Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

Something is wrong.

No. Everything is wrong.

Something inside her is dying.

Raika collapses from where she was meditating, a taste of infinity escaping her, the dance of energy itself burning through every part of her like a wildfire.

Raika spasms as a thousand different ammo-cyclers collapse, the material of her makeup collapsing and expanding at once.

Raika and Raika and Raika simply stop, calculations and lessons and comprehension suspended in a void of nothing that wipes away every thought she is and has had and could be.

Raika feels a moment of sun-heat pain, an oncoming event horizon of pitch black darker than night- and then falls forward, vomiting up the debris trailing ahead of it.

Her jaw breaks as it's forcibly distended by a scaled body, hundreds of limbs falling out of spatial alteration too far back down her throat, cold and sharp against her tongue and knocking loose teeth. Her skin roils and rejects the worms swimming under it, the pathways and carefully designed alterations malforming at the loss of an intrinsic property of her being. The patterns carved into her bones scream, no longer itching but now directly focused in her mind's eye, as present as every other part of her body, no longer muted behind other processing centers.

And then comes the pain.

Just a moment of it. Any more and she would be dead.

As it is, her heart stops from the shock.

There are limits to what willpower can do when confronted with an abrupt end, and even further limitations on what a functioning brain can handle. Redundant neurons, optimized cerebro-spinal fluid, enhanced cushioning and oxygenation- at the end of the day, there are certain things hard-coded into how a humanoid brain is meant to function. They are exceptional organs, and yet, beyond even their flaws, there's one simple truth.

Nothing is designed to feel itself die so many times.

Her connection to her wider self is limited, crippled by surgical alteration. The impact of what hit her lasts barely an instant. In spite of her defenses and sacrificial selves, she has experienced more Pain than any human being could survive, every moment of every day for months.

Even still, she lays there, choking on her shattered jaw, her eyes blank from the pain, her nerves blanked out in a singular wave of agony.

Her heart doesn't beat.

Behind it, deeper, further… her Heart doesn't beat.

Or maybe it's just gone.

Maybe it's all just gone.

Maybe she's all that's left. A few moments of horror before even this shattered, cast off remnant of herself goes away like all the rest.

DINK

A pulse of force, no subtlety, no complexity, just impact. A single sound that barely even sounds like a note, every aspect of it shaped into something percussive, traveling from the metal around her collar to her sternum to her organs-

It forces what's left of her throat to spit up a wad of blood and phlegm. It forces her lungs to compress, the return to their natural shape just enough to drag breath back into her body.

It doesn't restart her heart.

It does cut past the pain. It echoes past the aftershocks of agony, a new stimulus entering her awareness.

Her blood is hyper-oxygenated, tremendously thick and heavy compared to conventional blood. She's got multiple types of oxygenation systems in it, copied from insectile fluids and how they use pressurized mechanisms instead of veins.

In one way, it's an advantage. She has a little longer before the lack of a heartbeat forces her mind to shut down, and a little longer after that than most before her brain starts to die.

In others, it's not. The force required for the muscle of the heart to contract is multiplied, and while it has been modified with that in mind, it was never designed with still blood in mind. Always, she's moved living, flowing blood through herself, because there's no reason to have blood that's left static- and now that's all she has. No momentum to help the organ to resume its pattern.

A large, cold snout enters her awareness, snuffling against her forehead as she tries to force a second breath back into her lungs. A distant thumping sound, like that of something small and heavy hitting the ground repeatedly.

Tools. She has tools. She has-

She tries to raise an arm, but it's so heavy. It's so sluggish. The muscles aren't responding right, the nerves still scrambled, the pain still echoing across them, and they're so fucking dense.

She can't move. She can't breathe. How long until the oxygen in her bloodstream runs out? How long until-

Her Truth.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

Focus. Focus. The blood is Her. The blood is Hers. It will move, because she wills it to move.

She drags in a third breath, her sternum like a mountain pinning her lungs to stillness, and forces the blood to travel from her lungs through her veins, up to her brain.

She can do this. She can-

There's too much. Too much her. She can't focus on it all at once. Her whole body at once is a nightmare to keep awareness of with a fully-functioning mind, and that's not one of her tools at the moment. Her neural locks, extending her awareness, allowing for heightened processing, become a liability, beginning to misfire as the pieces furthest from her vascular system start losing oxygen.

