Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

It hurts to approach.

The sands whisper loud. Ground bone shifts and coils like a sea, the things swimming beneath the surface hungrier and more awake now. Even with the arrays built into the artifacts they wear, designed to minimize their presence and shield them from harm, there is a tingling sensation that runs through him, a sense of worry at just how bright some of the talismans are to his senses.

They approach a place of death, and it welcomes them with whispered word and promised violence.

And still they move forward.

Mei Yu has vanished, acting as both scout and overwatch, while Gou Mai and the researcher Yun Ka in her mechanized construct guard the rear. Shin Ren goes to take the frontmost spot, the vanguard, but instead is left a step behind as the corpse-man of the DIvision of Altered Cultivation steps forward instead.

With every step, Taran's movements become more fluid, somehow both more artificial and less cumbersome. A puppet, dancing on strings that gain skill even as they become more visible. He alone seems widely unaffected by the miasma of death and decay. His guns almost seem to sway in tune to something, moving at a slightly different pace than his physical walk should cause- moving in the waves of death and gunsmoke.

And the darkness approaches.

"We want to make sure that we aren't detected," Shin Ren says quietly. "At least until we have to be. We don't know who's here. We can assume that most of those harvesting are at a lower tier of power, but they'll have to have at least a few individuals with enough strength to guard this place. Seeing as we haven't gotten any real information about who might be out here, we need to prioritize information gathering first."

"Always a. Good priority," says Yun Ka, within her mechanized suit still. Its mechanisms glow with activated defenses of all kinds, iridescent to his Qi senses and ever-so-slightly luminescent even to mortal eyes.

"Do you have sensors of some kind? Ways to properly analyze what's happening here?"

"They are. Already active. Analyzing the. Composition of this. Location. Dao makeup is. Distinct. Qi flow is irregular. And strange. New patterns not. Previously recorded. Fusion of mechanical and. Biological systems that. Integrate with their. Surroundings."

"Alright. If you can detect any patterns, we need to ascertain the prime targets. Once we hit the right spots, we can destabilize this place, cause it to collapse."

"Or bring it further into this realm's decay," Gou Mai says, his gaze roving over the landscape. "If it collapses, isn't there a chance it will be absorbed somehow? Or spread further?"

"Not if we do this right," Taran rasps. His voice sounds… different now. Still a rasp, but the sound is smoother, cleaner, more like a husky instrument than something out of a broken throat. "I have some techniques that might be able to contain pieces of it. If we break it apart properly, it should dissipate. The Death and Ruin here are too powerful, too central, for anything to last unsupported. It's… beautiful."

Shin Ren decides that the Corpse Aflame and Taran would probably get along.

She doesn't disagree, which is a nice change of pace. Even now, after so long, he's still getting used to it.

"Alright then. We find the central parts to this place, and we take them apart. Bring back what we can, but prioritize the location's extermination."

Taran smiles, long and sharp. "On we go then. To the Gundeath Grove."

And so they go.

There are no defenses on the perimeter, no shields or weapons facing outwards. The land itself is a defence of a kind. Their talismans pulse with power, forcing the restless fragments beneath the ash to quiet and the bone-dust they're partially made of to settle, overcoming the first hurdle. The point where the sands turn to obsidian, to glass and coral blade-shards, is the next, and their defenses flare a little harder again, flattening out the terrain for them to walk.

It's like going underwater. Waves of kelp tower above, but they're not fluid, not mobile. Bits of metal chime in the wind as the statuesque spikes of black they grow from pretend to be trees. The ground crunches underfoot, echoing slightly.

Shin Ren casts out his senses, but… it's all dark. It's overwhelming out here. Pushing his awareness out feels like scraping his mind against scalpels, harsh and burning with the taste of explosive powders and flame.

It is familiar and alien. It's what he is, and what he tries not to be.

His Heart Demons coil inside him, low and loving in their own ways. They are monsters, and they are his monsters. He feeds them his fears and his doubts and the things he hates, and they feed him their strength in turn. They keep him sane, holding his hand as he changes the definitions of sanity to best suit his survival and his goal.

"This place is…"

"Beautiful," Taran whispers.

"Fascinating," says the researcher.

"A sort of hell," says Gou Mai.

"Dangerous."

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

A snort. "On that, we can all agree," says the corpse gunslinger.

A slight pinging sound from within Yun Ka's frame.

"Movement detected. Two-thousand meters. Several smaller life forms. Approximately human-scale norm. As well as multiple. Qi signatures."

Taran sniffs the air like a hunting hound, drawing a glance from Gou Mai. "I can smell them. Most of them dead, some not."

"Alright. Gou Mai, you'll stay behind with Researcher Yun Ka, make sure that she's safe and provide support if needed. Taran, you're more comfortable here than the rest of us- do you think you can navigate this area alone?"

He nods. His eyes flicker, and for a moment the fluidity of his body completely changes, shifting to a whole new stance. "We'll be fine. Been in worse jungles than this before, and this one's a might bit comfortable."

"Good. You can provide overwatch with Mei Yu. Mei Yu? If you can hear me, head out to scout, meet me on the way back. Do not engage."

