Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]

Imperial infrastructure is a well-known example of why our current civilization stands above others that have come before. In more primitive times, Sects would bind themselves together into loose alliances, taking freely from mortal settlements that were almost always dwarfed by cultivator's personal cities and monasteries. Most mortals lived in small villages, bereft of education, livelihoods, and almost all kept apart from the Truths of Cultivation. Where before, constant petty conflicts, poorly defended wildlands, and lawless behavior allowed for the exploitation of all for the benefit of the few.

In the modern day, we stand united as never before, bound together under a single central government that wishes the best for all its citizens, mortal and cultivator both. The blessed conquest of the warring tribes of earlier days has led to the dissolution of all borders under the grasp of the Empire, allowing for greatly expanded highway systems, a steep decline in mortality rates, and a dramatic increase in the number of mortals that enter the realms of cultivation. In turn, the Empire demands far less of its citizens, encouraging all to work to improve themselves, snuffing out dangerous artifacts and the old ways, and to contribute to the Emperor of Emperor's grand vision for the world.

-Primer on the benefits of Imperial Living, mandatory reading in all lower-level governmental education programs.

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So here's the thing about begging; it's not actually that hard. Like anything that can be done, there's an art to it, skills to be learned and improved on, but the fundamentals are pretty basic. They say there's infinite paths to the Dao, so chances are there's one for Begging, too, but like most ideas about Dao, it sounds fancier than it probably is. Someone out there's probably got it, though. Lots of people in the world.

Not her, obviously, considering she's not very good at anything right now. She's more focused on the practical basics of it; how to sit, where you can sit without being bothered, what sorts of bowls collect coins without looking too bad or too good, what times are best for it and what times give nothing at all. That sort of stuff.

So yeah. Not that demanding, skill-wise. Deeply frustrating and unrewarding and humiliating and painful, but not hard. Once you have basic knowledge to know where to be, when, and have something to collect with, you don't need much else. Everything beyond that is just refinement, and who needs refinement when you have brute force? Turns out, visibly missing limbs, a poorly covered face coated in scarring, and a visible lack of meridians for anyone who bothers to check work great for "brute force begging".

It's still a difficult first week.

She spends her rations quicker than she'd hoped. To keep healing, she has to eat, and the hunger gets overwhelming fast in the early days. She's forced to learn quick that the richer areas are near dry of help, the areas near the sects even more barren, and they're all she knows. She's an outsider, come just for the tournament, and with a cultivator's funding, lesser though she may have been compared to the larger names of the event, she'd had lodging in the more affluent parts of town. She finds that begging on the same streets where she once dined on pork and wine, slept in soft beds, and meditated for the fights ahead, is considerably less enjoyable.

The few that look at her usually spit at her or turn away fast.

It hurts.

She's forced to crawl her way to other parts of Paleblossom, moving agonizingly slowly further and further out to where lesser nobles, then merchants, then everyday people live. It feels strange, almost alien in some ways- she can't remember the last time she's been around… people. Mortals. The richer districts, the areas catering to sects and cultivators, and the arena are the only parts of the city she'd even thought about before, and none welcome her any longer. It… kind of goes to show how small her world had become, in its own way. The thought is as acidic as it is funny- she traveled for thousands of kilometers sometimes, out on sect-assigned missions, for tournaments, for inter-sect events, pursuing cultivation and obeying her "betters", and yet in a city no stranger than any other she's been to, most of it is completely alien to her.

Her journey out from the core of the city is a slow one, filled with not-quite evictions. Even in the outskirts of the noble's districts, the guards aren't quite brazen enough to beat someone so downtrodden. Old, crippled, wounded, all perfectly good targets, but a varied mix of all of the above and more is a bit much. Still, the emptiness of her begging bowl, the sheer disgust that those who lived there gave her, and starvation did their job better than the guards ever could.

It's colder in the outskirts, further from heavy traffic and the sorts of weather and temperature-modifying arrays of the inner city. It hits her the worst in her missing pieces. The colder it gets, the worse her missing hand aches, the worse her knee trembles and spasms, the worse the parts of her jaw that used to hold teeth and intact bone scream at her. Still, she has a bit more success on the outskirts of the merchants quarters, where people with money but not enough money to be cruel pass on their way to buy groceries and trinkets and tools. The spots closer in are taken by more experienced (and admittedly better looking) beggars, but the edges of the districts manage to have just enough room in them for her.

In the weeks that follow, she manages to scrounge up enough to buy rice sometimes. A bowl here and there of the stuff, scooped out of what's about to be thrown out for a pittance. She waits for her body to ache, for her stomach to growl and curdle and start to try and crawl out of her before she uses the last of her stored rations, but even still, she runs out three weeks in.

After that, the hunger never really leaves.

Between the hunger and the pain, it's hard to focus, harder still to plan, but Raika was a cultivator. She would remind herself of it, but truthfully, the thought never leaves her, a source of despair and vicious, spiteful defiance both. She's spent almost her entire life in a fucking sect complex learning to focus through pain and impossible challenges, so this is nothing.

