War is hell.

  Hell is, it would seem, a lucrative endeavor.

  She’s… not entirely sure what to make of that fact. The fact that she’s growing by leaps and bounds here. Barely days into the conflict since she arrived, and still she’s evolving, adapting, consuming in ways that she never thought possible.

  The Wall is not an impediment, it’s a meal.

  Someone shoots out her throat, a bullet of steel and enchanted arrays turning her esophagus and the spine behind it into shattered pieces of crystal.

  It grows back.

  A slash cuts across the world, a building-sized line bisecting space and matter, its edges aflame and leaving behind cracks in the air as it travels. She doesn’t dodge fast enough, and it severs her body from shoulder to opposite hip.

  It grows back.

  She walks back over the place where her “old” body lies, picking up the weapons that got left behind with it, and gets back to work.

  She mistimes a step, a half-dozen minds working perfectly in tandem within her to coordinate and organize and still not equal to the horrors of war. She steps on a landmine.

  Landmines are fun. She hadn’t really considered them before. All of the ways that you can use the machinery and concepts of a gun, without needing it to be a gun. Trigger, detonation, ammunition, all aligned for destruction, annihilation, murder. This one, in particular, is aligned for her destruction, annihilation and murder, and sends shards of shrapnel through her leg and up into her body. Interior armor-plates interrupt the damage, but it mostly forces things into ricocheting, pinballing through her organs and muscles.

  But it doesn’t blow up her head, or the needles limiting her abilities inside it- so it all grows back.

  And through it all, she feeds.

  On Dao, yes, as that is a big part of the reason she came here in the first place, but also in more material resources. Corpses that she walks by vanish, subsumed by a body that forever returns to her “default”, sent down into storage through a vague but still accessible connection to her ur-self. Every new technique that leaves residues or leftovers, she absorbs, drinking deep of them, sending them to her Inner World or off to be examined by other minds in other places.

  She is an industry of violence unto herself, and she cannot die.

  And so, war is hell- and hell is profitable.

  And she kills. And kills. And kills.

  Her form is optimized for warfare and aesthetic in turn. One does not need to be human in order to commit violence- in fact, in so many ways, the human body is trivially weak, as evidenced by the fact that it’s forever being modified or compensated for as cultivators advance. Removing the necessity and use of organs and turning oneself into a beautiful incarnation for many orthodox cultivators evolving animalistic qualities and tools for Beasts and those who follow them, or finding ways to improve and adapt, using fleshcrafting or construct creation; all of cultivation, in many ways, revolves around evolving past the starting line that is humanity. The human form and mind, at its foundation, is fascinating, complex, intricate, and not suited for hell.

  So she has CHANGED.

  When she left her ur-self, launched like a bullet from a cannon, she was human-shaped. That is no longer the case. Six legs spiral out from her center, allowing her a 360-degree cone of movement, matched by eyes and ears that face every direction. Sight and sound are the best senses for the chaos- smell is easily overwhelmed, and touch is even more easy to confuse than sound, so she’s improvised alternate senses, pushing her comprehension of her eyes and ears and what they can perceive. Beneath her ring of legs, tendrils of mouths expand and consume flesh as she passes over them, and above, a deva, multi-limbed and facing in every direction at once, wields an arsenal of Guns and Blades.

  And she kills. And kills. And kills.

  Rifling and long barrels decorate her like acupuncture needles, ever-improving internal architecture sending bullets out further and further. Multi-jointed mechanisms take the place of arms, operating as platforms for ammunition that is ever-spawning and machinery that belches chemistry and flame, filling the air with cordite and static. She fires in every direction, and whatever gets too close, she Cuts.

  And she kills. And kills. And kills.

  And she continues to be shot, and cut, and poisoned and burned- but never enough.

  That’s the trick to hell- being dangerous, but never being so dangerous that you’re made a priority. There’s currently some kind of upside-down jellyfish that can swim through solid matter, turning it into a strange sort gelatin that is either really acidic or really basic, and it’s about halfway into one of the improvised bunkers being set up along the Wall. Behind it, there’s a series of corpse-amalgams, constructs that remind her of her time in Paleblossom, Blacksteel melded along dead bodies until they’re like a coral bed on which each other grows. Together, they’re currently being matched by a Daemon, one that she’s a bit too far away from to feel the name of, but which seems like a concentric ring of brass arms orbiting a glowing ball of light and Plasma, shadow and Void. It’s tearing into the inverted jellyfish with streams of energy that don’t act the way that they should, the Dao somehow inverted in parts, acting backwards, and into the destroyed areas that regenerate with the damage, soldiers are moving in in concert, setting up array barriers that summon doll constructs and act as points for further reinforcement.

  In comparison, she’s more or less just… there.

