Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

Writhing tendrils of rot and collapsing violence flail blindly against chains of onyx metal, creating a cacophony of clattering and the sound of cracking stone. The sound of bones grinding against each other rises from the center of a strange mass, clumps of teeth and tissue tearing into each other and pulling at their bindings, shrieking without the freedom of lungs with which to exhale, and the mass convulses, throwing itself again and again at the edges of its constraints.

Better than last time, at least.

Raika sighs, slashing one of the needles sticking out of her limbs across the array she's drawn into the ground. There's a flash of light from the runes, each kanji individually glowing with the energy and concepts built into them before they dissipate into mist, leaving the entirety of the array as nothing more than a fading afterimage. The mass at the center of it spasms one final time, harder than before, yanking at its chains hard enough to make cracks skitter against the floor, and then falls limp- within seconds, it's started dissolving, the bonds between the muscle groups, bones, and reactive materials imbued into it coming to nothing.

"That was better than last time, at least," says a voice from the shadows. "The conceptual intellect runes were a bit off-kilter. Perhaps you may have accidentally-"

"No. Wasn't an accident."

She sits back, leaning against the far wall of the room. As opulently and murderously decorated as always, the dark wood, juxtaposed with ivory and the corpses she can still feel beneath them, is a comfort against her back, somehow warmer than her.

She's always cold now. Comes from not having a heartbeat, probably.

"I improvised. Again. I thought… I don't know, I thought I could move faster."

"Hmm. Perhaps understandable, but I'm sure you already know better, dear. You don't have the grounding for doing this instinctually yet- but once you do…"

"Once I do, yeah. Only problem is that I fucking suck at this."

There is a clattering of teeth from the other figure in the room, the sound of someone without lungs chortling at the play-by-play. His voice hisses as it escapes into the air, the sound made of dying air rather than someone exhaling through lips and lungs. "I would hardly say you are terrible at it, milady Bishop. You simply have minimal grounding. Your education has been unconventional, even by our standards. You may have come to us already laden with death, saturated by it, but to have embraced it as in your current state, without first learning anything of the intricacies of Necromancy, is an incredibly rare occurrence. One should not be blamed for not being capable of matching intrinsic geniuses or the glories of centuries-old experts like myself."

She sighs again, reaching into a pouch on her hip and fumbling around for a moment. Weird, having to get used to using a physical inventory again, but necessary. A moment later, she has a cigarette in hand, pre-rolled, and a match in the other. She lights the former with the latter, inhaling the first full breath of air she's taken in a few hours and tasting the smoke and ash inherent in it.

"That's not the issue. I don't have time for this, and I'm rushing things. Like an idiot."

"Like an overeager combatant, perhaps- one hungry for violence, starving for teeth to wrap one's teeth around, without knowledge of how one might use them to breach armor. The technical expertise you require before you can so freely modify a Necromantic working is one that is hard won, and takes patience and diligence. Your memory is eidetic, as far as I can determine- the issue is not in your recollection."

"No. It isn't."

"Mmh. Good. One must understand one's flaws before they can overcome them. What do you have, and what are you missing?"

She pulls in another lung full of smoke, letting the taste linger. She's had to make it heavier, stronger, because the taste is… dull. Without blood, without the motion of life and its mechanisms, most of her senses are weakened at best. The needles in her body, the runes carved into them, Li Shu's efforts in maintaining her existence as a cast-off piece of the Ur-Raika- they maintain function, maintain movement, but it's the difference between having people moving through a bustling city street and the echo left behind by their absence.

"I know the runes. I know how the machinery works. Each kanji is a channel, a formation made small- where nature weaves vast tracts of motion, sharper lines force sharper currents. Into those currents, Qi, the energy of All, is pushed, through saturated materials or direct manipulation."

"Good. But this is for all arrays. You are not learning all arrays. What do you have, and what is missing?"

