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Xin Wu, yet another Cultivation Quest

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Yatr said:
A big part of the reason folks voted for this was in order to rest, limit breaking seems to be missing the point.
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I thought wanting a safer place to sleep was the weakest reason for taking a multi-day detour. I was more interested in finding knowledge/infrastructure that could help with the apocalypse, and/or something to trade to Mala and Darpan rather than showing up with nothing but terrible social skills and overwhelming violence.

Isn't the plan to uncover a cool ruin, secure it, and sleep in it? How is limit breaking in conflict with that plan? We'd sleep it off right after. We'd benefit from super speed, reflexes, danger sense and durability in case we run into any ambushing Elders or traps. We seem very unlikely to be making any social rolls that would be penalized during the limit break.

Odds seem high that we run into something that's worth using the limit break on anyway. It has the resources to make thousands of cultivators just lying around. Think of how many Elders might be supported by this ecosystem.
 
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6241, Ascending Void, Plants
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    • 6241, Ascending Sun

    Searching through the forest bit by bit was not the most riveting of tasks - not as you tried to avoid harming the flora all around you. A kindness you did not extend to the Farbeasts that you came across, who were executed in their sleep before they could even be roused from the Sun induced hibernation they had entered. The Farbeasts in this forest were... different, that was certain - all Farbeasts were tougher than you might expect if you equated their tiers to a human, but these were even more powerful than their peers. It was hard to truly estimate, but the adolescents that usually were dispatched without thought required some actual amount of force, and the adults at the core of these Farbeast nests made you actually utilize your new hammer to end their lives before they could wake up. Whatever this 'sacred' forest held made the Farbeasts living within it a cut above their kin. Though exactly how much above would require them to be much more aware. Still, it was noticeable.

    And that made it valuable. If just eating these plants raw could, over time, make Farbeasts nearly transcend the tiers you knew of, what could you do after processing them? What could the forest yield for your people, with the knowledge of the greatest alchemists of Rama's time, combined with the untouched, unharvested growth of hundreds of years? "Oh yes. We will grow quite strong indeed! We shall inherit all of what remains of this realm, and we shall wring it dry of all that is left, and when we leave it, we shall stand on the precipice of greatness. We shall not fear the Heavens, but they us!" Garm filled the time as you looked around with delusions of grandeur, clearly bored of the mundane search you had chosen to embark on.

    "Do you know what this plant is?" You started to ask the questions, if only because it distracted Garm from talking to himself about nothing for at least a time. But each time the two gave you completely different answers, and neither of them seemed all that confident of it.

    "That could be a Bony-Woodwart. Eating them is just like it sounds; it makes your body start developing bones on the outside of the skin. This was sometimes utilized by particularly desperate cultivators to create something akin to natural armor, but at the cost of making their heirs... well, hideous. A proper potionmaker could at least make these changes controllable, limit them to the forearms or such, rather than your brow ridge suddenly having new bones."

    "No no, it's almost certainly a Bursting Wartbone. Totally different, they just look similar. If you ate that, your bones would explode inside you, like popping one of those disgusting mortal flaws that forms upon the face of a youth."     The armament spirit hmmed and hummed in a bell-like fashion as they tried to think of the word.

    "A pimple." Rama supplied it before you could.

    "Yes! Exactly. Like a pimple. Exploding. Inside you. Your bones. Quite horrible! Utilized by skilled poisoners to create... well, a poison that makes peoples bones explode. Hard to fight when your bones are trying to explode, isn't it?"

    You shuttered as you tried to imagine that - your bones bursting inside of you. What would you even do? "That would be a nasty poison..."

    "There's a reason almost every proper son or daughter of a great clan seeks above all else an immunity to one hundred poisons - if not better. Poison is the tools of cowards and weaklings, to tilt things into their favor." Rama seemed particularly upset by the talk of poison. You winced as you remembered the fact that his brother was, in fact, quite adept with them, utilizing them to weaken his Father, and then kill Rama himself. Oof.

    "And that one?" You pointed to a fist sized glowing acorn, that seemed to shimmer into a different color every time you looked back at it -even just blinking.

    "Oh!" Garm seemed excited for a moment, "That's an Endless Dream Tree. Don't go to sleep in that tree, or you'll neeeeever wake up! Haha, no I'm kidding. I could wake you up. I'm that powerful. But anyways, those trees are pretty rare - and they grow fertile offspring even less often. Having one of these in the vicinity ensures that sleep-demons cannot enter the corporeal in its presence, trapping them inside of an endless dream prison, which it then uses as nourishment. Unfortunately, if you sleep too closely, it will eat you just as well. A true man eating plant! I could teach you a Will technique to become aware in your dreams, and we could use it as a portal into the Dream-Realm. That could be fun!"

    "No, that's stupid. An Endless Dream Tree's entire body shimmers. That's a Kaleidoscoping Coral-Wood. Eating that acorn would let you, temporarily, see into colors impossible to humans. I've heard some potion makers could make that permament... but that those who did it often went mad from the long term exposure. The tree itself is useful because it can absorb any and all essences in the act of construction, taking on a form befitting to any of the five base elements. This is particularly valuable as making wooden staves with Fire essence is near impossible."

    "That's such a boring answer!"     Garm seemed upset for just a moment, though he didn't torture you or Rama when he was upset. Not like the Signet did, "Yes, they look similar, but that's definitely an Endless Dream Tree. And we should definitely learn to explore the Dream Realms. Because it's fun."

