Chapter 423: Chapter 423 - We Can Rebuild Her, We Have The Te-... Wait Is This Actually Any Better?
Elua er Goltbred began to fit her *very* self-made rope through the slightly reinforced eyelets on the large flat leaves she’d gathered. Making a very makeshift sort of tunic out of them. When it came time, she would be focusing on nothing but her spirit as a sensory method and her physical energy paths... which meant her current defenses - at least around her skin would drop to nothing.
"Don’t you have a nice piece of clothing already? That silver dress."
"I do. Yet, I refuse to clean this abhorrent substance off of the garment I married my beloved in. Again. Or to... make another memory of throwing up on it."
The ancient cultivator dipped a small cup into one of the cooling batches and took a slow, deep quaff. Her face remained impressively even despite what Madrigil was sure should be an appalling taste. Considering so much of that particular sense was tied to smell.
’Not to mention the sludge like thickness. I kind of want to try it. But I’m sure I would quite literally die.’
The noble sighed and stood to his feet once more, already feeling the pressure to get going. Overstaying his welcome was not something new, but not pressing his luck was something the man was learning quite well.
"How long are you estimating this will take? I’m sure I will be perfectly fine finding things to do, but our other prisoner is sure to get very... well, she’s going to want to talk to me because you are not around to talk to. I’d prefer to minimize that."
"Weeks, probably. Maybe a month in the total period of phases I have planned. But that’s just a hopeful guess. And you must not approach past the sigilry I’m sure you studied on your way here. They’ll be active and lethal going forward."
She set down the cup and fixed him with mint eyes that seemed not to care as much which way things went, despite her warnings. He could also tell that she was prepared to force him out - and if he resisted, end things quickly. Because at that point, he would be messing with the plan she made to become more ’complete’, more for Qat than herself.
"I cannot afford distractions. Don’t come back to this section of the Exclave until you see me show up and tell you it’s safe. It’s time for you to leave."
"Understood. I’ll... find other areas to explore."
"Good. Give me at least three days before even checking if the barriers are down. And warn Sevra. I might not be very happy if she dies - and I have no way of guaranteeing how I might react. But it will certainly be less controlled than this conversation."
Madrigil could feel that weighty spirit pressing down on him, sense the single bubble of air in front of her person she let him see, and the hand that pressed lightly over it like a cannon ready to be fired. Controlled was definitely a word for it. Excessive was another, but in the grand scheme of binary situations...
’She has not killed me yet. I am still doing fine.’
⟠ ⟠ ⟠
Elua sat cross-legged on the platform she’d cleared at the center of her ’laboratory’. Four days after dismissing the exiled noble from another continent, the awful-tasting brew had become routine - she consumed it like medicine every hour, maintaining the energy density her body needed. But the hard part wasn’t the preparation she’d done in the days before then.
The hard part was sitting still and deliberately ignoring everything that had kept her highly functional for fifteen years. Layers upon layers of refinement, each one a technique honed across her whole existence to an elegantly efficient simplicity that no one she knew now would ever call simple. Each technique was perfectly logical for the cultivator she used to be.
Days of reaching inward with her awareness, mapping the intricate nature of every result of a completely unguided physical energy system, had given her more proof that she had sought strength at a cost. The primary circulation pattern she used before - a complex corkscrewing helix that moved it all through her vital channels and coiled through her organs - had been refined to work with a Demi-God’s not quite *human* anymore body.
Elua had of course known that and modified the technique to the one she taught her young disciples. But that wasn’t the only problem. Every little thing she thought she had adjusted right because it ’worked’ began to show faults. She’d merely been forcing it to work through constant ingrained micro-adjustments and pure spiritual pressure.
"And to think, I once mocked a man incessantly because he was sure that pure fighting spirit could sustain someone. Well, I’m both proof he was wrong... and proof he was right up until a limit."
