“What are you?”

  A hundred mouths smile and a hundred voices chuckle. “I will be happy to tell you. But I do not appreciate secondhand witnesses.”

  For the first time that she can remember, Raika feels her Heart do something that comes from beyond herself. Their conjoined will is, for a moment, subverted, made dissonant- what she wants and what it wants are, briefly, at odds.

  So it is that she fails to stop it from acting. She feels it reach out from her inner world, some unspoken, unfelt communication between it and the being before her guiding it- and in an instant her body unravels, opening wide and expanding out into a platform. Both her four-legged form and her avatar both meld together, the illusion of separation undone, made into a pale white mass that mimics the texture of the orb above- and five people emerge from it, all of them immediately suffering from the effects of the presence here.

  Raika isn’t so rude as to keep her passengers in the dark- a slightly delayed view of what she’s been seeing has been recorded, her brains and her Pillar translating everything one-to-one onto a screen of chromatophores in her interior rooms. While she tends to keep Ko and Aria in the dark, anyone who wants to watch, who wants to see the outside world on a one-to-one, can.

  It’s not quite the same as feeling it.

  Li Shu, Jin, and Many-Grasping all fall to the ground immediately, their bodies collapsing under the weight of the Qi all around them. The orb that floats in the sky, in spite of its unbelievable presence, emanates almost nothing at all, but they’re surrounded on all sides by Divine Beasts, each of them capable of fighting, on at least semi-even footing, Warrior realm cultivators.

  Ko and Aria both hold up better- but that’s only to say that they don’t collapse immediately. Both of them gasp, a choked sound, more than what the others managed, and both fall to their knees rather than their faces, but that’s as far as their strength takes them.

  With a sound like a rasp, made from improvised and malformed mouths, Raika screams. She rips herself forward, tendons and ligaments and muscles forming as fast as she can make them, a hundred brains all operating as fast as they can to try and form some sort of defense. Pillars of bone are launched and fall, surrounding her allies like a cage, locking into place against the crystalline marble, and she weaves Qi through them, veins of it acting as pattern and circuitry to form the most rudimentary and immediate arrays she can think of.

  It all takes less than a second. Half as long, if that, from the moment that she was betrayed to the moment she set up the defenses.

  She still lets out a gasp of relief as she registers their heartbeats, tracks the breathing of her weakest members.

  “It’s not very healthy to bring ones so fragile to such dangerous places,” say the voices of Many-Mouths. “I apologize. Your Heart did not inform me of their status when I asked for their presence. That was rude of it, and by extension, of me.”

  “You could have killed them,” she snarls. It’s taking her a second to reconstitute, longer than it should. The Heart isn’t assisting, and she doesn’t have the mental capacity to try and find out the strange mix of emotions coming from it, and she’s just a bit off balance. Her avatar form, still bedecked in sunset neural tissues and horns, nonetheless looks malformed, the proportions off. What’s needed to speak and represent herself, not much more.

  “They will not die under my care. That much is simple to guarantee. If my other visitors could, perhaps, calm their presence…”

  Aurick rarely emits any true pressure from his Qi, and the Thresher isn’t one for announcing its presence, but one look from him has Sakihebi blushing and focusing, very hard, on pulling her Qi back inwards, condensing her presence down. It never makes it down lower than a Nascent Soul cultivator, but frankly, Raika wouldn’t have the spirit to criticize it, even if she were in a better mindset- the seemingly young beast has her eyes closed, her mouth puckered like she’s trying to hold their breath.

  The Thief, on the other hand-

  “Thief. If you would.”

  It looks down at the four humans that have emerged from Raika, still recovering from the strain of their arrival under the dome she’s created. There is something in its eyes there, something that does not look at Aurick or the Apex or-

  “If you do not stop hurting my friends I will cut you open and eat you from the inside out,” she whispers.

  The way that it thrums across her vocal cords is almost painful with its weight. Truer than true- made true by her word, and by the power it holds.

  Its gaze turns from them to her… and it blinks first.