    "Oh!" You interrupted, because arguing meant nothing, and you weren't going to start taste testing these things to see who is right, "What about that tree?"

    For once, the two answered in unison,

    "That's a Warding-Willow."

    The instant they noticed that they had both said the same thing, you could feel a wave of disgust from Rama, and pure unadulterated joy from Garm. He seemed to be into it at least.

    Rama was the first one to continue though, "It's a particularly large specimen. But you can tell that it's one because everything else in this forest is moving. Just a small amount, from the wind. The rustling, all of that. The willow is too still, and thus it must be a Warding Willow."

    "A Warding Willow, my dear uneducated student!"     Garm chimed in, "Is one of nature's finest caretakers. Anything inside it is warded from tracking. By anything. Smell, taste, sight, sound, even esoteric senses such as essence senses, earth-sensing, or the vaunted Root-Sense cannot pierce it easily. I've known Masters of the Root-Sense technique fail to find what was hidden inside of one - and that's the technique that literally uses trees as your sensory method. So that's impressive. They're pretty tough to harm too, I bet you could knock it over if you went full power, but not without it. Some legendary examples have even proven refuge for those fleeing the Gods' foul sight."

    "We should remember it, for a couple days from now. When you need to rest, entering the Willow might be your best bet."     Rama seemed less enthused on going into its specifics, though he still seemed happy enough with this find.

    "If we haven't found the Vault." You were hopeful you'd find it before exhaustion hit you and you had to sleep. But at least now you had an alternative. "I wanna get there as soon as possible."

    "Always good to have a fallback plan, however. We should check to make sure there's nothing already living within. It would be terrible timing to be losing conciousness as we find an Elder." Rama chided you only lightly, as you moved into the Willow to see what it was like.

    "Well, I think that would be hilarious! The desperation would be rife for growth."

    Rama was still the more sane of the two spirits in your soul. Just brushing the branches and leaves away felt like trying to move piles of metal, they were as heavy as lead and seemed to almost knowingly try to slip out of your hand as you pushed in. And the canopy was thick, obscuring the outside to you before revealing the inside, as if there were six layers of vine-like branches draping through. But when you reached the center, a soft glow filled the air, letting you see the small pocket of safety - scarcely big enough to hold six or seven people at most. Nothing was living inside of it, nothing you could see with your eyes at least.

    Just as Garm had said, you could hear nothing from the outside world. There was no wind coming through the branches either - and the air that had outside felt... warm to the point of being a bit uncomfortable now felt... cool, comfortable. Similar to your home, in fact - something about the air inside it made you feel almost exactly like you were home.

    "An excellent observation!" Garm chimed in the second you thought that, "These Willows were actually one of the points of inspiration when Nakul was creating his Palace. Though his designs have far more uses than a base plant could ever hope to achieve! The natural world can always provide ample inspiration for one with a clever enough mind!"

    "I don't think I have any interest in following Nakul's path." You said it out loud, as you sat down for the first time in too long. You'd started to do some mapping in your head, but now it finally seemed like time to try and create a proper map. Ripping some of the bark off of the tree - at great effort - gave you the tool you needed to create the crude map of what you had seen so far, with the Willow set as your central place, "I just want to find that vault, not be inspired by this forest. And to do that, we need to be methodical."

    "Where exactly would a Willow like this be planted, if it came from their Garden?"

    Cultural context was important, and you knew that much. The Garden of your homes for instance kept the food and medical supplies well seperated, with building materials bridging the gaps between them. The thought on why came from superstition on the medicinal herb's association to death and the dying. A thought you would have found quite normal, had Jo Kul not revealed to you that many medical herbs he could and did utilize in his cooking. Superstition was important, however.

    "Warding Willows could be used in many ways, if a family found value in tending them, but mostly they were seen as objects of suspicion. While you might hide in a Warding Willow to avoid being found in an emergency, an assassin might utilize it as a base of operations unless routinely swept through. So they were generally kept well and truly seperate from any central locations." Rama was the one who talked to you on this, "I don't know what, if any, alchemical uses these trees had, so I wouldn't know if this might be an exception in that tense."

    "No clue."     Garm chimed in on that last thought, "My creator had some knowledge of alchemy, but he preferred to see the natural world as inspiration for permanent artifice, not the temporary works of Alchemy."

    "Okay, so most likely this isn't close to anything that might have housed the Vault we're looking for." You weren't certain if you were smarter than Rama or Garm - but you were far more used to long term methodical planning. You'd figured out ways to optimize your routes all your early life, as you opened the doors that gave you Garm. You knew how to stop yourself from wasting time and effort - and now that you had a place to do it, you were able to create that crude dirt map, cutting the treasured garden into quadrants like you once had your home, with the Willow as its central point. "If we fan out from here, we can have a nice radius to search. Assuming that it's not nearby, we can cut out some of the direct surroundings. Focus our efforts more outwards."

    You'd already checked a good amount of the north eastern area, since that was the direction you walked to here from, if Garm had kept track of direction correctly. So you scribbled in some of the bigger and more obvious landmarks and trees you'd found in that time.

    "Greatest weapon in the world. Reduced to a compass!" He huffed and a bit of thunder roared through your head, before being replaced by the jingle of bells as he began to laugh.

    Unfortunately, you had absolutely no information on the other parts of this forest, "Well, do either of you have ideas on what way their vault may lay? Where would they have stored their greatest treasures?"

