Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

"Faster!" Says the un-voice of a Bishop of true Faith, and it's all Raika can do to avoid the next strike.

A wave of light washes towards her, its hues alien and tinged with un-color that connotes the presence of Death. Tinged Black with the deeper mysteries of Dao, the glow of the oncoming attack is nearly blinding, tearing through the world in flickering patterns of strange curves and styles. There's mysteries to the movement, hints of deeper patterns than just force and heat- but frankly, she's too busy trying not to explode to worry about that for the moment.

Which is sort of the issue.

One of her hounds grabs her by the back of her shirt and throws her over its shoulder, obliterated a moment after by the ongoing devastation of the BIshop's attacks. The remaining four grab hold of her and throw her onto a designated mount, dashing away from the impact site as-

Hell.

Damnation.

Destruction wrought large upon reality. Flames of blue and white and black and screaming faces full of violence and horror, tearing into each other and using the violence of that death-post-death to magnify the explosion further, to multiply its impact. The ground, pale grass that is somehow alive and also inert, is wiped clean, turned to ash and obsidian beneath the impact, and the world is washed in the colors of ruin.

The simple kinetic force of the blast is enough to shatter the hind-limbs of the slowest of her hounds, cracking open bits of armor and pulling at the joints of the others. The pressure wave is enough to launch her forward, off her mount and tumbling through the air so fast that she can't tell up from down, left from right- only forward, only movement.

She sends out a command, gritting her teeth and forcing dead limbs to clench tight so she can tuck and roll. She bounces, once, hard enough to cave in her shoulder, and then the hound she called forth is there to wrap its body around her and cushion her against the more violent second impact.

The pieces of the constructed summon fall to nothing, turned to paste and bone debris in the face of the sheer force of her landing- but she manages to get back up with only a few broken bones.

"That was better! Didn't even singe you that time!"

Bishop Seo En-Hyun laughs, still laying comfortably against a hillside, the many skulls hung around his neck flickering with joyful flame in their empty sockets. He towers over even Raika, his body bulging obscenely with muscle and ghost-crafted material made to imitate flesh, and wears a complex set of robes that seem to give a mix of formality and casual excess. His main head, all three faces upon it, smiles at her with a mix of casual joviality and the cold pitch of the grave.

She, meanwhile, looks like a corpse that's gotten the shit kicked out of it. But she's got better tits, so… some wins, some losses.

"Only cost you half your little pups, too! Not too terrible at all. I'm a little disappointed you didn't tank it directly, but I suppose that's a bit much to ask of someone so young in the finer Arts."

"Fuck you, asshole. It took me like four hours to make those!"

"And in turn, they saved you from infinite and total obliteration! Quite a useful trade, I should say. Not that tough, but you sure can make them run fast."

"I'm not used to working with materials like this. Used to tougher stuff. Got the mechanisms down, but the mechanics of it…"

"Yes, yes, all very technical. You do not yet understand the mathematics of magic or corpse-science, and frankly, you won't. It takes masterful madness to truly grasp such arcane languages, and years of study. However! I am a firm believer in experiential learning, and hold an even firmer belief in your ability to match a better pace with a more direct education."

"Fancy way of saying you like throwing bombs at me."

"I do!"

And then he throws another bomb at her.

It spawns from out of his own flesh, his body shifting out of sync with itself- echo-matter transforms from muscle to mist to screaming faces and back to mist, before igniting in an unfamiliar, alien process that makes for a Black flame, tinged white, blue, and other, less natural colors.

It doesn't fly through the air- flying through the air implies a certain degree of air resistance, correlation with gravity, intimacy with the idea of location and destination. Seo En-Hyun's attack bears no such connection to physics.

One moment, the orb of Death-flame is hovering in a single, static pose. In the next, Seo En-Hyun's wrist has tossed it casually forward, and it is gone- and then it is there, next to her, an orb of cerulean fire larger than a house already beginning to fully detonate.

Two of her remaining hounds leap forward from behind her, and she has her arm thrown out, a slip of paper on it hitting the constructs and unmaking them. The instructions for reality printed on the array respond to the machinery of her constructs, and pre-prepared channels respond easily to the commandments- the hounds unfold, fusing together, the materials that make them up combining into a sludgy mass of shielding.

The final hound is there once again to launch her away, throwing her beneath itself and leaping away from the detonation.

