She commands it to fall inert until it is prodded back awake, by Qi or by consumption, and lets it slide from her hand to drop like rain into the cultivator's.

"By my word and my will, as my life is My Own, this belongs to you."

The world rings with the weight of it. Truespeak, spoken by vocal cords saturated in Qi and made alien to what is mortal and ephemeral. Made truer, and able to speak truth unto reality in turn.

It's not foolproof- but Raika can feel it. The oath that settles into place against reality. This cultivator, whoever they may be, will be the only one able to keep and use the blood they now hold. She's not sure exactly what that means, but it was spoken, and so it is as true as she can make it.

Which, apparently, is quite a bit.

She rises up, a flick of the wrist allowing her to absorb the sash into herself and down into safer storage, deeper in her Ur-Body. A smile comes up, brighter than ever, at the stunned audience, still reeling from the moment and the words she used to transform it.

"The first bid has been won! Who's next?"

The silence is deafening yet again. That won't do. It's been way too quiet in here for way too long.

She slits open her wrist, a fresh stream of ever-burning, ever-living, ever-changing crimson falling out of it, and lifts it to the heavens.

"I SAID WHO'S NEXT?"

The returning roar of offers and challenges is deafening for an altogether different reason.