    "This is definitely the Madi's land, or what used to be it. But I haven't seen even a basic trace of civilization as we walked - the stone paths have weathered away or been eaten by plants, the buildings consumed and pulled under. I was hoping it wouldn't have fallen so long ago that all trace was gone." Rama was penitent on his inability to help you more, but it didn't make it any better.

    "Hmm. I think it will be to the north west!"     Garm gave his decision.

    "Oh? You remember this place?" You perked up at that.

    "Nope! I can't say I really cared to remember most of the territory Nakul ruled over. My focus was on destroying our enemies, not building some powerbase. We fought quite often about how much I simply did not care about his stupid followers. If I walked in this land once as a city, it was not a memory I cared to keep." Garm's words deflated you again.

    "Great. So it could be any direction then." You rubbed your forehead as you started to push your way back out of the willow. Unlike moving into it, the vine-branches felt like they had absolutely zero weight to them. Nearly losing balance from how easy it was, you came back out of the Willow into the forest. The forest was very calm as you tried your best to survey the directions. But... all of them seemed the same, at least in the moment. More forest filled with huge, magical, and potentially dangerous plants. You couldn't see any tracks of trails of Farbeasts in any particular direction - but that wasn't a surprise with the continued fully powered Sun sealing most of them.

    You had to take a blind guess, and hope you were right.

    [x] A. Northwest
    [x] B. Southwest
    [x] C. Southeast
     
  • Threadmarks
    • [x] B. Southwest
    I feel like going the furthest direction from home and marpan first.

    I really love the talent we got that lets our spirit buddies hang around. It's kinda like Isha's given herself the family she's lost. Just more traumatised family.
    Those Warding WIllows are super cool.
     
    KittyEmpress said:
    Nakulian Year 6240, Apex Stars

    You didn't have time for this - you had Farbeasts to slay, people to protect. You were too important to be standing here dealing with a patient who should be in bed. "Get back to the hospital before the nurses need to drag you there. My mother has enough worries right now." You bit back as you tried to step past the girl in question. She was tiny compared to you, barely up to the top of your chest. She couldn't stop you. And yet as you tried to move past her, she moved to block your path - you could hear the strain as she did it, the pain in her breathing as she tore at her stitching.

    Small as she was, your friend stared you in the eyes. You could see how she was trembling, you could hear the rattling of her spear as she held onto it for life - you knew she had to be in pain just standing there. Her spear was holding her up but even a slight brush and you could send her falling to the floor. You could hear the rasp of her breathing, the whistling noise deep in her chest from what had barely been patched up. Her face was pale, her lips a shadow of their former color as you looked at them, and yet she stood in your way and she stared at you with more fire to her than you'd ever seen from her. Your friend who was too scared to speak up to her Mentor's abuses, who was too scared to travel into the darkness, the friend who could barely speak in front of more than a single person now stood unwavering even as you tried to brush her off. "Isha... please talk to me. It's okay to not be brave with me. We're friends."

    The way she looked at you was far from the first blow, and further from the most severe, but the wall that you had built in your mind began to crumble at last. The bravado, the strength that you used to push everything down faded as she stood up to you for the first time. You felt a scream forming in your chest as everything you wanted to yell out bubbled like the poisonous concoction you'd been unintentionally forming, the hundreds of venoms feeding on each other and only growing stronger as each one was absorbed in turn by the worst. But instead of a scream, all you could whisper out as the first tears flowed from your eyes were - "My dad's dead." The quiet whimper was far from your recent tone, no strength, no assured Rightness in it. Your hammer began to shake in your hands as you trembled. "My dad's dead and he's never coming back." You couldn't even see Jute anymore, her form obscured by the welling stream of tears that blinded you to all else.

    But you could feel her wrap her small arms around you, even with your armor on - you could feel her weight as she leaned on you to keep herself upright. "I'm so sorry Isha." Your friend's voice was gentle, it was kind, even as it was pained - as it strained to come out. "You can't kill yourself like this though. You can't. It's not... it's just not right. He wouldn't want you hurting like that. He wouldn't want to see you injured, straining, forcing yourself into danger. He loved you."

    "It doesn't matter because he's dead!" You said it louder now, you shook as you said it, a half laugh coming out as you choked on your own breathing, a sad pathetic laugh, "Nothing he'd want matters because he's dead!" You repeated the word and each time you said it you felt weaker, you felt smaller, "He's gone, gone gone gone. He can't do anything! He can't protect me, us, here, he can't do it, he's nothing now, he was the hero and now he's just dead." You clenched, and you heard a whimpering noise - but it wasn't that that brought you back to your senses. It was something else, something you were oh so used to now - the slight tinge of iron.

    "ISHA!" The voice in your head screamed at you in the same moment that you became aware of it, the boy's tone frantic and forceful.

    You sobered up in a second as the smell of blood came through, and you looked down to the smaller girl you had squeezed as you collapsed. And you saw the dark blue robes darkening around her chest where he wound was. The girl in question wobbled as you pulled back - and you barely caught her in your arms, only for your armor to cause less than comfortable landing, barely different from falling into the floor. You scrambled towards the only workplace near by - your room. The lonely room that drove you insane was now your closest refuge as you quite nearly kicked the door down.

