SpiralingSilverandEyes
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Book One, Chapter 3 -Waking Up and I'm Feeling Just Fine
🕑 Added 2025-08-24 23:06:54 +0000 UTCUpdated version of, well, chapter 3! Who'd have thought!
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There is such art in the act of breaking things. Personally? I like to throw rocks at display shop windows. Excellent practice, and if anyone tries to act up about it, I get to break them too! Very convenient.
-Words of a wandering monk, notoriously drunk, versed in the three-hundred and eight arts of healing and capable of splitting mountains.
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She doesn’t wake up for a long time.
The pain is a good way to mark time. The only way, really. It comes and goes, but eventually it does more of the latter, leaving her hazy but able to sometimes accept the soup she can’t taste. Something is wrong with her jaw, with part of her mouth. If it is not ruined entirely, it is certainly ruined for now, and she can feel the soup or whoever is feeding it to her avoid the right side of her mouth.
She can’t feel other things, too. Her left hand, for one. Where it used to be there’s a sensation like something hurts, like every nerve is twisted up wrong, but when she tries to move it, when she rubs her bedding against where it should be, there’s nothing. It just hurts, and it does not stop hurting, but sometimes it hurts a bit less, and it’s moments like that where she can breathe again, just slightly.
Her chest hurts, too. Not as much; ribs are easier to reset, she knows from experience. Someone patched the hole in her lung, she thinks, and the floating ribs are at least mostly back in place.
Not much else is good. Not her leg, not her face, not her arm, not her organs or spine or the sharp-edged cuts she can still feel stinging and itching violently as she heals.
But she is healing. She is alive. That’s what matters. She survived the impossible, somehow, perhaps even at the mercy of the heavens or Feng Gui himself, but she survived and that is all that matters.
Until, on the day when she realizes she is awake, she reaches for her Qi.
There is nothing.
She reaches for her Qi.
There is nothing.
She reaches for her Qi-
She has started screaming, and someone is holding her down, and she is cycling qi through her body, making her stronger, making fire bend to her will and letting her survive anything and heal from anything and break anything, the energy she spent her entire conscious life grasping moving through the carefully cared for series of streams and meridians she’s spent so long refining-
There is nothing, and she is screaming, and she tries to punch but it’s with her left, and she tries to kick but one of her legs can’t move no matter how much it hurts so she sends qi to strengthen and lighten it and nothing happens because there’s nothing there’s nothing it’s not here it’s gone-
Something is pushed between her teeth, and her jaw doesn’t work right and she can’t bite and it tastes like acid like defeat like hate like poison like medicine-
And then it is dark again.
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She wakes up, and spends some time wishing she hasn’t.
She doesn’t move what’s left of her body, lest someone hear and see she’s awake. Someone is keeping her alive, that much is clear, though why is anyone’s guess. Certainly not because she’s rich. It is someone’s pity that lets her live, and she does not, can not face that fact yet.
Instead she turns inwards.
It is so, so quiet.
Supposedly it’s different for everyone. She’s not much of a researcher, but she remembers some sect members who practiced the same cultivation method mention how it felt when she asked them for advice. It all sounded similar to her experience, but even then, their backgrounds and the details were always a bit different each time. For others in the Hungering Roots sect, the technique she cultivated felt like slow-dripping rivers of magma, dense and beautiful and slowly swirling through their bodies. For her, it had been a raging fire, like molten metal pushing heat and pressure through her body, that dense molten center feeding her meridians from her Dantian, the center of her being.
But it wasn’t the main cultivation technique for her sect. Just the cast-off leftovers that fit her, unlike the more nature-oriented techniques for more promising students. For Hisheng, it had been something bright, blossoming outwards through dense soil, which one had to carefully move in the right patterns lest it dissipate or burst.
She wonders if Hisheng is alright. If he’s come to check on her. If she’s here, alive, from his pity or his friendship or his love. She does not know, and it hurts worse than her hand when she thinks about it.
