Chapter 298 - Meditations (Patreon)

I didn't make it to three chapters yesterday on VISCERAE, but I remain a woman of my word! Back to RfR! I'm figuring out my routine some and having a really good time, I think I figured out some of what was distracting me and keeping me from focusing. We're going to have a few chapters dashing between Raika's selves and some Interludes before we get back to "main plot" stuff, and might even do some mini-arcs! Big juicy delicious coming right up!

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Raika exhales, and the taste of blood drifts past her teeth, past the shape of her tongue and the sharp-edged blades that glint like ivory.

She sits, quiet and still, and just… breathes.

Everything around her is either dead or quiet. 

The fourth ring is a wild, wild wasteland, in so many ways. In others, it’s a rich oasis, replete with resources that couldn’t possibly exist anywhere else. She breathes in, and feels one such resource trickle down her throat, scorching ever-so-slightly as it does.

She exhales, and what was once flame emerges as smoke.

She opens her eyes, watching the ash drift away. Carbonized flesh and exhausted molecules float, rising up with residual heat… until she pulls that much away from them too, leaving them to dissipate like steam or settle like falling snow. They glint off of the color all around her, the constant illumination born from the pool in front of her and all that has grown from it.

The overgrowth interacts with just about every kind of Qi she’s met before, and now, here, as far south as she’s ever gotten, it’s begun to interact more and more with heat, especially along its outer rim. Just as she once traveled through a prairie of life transformed by concepts of stone and earth, now she sits and meditates surrounded by fire.

The pool in front of her is golden-white, its edges silky as water but carrying the heat of burning lava, the ever-burning material of the shore turned to obsidian sand and ever-changing geography. Within about a mile of the little pond, every plant is either turned towards or directly connected to similar flames. Some plants have flowers whose coloration comes from flickering candle-fires, some of the cacti and short, stubby trees bleed magma instead of sap, and the motif of obsidian blends into the ground beautifully, roots and the occasional splash of fire-water scorching dark and loamy earth into burnished edges. The space around the pond itself, however, is richest in concept, burning bright in Dao and unique patterns, expressed onto the world through the unexpected medium of water and life turned to heat.

It’s perfect.

The needles in her head kind of ache, here, the metal and keratin of their makeup weirdly balanced when it comes to absorbing temperature, but they aren’t overheated, just slightly cooler than the rest of her. She can feel her ur-self, off in the distance, far to the north, dealing with… a lot, honestly. The revelations and information that traveled through her muted connections to herself were alarming, to say the least.

As she sits, meditating on the Dao of the land in front of her, she wonders about the end of the world.

All those stories about the fifth ring, how impossible it is, all the strangeness of the stars above and the way that one can feel things looking through them if you just focus, all of it makes a bit more sense, now. What cinched it as at least mostly real, or perhaps just possibly so, were the comments on the Cold Sun. The idea that whatever’s behind it is peeking through more often doesn’t just seem likely, it seems self-evident. The thing manifested a wraith-avatar to talk to her almost a full day after its yearly “eclipse”, and Jin’s visions while he was unconscious seem to imply that whatever avatar of END exists beyond there, it can interfere directly with those that contain some of its concept. The idea that the Cold Sun is a blockage, rather than a manifestation, also applies itself easily to the idea that it might be fading away. 

But the scale of it…

It’s almost a little insulting, in it’s own way. To think that the stars were once suns, each of them as vast and powerful as the one in the sky… except not. Apparently, the sun in the sky is a basic facsimile of something once far greater, something so far from the earth that all of Raika’s travels wouldn’t get her a fraction of a fraction of the way there. And apparently, it’s all gone because of these… earth spirits, hidden inside strange dungeons and growing strange Hearts, being harvested.

It doesn’t seem possible… and at the same time, it doesn’t seem like it could be anything else.