"...I have the foundational language. The kanji for individual elements, the runes for threading them together and against each other, the basics of how to arrange them such that they coordinate and create distinct effects- but only up to a rudimentary level."

"I wouldn't sell yourself short, Bishop- mastering first-tier formations so quickly is no simple matter."

"I haven't mastered shit, is the problem. I can-"

"You have. For first-tier formations, replication is mastery. As one added to one becomes two, fire added to motion becomes moving fire. The intricacies, the complexities, that comes with practice- to create more advanced arrays, one becomes a second-tier formation wielder. To modify them into something distinct, to more fluidly arrange connections, is the realm of a third-tier formation expert. You are trapped, nearing the second tier, below the third."

"I… fine. Yeah, if I see something written down, I can copy it, but you and I both know that that's useless outside of a stable environment. I need to be able to account for local conditions, and I can't do that unless I understand harder math than one added to one."

"Indeed. And mathematics are not, perhaps, your strongest ability."

"Fuck no. I can brute force it, and I managed to set up some of my brains to be better at it, but I don't have access to them anymore, and I'm not wired that way. Frankly, it's a fucking miracle that I'm capable of memorizing shit at all- back when I first started cultivating, I basically did only body cultivation for months because it was the only thing I could really get. I'm not exactly smart like that."

A tilt of a gold-plated skull, and a snort of not-air, herald Lu Karai's response. "Any good biomancer or social engineer learns quickly that intellect is not so easily quantified. You've proven many times over to have a startlingly complex and expedient grasp of open-ended concepts, and what you call 'instinct', I call subconscious processing. You view intellect as academic learning, memorization, and the application of knowledge- for two of those three, you are near masterful."

She can't help but turn her head to cock an eyebrow at him, staring up at the slender skeleton. "Masterful might be a stretch, Bishop."

The tin sounds of un-laughter ring out from the skeleton's frame. "Not at all. When a child goes to pick something up, within moments of grasping it, they understand its weight, dimensions, the amount of friction its surface possesses, and can calculate the angles and force required to lift it. Ask them to write those same calculations onto a piece of paper, and you're more likely to end up with sobbing children than competent answers."

"Well yeah, cause that's two different things."

"And yet, exactly the same. It's simply that one's mind is designed for one, and not the other. The invention of language, mathematics, things beyond bestial Intent, are what elevates us from what we were to what we choose to be, but it is not what mortal things are designed for. For most, the process of changing one's design is one undertaken with a guide, over many years and with many steps. You've spoiled yourself for transformation, my dear- for most of us, it is a long process."

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale again. She lets the smoke fill her lungs, heavy and cloying and just a little bit wet, tinged with cave-smell that she's quickly running out of. Can't whip out more of her home-grown supply anymore, can't grow it either. Let it sit and simmer, burning and dampening at once, heavy in her breast.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Exhale.

"Well, we've only got a few years left, and I got a lot of shit to do between now and then."

Again, the skeleton laughs. "Ah, your fanciful insight. There is yet wisdom in the mouths of beasts, my dear, but an excess of fear is common amongst even the greatest natural-born thing. The Cold Sun rises, it is true, but the death of a realm is a thing of many millenia, not mere decades."

She rolls her eyes, pulling herself up by the wall of the chamber and rising to tower over the more human-standard skeleton, waving a hand through the droplets of gold that melt from him and fall upwards like she's wafting away smoke. "For a group of people so dedicated to avoiding the End, y'all are pretty lackadaisical about hearing it's almost here."

He shrugs, seemingly unbothered. "Such is the way of things, my dear. You're so very, very young- barely more than a child. It is the purview of the young to fear the fall of an age. We march against the Cold Sun and that which feeds it, this much is true, but failure, while not an option, does not imply an immediate end. Perhaps the turning of a point of no return- and against this, you will find the Holy Skel equally committed to vanquishing such a foul turn of fate. But I highly doubt that it will be something that happens in an instant, nor that the point of no return shall be a solid and unmoving moment."

