The world continues bending, ever-changing, ever-shifting. It reminds her of the technique that Aurick used, strangely bending things, but while his was a demand, an avalanche, a stampede reforming the world around itself, this is gentler. If not for prior experience, there’s simply no way to know that the world can’t just… do this on its own. There is Qi in the air, and she can sense it affecting things, but it is so minute, so precise, that it just feels like part of the background.

  A pathway opens. The way ahead continues. Rather than going over or around, as they walk, the space just sort of opens, the overgrowth turning from an active impediment into something gentler, open and aware. The edge of the crater melts away, forming a tunnel, maybe twenty feet tall, and that tunnel…

  It glows with life.

  Like unearthing layers of strata beneath the earth, there are overlapping tiers of life, each one ever-so-slightly different. Near the top, there are denser flora, vines, leaves and more all enhanced with concepts and Dao that speak of density, thickness, solidity. Beneath that, they become more colorful, increasing from the spectrum of greenery above down into reds, blues, golds, purples- flowers of all kinds, dripping with Qi and power. They wind like veins through a tapestry, leading down into a second layer of hyper-dense greenery, little creatures skittering through the plants of impossible hardness, and then unwind again into more open layers. Again and again, it alternates- supernatural density turned to supernatural potence, each individual plant somehow everywhere and nowhere, each individual element of the tapestry rich with their own unique powers and concepts.

  It’s as much a work of art as it is a show of power. The majesty of life, and an inspired use of Heaven’s Will, all layered over each other, used so subtly but so completely that she can barely even track all that’s happening around her, even with her senses.

  And, considering that it’s only visible because of a tunnel formed through it, seemingly with no difficulty at all…

  She passed through weeks worth of the overgrowth. At least days worth of the hyper-dense variety, so overgrown it becomes terrain rather than environment. If, under all of it, there’s this much power? Manipulated this easily?

  She laughs to herself, a quiet little huffing sound. She thought she was vast. She has a long way to go.

  She dedicates a few subminds to watching everything around her, tracking every detail she sees. She takes note of every possible detail, tracking it. If she could replicate it with veins and patterns, more properly meld her inner world with her Body… or fuck it, learn to properly transition from flesh to flora…

  So much further yet to go, even now.

  “Hmph! Admiring PROPER power, weird one?”

  She turns, cocking an eyebrow at the woman walking beside her.

  Some of the beasts stayed behind, but others came along- some to watch the perimeter, maybe, or too bored to give a shit about the rest of her introduction. A few, however, have come along. The Pale Thresher, Aurick (obviously), Thief Of Many Wings, and, most loudly, Flame-Scale Of Many Branches.

  Raika stares down at her, smiling a bit. For all her power, the Beast gives off the impression of a child, an unruly teenager at best. Even without her physical stature, looking down on her would be easy- Raika is currently sitting atop a wolf-like body of her own, riding sidesaddle on it and looking through two heads and moving with two sets of limbs, and her true form is a good seven feet tall besides.

  The serpentine beast, on the other hand, is about five feet tall on a good day. Even with the antlers, she’s minute at best, petite.

  And seemingly very angry about it.

  The shadow of her original form winds behind her, like a many-headed hydra of ash and flame and smoke, hidden just out of sight- but besides the ever flickering Flame she carries, laden with poison and Dao, there’s minimal hint of it. She looks like a particularly true-blooded beastkin, if anything, and only the weight of her presence and cultivation (frequently flaring up) truly indicate how powerful she is.

  And she is, quite visibly, pouting.

  “I very much am,” Raika says with a smile. “It’s fucking gorgeous. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

  The snake-woman flinches back as if struck, visibly confused. “Ah- yeah! YEAH! You SHOULD bow before the MIGHT of the Apex! I-”

  “Sakihebi, dear,” Aurick says from up ahead, “if you would, please be a little quieter. It’s rude to be so loud when the person you’re talking to is close by.”

  She growls, the sound coming out more as a hiss. “But the LUNGS are so SMALL! How will ANYONE hear me if I DON’T-”

  “Sakihebi, everyone here can hear heartbeats from across several fields. It’s good practice to speak quieter.”

  She growl-hisses again, rolling her eyes, and at this point Raika can’t hold back anymore.

  “How come you’re so adorable?”

  The hiss that follows the question is loud enough that she can hear the shape of it in the beast’s lungs, the air almost pressurized as it’s moved from massive lungs into a minute, human-sized throat.