The more she learns about how complex everything is, the clearer it becomes just how easy it is to destroy something, and how hard it is to create it. How much harder still to maintain it. Without her Truths, her transformations simply wouldn’t work. Flesh-crafters and specialized cultivators spend decades learning to manipulate flesh, acquiring a Dao for it, and even then, Qi or specialized ritual make up for a lot of the deficiencies in Dao and technique. Remove one organ out of dozens, and the whole system dies. Introduce an allergy, and a mechanism that lasts for decades, which can be self-aware and sapient, can react so specifically and so chaotically that it literally burns itself up from the inside. It’s not impossible that losing continent-scale organs would damage the fabric of reality like that, force it to fall in on itself.

But still, the scale of it feels off. Like there might be… more to it.

It’s not that she doesn’t trust they of Many Mouths, but… it’s one thing not to distrust, and another to have that trust actually earned. And even then, trust, but verify. 

It’s not her role, necessarily. There’s a hundred other brains all working alongside Raika’s ur-self, and the Pillar to boot, all work on a larger scale than she currently can. Her role is to find places like the one in which she sits, precious spaces, rare opportunities, and to pursue the Dao.

But she’s a multitasker. Always has been.

And pursuing the Dao is almost as boring as it is fascinating. Most of her experience with Dao proper has been in surviving other’s use of it, or consuming it for her own gain. Forming it on her own, even with a stolen foundation to learn from, is taxing.

She’s here pursuing her primary three Daos, two of them connected to her deepest self, and one of them new. Flesh, Flame, and Lightning.

This place, like most of the overgrowth, is rich with life, life capable of adapting to the ever-changing currents of Qi that move through the outer rings of the world. Knowing what she knows now, she assumes that that has a lot to do with the overgrowth belonging to Many Mouths, a being capable of wielding the laws of reality and the Will of Heaven (i.e. Dao itself) almost seamlessly, weaving it together into unique patterns. This particular field extends much further than a mile, but go too far and it starts to vary. Fire-water becomes superheated steam, still moving as if contained to rivers and lakes, and then into trees made of clouds with fruits made of lightning. Go too far north, and the flame dies down, becomes a facet of life, adding venom to the stings of Beasts, spice to the roots and flesh of the flora, and a glow to them all, at which point she could follow it towards places that highlight that light or which reject it in turn. Everywhere, the world is ripe with concepts, adapted with Qi into a fusion with life and geography, ever-changing. To a cultivator in the Empire, every part of the fourth ring is either deathly poison or heaven-sent advantage, though the danger of both possibilities is almost impossibly higher.

Here, in this particular place, next to this natural treasure, Raika meditates on her two-and-a-half centermost Daos.

Flesh, earned on her own, but not entirely understood. A free-growing strangeness in her Soul, its contours familiar but its fruit still hard to grasp.

Flame, earned and taken, burned into her and experienced with all the horror of agony and fear, of respect and admiration. Some consumed, some scarred into her, and familiar for it.

Lightning, stolen entire, taken from those who worship and comprehend it- and yet, so strangely close to certain things within her.

All three of them are ever-changing, ever-growing. All three consume and transform, CHANGING from one state to another, from fuel to effect, ever in motion.

She has other Daos, some of which she even hopes to understand one day. Another of her selves is currently getting quite a bit of use out of the Daos of Gun and Blade, to the northwest of her, up against the Wall. But these three are her task, and these three are her focus- and they are thus because they are hers, reflective of her very core, rather than added to it.

She’s never really done this. Stop and meditate, slow and steady, using her senses to examine things without necessarily doing. It’s a bit essential to Dao, though. While you do eventually need to connect the patterns of a concept to how conscious action can change them, they exist outside of human consciousness, outside of the need for human control. 

Raika, seven feet tall, her face replaced with eyes and sensory nodes and antennae, sits peacefully, staring out at a pool of liquid heat and the ever-changing Flame that has been born from it.

She was burned with fire. Even now, as she breathes it in, feels it burn her flesh on the way down, she can feel how it changes things. It’s not destruction. Change can destroy things, and Flame is change. Change is an inevitable consequence of it. She can feel heat move into her body, touched by the fires she inhales and all around her, and that energy just… can’t be contained or used by her. So it changes her. Parts that are still too small for her to entirely perceive are changed, pieces of them agitated to move, to dance, and the only conclusion to them is carbon, charcoal, ash. 