    Your medical supplies were full - you were basically a mini-hospital. You had everything on hand that they did, every tool, every poultice, every herb, every ground up farbeast horn, every single thing was held on your back. It was only because you were so strong that you could carry it all, but in this moment the weight felt like nothing as you tore your way towards the wound in question. You wished you had the Signet, you wished you could heal her wound away - but you were far from the Hospital, and if you'd reopened her wound in full she may not make it there. You were losing it. You'd broken her the first time and now you'd broken her again. Your friend was going to die because of you, because of you just like your Fa-

    "Isha, focus." Rama's voice called out gently this time as the panic began to overcome you. You no longer had your wall to keep your emotions out, and they were so strong, "She's breathing, you can hear that she is. It's not worse than before. You didn't re-puncture her lung. Just focus on my voice, don't listen to anything else in here." The voice was calm and collected as you panicked, and as he pointed out those things you noticed them too - the whistling was no more intense, the laboring breaths were clearly painful but were there. She was breathing.

    Slowly you made your way through taking care of your friend - your scaled armor had ripped open the sutures of her wound, and the force of your hug had probably cracked another of her ribs. But she didn't seem to be bleeding internally, and as you sat at her side as she bled over your bed, stitching up her wound once more, you felt heavy. You could remember every word your mother said to you on how to check this kind of wound, on how to treat it. You remembered every line of every piece of medical text you'd poured over night after night. You disappeared into the protection of that knowledge for the moment.

    But that protection was fleeting, it was temporary - the paper wall of knowledge could not hold back what you once had an iron wall to contain. In the end, you probably should have called for a Nurse to come and help as you finished, but you couldn't move. Your entire body refused to move as you sat there watching the poor girl who had come to snap you out of your suicidal rage. Even Rama's soothing voice faded away as you cried. You shook and you cried and you screamed wordless screams of pain as everything you wanted to yell came out at once.

    "We're all going to die." You said the words as you cried, the fear rising to the top and needing to be said, "I can't protect everyone. I can't replace Dad." You weren't sure if you were talking to Rama or to Jute as you said the words out loud, "I'm not strong like him. I'm not fast like him. I should have learned from him. I should have spent more time with him. I should have helped him save people, I should have... I should have done something different. I should have spent more time getting faster, or I should have enhanced my senses, I should have... I should have... I should have learned to cultivate, I should have pushed to strengthen the ring even more, I should have done something, something anything. Then he wouldn't be dead. We wouldn't all be dead." You squeezed your hands so hard around your now unarmored knee that you could feel the bruises starting to form. You couldn't feel the front of your head as everything just hurt.

    "Oh Isha..."
    "Isha..." The two people closest to you spoke in near unison, internally and out loud... but only one could reach their arm to rest their oh so small hand on your white knuckle grasp, "It's going to be okay." Her voice trembled as she said it, but she still said it, even as your fear filled her with fear, "We're not gonna die. We're gonna live long and happy lives. We'll be okay."

    If only you could believe her, but you never were the hopeful type. "Everyone I care about is going to die. Just like my Dad. Just like my Uncle. We're going to fight. We're gonna fight until our last breath, and we're going to die protecting this place, and it's not going to matter because we all die. Every. Guardian. Dies. And it's not dignified. It's not beautiful. It's not honorable. It's just bloody and messy. We're losing. We're all losing. My uncle... my Uncle thought that, he thought that I could save us. That I would be a hero. That my compatibility with the oh so incompatible Signet was a sign of a Change, of something improving. I trained. And I trained. And I TRAINED." You huddled down in your seat next to the bed, covering your face as you cried out in fear and shame, "Every day. Every day and every night I worked to be a hero. I wanted to save my family. But in the end even my Uncle knew it was hopeless, didn't he? I was never gonna be able to save everyone. He said he regretted it. That he regretted those days. Those nights. That he wished he hadn't pushed me to it. Would he have regretted it, had I came out better? Had I come out stronger?"

    "I worked. and I worked. And I suffered. And everything hurt. But it was for something. It was for everyone. It was for them. My bones broke and cracked and they became heavy and unnatural. My body ripped and tore itself apart, and I became a monster to everyone, I listened to their whispers and their jibes and their quiet hate they thought I couldn't hear and it was okay because I was becoming a hero to save them. Everyone, everyone, everyone kept promising me that it'd get better and it only gets worse. It gets worse and worse and I can't see anything getting better. I screamed and I fought and I made Dad angry and scared because I thought it would help me save him in the future. I thought that if I volunteered myself, if I became a hero, it'd help him, that I could take some of the load off of his shoulders. That he'd be happier in time. But all I did was make his final year miserable. I never spoke to him except to learn to be a better soldier, I never... I never... I told him he was wrong, I yelled and screamed at him. I ran away, and I nearly got myself killed. I nearly got myself ripped apart by the dead. Maybe if I'd died things would have been better. Maybe if I'd never come back, maybe then something would have changed. Dad would have protected Mom and their new kid and not died. She wouldn't have gotten paralyzed."

    Jute listened in silence as everything came out, every bit of pain cascading, even as you rambled into something she couldn't possibly understand, "Rama... Rama you promised to make me stronger. To make me better than this. You said you'd teach me to be better... that I'd be more than mortal. But all I did was anger the Signet. All I did was weaken myself and offend my teacher, drive a rift further between my family and I as I became less of what they hoped and gained... what did I gain? If I hadn't accepted you, if I hadn't gone that way, would things have been different? Would I have been good enough to save him if I didn't have you - would my Mother had been safe away from the danger if I was the one holding the Signet without you here? Why did you come? Why did you have to be kind and caring, why couldn't you be a... a monster for me to feed off of, to destroy and be better for? Why did you have to make me care and why did you have to care? Why did you have to worry and limit me when you found danger? Why couldn't you be heartless, why couldn't you destroy me and build me anew like the Signet promised? Why couldn't you be like Darpan, he would have... he would have..." Your brain started to throb as you approached the forbidden subject - a different kind of throbbing than before. It felt like it was going to rip itself apart and you cried out in pain and anguish, "AUIGH!"