It doesn’t feel like anything, now. Not even like her cultivation method is gone or like she is empty of qi, tapped out and drained. She can’t feel any of it. Not her Dantian, that core that lets one accumulate qi at all, which she meditated for months to be able to see, not her meridians, where that energy would flow and, in the right patterns, transform herself and the world around her. Not the partially formed Core that gave its name to the Realm she’d stepped into.
They’re not empty. They’re gone.
Raika thinks back, and the memory of it, as much as it hurts to hold, is still there. That final blow, the one right below her navel, right where a cultivator’s Dantian is located.
“See how long that victory lasts,” he had said.
It’s usually taboo. The ultimate act of cruelty one cultivator can perform against another.
He killed her cultivation, like slaughtering a pup in its bed. He took from her what she is- what she was. Her purpose, gone. Her progress bled out like a slaughtered pig.
It is one thing to do it to a demonic cultivator, or as punishment by one’s sect, when all the elders and patriarch are in agreement that such an extreme measure is necessary. Better to torture, better to main, better to kill someone entirely than to even consider killing their cultivation. One is to remove a problem, to punish; the other is to take everything someone is, all they have worked for, sometimes for centuries, and kill it from the world.
Feng Gui did not beat her.
He killed her from the world.
She extends her senses out, but at this point she knows the deal. She can’t sense qi fluctuations in the air, can’t feel it in the materials she’s laying on or whatever medicines may be in her body. After so many years with it, it’s worse than being blind, because at least the blind might someday be healed or given prosthetic artifacts.
He killed her cultivation from her. She has never heard of it coming back. What swordfighter can call themselves a swordfighter, when the very idea of a sword has been cut out of them?
Her parents died, two years ago. Old age for her father, and a harsh winter for her mother. She has a sister, but she was barely a baby when Raika left home, and she hasn’t been back to see them in nearly seven years, and longer before. They aren’t close. Of all the people at the sect, the only one she could claim closeness to would be Hisheng, and if he isn’t here already, he has done the wise, painful thing of cutting her away from his life. Maybe Ki Shi, but… no, barely friends, traveling companions at most.
She is 27 years old. An infant, for a cultivator, and nearly middle-aged for a mortal, and she is alone in the world. If her body was firm she still couldn’t fight for a living, and all she knew before cultivation were a few years as a child on a farm. Who needs a one-armed cripple who can barely walk to help on a farm?
“See how long that victory lasts,” he told her.
She does not move for a very long time. When someone eventually comes into the room, they wipe at the corners of her eyes, where she has been crying.
“Are you awake?” asks a soft voice. Feminine, and seemingly young.
Raika shuffles her head a bit. It could, if one were generous, be called a nod.
“I’m glad,” says the owner of the soft voice. “You’ve been asleep for a few weeks now. We weren’t sure you were going to wake up again.”
She sighs gently. Raika’s eyes are still a bit blurry (concussion or eye damage, take your pick), but she opens them to see someone dressed in the white shift and red highlights of a healer. The figure is thin, with long black hair bound up into a tight, orderly bun, and before she can see more, there is a cold cloth pressed against her forehead, and it feels for a moment like the greatest comfort in the world.
“There we go,” whispers the newcomer. “I’m sure you’re disoriented. Master says you shouldn’t move for a good while yet, and what she says goes. Don’t try to speak, either. Whoever did this to you really messed up your throat and your jaw, and if you’re not careful you’ll make it worse.”
So, Raika doesn’t speak. She just does her best to wriggle against the cold cloth, shivering when her caretaker switches to the cool side. Like a worm, or a child. Fitting, even if the intrusive thought makes her want to puke.
Eventually she pulls the cloth away, and Raika has to think again. She turns, trying to find the right corner of her eyesight to see whoever is taking care of her. Seeming to notice her shifting, the young woman leans over her, coming into clearer view.
“Sorry,” she says. “You probably can’t see very well. Master said eyes heal better than some places, but… yours got cut pretty bad. And hit. A lot, we think. My name is Li Shu, I’m the healer’s apprentice here. You’re safe for now, ok?”
It’s weak of her, she knows. It hurts to do it, even. But Raika cries again.
She cries long into the night, until oblivion takes her.