A whisper on the wind, glowing with something like mist on a warm day. He takes that as a yes.

"If anything comes up, signal with your communication talismans. Emergencies only though- we don't know if someone can intercept communications here, or how well they'll work with all of the interference around here."

"Acknowledged."

"Copy, hoss."

"Understood, team leader and senior brother."

Shin Ren shoots a smirk at Gou Mai for that one, and he winks right back at him.

"Alright. Move."

He flexes his aura around himself, adding propulsion to his movements, and launches himself towards their first target.

The place burns easier than most. Even without his Truth, the gunpowder in the air itself catches fire by his passage, leaving twisting embers and popping sounds behind him. There's enlightenment there, should one choose to pursue it, and yet again, the Corpse Aflame is eating well. He can sense the others dispersing behind him; Gou Mai uses his "skybound" technique to vanish out of physicality, taking Yun Ka with him (something Shin Ren didn't know he could do), while Taran simply vanishes. It takes a moment to relocate them- they're not using any kind of concealment technique, as far as he can tell, but their nature feels so comfortably aligned to this place that they might as well be wearing camouflage.

Meanwhile, he can feel eyes lighting on himself. Other's Qi senses are touching upon the edges of his own, sending out pulses of Intent that ask for verification or identity. He doesn't bother with a response. He just advances.

Better that all eyes be on him anyways. Makes it easier to figure out who's a target. Easier still for those behind him to find the best ways to proceed.

He makes it about halfway to his destination, just far enough to glimpse movement with his normal eyes, before they strike.

A wave of Qi, less concrete and yet somehow wider than he expected, washes across the spikes beneath him, and a few hundred branches suddenly reorient to face him, dragged by their bullet-seeds. The rattle of gunfire echoes through the open sky as he flies over, half-formed bullets trying to shoot him out of the air.

He melts them before they get close enough.

A second wave flashes by immediately, reborn from the chaotic mess below, and he keeps up a shield of superheated air, evaporating the metal before it can reach him. It's a drain to maintain it long term- but he has cores to spare, and the gunfire just isn't powerful enough to power through.

It's a small opening salvo. Testing the waters at best.

He returns fire just the same.

Everything Burns.

He grabs the air itself, infusing it with his Truth and empowering it with his Qi, and launches a spear of flame and force and the barest hint of a Cut towards the origin of the wave he sensed. There's some surprise in its response, but not much- whoever he's facing, they're a professional, and they clearly have a more direct line to this strange place than he'd hoped.

That's proven true as some of the spire-spikes spear up from the ground towards him, slashing through the air even as knives and talons grow from their edges.

Shin Ren begins a rather dramatic game of cat and mouse as he dances with the landscape itself. The ground rises up in a sea of shards and death to cast him down, and he steps on air, uses his talismans to block the occasional blow, and overall uses his immense Qi reserves to burn away the attacks that come close. They seem to be trying to overwhelm him with quantity rather than quality, but for all his poise and grace, Shin Ren is a brute through and through, and it barely slows him down.

He catches sight of his destination at the far edge of his vision. A quarry, half artificial cubing and half organic fractals, is dug into a hillside, partially unveiling some kind of… corpse, maybe? It's hard to tell. A massive thing, part centipede, part weapons platform, part human cyborg, all blooming with additional spikes and higher-quality artifacts. There are hundreds of corpses around it, digging into and out of the hillside, and several spirit beasts suited to the landscape roam about in predatory patterns, many converging towards him.

There too he catches sight of his opponents. One, a young woman, a deconstructed rifle floating beside her as if in orbit round her body- the other, a slender figure of beastkin origin, their eyes wide and locked onto his own-

A sharp spike stabs into his mind.

He's burning. He's burning. Agony and flame and the perfect death of the soul, all the things he has been before and might be again if only he breaks entirely.

His weapon is gone, was never here, cannot be remembered. His face is melting off and the centipede-automaton is rearing up out of the hill, on fire, its flesh melting as it reaches out to bite at him-

Several talismans break across his armor and he feels himself snap back to reality, gushing blood out of his nose and tear ducts. He can feel the strain where blood vessels burst in his eyes and snorts out the smell of iron, shaking himself.

A psychic attack. A strong one to boot. Prescribed techniques, available only to the Divisions within the Empire- but clearly not restricted in quite the same way here in the wilds.

Fuck. They almost had him. For all his defenses, all his strengths, his mind is-

The tar bubbles.

His mind is a mess. Held together by willpower, by promise, and by the symbiosis he's made with what most consider to be worse than diseases and less appealing than parasites. His support system is half symbiote, half tumor grown out of his own cultivation- less than a vulnerability, but against psychic techniques, less than an advantage too.

Fuck. Easy to forget, with how far in his cultivation he is, that he's really quite specialized.

Fuck defense. He's here to cause a distraction.

He grabs the air again, and gives it a choice.

In this gunpowder-laden landscape, it gleefully picks the right one.

Shin Ren pulls down the sky, and lets rain spears of burning plasma down onto the earth.