And this, in turn, reflects Lightning.

It doesn’t start as Lightning, is the thing. That’s an end result, a pattern of Dao that she can replicate- but it has puzzle pieces necessary to build to it, to understand its intricacies. It starts as electricity- which, with the aid of the stolen Dao she meditates upon, she can sense in the burning. 

One to one. The patterns weave into one another, reflected and transformed between themselves. As heat becomes Flame, Flame becomes energy- or perhaps always was. As that energy changes and awakens the tiny particles deep inside, those same particles let off pieces, and that dance… it tickles at her Dao of Lightning. Electricity.

It’s all motion. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it’s all energy- motion, Flame, Lightning, even Life itself, all an interplay of energy and materials. 

Flame into Lightning- not a material in and of itself, but the dancing of a material, pieces made to move in artistic patterns, in beautiful sequence. 

Neither gas, nor liquid, nor solid, which are material alone, but a fourth state. One that she’s glimpsed before.

Plasma.

She inhales, her flesh crisping down her throat, inhuman senses tuned to post-human sensoria examining herself and all around her. 

Energy into Motion.

Motion into Material.

CHANGE.

And then… fusion. The pattern of Dao, reflection of the Will of Heaven. Gods, sending down their ideas of what reality should be, and thus, the TRUTH of reality.

She exhales. This time, it emerges not as smoke and ash, but as a flickering cloud, a buzz of static and embers filling the air in front of her.

The role of Raika, of this Raika, is to meditate. To learn. She has a garden of Dao in her Soul, and she has spent too long taking it for granted. So she learns.

And in her inner world, the garden grows.

At its center is an anvil, an altar, upon which she carved the first of her greatest weapons, her first TRANSCENDENT ART. Around it, the garden. A tree of Flesh, with branches of eyes, organs, claws, evolution and adaptation- and in its trunk, deeper, deeper, not yet grown-in, something deeper. Flora, fungi, hints of other, stranger things, and behind them, LIFE. It’s grown by several feet since she began to meditate here, and since she began to learn more than the superficial things.

At its feet, and at its sides, and behind it, and below it- in a direction that isn’t a direction, but leads back to the Garden, there are two trees, which are… changing.

A tree of Flame. Every color and shade, heat, ash, transformation and carbon and blaze and inferno- and next to it, a Tree of Lightning, which was a sapling, but now holds striations of energy, of static, of electricity.

And between them, as they both grow, their roots intermingle. Something grows between them, rising as both trees do, forming them into one single plant, and yet also into smaller parts of another plant, another growing thing. As the branches of the other trees denote individual parts of the wider concepts of their trees, so now do these trees become branches of something else. 

A tree of Plasma- and beneath that, down in the roots, barely even the size of a blade of grass- the idea of Energy.

Slowly, comprehension grows. Slowly, the weave of the pattern becomes more complete. 

And so she meditates. 

And so, she thinks.

One little valley. One little pond, full of energy and Qi, shaped into living material. The closer she looks, the less she understands, and the more she learns that there is to learn. 

The world, apparently, used to be so much bigger.

There is so much fucking majesty in even the tiniest of things. So much. Infinities inside infinities. 

And it used to be more. 

And someone’s taking it away.

Whether or not the world’s end comes exclusively from the Emperor, or a series of conditions, she doesn’t know. Whether or not it can recover, she doesn’t know. What happens if or after the Emperor is gone, she doesn’t know.

But she can meditate on it. And she can learn. And she can build on what she already knows, whether it was earned, taken, or grown from her.

She is becoming more too.

And whatever the truth is, whatever the full picture might be, she’s quite certain that there are some people in the world which only make it less. 

Maybe she can’t be the person to solve everything. Maybe she can’t transform the world into something more. Maybe she’ll never learn enough to truly understand all the nuances of it, and she’s pretty sure she can’t just fix it.

But she can learn. She can be more.

And she can make sure that the people making the world less go away.