Do this. Do it, or you die. Do it.

A fourth breath, and she pushes the blood up to her skull.

She blinks- thought. Awareness.

She's on the floor. Her body is still hers, but scrambled, the signals half-sent and half-received jittering through her nerves. The floor is cold, because it's made of marble, or limestone, or slate, or-

It's made of rock. It's cold. Everything's cold. Parts of her she's never felt as cold before are freezing.

Beat. Heartbeat. Force it to beat.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

Beat. Beat.

Bump-bum.

Not a full beat, not a complete restart- but it's something. It's enough it restarts-

Silence.

The muscles are designed to beat. Always and forever, constantly. The right stimulus should jumpstart it back into an active state, and… it hasn't.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Breathe.

Five breaths, each one more labored than the last. Each an act of supreme will serving to only barely keep her alive, just enough to prolong the effects of oxygen deprivation a little longer.

She's in a courtyard. It's a nice courtyard. There's flowers in it, and wood so dark it's black, and the sun up above, filtered down the the ruin of all things.

Or maybe that's just her eyes. Her brain optimizing itself, deciding which elements are most essential for survival and deciding that eyesight is not among them right now.

She's in the courtyard. The courtyard of the manor she's been given. There's… there's probably noise. She can't hear it, but there's probably noise there, panicked movements from the centipede reptile and Beetle and Dink, which… which she can still feel, faintly, against her collarbone.

Dink isn't designed for what it's trying to do. It sends pulses of vibration through her body, but they both discarded that aspect of its growth as it grew ever more talented at neutralizing other frequencies, other wavelengths. She has to imagine that it took a lot of energy for the still-recovering item spirit to make that first pulse, the one that helped her come back to the present.

But it's trying. Pressed against her collarbone from where she's collapsed, staring up at the sky, she can feel it sending pulse after pulse, trying to jumpstart her heart.

Her heart. She needs to- it needs to beat again. It needs to-

Where is her Heart?

It's so quiet. It's so quiet and it hurts.

They're making a lot of noise. They should be making enough noise for someone to hear them, right? The courtyard is big, but centicroc alone is big enough to make a fucking echo of his steps as he walks sometimes. Someone will hear. Li Shu will hear, and she's a healer, she'll have some idea, she'll have-

If she makes it in time. If she makes it at all. If she can hear anything. Raika can't hear anything, no matter how loud she knows it is.

It's so quiet that the quiet is like thunder, never-ending, rolling forever and ever and ever inside her.

Raika hopes that Jin isn't the one who finds her. He's seen enough. Suffered enough. He deserves good things, that kid. He doesn't…

He doesn't deserve to find her body.

No.

No. She's not dead yet. She's not dead yet.

One more time. How long has it been since the last breath? How long has it been since the last heartbeat? It seems like hours, and maybe it's been days. How could she tell? She's not sure she remembers how time works. One moment after the other, but this moment is forever and forever hurts and maybe this is all there is, maybe this is the end, maybe this is what it's like after you die, no moments but one moment and that moment is forever and it hurts-

Organs are hard. Organs are complicated. Organs are confusing.

Arms are easier. Move. Move the arm. It's hers. It's Her arm, and even if it's dead she can Change and she must Change and isn't death the ultimate Change and-

The muscle fibers don't work right, and the bones feel heavier than they've ever been, and the veins are still and static things full of mud and dying.

She lifts, with all she has. Decades of physical training, of meditation, years of pushing past pain and incomprehensible sensation like nothing else that is all come at once, synapses firing blindly yet connecting just enough.

Controlling organs is harder.

Hitting things is easier.

She lifts as high as she can, and then she contracts the elbow joint with all the violence she can muster.

Thud.

It's not enough. She has to hit harder. Past armor plating and nanoscale material and hyper-dense tissue and padding, past all of it, deep enough to hurt herself. Deep enough to shock her heart properly, just once, just once.

She lifts again, and she's slower. And her mind hurts. And everything she is is just another vector of the hurt that comes before the vanishing.