She scoffs, flicking some ash off the cigarette in her hands and turning back to the array. "I appreciate your insight, elder, but frankly, when an organ of reality tells me that shit's got a timeline for its collapse, I feel inclined to listen."

"And I do not begrudge you this! It is the privilege of the youth to speed forward, unheeding of the wisdom of their elders, just as it is our burden to see the youth fumble along, ignoring better-trodden paths. But! I sense that your desire for philosophical debate is at an ebb- are you ready to resume?"

Raika sighs, letting the last of the smoke finally drift out of her lungs, and puts what's left of her cig out on her tongue, swallowing it whole as it sizzles.

"Yeah. Let's get back to it."

"Very well then!"

And with a wave of his hand, the Bishop of the Church of the Crawling Saint, Elder of the Holy Skel and master over Death, casts a droplet of gold into the world.

It lands with far more weight than its size would indicate, drifting slowly before thudding loudly against the ground- and unfurls.

The droplet expands into a bubble, and then a membrane, corpse-materials pushing violently against its interior and stretching towards release with all the eagerness that a pressurized chamber encourages. For a moment, the golden liquid swells to nearly the size of the ceiling, filling the cavernous and sterile chamber with a glowing gold and writhing forms- and then it bursts, like a bubble of soap, vanishing entirely out of existence. In its place, the roiling mass of dead tissue within splatters outward- rotten meat, freshly-harvested livers, putrescent eyes, chipped bones, whole corpses hollowed of organs and intermingled with seemingly random detritus. Almost all of it oozes out black fluid, blood left to coagulate so entirely that it has blackened and turned charcoal, kept free of all but the most useful bacteria and decomposers. Raika glimpses human skills intermingled with insect shells, bits of fur slathered in the remnants of guts and gore, claws and fangs and muscle tissue all torn open and scattered like debris.

The sound of them takes many seconds to settle, echoing in the vast chamber. The smell of them… lingers. She's pretty sure she should hate it, but between the loss of sensation of her "death" and the fact that her digestive system (back when it worked) was capable of eating almost anything make it a disturbingly appetizing pile of mess.

"For this next exercise, I felt it might be appropriate to shift our expectations. Differing levels of decomposition lead to different equations, different requirements, and so we find ourselves with an opportunity to, hmm, mix-and-match. Whatever you design must possess at least three varying degrees of carnality and decay. I leave the rest to your discretion."

She stares at the overwhelming hill of dead tissue, thrown in the most haphazard way possible onto the floor of the space.

Alright. Time to work.

Chalk made of ground bone and skin-ash makes a slightly sharp sound against the stone floor as she draws around the pile, taking her time to walk around the entirety of the mound and completely encapsulating it. The process takes minutes, but in that time, there's meditation, space to contemplate, and by the time she's connected her line into a true circle, she has an idea of where to start.

An array is cultivation- except it's the world cultivating itself, along the lines one advises. All reality alteration falls back to the same two principles- Qi and Concept. Energy and pattern. Just because it isn't her mind shaping the beliefs fluidly doesn't mean the process is fundamentally all that different.

She holds on to that idea as hard as she can as she begins to draw.

Her Truths remain, albeit muffled in her current form, but without a living body, she's been forced to adjust how she uses her physicality. Previously, muscle memory and ingrained patterns she built into her flesh allowed her near-perfect precision- now, it requires much more conscious effort, reminiscent of her time as the Mask for herself, carefully calculating each micro-expression. Without life, the body doesn't move on its own- but without life, will and thought hold absolute dominion over each and every act of once-animate material. Her posture, her grasp, the way the chalk glides over the ground- each action requires perfect and absolute awareness, but each action is also perfectly accurate to the commands she generates.

It's slower going, but the precision makes up for it a tad.