Reality detonates once more.

Again- the concepts of Flame, Explosion, all that, are all reflected in the bomb, but that's not what it is. It is screaming souls, it is Qi and entropy, it is the sensation of death and devastation, ruin and unmaking, all wrapped up in the idea of a flame because that is how its wielder decides to manifest it, not how it inherently demands it must be. Both hounds almost evaporate, the final one that's shielding her losing its spine and half its body to a flame that unmakes as much as it burns, that eats at reality and imposes the death it is built from on all that it touches.

There's still enough force left over in that reaction, however, to shatter her forearms, break part of her spine, and send her corpse a few hundred feet directly down into the earth, shoved ahead of the crater formed above her.

Her skull cracks, her tissues liquify, her body is unmade and torn apart and held together by the density of her Qi-saturated tissues and sheer fucking luck. She coughs- but it's out of habit, an exhalation forced from dead tissues as her torso is violently compressed. She can barely even move as she is, literally curled up into a ball by the force of the explosion and the weight of earth and stone holding her in place.

She goes to rise- and finds herself stuck. Like, properly stuck. Her limbs, the mechanisms of living tissue, are torn apart, and she can't just remake them like she used to be able to.

Well. Probably not? There's no pain in the traumatic ruin of her form. Corpses don't feel pain. Pain is for the living and for the mind, and even without her ability to fully manifest her biomancy, she is still Hers- her Truths still hold, and being made of corpse-tissue doesn't negate that.

Her bones are shattered and her tendons snapped like cordwood.

She wills herself to move anyways.

She is dead. The laws of living mechanisms is not what allows her to move.

A finger twitches. Her hand, half-separated, held in place by skin alone, shifts against the dirt.

And then a hand punches through the stone around her, wraps around her head, and yanks her out of the dirt.

She splutters, instinct demanding that she try to breathe and finding a bunch of dirt in her throat instead. She tries to spit it out, and, being incredibly helpful in his way, Seo En-Hyun simply smiles and shakes her violently. She spasms like a ragdoll, moving in ways that would be agony for anyone living, spattering grave-dirt in every direction as her limbs flail about, mostly disconnected from her torso.

"Alright! Still intact!"

She spits up a final clump of dirt, finally managing to inhale through the clods left in her airways. "Gods- fuck! Are you trying to kill me over here? I can't regen like I used to, I'm new to this. Don't-"

"Ah, nonsense. This grandfather is only the more overjoyed by his certainty that you learn best through getting the shit kicked out of you! Tell me truthfully- how many of your greatest accomplishments, discoveries, or innovations came at the cost of slow and steady study, as compared to the thrill of live combat? If anything, I'm going easy on you! You can always get put back together later."

"I- if the needles are removed-"

"Ah! Apologies. I had forgotten how young you are! My dear, a corpse is only a corpse after all. You have died. You preserved your animus, it is true, but the binding that has locked you to your form remains only a simple one. It would be as easy as a wave of the hand for this senior to weave you back into flesh, now that your first death has been so thoroughly experienced!"

She snorts, spitting out a wad of gray mucus and dirt. "If it were that easy, then why the fuck go through all this ritual? Why even have the needles?"

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

He laughs, the sound like a crackling of a bonfire, like the echo in a mausoleum, like sticks of incense being broken. "Why meditate? Why learn of the nature of the world? Why bother with words and formations and hand-signs? The young need support if they are ever to learn to stand on their own! For a novice necromancer, needles, carved flesh, runes, ingredients- all are useful tools, as they are for users of the Craft. But! Past a certain point? An expert like this grandfather can see and feel and taste the shape of a soul! Just as I'm sure my fellow Lu Karai or his wife might be able to pen your animus' exact dimensions with numerology, or capture your essence in paint tried and true, I am a tactile being, as I sense you yourself are.

"Leave the complexities of ancient learnings and the written words of the ancients to your fellows. Your young rival has a lean towards philosophy- your paramour, a mind for facts. You? You are a thing of experience- so let us experience together."

"And if I die?" she asks, cocking an eyebrow.

His grin is a cavernous, wide thing, full of teeth and expression despite having no lips or facial muscles.

"Do you fear death, little corpse?"

She takes a deep breath. She feels what used to be living tissue, now long-decayed and torn asunder, respond to her will, in spite of silent neurons, in spite of a still hear. And in spite of herself, she can't help but smile back.