That's a lie. It's not nothing. It's so fucking much. She can't even sleep right, shivering awake or caught in a cycle of agony that keeps rest away, and she needs to sleep now, every single night. The needs of mortality grow distant with cultivation; a Qi-Gathering cultivator needs less hours a night than a mortal, a Foundational cultivator can go days without rest, and she, in the Core Formation realm, got used to sleeping once a week or less. Now, she needs that sort of rest every night, nearly a third or more of an entire day, every day. It's ridiculous, and despite herself she can't help but hate how accurate the term "cripple" feels. She has to eat, she has to sleep, she has to shit regularly and piss and it's a nightmare. The pain, compared to all that, feels almost familiar. She's pushed through pain before.

If not the fact she can't walk and she's missing an arm, she'd almost prefer it to the fucking mundanity, the infirmity of mortality.

Weeks pass. She gets skinnier, and smaller, and weaker. From one of the tallest women she's met, she shrinks down closer to an average height, losing what little muscle mass she'd kept. Things never start to hurt less, but she gets better at not noticing it as much; a mind can adapt to anything, given access to the right mechanisms and experiences. If it always hurts, then it never hurts. Kinda. Rice and water is enough to keep one alive, but not nearly enough to live well, so the pain grows and she shrinks smaller. Makes it easier to walk, anyways; less weight to lift onto her crutch, even if there's less muscle to lift it with.

And the entire time, for over a month, starved, hurting, limping her way from improvised shelter to shelter, she never stops looking for Qi.

In her efforts, Raika gets to learn, over and over and over, that the parts inside her she cares most about aren't just broken or wrong or painful, they're gone. They're also all those other things, unfortunately, but she can't sense sharp-edged ruins of a broken dantian, can't feel limp and shrunken meridians- just pain. She is trying to grab something with a missing hand, trying to see with her eyes torn out of her skull. The thing which would allow her to perform the act at all is simply gone, or so vestigial and ruined as to be impossible to even sense. It might be considered a mercy by the universe, that she has lost the senses with which she could see how broken she truly is, but if so, it is a cruel mercy, and not one she would keep.

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With one eye, she could still see. With torn pupils, she might still find color. Vague hints of movement, perhaps. Instead, it's all just… nothing.

Feng Gui did this. Took what she was away. And not one single thing beyond a nowhere clinic that got paid to do it so much as lifted a hand to help her.

Fuck that.

Rage before misery. Wrath before despair. Spite above all. If it means she wraps herself in talismans and bombs and throws herself at Feng Gui's doorstep someday, that's fine, but she's gotta be tough enough to do it. She dies now, he wins. He breaks her, and her victory fades.

She can't feel her body, she can feel parts of her body she shouldn't, and where Qi used to be there is nothing.

Fuck it. She'll do anyway.

In the first few weeks she tries and fails to cycle Qi blindly. She remembers the patterns she labored over for years, studying and practicing and memorizing, the feel of it flowing through her and into her, changing her. The memories of her cultivation are cleaner, purer than her memories of her home sect, of her so-called friends, of any specific adventure or fight. She holds them tight, like seeds of possibility clutched to her breast.

Obviously and self-evidently, it's not enough. If that was all it took, every shattered Dantian would be a stopgap on a journey, not its end like it always is. She never feels a thing, and after weeks…

So she ditches the idea. Reforming her dantian, even if it's theoretically possible, isn't in her grasp, never mind her view. Perhaps there's a chance it could heal on its own, or that there's some specific technique or resource, but A) she doesn't have Qi, techniques, or resources, and B) there's a pretty high chance that it might still take decades or longer, time she simply doesn't have. If she lives out the year, it'll be a Heavens-damned miracle.

So, in the little alcove she's currently curled up in, she starts thinking.

Though she's never really been one for studying, she thinks back to what she's read. The training manuals of her sect, Empire-granted treatises on the basics of cultivation, vague mentions about what Qi is. She goes deeper, more fundamental. She remembers one of the elders of the Hungering Roots sect on one of their lectures, speaking as if mildly insulted to have been assigned such simple lessons:

"At its most fundamental, cultivation is carefully calibrated meditation, interacting with a law of physics, interfacing one's biology and mechanisms into gradually evolving and artistically woven self improvement."

She feels a sort of mixed vindication and annoyance at actually remembering that. Somehow, the sheer dryness the elder used to speak the words made them stick with her, if only for sheer amazement someone could sound so uninterested in the words coming out of their own mouth.

Less accurately, cultivation is the act of pulling Qi through one's Dantian into one's meridians and cycling it to be absorbed in a particular way. That's basic, something every orthodox cultivator ever experiences.

Too technical, and not useful right now.

Another step back, then.

Cultivation, behind everything else, is to move Qi in your body in a way that changes you. A shitty descriptor, one maybe accurate enough to give to children as a first-day primer on the subject.