Around the circle, her first set of runes animates at her touch, the chalk itself saturated with enough Qi to bind the scratches on the ground into meaning. The Fallen Kingdom's runes are distinct from the ones she's used to- though they still form their own sort of kanji, they tend to relate to concepts and words that are familiar but distinct from ones she knows. In the first line, she writes what might be translated to "mors motum significant"- death means motion, more or less. Around that, she carves runic meanings for connection, conceptual binding, and an equation, repeated at cardinal points, claiming to reality that all within the circle is a single cohesive whole, to be acted upon as one.

Then, she spends an hour making the second circle of the array, highlighting each and every different material and composition she can see in the pile.

By the time she's gotten to the third, the mass of the pile has begun to quiver on its own, the partially-completed array acting on it in spite of its circuits remaining disconnected. She's cheating a bit- there's a lot of free-floating Death Qi in the area.

A multi-layered, equation riddled thing forms by her will, painstakingly carved, step by step. Death is equated to motion, motion is equated to intention, intention is equated to command phrases and terms; connection is equated to tissue, tissue is equated to material, material is equated to combination. Over and over the math of reality-alteration is iterated, layered over itself in ever-increasing complexity until the ground around the pile of materials looks to have been scrawled upon by a madwoman, the formerly black stone of the floor turned near-white by the density of symbols drawn upon it.

And then, at last, she steps back, and connects the lines of equations connoting energy-flow to each other.

The room grows colder, then a bit warmer, as the Qi in the room and the concepts it contains rush inwards, channeled through the formulae like water through aqueducts, feeding each part of the array they reach in sequence. The whole process takes less than a second from start to finish, her channels optimized by experience and memorized patterns, and the runes light up in that way that has no light, in the way that only Qi-senses can detect. The chalk burns and sizzles, eaten away and carved into reality both, and a complicated series of steps are achieved to tailor the incoming energy to patterns and wavelengths suited to her design.

The final circle lights up, and the array activates fully.

The flesh quivers.

For a moment, that's all. A quiver, a ripple through dead and diseased meat and material, like a stone cast into a pond.

Then all is motion.

Like quicksand, mercury, or sand, the tissues all break apart, holding only to the memory of their form, remolded by arcane will into shapes only reminiscent of their original formats. Tendon becomes rope becomes string becomes wire, muscle becomes sealant becomes engine becomes armored mass, and bone above all else is transformed, the source of new blood and the foundation of life, the solidity around which other concepts form, become something wholly new.

The pile breaks apart, reforming itself into several distinct bundles of tissue. As they break down and reform, the impression of raw material is slowly cast away as the arrays' different instructions act on the energy entering each of them. Structure begins to emerge, patterns, hints of something not of flesh or machine, artificial yet wholly twisted in its natural form. Limbs emerge from the piles, then compress, re-forming into new appendages, and each ingredient moves to its assigned place step by step.

It takes a while. Too long. Almost thirty seconds- an absolute fucking eternity in the realm of live combat.

And yet, in less than a minute, what was once dead meat and chicken scratch rises.

Six hounds- for that is not what they are, but perhaps the closest equivalent. Each has six limbs, six eyes, six mandibles- each has segmented spines, crackling and churning as pieces move into place, as the illusion of wholeness is returned to the donated material. They're larger than a baseline human, armored in bits of calcium and coagulated rot, made compact in spite of their incredible mass by the compression of their tissues into a still-functioning slurry. The ideas behind each material remain, but they have been transmuted from the complex machinery of life-turned-rot into stranger and more arcane materials, guided now by the instructions of impossible words and alien equations. Six sets of six eyes turn to stare at their creator as the horse-sized hounds inhale and exhale as one, blowing clouds of plague-ridden grave-breath from flowering jaws and out of hidden vents along their flanks and bellies, replete with needle-tipped former bone.

Lu Karai raises an eyebrow. "Were you intending such multiplicity, my dear?"

She turns to him, teeth exposed in an expression almost as violent-looking as the beasts she's crafted. "Nope. But I think I know why it happened. Progress."