"Yes."

"Good. Fear Death. Embrace it. Love and fear and hate and joy, all one and the same in the face of the End in you. Behold enlightenment."

A cackle of un-air- and then his flesh is smoke, and the smoke is screaming, and the screaming is the collected deaths of thousands, maybe millions, and then that death is fire.

She tears her arms off, leaving behind the needles in them, throws herself back, launches the core of her being away. She doesn't need to use her muscles, none of the mechanisms she was born with or constructed- they are tools, aids, but not necessities. Cells push against each other, unbinding tissue from itself like molded clay and moving her according to her will.

She makes it about ten feet in less than a millisecond, her corpse-flesh moving unnaturally through space, pulled by death and thought- and then the flame is in her.

Agony.

The world is gone. Sight and sound and sensation are taken, Their absence filled in by agony.

At the heart of all that was once human is an animal. At their core, all that lives holds to a single, unified design- survival at all costs, however it can be achieved. Consume, so one might live. Reproduce, so life might continue. Remain whole, so you might live on to consume and reproduce further. Buried beneath faith and language and belief and thought, there are the pieces of self built to protect and manage a delicate, flawed system in a world that might take it apart.

As she burns in screaming, horror-stained flame, Raika tastes the failure of that inner animal, and she screams.

Throats slit in the night. Guts pulled out by hungering teeth. Flesh pulped beneath stone and steel. Division enacted by metal and claw. The instant of stillness at the end of a long fall. The blink of awareness before shrapnel hollows out a skull. All of this and more is in the flame, each and every Death turned to fuel and flavor for the destruction that it brings, running rampant through every fiber of her.

Pain is for the living and the mind. Corpse-flesh feels nothing, but Raika is more than inert tissue, and every single remaining piece of her experiences the agony of dying a million times in an instant. She is torn apart, pulled to shreds, unmade piece by piece-

And then the flame vanishes, and she is nowhere.

She has no eyes with which to see. No skin to feel the air, no nose to scent her surroundings, even through the muted filter of death that suffuses her and the kingdom she stands in. There is nothing to anchor her, nothing to sustain her, nothing for her to inhabit- a lesser flame tore a crater into hard-packed earth for hundreds of feet in diameter, tore her apart without touching her directly, and this flame was a part of her as her Death is a part of her.

It's quiet here.

She's not sure how she can tell. A lack of sound isn't quite the same as quiet, true quiet, because they exist in contrast with each other. Without the idea of light, there can be no darkness, and here, even the idea of sound is a distant thought. She remembers it as the thought flits by, but it feels ephemeral, distant.

But even still, it is quiet.

It is peaceful, if only because there is stillness. Stasis in absence, all around, and all of it waiting for her, deaf, blind, dumb and mute.

She could rest here.

It's so quiet. Not even the squelching of her corpse-body, so much quieter than the thunder of a heartbeat and the bellowing of breath. It is not a place of rest, because even the thought of action does not suit this, but it is closer and deeper than she has seen before.

She wonders if she's been here before. It feels like sleeping, remembering a dream. Or perhaps waking, and feeling the dream drift away.

She doesn't know how long she remains, drifting on the edge of oblivion.

Has she been here before?

A shadow, hidden in white marble, swallowed in spite.

A bullet to the back of the head; the silence that followed it.

The moment before and after a blade of Nothing carved through all that was Raika, that was her, and is her no more.

It feels familiar.

As that thought echoes, moving soundlessly through an empty place, she feels something with her.

It does not move. In a sense, it has never moved. She feels it by the echo of thought, the sound she emits in this soundless place, pinging off of distant impossibilities.

It is not a woman. It is not a giant. It is not greater than the mountains and wider than the skies and vaster than the earth- but these are the closest things to it that can be found in word and thought. Its face is not turned to her, cannot turn to her, has always been centered on her exact placement, and in an empty place of End, she glimpses a flicker of… something.

An eye, hollowed out. The socket is so vast that as she stares at it, she wonders how far it must be to still appear as a void. There are oceans that could pour into its depths and come to nothing.

In place of a pupil, there is a sphere that is not a sphere. Cold, white marble, shaped in hard angles and sharp corners, bundled into an imperfect cork and planted into that which is Not.