  Its presence reduces, the radioactive power of what Aurick called its “half-life” concept turning quieter. Not silent- never silent, but quieter, quiet enough that she can feel it only distantly on the array she has draped over her loved ones.

  For a few seconds, there is silence.

  A hundred bodies, a hundred lives, all bow, touching their foreheads to the marble below.

  “I apologize. Your Heart is young, and perhaps overeager to please. As compensation for the pain I have caused, you may take these lives, enriched with existence, or demand of me a favor for my rudeness.”

  She frowns, half-completing her form. Li Shu and Many-Grasping are both more-or-less recovered, their breathing less pained as they slowly make it back to their feet- but Jin is still down. She is represented in her avatar and in a more human form, emerging from the array and dome surrounding them, holding him up onto her lap and tracking every beat of his heart- but still, she growls.

  Li Shu steps forward, still breathing heavily, still shaky- but her Sacrifice is in motion, needles emerging from where she hid them in her robes to poke ever-so-gently beneath his skin, absorbing information and infusing medicine and healing-concept into him. There’s a few breathless moments where Raika is nothing but Blade and Flame, the edges of both emerging from the still semi-molten form that she fell into… and then Li Shu lets out a breath, and Jin coughs.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “It’s ok,” she whispers. “It’s ok. He’s alright. That much Qi at once, it strained him, he’ll need to recover, but he’s not damaged. You were fast enough.”

  Still, for a moment, all of Raika beyond the cage is many-eyed and full of sharpened killing points, her Intent radiating a kind of mindlessness that leaves the Pale Thresher twitching, off to one side.

  Many-Grasping is there, by the side of her main body- and Li Shu is there with her more human one, poorly formed but still her, still afraid, still holding onto the boy. She reaches out a hand, touching Raika’s arm gently.

  “Raika. You were fast enough. He’s ok.”

  Slowly, gradually, she reforms.

  The body holding Jin stabilizes, completing itself rather than remaining malformed.

  “Ok. Ok. Thank you. Li Shu, just- just watch him. Please, just-”

  She nods. “I will. Not exactly much use here. I…”

  “It’s alright. We’ll deal with that later. Just be careful, please.”

  Her avatar, on the outside, grows.

  A sequence of Blades, edged with Blacksteel End and glowing with power, ringing her lower body like a cloak. Six arms, armored in fractal-edged scales of black and orange, edged with indigo and crimson, leading to a central body that emits hints of Plasma, hidden in Flame and Lightning. She stares up at the orb above and the infinitely deadly creatures around her from out of a crown of eyes around her antlers, each of them iridescent and pupiled with eight-pointed stars.

  “Do not,” she whispers, “Ever. Do that again.”

  “Is that the favor you’d like to ask of me?”

  “It is a commandment. One you should heed.”

  A hundred lives all let out a breath, somewhere between a scoff and a chuckle. “You are strong. Of that, there is no doubt.

  “You are not strong enough to command ME.”

  “No,” she agrees. “I don’t even understand you. But I do not need to understand you to detonate loudly enough to turn this valley to a plateau.”

  A sense of bemusement. Aurick goes to step forward, perhaps looking to appease-

  “No. No need for that. Again- I apologize. At the heights, even the slightest mistake has consequences. I am an expert on caring for the smallest things, yet I neglected to predict what would occur here. That was a mistake indeed, one for which your protected have suffered.”

  She remains very quiet. The space around them, impossibly vast and yet intimate, echoes strangely indeed, the remnants of voice carrying out in strange vibrations across this quasi-world.

  Slowly, she lets Flame die down. Slowly, still towering, still vast… she relaxes, just a little. Just enough to not be actively ready to kill and die here.

  A slight hint of Intent. Approval, of an almost parental sort.

  “Your arrival cemented Aurick’s good sense- you are powerful enough to join the Pack, strong enough to influence the war to come. Your calm, here, cements your own good sense. Strength isn’t everything, and it is always good to see another who understands how to survive in a world defined by it.”