  “I am SAKIHEBI! Flame Scale Of Many Branches! I am serpentine FLAME and VENOM and TOXIN, I am HUNGER and WANT and EVER-GROWING! I am NOT ADORABLE!”

  Raika can’t help it- she laughs.

  “I’m sorry! I don’t mean to insult! All of those things can be true at once!”

  “I AM NOT ADORABLE!”

  Beneath the rage is an absolute kind of frustration- the sort that comes from a child who has dealt with this particular kind of teasing before, and is not happy to be having to deal with it again. The edges of her body begin to percolate, becoming hazy outlines of shadow and flickering fires- and Raika raises her hands in mock surrender.

  “I did not mean to insult,” she whispers, letting her vocal cords echo with Truespeak.

  Wings turns to look at her, its many eyes wide, its body suddenly tense. A pulse of that strange energy moves through it once more-

  The tunnel ripples, and Aurick stops the procession for a moment.

  “The time for fighting has passed,” he says, a clear warning in his voice. “Further violence will not be dealt with by me, or by my associate- it will be dealt with by the Apex.”

  He stares up at the hovering figure. “Your half-life did not earn you supremacy before. It will not do so now.”

  The walls ripple. Just once, all along a hundred-thousand different lifeforms that create the mosaic of the space.

  Thief Of Many Wings… relaxes. Just a touch. Just enough for the Intent to leak through and then fade- subservience. Acquiescence. Calm.

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  Raika smiles up at the monster above, shrugging. “Sorry to surprise, but you’re not the only one who has some special tricks, hmm?”

  A hint of aggression. Frustration. And then…

  Oh? A hint of jealousy? Delicious.

  Very pointedly turning away from the floating figure and “ignoring” them (the beauty of having ever so many cortexes- she’s got a very close eye on the fucker and every twitch of its body and Qi), she looks back at Sakihebi, who is still pouting- but considerably less, after the whole “Truespeak” revelation. Now, her gaze has shifted, becoming much more focused on Raika, somehow mixing aggression and interest.

  “HOW can you do THAT?”

  Raika laughs, shrugging her shoulders. “Truthfully, I do not know.”

  Sakihebi frowns, the features exaggerated and… “loud”, for want of a better term, like she’s pantomiming human expression rather than doing something well-rehearsed. “That canNOT be true. You CLEARLY just intended to USE it- so HOW?”

  “I developed it… honestly, fairly early in my advancement. Most of my growth has been focused on infusing Qi everywhere, similar to Qi-poisoning, and then forcefully moving it through my body, even tearing into it if need-be. Rather than meridians, or even a Dantian, I just sort of forced my body to accept it, which includes my organs. Infusing my throat… eventually changed my vocal cords, and now, if I relax them properly, my voice comes out as this ‘Truespeak’.”

  Sakihebi tilts her head to the side, transmitting a sensation of admiration and confusion. “Ah! YES! You poisoned yourself! This is GOOD! Poisoning the self is FROWNED upon, but it is TRUE and STRONG, like me! But… how did you not DIE? Qi-poisoning is one of the STRONGEST kinds!”

  She shrugs again, using her lower “wolf” body and her upper, humanoid shoulder at once to add emphasis. “I had a friend that kept things circulating, and I got lucky. If I had to list all the times I’ve done things that should have killed me, we’d be entertained for the rest of the journey at least. This particular case… I had help from a friend, and was very determined.”

  “Never knock determination!” Aurick says from the front of the group, chuckling to himself. “All cultivation is ultimately willpower expressed through Qi. There is… a chance, at least, that your will was strong enough to use what little you had, even without spiritual organs, to keep yourself alive. I would be truly impressed were that the case! It would take someone truly mad to put themselves through such a hell, when any minute shift might mean a completely different result, most of them death. You are either lucky or blessed by the heavens, Raika- and I know what I’ll place my bets on.”

  She cocks an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? What’s that? Cause frankly, if it was luck, I must have burned it all then- everything since has been an uphill battle. Well, except for… a few choice encounters.”

  His shoulders roll with laughter, the litheness of his strange torso and humanoid upper-half rocking up and down. “My dear, no one is that lucky, not even once. Not in all the infinite universes! You survived by the will of the gods, or perhaps the Heavens themselves- and in turn, they have led you here, to us. To the Pack. To the Apex.”

  As he speaks, every beast (save for the Pale Thresher) makes a sort of strange bow, raising hand or limb upwards to form something like a crown and lowering their heads.