This is, of course, a metaphor. There is no sight here. There is no distance. There is no un-woman, no cavernous cavity, no Cold Sun to pin it to being. There is, at most, an impression, gifted to a little nothing that joins the greater whole.

It is quiet here. She could rest. She could Cease.

Instead, she turns from it.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Without thought, without action, without time, the dissipating wisp that was Raika barely even knows itself- but Truth remains.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

I Can Change.

I Am What I Eat.

The not woman does something that should not be called a smile, and does not truly fit any other interpretation, as a fading wisp takes a bite of the infinite nothing.

And then turns into the bite, and burrows, and turns, and acts.

And then, out of the nothing, there is a hand of pure white smoke, shaped by the memories of those who are no more. It wraps a palm the size of a building around her struggling awareness, cocooning her gently in its giant form, and pulls.

Raika pulls in a breath, unnecessary though it may be, as she comes awake.

Synapses don't fire- but the shape of them, the memory of what they once were, provides structure enough for her to wake, and remember, and come to terms with consciousness. Lungs that lie still bellow and groan under her panicked animal-self, even as her heartbeat echoes in its silence.

She coughs, spitting up bits of some sort of clay- and then flinches as she feels the ache in her. There is cold in her, centered around the sensation of pins stabbing into her tissue. Each of the needles in her is ice-cold, cold to the touch, cold to a corpse, and she hisses as she moves, wisps of smoke drifting up from the superheated materials.

A three-sided skull looms down into her line of sight, followed by a cackling laugh.

"Good! Usually takes hours to wake back up! Not you, junior! Bright and bouncing- all it took was a little shell and a good slap. This granddaddy is honored to have such a competent student and peer!"

She coughs again, more out of habit than need.

She doesn't sweat. She doesn't blink. She doesn't need to. She's dead.

She's never felt it more.

And yet… if she had a heart that still beat, it would be thundering.

"Was… was that…"

"Ah! You remember! Also rare. Perhaps I am simply that talented a teacher, hmm?"

She turns her head to look at him, even though she knows, deeper down, that she doesn't need to. That a corpse cannot see, and so her vision is a consequence of her will more than any biology and base physics. She turns anyways, trying to remember where she is, that she is here, that she is now.

"The Cold Sun. I've… I've seen it move before. The thing behind it…"

"An avatar of End. Lovely, isn't she?" The ghostly giant collapses backward onto the ground, sitting haphazardly. "This senior has earned her gaze many a time in his life and undeath. Oh, how I yearn for her touch. Oh, how I flee it. Such is corpse-magic. Such is Death in defiance of End."

He leans forward, and in the flames of his sockets, she can see final moments and echoes of endings reflected back at her.

"Now do you see? Now do you understand?"

Inhale. Exhale.

Inhale.

She doesn't need to breathe. She doesn't need to exhale.

She chooses to.

In her breath, there is a whisper of a knife in the dark. A bullet to the cranium. A flame that annihilates, and a fragment of marble, holding a shadow.

The world doesn't burn, as it does for Seo En-Hyun's chosen techniques. Instead, all around her, the ash and Ruin of the fields they fought on stir. Pale grass, alive and dead, spirals back into form, and as her breath dances through it, suffuses it, it blooms.

All around her, azalea blooms burst from out of nonexistence. There are dozens, then hundreds, spreading from her in patterns of blood splatter, of bruised flesh and crawling ruin and exploded form, burnt and unmade. She lays in a field of death she has claimed, which is hers, which is by her hand and tied to her forever.

Four azalea flowers, pitch-dark and ivory white, open their petals around her. One is no larger than the palm of a hand, shaped to the splatter of a collapsing cranium, no larger than any of the field surrounding her- but more, somehow. Intimate in form. One is dense, smaller and richer than all but the greatest, its edges hinting at teeth-marks. One is bright and loud, spread wide and swaying like flame.

The greatest of them is nearly the size of her torso, tall and sharp-edged like a bouquet of knives.

"Ah. Behold! Enlightenment."

She finishes her breath. She feels the Death that is hers, infused into the world, reborn in concept and Qi. She cannot feel it, not as one would with an organ, but what is an organ to a corpse?

She feels the remnants of her hounds like clay at the edge of her fingers, waiting for a touch. She feels the talismans she'd prepared, which she barely had a chance to use, their echoes ready to be filled back in.

She looks up at the Bishop before her, ever-smiling and ever joyful and ever grim.

"Do that again."