Contract the elbow. Aim the fist. Retract it with enough force.

She has to be stronger than she is durable. She has to hit hard enough to kill the death in her.

THUD.

A beat. Just one.

Blood shooting up to her mind. Oxygen leaving her lungs and traveling into her body at last. No more building-sized air tanks, no more backup supplies, no other minds she can connect to or pull from or beg, beg for help.

Another delay. Another blind moment, fumbling in the dark, breathing through stone, feeling cold beyond cold because this cold is not an absence of temperature it is an absence of everything.

Her heart doesn't restart. The pulse in her chest refuses to come alive again.

Too much death.

Too much of the End in this place here, at the edge of the world. Too many corpses begging to be joined, buried in the walls and the floors and the dirt and the sky. An infinity of corpses, buried and still walking, and from inside her the death that has been planted reaches out and calls.

It does not beg, as she does. It does not plead, as she does. It simply calls, and is true, and is final and forever because it is inevitable, as the End always is.

It's not enough. She's losing ground with every strike, losing ground with every instant. Each random pulse is just enough to keep her alive a little longer but never enough to bring her back, to recoup what was lost and get stronger. She can't… she can't-

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

She can't see. There's no color and no light and no sound, but she can feel, she can feel it against her. Claws, digging through her clothing and into her skin, sharpened points on an overweight body pressing down. They're cold, and she can feel… scales?

Thud. Thud. Thud against her chest, against her sternum, against the pressure and weight of the blood in her. It doesn't dig all the way through, doesn't compress the heart like it's supposed to compress, and-

No. There. Not a full beat, but it's moving, contracting just a little.

It wants to beat. She wants to live.

But there is so much death in her.

What right does the smallest fragment have to live on, abandoned as it is at the death of every other part?

Is she dead? Is the rest of her dead? Is she all that's left, kept to this side of that abyss by only the slender beating of heavy paws against her chest?

Desperation. Need.

A little piece of metal, pulsing in time with the pounding of her friendly beast. A sharper, smaller thing, heavier than it seems, insectile and cold against her chest.

The worms left in her veins wriggle, twisting and churning. There's enough blood in her feel something past the cold, enough there to know what is dying and what is pain- and they are pain. They're eating through her, digging through dying flesh and starving cells. It's like she can feel each and every one, all at once and yet all apart, in a way that she has rarely matched, feel as they try to escape the living corpse that she has become now.

Except they're… they're not escaping.

They're digging. Digging towards each other.

It is of Death, yet again. Like so much of her is, like all of her is. A thousand minds, a thousand-thousand beating hearts, all gone silent at once, and where is her Heart?

She is a dead thing, in a dead place. The barest fragments of who she is drift in her mind, fluttering amidst half-beats of a half-dead heart.

A dead thing in a dead place.

A dead place.

A dead place where dead things still walk.

There is too much death in her. A forever-death that rises from a murder near-divine, leaving only this fragment behind. Too much of the Black in her soul and her body and her mind and the world around her now.

But Death too is CHANGE.

I Can Change.

And Death is not the END.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

Being dead doesn't actually change that, does it? It's still Truth.

Fuck it.

Fuck it.

Dead flesh, living flesh- it's still Her.

Her heart beats once more, sending a flood of blood back through her veins, through her body, through the parts that are corpse and the parts that are living, and she comes awake one more time.

It's not quite right. It's not quite functional. It's a start.

She lies there, the beating of her friends and beasts and allies against her chest pushing just enough blood through her. As life fades, awareness remains. As stasis burns through her, consciousness continues.

Parts of her brain start to shut down, and she moves the death along, shifting it from one end to the other, away from the parts she still needs alive. She feels the possibility of rot begin to set in, here and again, and she makes it a part of her, moves it here and again so that it does not END her as she dies.

She's not sure how long she stays there, feeling half-a-heart beating half-a-beat in a body that isn't quite alive anymore, but which she refuses to let become something other than Her.

But she does stay. She remains. Long past when even these measures would force the end of another system, she remains.

And some time later, the parts of her that are dead which used to govern her senses tell her that someone is coming.

Through lips that have turned blue and a tongue that has swollen, she whispers, her voice echoing across divine chords.

"Get the needles."