  Every time it looks like a particular array might do more than the others, hit at some critical point of the Divine Beast’s progress, she snipes the operator in charge of it. Every time that the beasts advance too far forward, she practises her growing comprehension of the Gun to make some more fun landmines, grenades, and shrapnel to impede them. She skitters to and from, moving to any area that seems like it might have decisive victory and killing there until the waters are muddied and the ground runs red.

  She is… more or less on the side of the Pack, but at her current strength, pushing forward too far would just get this version of her killed. And being temporarily aligned while she learns more about them isn’t exactly the same as letting them push forward into the Empire, towards cities of civilians that taste delicious.

  Fuck the Empire and all that, but keeping a wave of undirected, barely controllable slaughter rolling into towns and cities is a bit more of a priority, at least for now.

  She’s a monster. She can feel it with every death she takes, every bit of murder that she can taste in the air, feel when she squints and uses the sight that Jin showed her. But she is not that monster. She is her own.

  And for all that she’s learned to be her own, to comprehend and defend her own perspective and ideals, she doesn’t feel all that terrible about the whole “killing soldiers” bit of all this. The beasts and undead barely even bother recouping their losses or retreating, they just send endless berserkers and fodder, regenerating where they can, eating and replicating and even reproducing in some parts of the battlefield. The soldiers… well, they are doing their jobs, protecting the land behind them from wanton slaughter- and also a big part of the reason why this war is happening at all, supporting and empowering a cycle of genocide and death that’s lasted for millenia.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  The Empire’s worse, and the state of the world is its fault. The horrors they have created have metastasized, forced retaliation, bred trauma after trauma until the whole world either serves them or has had to adapt against them.

  But… survival isn’t enough. Adapting against something isn’t enough. She needs to be more.

  She wants to be better.

  It doesn’t matter if the Beasts are justified in their fear, their aggression, their naked hunger for better. It doesn’t matter if the soldiers are just cogs, doing the best they can in a world turned against them and which forces them to serve or lose everything. It’s not enough to be good at war. It’s not enough to profit from hell.

  She wants to be better.

  So for now, while she’s still learning, while she’s figuring out the parameters she’s trying to meet, as she’s improving her tools, she maintains the stalemate, which… really doesn’t need much help in being maintained.

  And she kills. And kills. And kills.

  And through it all, she learns.

  The way that a cannon is a landmine is a pistol is a bomb is a Gun.

  The way that a spear is a sword is a knife is a claw is a Blade.

  The way that both of them are Weapons.

  And there, down deep in her Inner World, Raika watches two trees grow, lengthening, gaining new branches, and slowly, bit by bit, bond by the roots, growing a new tree between and and beyond and below.

  There’s a long way to go before they’re as full-formed as the section of her garden dedicated to Plasma and its derivations, but it’s coming along. And just like with that slightly-older, deeper garden, the growth coming forth now hints at more. Pursuing Plasma has gotten her insights into Energy, with shrubs and grasses of Motion and Force beginning to populate the area between the trees, and now, as Weapons grow in her deepest self, it points to other concepts, ones she didn’t even know she had. She’s pretty sure that one of the nearby patches of grass relates to furniture, of all things, which makes no sense-

  Oh, wait, no, it does. She’s had to design and create a bunch of furniture in her body to accommodate people multiple times, not even including her work on her “sect platform” and the mechanisms therein. Between the tree of Flesh and the sub-garden of branches and associated concepts, there’s a line connecting to her “Weapon” grove, with hints of pressurization, mechanical engineering, patterns of trigger and reaction…

  As it turns out, there’s some notable similarities between high-concept machinery and flesh. Who’d have thought.

  This version of Raika can’t really give orders to the rest of her, just offer suggestions- but considering that three similarly limited (“incentivized”) brains are already at work with engineering, chemistry, and the magics of Arrays, she sends the idea up the chain that they should spend more time in that garden, understanding what-grows-where and how it all connects.

  Why have one Dao, when you can eat and drink as many as you can get your teeth on?

  Why have as many as you can eat or drink when you can have them all?

  It might take centuries to learn it that way, but… well, in theory, she’s going to survive this conflict. Probably. If they win, anyways, and the world doesn’t end (and maybe even if it does, whispers a dark little thought). She probably has centuries.

  And in the meantime, she still has the groves that are the most Her and Hers, and plenty more to learn with them too, even with a legion of minds and training that would put even the most sociopathic sect to shame.

  Speaking of which-

  A blade that reeks of open skies and vast heights descends like a meteor, severing everything about her current body almost perfectly in half.

  It takes approximately 10 to 15 seconds, post-decapitation, for a brain to shut down. It takes about 0.16 seconds for the specific brain damage she just experienced to force a brain to stop in every conceivable way.

