Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

Three needles to isolate her from herself.

Seven to lock into place the Death within her.

Fifteen to help convince her body it is as it used to be.

Some of her veins pump blood sluggishly, but it's vestigial, born from the acupuncture and energies moving in her more than her heart. Others are filled, replaced by squirming, iridescent things that infest her, running through her body like maggots, pumping fluids and contracting in place of fibers and tubing.

Some of her bones are still bones, and others have been replaced by better materials, ones that feed off the Death in her and grow it to the shape she needs.

Raika breathes, and can't help but hear the wheeze in it as her body fights against itself, as far beyond life as she can be without crossing the threshold, host to wonders and horrors.

Li Shu finishes the last stitch, pulling shut the jaw left shattered on the ground by the emergence of her reptile familiar.

It's strange to sit here, suffering under the slow act of repair. How long has it been since she was unable to regenerate? How long since phantom pain dug through her every moment, reminding her of how her body is half-gone and yet somehow still her?

History isn't a circle. Things don't repeat, not quite.

But time is a spiral, and as it winds, it reaches many similar sights on its way.

What's left of her regeneration is a limited thing. It was never an automatic process- if it had been, she'd be healed by now, returned wholesale from near death. Instead, it was reliant on her Truth, which is, in turn, guided by her mind. Her ontology demands that she has authority over all she is, but what she does with it is up to her, and replacing or modifying her flesh took the place of natural healing years ago.

Had she a hundred minds, she could modify herself as freely as needed. As is, her one mind has too much to focus on, and not enough to do it with.

Another lock of tissue falls from her scalp, carefully carved off by tender hands. Another branch of neural tissue lost, the augmented processing it once offered turned to a waste of resources and pointless weight. It disappears, carried off by a puppet of wood and bone to some unknown destination. Chances are it'll make for good material, something to experiment with- but it bears no purpose where it once grew.

It's taking all her focus just to keep herself mobile. Without the rituals of the Church, which almost certainly carry requirements and demands of their own, she's trapped between death and oblivion, and while the dead parts of her are still Her, they're still poison. It takes all she has to keep both sides in mind, to see the soon-to-be-rotting pieces and the once-alive parts as one and the same while also treating them distinctly.

Her heart doesn't beat. Most of her brain no longer thinks, not in the way it once did. Without the worms, tendons and ligaments would be useless, hardening under the effects of rigor mortis.

Tubes of Qi-infused liquid inject their contents into her guts, filling up now useless organs with preservatives and alchemical mixtures.

Too valuable to remove, too expensive to repair.

Raika exhales, trying to learn to ignore how her lungs wheeze with the effort, and lets her blue-tinged smoke leave her lungs.

Li Shu gives her a look, a mask of fabric inscribed with a purifying array over her mouth.

It's the heaviest dosage Raika's used in… well. Ever.

Without bloodflow, with tissue resistant to Qi-absorption, with the need for sensation to tell her what's happening and where… it's the only thing that works, so far.

From superhuman to a rotting thing. Weaker than the dead, than the living, a shadow of what she was.

She inhales another pull, ignoring the wheeze.

Li Shu carves out another lock, watching intently as Raika's severed jaw bonds to the stitches, failing to heal but still acting under her will.

Living death. A corpse walking in even more literal a form than the Fallen Kingdom seems to worships.

Raika lets the smoke sit in her lungs a while longer than she should. She holds it until the parts of her she thinks might still be alive, or perhaps just think they are, begin to beg, to whine and transmit pain at the lack of oxygen.

Most of her remains silent.

She exhales, and breathes back in the air. Enough to quiet the screaming.

She has her Spirit Beast companions. The worms, the reptile, the Beetle. She has Dink, resting and nearly empty after its desperate attempt to save her life. She has her knowledge of array-crafting, surface-level though it is. She has a body that feels no pain and can ignore most damage across most of itself, but which can no longer regenerate as it could, not until she finds new brains to work with.

The temptation is there to remove the needles in her current brain. To see if there's anything left. Discard the subconscious connection she has for something more direct, to tell her if she's still alive, if there's any other part left-

No.

Near as Li Shu can figure, the needles might be the only thing that saved her. A clearer connection to the rest of her identity might have just killed her harder, that almighty END that rushed through the rest of her finding her faster or accessing her more easily. Without them, there's a non-zero chance that all that endless ego-death would keep rebounding, that whatever all-consuming death energy was shoved into her would be able to more easily affect her.

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She's alone.

Singular. A severed finger of a greater whole, damned to know what it is and what it isn't.

She is Raika. She can't not be Raika.

But as far as they know, Raika's dead. She's just the ghost left afterwards.

A little more living tissue, and she'd be fine. If they'd managed to get her heart beating, they could have just cut off all the dead pieces, let her build new ones without worrying with balancing dead tissue alongside living.

But they didn't. And now she's stuck like this, too busy keeping her system together and functioning to turn to improving it like she used to.

It's all Her, but that doesn't stop her from being toxic to herself.