    "Isha... Isha you're talking to someone who isn't here..." Your friend's voice was concerned, it was scared, as she squeezed your hand gently. "No one... there's no one named Rama in our home. It's okay... it's okay, they're not here..."

    "There is. There is." You rocked back and forth, "Just no one living. I ran away. Do you remember when I ran away? When everyone came looking for me? I didn't find nothing that day. I found... I found death, I found death and the dead. You were right to fear the ghosts hiding in the dark hallways." You shook as you told her the truth, your convulsions as your emotions poured out getting worse not better, "I found them, ghosts deep in the halls. They were going to kill me. But instead I became... I became paired to one. I took one into me. His name is Rama, and when he was alive our realm... our realm flourished, it was wide spread. There weren't Farbeasts, we weren't dying out, we were strong and numerous. His father held my Father's blade, and ruled over hundreds of thousands of people. Can you imagine that, Jute? Can you picture a hundred thousand people living together? And yet he served someone who ruled over millions. I have seen his memories, I have seen so many people that they were impossible to pick apart, a blur of so many voices and faces in one room that they make the Great Hall look like nothing. He's why I changed. Why I... why I decided to start learning to use my Hammer. He used one in life, and he wielded a power... a power that no one here knows about. They held power like the Armaments in their own body. They were all Armaments. He could make the earth tremble with a step, without anything special. He said he could make me one. I was going to... I was going to learn... but then he said it was too dangerous."

    You looked her in the eyes and saw the confusion, "I sound crazy, I know, but I'm not. Everything... everything I've gotten praised for lately, it's been him. He's why everyone thought I was a prodigy on the battlefield, it's because he is that good at it. My hammer came to me as second nature because it was to him. My ability to ward off so many enemies at once came from his ability to walk into them and destroy them all. It's all been him, not me. I'm a fraud. And then... and then the Signet, she hated him. She said he made me weak, and I... I believed... I believed her? Using her hurt, in a way it never did before. Because of him. And so I wouldn't be able to save everyone, I wouldn't be able to be the hero, and she was mad and I was scared. And so I tried to... I tried to overwhelm him, and I'm a monster. He helped me and I tried to kill him. And yet he's been trying to... trying to comfort me, trying to... care for me, and protect me. Just like you... just like I almost killed you... and yet you're... I just... I can't do anything right. I can't. I'm always... I'm always hurting someone. Scaring... someone. Angering someone. And then... and then they die. I can't fix it now. I can't fix anything. I can't protect you or anyone else."

    You leaned into the pull as the small, fragile, and heavily injured girl pulled you closer. Her arms wrapped around you as you shook and sobbed. "I... I spent time with them, you know. Your Uncle... a-and your Dad too. And they... they never were mad at you, whenever they'd talk about you it was... it was loving, it was like you were the best thing in the world. They loved you with... with every bit of love that they had. It's... you don't have to... I think... I know that they are proud of you, as they return to Nakul. Even if you feel like you shamed them." Her labored breathing was soothing as you rest your head gently against the bed. Even as it sounded so pained and tired, the presence was something that soothed. And you slowly felt yourself fading off as she continued to talk through her own exhaustion, "You don't have to be a hero. You don't... I don't need you to protect me all the time. I will... I'll work hard with you, so I can help you. I'm so... so sorry that I relied on you so much. I thought.... I thought you were unbreakable but... I I do know I was wrong. But I'll try hard. Hard enough that you don't have to hold it all yourself. Okay, Isha?" There was a pause in her thought for a long moment, "Isha...?" She asked you it more quietly, as she brushed the rough, unkempt hair that you'd stopped tending to out of your face.

    Only to find your eyes shut tight, as you drifted off to the labored sounds of your friend's promise.

    ---------

    When you woke up, you knew where you were - but not how you got there. You'd recognize the smells of the Hospital from anywhere. You turned over and came face to face with your Mother, sitting... paralyzed in her chair, Lochan behind her as she watched you. The lines of Armament overuse spread all over her body, her dark circles making her look dead to the world, "You had people worried, my little sunspot." She brushed her fingers through your hair as she said it, her tone trying to hide her empty grief, "Rohan feared the worst when you didn't show up to your shift. It took him a lot of effort to carry you both back here without reopening her wounds." You looked past your Mother, and saw Jute asleep in her bed again, "I was worried when we realized she'd snuck out, but..." She gave a wan smile that was clearly forced, "I suppose I can forgive her. It appears to have been needed."

    You stared at her for a moment, and then tears started to form in your eyes, "Mom... what are we going to do...?" You could see the shock on her face as you asked the question - the strong, 'mature for her age' warrior of a daughter acting vulnerable. But soon enough her arms wrapped around you as the few tears you had left came out.

    "We're going to do our very best. Even if it's hard." The tears fell down her face as well, pooling into her sunken cheeks before falling down.

    ----------

    Something needed to change - with you, with your home, with your friends, something. Running into a pointless defense helped a symptom, but not the disease that was slowly crushing in. You had to do something, something real. But maybe you didn't have to do it all on your own.