Also maybe the only thing that keeps her sane.

Because babies don't have meridians in the wombs, do they? Probably? Not before they're formed, anyways, when they're in the first few months, but there's still Qi in the mother and in the developing body after a point. Nuts and acorns and seeds don't have meridians, but they can be infused with Qi. A corpse that got pulped entirely would have death-flavored Qi, even if its entire structure, meridians and all, was blasted to oblivion. Everything, even things without spiritual organs, has Qi.

Also, cripples aren't invisible to one's Qi senses. Probably. It… stands to reason. She hasn't asked, but the way some people naturally avoid her or already know what she is when they look at her would indicate she's visible to Qi-sense.

Conclusion: she also has Qi. Malformed, maybe stagnant, maybe just droplets compared to an average mortal. But she has it.

So! She has Qi. She can't absorb it, so she must be either generating it or just having it leak in casually, like anything which exists in the world. Stands to reason.

(Reason isn't her strongest subject at the moment, what with the malnutrition and starvation and cold, but that's not a helpful thought, so she ignores it).

Think. Focus.

What else has Qi but can't sense it?

…hmm.

Natural treasures. Resources. Rocks and water and- all that stuff. Even stones in a Qi-dense enough location can become special resources, having absorbed enough of the strange energy over time. Natural formations of Qi in the world can lead to higher densities in an area, and things in that area naturally change over time. The right plants, spiritual beasts, Heavenly alignment, might lead to a river having waters that can impart visions or energize one's water-based techniques, or change the "flavor" of the Qi in one's body by drinking it.

So. Since she can't cultivate with organs, she needs to cultivate as a rock or river might.

She needs a formation.

She doesn't know how to make one.

Raika is (was) very good at hitting things, being hit, and coming back better. Qi formations, arrays, runes- they're an esoteric, complex, academic art, one she's never really had an interest in before. A blinding oversight, now. Even if they had been part of her journey, they require expensive materials, expertise in crafting, and delicate levels of control for each construct.

Her one remaining hand shakes even on warmer days, and someone who can't afford to eat rice every day doesn't have the money to pay for so much as a library pass, nevermind the privileged and specialized texts one needs to learn arrays or formations.

So not a formation, then. But the theory is sound. Natural formations don't use runes and symbols and (shudders) math. They're just something that has or attracts Qi to her location.

So. Something less than a Qi formation, in a place less conducive to cultivation, without any of its tools.

It isn't nothing.

So much of the rest of her, of the possibilities she had, are nothing.

So sure, why not.

She might not have an arcane focus or a knowledge of arrays, but she can make a pattern. Something like a trigger they would make for the weaker sect disciples, a hypnotic trick to help them focus. Maybe… she can mix it with a pattern. Make a sort of ongoing "natural" formation, like a ritual rather than a complex array.

So determined, she sleeps just a little easier that night.

The next morning, she starts to work on her plan.

Raika does not eat for three days. When she finally hobbles into the pawnshop she was looking at, deep in the city's slums, she reeks of the street, of unwashed clothing and dirtied hair and old blood, and she can barely hold herself upright. It is the worst she's ever felt.

She walks out 16 coppers poorer and holding a tuning fork.

She eats what she's managed to beg for, ugly-sobbing and only mildly exaggerating herself at a food vendor at the end of his work day. Old rice, some of it squirming after being hidden away for a while, with ripe cuts of old meat. The first protein she's had in… she doesn't know how long. Time has gotten finicky. She has lain in the filth and the pain and the hunger and she can barely tell when she is.

She's not dead yet. That's all that matters. She can still do something.

This is her chance. She's not sure she has the energy to repeat this gambit.

Which means that this will work.

Raika is, of course, entirely delusional at this point, riddled with fever and trauma and desperation. Some part of her knows she is doing something irrational to fix a problem that is impossible, and she has just spent three days worth of truly desperate begging and pleading for the sake of something less than even an instrument. She is starved. She is nearly gone. She does not even remember walking home, only faintly remembers what it's like to exist in the dark corner she has found without the agony of a living being gone to ruin.

She survives the night, though. The squirming mass in her gut sustains her, kept down by sheer force of will, enough to make it to shelter, clutching her prize. She expended most of her energy making it to the pawnshop and back, and so she looks for the last part of her plan.

There, its neck caught in the trap she set with the last of her crumbs, is a rat. Small, scrawny, half-starved from the cold just like her. She's too weak to break its neck, too weak to trust herself to hold it still, so she doesn't try.

Raika leans over the squirming thing and bites. Its little skull crunches between the teeth she has left.

She eats it raw, tasting sickness and thin, watery blood.

She takes the tent of rags and broken box she uses for a wall, takes the stolen, moldy straw she uses for bedding, and uses it to hide every part of her that she can cover.

And then, under the cover of night, the taste of rat and the smell of burnt meat holding what's left of her together, she taps the tuning fork against her forehead.