She laughs, and it comes out wrong, like her throat has a hole in it making the air come out weird.

She inhales smoke, and pretends not to notice how much she craves the numbness it brings.

A careful knock on the door.

"Master? Big sis?"

She keeps inhaling. Refuses to let herself flinch.

"You'll have to, at some point," Li Shu says, surgeon's hands maintaining the ongoing acupuncture and the carving.

She's right.

Exhale.

"Get him a mask?" she asks, her voice quiet and thin.

She feels Li Shu nod and step away. She exits the manor-room they're in, using her body to block Jin's view for just another moment.

Crippled again. Needing help again. All because of… something. Some glimpse of jade-leaf and oblivion black, flickering through the back of her mind alongside the sensation of dying across miles of herself. Cared for by someone she has no way to pay back, who might be better off not bothering.

Her hand trembles, and from the pallor of it, she knows it's not nerves. Dead tissue only trembles when it is willed to.

She feels the pipe in the hand begin to creak, unable to properly feel the pressure she's putting on it.

No.

No.

History doesn't repeat. It's not a circle. It's a spiral.

A spiral circles around, but it also moves in a direction.

She knows more. She is more, even with all that has just been taken.

And she's quite possibly in the best place in the world to find a way to turn this to her advantage.

She grins, and makes it a cold thing, the stitches along her jawbones creaking.

Someone almost got her. Even with all that growth, she almost lost everything. Death came for her without notice, without a way to prepare to match it directly.

That's fine. That's what Death does.

Whoever wielded it fucked up, though. Badly.

She's still here.

She puts out the flame in the pipe, saving the ashes in it for later. The door clicks as it opens, and Li Shu comes in, the young man that followed them into the unknown behind her, his hands fidgeting with a piece of black stone.

Raika turns to Jin and makes the smile something softer, aware of how she must look with her "hair" almost all removed, her flesh blackening along the veins, those same veins pulsing with iridescent wormflesh.

"Hey kid."

He says nothing for a moment, half his face obscured by the veil over his mouth- but she sees the tears glistening in his eyes.

"I thought…"

She laughs, the sound wheezy and just a bit wrong. "What? That I'd be gone that easy?"

He laughs, and it comes out just as wrong as hers, tinged with a manic sort of relief.

"I… you're ok?"

"Fuck no, kid. This sucks. But honestly, I've been through worse."

"I… I thought that you… that I'd see your…"

She shakes her head, the sensation weird without her hair. "No. I wouldn't allow it."

He frowns then, a note of anger coming in. "But you can't… sometimes things happen. I've seen them. The stuff behind the Cold Sun, the war, the Death at the Wall-"

"Doesn't matter."

He blinks, as does Li Shu behind him, raising an eyebrow.

"I. Would not. Allow it."

The words are the only part of her that still feels as real as she used to be.

"I would never let that happen, Rai Jin. You are… you are my student, and my charge, and my responsibility, and I will never fall so terribly that I cannot stop one that I care about so deeply to see me so reduced. I swear this to you, kid. I swear."

He just stands there for a bit.

Then, the tears start flowing, and he runs into her arms for a hug.

She can't feel his warmth, but there is a weight to the contact, and she holds him, and it is enough.

They stay like that for a while, her running her hand through his hair as he shakes quietly. Li Shu comes close, and Raika reaches a hand to her, and she sits beside the two of them, together but giving them the space they need for this moment.

Even as so much of her senses have died, she can still smell him. Smoke and ash and whispered voices in dark rooms, hushed tones of comfort and conversation. The cold that rises from him feels more at home in her than it has ever been, and she memorizes the smell, deeply enough that she could never forget it, and she hugs her kid close.

Only when his shuddering breaths have eased and his tears have begun to slow does he pull back a bit, just enough to look her in the eyes as he lifts the little black rock he was holding when he came in.

"I made this for you. In case… in case you needed something to hold onto. So you'd stay."

It's clearly rushed. Compared to the effigy he made for his companion-spirit, the black sandal, it's not really made to look like anything, just a carved piece of Blacksteel material, metal shaped vaguely like a rock.

It has only a few marks carved into it. Two words.

For mom.

Her tear ducts don't work right at the moment, which isn't all bad. She gets to still see clearly the look on the kid's face as he wipes the tears from his eyes, his relief mixed with terror awaiting her reaction.

She smiles, pulling him in close again and giving him a kiss on the top of his head.

"Thank you."

She holds him there, and he stays, cuddled up against her and the lukewarm heat of her body, half dead, half alive, and all here.

Yeah. Not a circle at all. A spiral, heading forward.

She has a kid. She has her friend by her side, uniquely suited to assisting her and here, in spite of all the shit Raika's put her through. She has new knowledge, spirit beast pets, and is in the place in this world perhaps best suited to helping her turn what has happened to her into an advantage, at least until she figures out what's happened to the rest of her and finds a way to return to herself.

Two steps forward, one step back- but always, always, forward.

Onward, once more unto the breach.