    [ ] A. Approach Darpan and try to help his plan to create Warriors with Farbeast-like powers.
    [ ] B. Take back the Signet and try to become the hero your Uncle thought you were capable of - and heal the wounded.
    [ ] C. Try to synthesize yourself with Rama under the watchful ghost Seer.
    [ ] D. Continue to absorb Rama's essence into you.
    [ ] E. Attempt to learn Cultivation forcibly by traveling outside the Embrace to a place of power.
    [ ] E1. Take Jute with you as support, once she is well.
    [ ] E2. Try to convince your Mentor to go with you to protect you. (This means talking about Rama)
    [ ] F. Attempt to learn Cultivation forcibly by consuming the spirit-core of a powerful Farbeast, despite the heavy risks.
    [ ] G. Seek out the Treasures of the Embrace in hopes that they may hold some solution.
    [ ] G1. Take Jute with you as support, once she is well.
    [ ] H. Get involved in the politics of the Embrace, and try to mend the current schism that is splitting your people in a time of chaos.
    [ ] I. Seek out the Ghosts of the Outer Embrace, and see if they would be willing or able to bond with others like they did you.
    [ ] J. Write in


    ------

    Hello everyone.
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    I'm reading this in 2024. The writing had been consistently good, but this time you have outdone yourself. It hits me especially hard, as I lost my own father a few years ago. Isha's pain and fury feel familiar, correct even, as they are tearing her apart. The break seems to have done you well. I look forward to the many more chapters I see are still to come.
     
    Adnate said:
    I'm reading this in 2024. The writing had been consistently good, but this time you have outdone yourself. It hits me especially hard, as I lost my own father a few years ago. Isha's pain and fury feel familiar, correct even, as they are tearing her apart. The break seems to have done you well. I look forward to the many more chapters I see are still to come.
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    God damn, re-read the scene and for the second (third?) time it brought tears to my eyes. So real and raw. And damn did Jute deliver on her promise of working hard. What a good friend.
     
    6241, Ascending Void, Mirrors
  • Threadmarks
    • 6241, Ascending Void

    When you chose to head to the Northwest, you weren't sure what you were expecting. Well, actually, you were. More trees. More glowing fungus. More plants with fruit that seemed to have scent more akin to sound than smell. And really, that was all you could expect. In your short time within the treasure trove that Rama was drooling over even as a ghost, you had grown just a little numb to it. Your hope of finding something different was all that really made you press on, as you left your Warding Willow.

    Oh, it was all quite impressive, and quite important too; if you could take home samples of all this, think of what your Mother could do with them. The few plants that you recognized were key ingredients to things like the potions that allowed your people to procreate, poultices that could heal burns as quickly as the Signet, and medicines that could have allowed your Uncle Aan to live without pain, even to his last days. You knew their value. And in the forest you found more of these plants than the Garden could produce in a hundred years.

    And yet it felt worthless, as you simply went through more trees. You checked around the bases of them, looking at their roots - because Rama suggested a tree may have grown over the entry way to the Vault. You crawled under bushes made of steelrazor-nettle because Garm thought that Rama was too lax with his searching measures - leaving you with small cuts over the back of your head, where Garm did not cover. More than once you encounter small nests of smaller Farbeast variants than most you'd ever seen - much like the Flittering Fireflashes, they were individually weak. This was clear because many of them actually seemed to be awake despite the Sun being at its highest.

    This also meant they were literally nothing to you, as you crushed nest after nest of various fist-sized-at-largest Farbeasts. Saving the largest ones to be used in your meals, of course. Their corpses fit in the pockets of Garm, they were so small.

    "Oh yes, just use me to carry a bunch of bloody bodies! I loooove this. The feeling of the.... oozing... warm... gooe-yness. Inside of me. But also outside of me. Oh yeah, definitely a pleasant experience. Top ten for me, for sure. So glad I could experience this with you, Isha my friend-caretaker-master-whateveryouwannabecalledtoday." The voice of the Armament was like each bell from the normal chorus was being struck at just a very slightly different timing than the last - leaving a discordant feel that told you exactly how he felt about it.

    "I don't have anywhere else to put it, and I'm going to need to eat later. If you have some secret method of creating a bag to carry this stuff in right now, please feel free to suggest it. Because I don't exactly know how to weave a basket myself." Handcrafts were below your station to do as a job to begin with - and you'd always been too busy to pick it up as a hobby, as some Guardians may have done.

    "Ohyes-excellent! Royal Pocket! Bring will to bear, imagine the... imagine the body in your soulspace. Yeah! Letsdothatletsputthebodyinyoursoulinstead." Garm's discomfort with the body being shoved into the pocket seemed to be overriding some of his normal smugness.

    "Soulspace pockets are a dangerous method." Rama was less concerned with Garm's current suffering, "By bringing something into your soulspace, you are giving it full access to your spirit. It can kill you. Bringing the dead into it is one of the most dangerous things you possibly can do." His words were wise... until he followed it up, "Though I never managed to manifest one myself. It's a difficult skill, much easier to simply purchase or have created a Space-Twisting container or some sort."

    "I can protect you from those dangers!"     Garm was bartering at this point, and you pulled the bodies out to let him speak a little more comprehensibly, "Royal Pocket is no simple soulspace opening technique. It is one infused with Will! And your Will is eternal in your Soul. So nothing can defy it. So no matter what you draw into it, the most deadly poisons, the most powerful sacred artifacts, whatever it is, we can contain it! No problem. Please. I don't want that squishy feeling inside of me again. It's like being a disgusting biological being myself, which is a more horrific fate than being split into dozens of split personalities for hundreds, thousands, or other questionable amount of years! And I'd know, I went through that very specific scenario I just listed!"