  “I didn’t realize you worshipped the Apex that way.”

  Aurick shrugs. “Not everyone does, nor should they worship every Apex. Apex is a title, earned through strength and survival and consumption, things any and every beast understands, but that is not all that defines a creature. Za Warudo, Apex of the northern seas, is a world unto himself, an infinite mountain carried on his back, its every moment accelerated to a thousand times the rest of the world; the Corpse Martyr cannot die, and takes death unto itself, that all should live eternal by its grace- these, perhaps, I could see one praying to. But Many-Mouths deserves prayer. They are of the Heavens, and deserve to be venerated as such. Glory Be.”

  “Glory Be.”

  “Glory BE!”

  And, deep inside her, deeper than her flesh, down in her inner world and Soul… her Heart beats. Just once.

  Glory Be.

  Her Heart said that to her before. Just twice, to be exact- both times, relating to when she asked it for help creating her weapon. Her greatest synergy yet- her TRANSCENDENT ART.

  The tunnel pulses, just once- and something shifts at the end of it. The roots and veins and limbs and fruits of the tunnel shift, the mosaic coming closer, becoming less tunnel and more living pathway-

  And the words.

  GLORY BE.

  The same words that her Heart spoke, when it looked on the anvil in her inner world with pride. When she had let it free to pursue what it had called “deeper purpose”, and which now rests deep inside her, an anchor for something she created and barely even comprehends.

  “That phrase. What does it mean?”

  “HA! Silly newbie doesn’t even KNOW how to PRAY!” Sakihebi says, turning her nose up in a child’s impression of haughtiness. Despite herself, Raika almost giggles again- but she doesn’t want to hurt the little (colossal) beast again, and the words come through heavy.

  “It’s… a prayer? From something from the Heavens? That’s… I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  Aurick looks at her, eyeless face showing confusion- but before he can speak, something else interrupts.

  “I find that very strange, considering how you carry a seed of Godflesh within you.”

  Raika turns, and-

  They’re not where they were.

  The tunnel is behind them now, but she… it didn’t move. She would have sensed it moving, felt a spatial shift or something.

  No, what’s more is that, as she checks on the parts of herself left planted, hidden generators and backups spread through the fourth ring and spreading further, she notices it. It, in this case, being that she somehow traveled a journey that would take days, or multiple flights as a bullet from a Gun, without ever noticing that any distance had passed at all.

  The tunnel ended, and somehow, she and the rest of the group have been brought forward and placed on something that looks distressingly like an altar. The tunnel folds back into itself, strata of life bending in a way that hurts the brain to look at, until they sit, surrounded on all sides by mountains, running with veins of lava-

  Oh.

  That’s not lava.

  That’s Qi. Raw, undigested Qi, drenched in the concepts of Flame and… more. So much more, concepts she’s never even seen, Dao that she feels at a loss to comprehend, even with her senses. The taste of depth, of shifting stones the size of worlds, of ever-flowing life and ever-changing surfaces and time and weight, and-

  And it’s nothing compared to what’s above.

  Ringed by the dozen mountains that stretch impossible far up and are somehow close and far at the same time, there is an orb.

  Like a pearl, it has layers, as if glistening oil anointed it and then settled into artistic patterns on its surface, leaving iridescent ripples and waves in its design. It is white, but only in the sense that it somehow holds both all colors and none. It glows, but in a way that sheds no brilliance and demands no attention. It is present and it is not; more than a mirage, like a layering of reality on reality, both true and not at once.

  It does not beat, but Raika’s Heart knows it nonetheless.

  Family.

  From out of the pale marble ground that they stand on, run through with veins of every conceivable form of crystal, bodies begin to form. Each one grows and becomes… a person. A full, entire person. Human, goblin, giant, beast, beastblood, species and races she has no name for and variations in between, until the group is surrounded by nearly a hundred faces, each one baring signs of age, personality, piercings, tattoos, micro-expressions… and she can taste them. The synapses firing, the breaths stirring, the hearts beginning to beat.

  To all appearances, whatever this Apex is, it just created a hundred new and unique life forms, full people, flavored by the hunger-stirring touch of sapience, out of nothing.

  Not a ripple of Qi. Not even the slightest taste of a Truth or of Dao. It just… did.

  “Hello, little one,” says Many Mouths, speaking through a hundred newborn voices. “Welcome home. We have much to discuss.”

  TWENTY FOUR CHAPTERS AHEAD FUCKOS! YAAAAAH

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