  Luckily, she has other ones to pick up the slack, and by 0.15, she’s fused the heads back together into one, repairing the damage and draining away the excess blood.

  “Ah! A worthy opponent, then!”

  She blinks, a dozen sensory organs pivoting to focus exclusively on the cultivator in front of her, one that she actually recognizes.

  Gou Mai stands, exhausted, bloodstained, covered in wounds and smiling, his physique leaner than the last time she saw him but still bear-shaped. In one hand he holds a sword still dripping with her blood, its blade a fine-honed edge refined further by Qi and technique, and in the other, he holds what looks like a set of prayer beads- except each bead is a small hammer, like a jeweler’s tool.

  “Apologies for the unfortunate introduction. I hope it wasn’t too disappointing, losing our first encounter so completely.”

  She can’t help it. She forms a mouth with which to smile, improvising internal mechanisms to compensate for the lack of lips.

  “Not at all. I have always found that the rematch is the more exciting of the two.”

  “And perhaps I can barely be said to have won at all!” He says, waving his sword at her conversationally. If he’s surprised by her ability to speak, he’s making a good show of hiding it. “After all, what sort of victory allows an opponent to repair themselves so quickly?”

  “A small one,” she says, shrugging with limbs not really designed for it.

  He grins. “Sometimes we must take the small victories.”

  And then, the grin sharpens, losing some of the humor to it. “And sometimes, we must aim higher.”

  She nods, and then, realizing that nodding when you have a multi-spine that faces in every direction at once is not easy, she bows a bit instead, lowering herself on the two legs facing towards him. “On this, I’m afraid we agree, cultivator.”

  Silence, for a moment.

  And then, the smile drops, and he seems more relaxed than she’s ever seen him.

  “I’m glad. You’ve killed a lot of people. Not enough to bring forth my senior brother, but even one is too many. I do not enjoy this conflict, and so, one way or another, I cannot have one such as you around to prolong it.”

  “What you do or do not enjoy is of little relevance to me. I hate this as much as I find it… incredible, but I’m still here, fighting. We each have our goals, cultivator.”

  “So we do.”

  He sighs, and it comes through as a long, exhausted exhale. He has been fighting, judging by the lactic acids and the state of his Qi, for many hours. It’s likely he hasn’t slept in days.

  And then his gaze turns back to her, and it is as sharp as any she’s seen.

  “I’m afraid I can’t afford to die here, and I cannot stand another death at your hands that I could have stopped. So you’ll have to end here. I thank you for the conversation. It is… rare that I find time to speak in this place.”

  She snorts, though it comes through as something of a rasping hiss. Most of her airways are either insulated, pressurized, or made up of vents along her body, rather than a conventional throat.

  “I believe that one as boisterous as you finds time to speak wherever he goes, whether or not he is heard. But I suppose you’re right. I would hate for the Prince on the Wall to have to leave his place at the vanguard to come deal with little old me, so I guess I’ll finish this quickly.”

  “I shall endeavor to do the same, construct. To the victor, then.”

  She goes to nod, but…

  Hmm.

  She modifies vocal cords, just enough to let her true voice speak.

  “May there be growth from this death to come.”

  He pauses, and inhales. She feels the weight of the words- not just a statement of truth, but a demand, a pull on the world using Truespeak.

  “...May there be growth from this death to come.”

  She tenses, aligning her barrels- and he is gone, as if he stepped on a staircase that goes nowhere.

  Approximately one millisecond after, while a dozen Gun-limbs and long spear-arms pivot to face in every direction at once, still firing at the occasional target, the sky begins to rain.

  It rains hammers.

  What were once beads on a bracelet come from the sky above, from the heights, from Beyond- and in that perspective, they land like meteors, artfully crafted items of bludgeoning striking the earth like meteors.

  She dies, and lives, and dies again.

  She kills, and kills, and kills.

  She does not win the fight- but she does survive to fight another day, retreating as a centipede of Blacksteel, gunpowder and twitching biological gears.

  It’s so nice to see an acquaintance doing well. Gou Mai’s grown considerably since she last saw him so many weeks ago.

  But still, she is her own- and still, she learns.

  And still, as the fight carried on and destroyed tracts of the landscape, reshaping the battlefield further, she managed to get off a particular shot. Not into Gou Mai. Not into Shin Ren, who’s appeared to burn away the Divine Beast and drive it back. Not even into the Wall itself, or its many defenders.

  Well past them, out to a distant horizon to the west.

  Right through the breach.

  I Am Me, I Am Mine.

  I Can Change.

  Her two fundamentals- once again unleashed beyond the Wall.

  So much to do, so little time.

  TWENTY FOUR CHAPTERS ahead over on the Patreon, babes!

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