    You were not heartless enough to put your fully-equal-partner through something so disgusting that they'd rather be split up again rather than go through it, so you sighed out an annoyed, "Fine, I'll carry the stupid bodies myself for now." Your hands were now full of dead bird-beasts, and you weren't really a fan of that either, "I'm not going to try to practice a new technique in the middle of nowhere when we have better things to do." You wished that you had been a little more well prepared for travel; you didn't even have your medicinal pack you usually wore. That was left behind the barricades at home, far from the front-est of lines you tried to place yourself in.

    --------

    Within a matter of minutes you'd discarded the corpses that would have made a snack for you at most, because they were a pain to carry without a bag. The idea of trying to teach yourself to weave a basket, or trying to turn your soul into one with Garm, was briefly tempting. But as you seriously pondered the idea as you dug near another set of large overgrown roots, Rama's voice shook your annoyed reverie.

    "These plants look weird. Look at that sheen." His voice was tinged with... confusion? Worry? You weren't certain, but nothing good.

    But you'd also been seeing shining plants all day. So it didn't shake you into awareness, it shook you into more annoyance as you opened your mouth to say, "Like every othe-" And then you noticed exactly what he was saying. It wasn't just the tree roots that were reflecting the light. It wasn't the flowers next to them either. Or the bush across the way, or the blades of grass, or the leaves above... every single piece of plant matter had an oddly reflective sheen to it. And as you looked around, you felt more and more secure in the knowledge that you weren't mistaking that.

    It was everything. And as you walked further, it became more pronounced. You saw plants that you recognized, but now they were reflecting Garm's golden light back at you, instead of being in their typical greens, reds, purples, and other hues. Those hues still existed, but under the golden light that bounced back at you almost blindingly.

    It wasn't just the plants either. A Farbeast rushed at you as you tried to get your bearings on the sudden shift, and its fur and chitin both were a reflective silver, as you slammed your fist through its head. You felt the impact twice again as much as you normally would, and it left your hand throbbing for a few seconds - but the beast was dead and gone, its canine head caved in, the shining exoskeleton that had made a helmet-like fixture upon its head not actually stopping you.

    "What the...?" The blood on your hand was silver, as it dripped off. The beast itself was bleeding reflective silver blood, and that was a step far enough to make your stomach start spinning. You felt a tightness as everything felt twisty for a moment.

    And then you realized it wasn't disgust or discomfort causing that. It was dread and fear. Because as you looked through the reflective treeline, you saw something you didn't notice. Something that blended in, reflecting everything around it. Something that looked like just more forest. Something whose head was the size of the Elder Boar you had nearly died against, two Suns before.

    "Oh, wow, yeah. Just so you know, that thing ate an Armament." Garm chimed in as you felt the palpable dread in your soul for a moment. The beast seemed to be sleeping under the 'sun' that was far above, but you still felt fear from it. It was stronger than anything living that you'd ever seen, and you could tell that at a glance.

    "What!?" You raised your voice a little too loud, covering your mouth suddenly. But the kaiju-sized Farbeast did not stir in its slumber, despite the blood of its kin on your hands and the words coming from your lips. Instead you thought the rest, "What do you mean it ate an Armament!?"

    "I mean, I've been sensing an Armament for like.... since before we left. You know, when you asked me if I could do it. Aaaand we're really close to one. And there's a giant giant monster right there. Where I sense it. So either it's sleeping on top of it, or it ate it. Aaand I'm guessing it's not just snoozing on it, since it's entire essence structure appears to have been remade by it."     If Garm could roll his eye without straining your spiritual pathways, you were pretty sure he would be doing so. Because he spoke like you were stupid.

    "And you didn't think to tell us there was an Armament nearby?" Rama's voice came first in the chorus that was now your soulspace and mind.

    But you weren't long after, "Why keep that a secret until now?!"

    "Uh... you didn't ask. You said our mission was to go find Darpan and Mala. And then you said that our mission was to find stuff to barter with Darpan and Mala. And then you kept asking for advice on where a vault might be hidden in the middle of a forest. Well, I didn't think my child would be in the Vault. Because I sensed it above ground. You see? So since you never said     you wanted to know where Armaments were... I didn't tell you. It wasn't pertinent to what you said we were looking for."

    An 'average' Elder would still fit inside your home and not fill the entire wall to wall of a hallway - that was the scale your home survived in. Where beasts dozens of feet tall were not scraping the roof. But this beast would only fit in a single room of your home - and even the Great Hall would struggle with it, from what little you could discern. And yet, despite this size, it seemed nearly invisible - if it weren't for your extremely particularly keen sight, you wouldn't have noticed it before walking straight into it.

    Part of you wanted to kill it. To end it before it could wake up. The Sun was high, and powerful, and it would be kept contained by it, you were certain. Even if it did wake up, something of that size had to be weakened vastly, did it not?

    And yet the feeling in your stomach from earlier still lingered in your mind. It felt like being in the presence of Haimi, before you met Garm. Like you could have died at any moment just from being this close to it. Could you kill it? What would happen if you woke it and couldn't?

    But an entire Armament... it was one of the pieces of Lost History for your people, something left behind in the destruciton of everything besides the Embrace under the Farbeast scourge's endless hunger. It was so close you could reach it; and just by bringing that home you'd be... well, bringing home one Armament bought you near worship with many normal people. Bringing home a second... no one would be able to blame you for disappearing. It'd write away any sin you made to your people on its own.

    All that lay between it was a multiple hundred foot long monster.