  She tilts her head. “Strength isn’t everything. Not what I expected to hear from someone leading the Pack, as you say.”

  A sense of amusement, echoing strangely off the marble.

  “Beasts are defined by strength. Strength in many forms- versatility, survival, power, but strength nonetheless. I am mother and father to Beasts, but I am not one.”

  “...then what are you?”

  A hundred lives tilt their heads.

  “I am the last will and testament of a God. I am a figment of a dream within a dream. I am a beating, pulsing, roiling organ of reality, an anchor for what is real against what is not, and a shaper of all in between.”

  “Frustratingly vague.”

  Much more amusement this time- Sakihebi makes a bit of a choking sound, a giggle suppressed by how much effort it’s apparently taking her to hold her Qi quiet, and Aurick joins in, giving up a snort of his own.

  “Things are only vague when you do not have perspective. Focus your eyes the right way, look at the right point, and even the vastness becomes visible. I don’t like metaphor- I speak as I am, of what I am. But… to practical terms, perhaps.

  “I was born when the sun died. I have seen the new sun be born, and the stars turn to blinking witnesses, and in all that time, I have lived and grown, here. Hidden, at first, and then, vast enough that I stopped needing to hide. I was old when the thing that some call Emperor, and which calls itself “All-To-Be”, first began collecting others like me. I was older still when it finally gained a talent for it. I am older yet now, as it stands on a pillar of their chained minds, wrapped in a bubble of itself made from the bodies of my family.

  “I am what the Mycolia call Godflesh. I am what the Beasts call home. I am what my children call Divine. I am what my hunters call the very Core of a dungeon-beneath-the-world, the beating organ at the heart of a labyrinth from which all is born.

  “My youngest sibling, the youngest I have seen in an epoch, beats within your Soul, in the depths of your self. We both know the face of Heaven, and through us, its will is born.”

  Its words echo, laden with the weight of truth and purpose, and echo forever in the strange dimensions of this place.

  For the first time in a good while, Raika feels… frustratingly small.

  “When I came into the fourth ring… I went through a place. A city made into a fortress, or maybe the inverse. It had channels, way down deep, where it would create weapons constantly, spewing them out against the world outside. When I escaped, I… encountered some part of it, hidden deep down. It was broken, twisted, but… alive. It asked me to come here. To come to you, I think.”

  A sad little laugh, little more than an exhale, a hundred breaths huffing from a few hundred lungs.

  “Perhaps. I did not know that any who still remembered me yet lived. Perhaps it only pointed you towards what it had felt. I… tried to reach out. Many times. I do not know if it would please or hurt me to know that some heard my call.”

  “Then… that’s what you are. One of those sentient places. Like the Palaces, and the Heart that I found beneath-”

  “Yes. What you know as the Emperor has been… harvesting us for a long time. Digging us out from where we burrow and build, taking us out of the earth and out of the world so as to better serve his purposes.”

  “You mentioned that. That you’re some kind of anchor, or a creator of some kind. What does that mean?”

  “I, and those like me, exist naturally. We are born when a world is born, and formed where it needs us most, as a natural reaction to existence. While we are beyond simple spirits of Qi and intent, we are… similar, perhaps. Born of complex circumstances. We possess instinctive knowledge of Dao, the way that the patterns of a given world interact with each other, and ensure that those patterns remain ever-flowing, the amount of Qi in the world ever-increasing, such that it does not degrade into entropy or fall to chaos. The larger a world, the greater we become- my elders once whispered to me of cores old and powerful enough to become continents, shaping what is and what was to come across eons.

  “Now, we are few and far between. The few left wild are those that have hidden, or have kept themselves small, and there are not enough of us left to sustain the world as it is.”

  “...what do you mean by that?”

  A sense of surprise. Two-hundred eyes blink, as if confused.

  “Isn’t it obvious, dear? Your Heart should tell you the same. The world is dying. We stand at the precipice of a final collapse, and soon, there will be nothing anyone can do to stop it.”

  TWENTY FOUR CHAPTERS AHEAD FUCKOS! YAAAAAH

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