    [x] A. Go at it with a full force Limit Breaking attack to try and destroy the Kaiju before it can wake up.
    [x] B. Don't limit break, but try to kill it with force.
    [x] C. Attempt to use your medical knowledge to open wounds to slowly bleed out the massive beast without waking it.
    [x] D. Make use of the poisonous plants in the treasure trove around you to try and poison the beast [Herblore + Alchemy is too low to ever succeed]
    [x] E. Turn around and leave. Quickly return to the Warding Willow, and hope the beast stays asleep until after your scent is gone from the area.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • [x] C. Attempt to use your medical knowledge to open wounds to slowly bleed out the massive beast without waking it.

    It should be suppressed with heavenly chains down to 4.0 but it likely has powerful physical mods like us with the huge size and mirror sheen. Maybe even a force reflection ability? If it wakes up eventually from the bleeding it will still start the fight wounded and we can still limit break.
     
    Didn't we manage to one shot an elder with a limit break super hammer attack pre-garm?

    I feel like we should be able to kill it if we go full force.
     
    [x] C. Attempt to use your medical knowledge to open wounds to slowly bleed out the massive beast without waking it.

    Yeah, hopefully even if it wakes up, it'll be weakened enough that we'd be able to fight or flee
     
    beardetmonkey said:
    Didn't we manage to one shot an elder with a limit break super hammer attack pre-garm?

    I feel like we should be able to kill it if we go full force.
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    We severely wounded an elder bird with the magnet rail gun that obliterated our hammer. We also wounded an almost-elder that Guarav claimed was one in a team fight by hitting it over and over.

    Our strength now is way higher than that though. We killed the fish elder and that as mostly about finally managing it bring our strength the bear with real leverage. If we'd hit that while it was sleeping it would have splattered. This thing is about 10x the size of that elder we took down with a full team though. I imagine it being like us if we'd had 10 more years to do body mods but were still under the conventional cultivation limit. Only a portion of our physical strength comes from Garm (the mermaid treasure) because we haven't had time to cultivate even to 3.0. Most is from the signet, so it's possible to get as strong as we are currently without the Garm cheat.

    I think we would win the flight too but Danger Sense is saying there's real risk here, probably the risk is it squishes us with its giant mass and even the anklet can't heal us from that.
     
    [x] C. Attempt to use your medical knowledge to open wounds to slowly bleed out the massive beast without waking it.

    I think the only real options here are to bleed it out or to run. A full force attack might injure it, but our danger sense is warning us that it vastly outclasses us. We also have been explicitly told that the armament it ate has enhanced its body and who knows what effects that has had.

    We arent even close to the power cap that can be reached through conventional cultivation + years of full body mods and whil garm and our treasures have improved us drastically, we are still far from invincable.
     
    A couple of other thoughts:

    1) If our Will is absolutely supreme in our own soul then techniques that manipulate our own soul like the soul space one should be very easy to learn and relatively safe even though according to Rama that's generally inadvisable. There might be another cheat there, like using Garm to make permanent soul-mods like the Signet's body mods. Would probably help to have Darpan's Armament for that though. What leaps to mind is bypassing the normal limit of having a single method of cultivation by partitioning our soul, or reinforcing our soul to hold more ghosts.

    2) We should eat this thing. We had the option to eat an elder before to enhance our healing. It'll rot before we bring it home. We can mix its heart with some of these rare herbs and get a cultivation stew going.
     
    Woo! Thanks for the update Kitty!

    This isn't a turn I saw coming but it's one I welcome. Time to start really building the legend.

    [x] C. Attempt to use your medical knowledge to open wounds to slowly bleed out the massive beast without waking it.

    Mr. Prokosch said:
    A couple of other thoughts:

    1) If our Will is absolutely supreme in our own soul then techniques that manipulate our own soul like the soul space one should be very easy to learn and relatively safe even though according to Rama that's generally inadvisable. There might be another cheat there, like using Garm to make permanent soul-mods like the Signet's body mods. Would probably help to have Darpan's Armament for that though. What leaps to mind is bypassing the normal limit of having a single method of cultivation by partitioning our soul, or reinforcing our soul to hold more ghosts.

    2) We should eat this thing. We had the option to eat an elder before to enhance our healing. It'll rot before we bring it home. We can mix its heart with some of these rare herbs and get a cultivation stew going.
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    1) So much yes to all of this. I agree the soul angle is an as yet unknown treasure trove of potential. The idea of partitioning the soul to take multiple paths of cultivation sounds dangerous and powerful in the best way. And to be honest, it might even gel with reinforcing the soul to be able to hold more spirit companions. I can imagine madness might be a risk with such a path, and having more powerful friends inside us to help us manage and maintain it could be essential. It will likely take a lot of developing Isha's Will, but I can see a future where she has a whole host of spirit companions between ghosts and armaments, and with a strong enough will she should be able to lay down strict rules for the spirits to interact and operate in her soul/mind-space effectively without disrupting her too much. As Rama is able to use his own power and attention to help Isha with many things, perhaps more guides could do the same for other processes, such as helping to maintain and manage a partitioned Soul & Ways. It's also a kind of following in Nakuls spirit-smithing path but inversely. Instead of making things out of other peoples souls, working with Isha's soul. This fits neatly with her desire not to be a tyrant like Nakul. But it would 100% require Darpan and Mala's Armaments. Either with their assistance or after we take them from them.

    This could even be a path to the Treasure Cultivation method KittyEmpress was talking about not too long ago, which really captured my interest.

    2) YES. Now we're cooking with gas folks.
     
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