The moment she once again released conscious control of the still-in-development articulation of one of her former techniques, her physical energy lurched inside her. Like a river suddenly freed from a dam. She gritted her teeth as semi-familiar sensations flooded through her teenage frame - not pain, exactly, but a profound discomfort that she had been enduring each time as she watched the *way* it unfolded out of the patterns.
With that, she could tell what parts were clinging and what parts were bursting too fast. Her skin visibly steamed from the spike of internal temperature. Sucking in a cooling breath, she fought not to fix it immediately... to gather the information instead of rushing to conclusions that would re-align it with old, defunct hypotheses.
Her mental reflexes screamed at her to restore the familiar pattern before she was attacked. Five thousand years demanded she take control and stop being weak. Guide the energy back, maintain the efficiency she’d worked so hard to achieve in that old form and life.
But Elua er Goltbred observed. Like she did with every spiritual technique that used to fail. Every new stitch pattern within leather. Each new acid that had been formulated and experimented with.
’I’d grown complacent, but hard work without instant reward - and sometimes no reward. This I know.’
Her legs grew numb when the energy pooled too thickly near the base of her spine. Something her ancient knowledge insisted a cultivator body shouldn’t be doing. Sluggishly at first, she routed it like water trying to spread out over hastily cut channels on hardened earth. Again seeking the spots and paths that were natural and not forced.
’This teenage frame almost seems confused by the sudden freedom. Well, I’d be uncertain too if exploring corridors that had been locked away for years. Just breathe.’
Another sip of the revolting energy supplement told her she wouldn’t have time this session to finish that area. Deliberately setting a new pattern, she identified the layer of muscle tissue she was concerned with... not most, but greatly. Her facial expression management could be replicated without any worry.
The way to thread energy through them to lock them down was ’easy’. Practice at being as genuine as possible these months while trying to prevent herself from using that method... had actually given her a lot of data. And she also had years of it from her facade’s displays that had been growing more complex and emotive.
Intricate micro-tensions that her spiritual self-delusion had used to maintain perfect emotional control of what it was trying to display - often that she was ’sweet’ and absolutely ’innocent’. Making those same expressions belong to her was not only about allowing the freedom, but convincing her spirit that it was alright to show it to others.
This one was harder to let go entirely, so she had been working on it before breaks in every seven hour meditation. She felt naked and vulnerable at the thought that her face might actually show what she was thinking - with all the disgust, hatred, and somehow negative leaning ambivalence that she knew ran through her mind so much.
The energy release this time made her entire face tingle as a decade of deadening tension unwound a little further. Working through those little failures that always caused her smiles to look not quite right or her frowns to look far more severe than she was feeling.
She touched her cheeks experimentally to feel how the loose softness of them could tighten at so many angles so easily now. The heiress, even without her facade, was well on her way to being as expressive as she could be with it. When she returned to the continent, her illusions could hide her when she wanted to.
"But everything else would be real. *Now*, real. Not just the reality of who I was..."
For a moment, her reflection in the mirror she had made a while back, to practice her expressions, showed her something she hadn’t seen from herself in too long. Happy tears were seen falling down her cheeks in the silver surface. Deposited on the foot round slab of polished quartz that she sectioned out of a giant crystal she found underground.
The unguarded expression felt like something she could not have shown without her facade in this life. Something that she hadn’t shown at all for ’real’... since around the time she was probably less than five hundred years old.
Her reflexes tried to kick in again, attempting to snap back to the familiar, unwasteful sort of stiff control. Because every little quiver of her lip and squint of her eyes, the too rapid blinking and the sniffling... it all used tiny, ’unnecessary’ amounts of physical energy.
All just to show things that she could with her illusions, with her influential spirit - and have it be exactly what was needed to be seen by the other person. But she knew she could do that in a different way, now. So through her tears she glared at the reflection... at herself.
And like usual, she had a few things to say - to the inanimate object, depending on the angle you were watching.
"No. You’re not *allowed* to hide anymore. You don’t get to cling to her acceptance of you and call it ’good enough’ any longer. This is part of what you wanted before you met her. This is who you want her to love as much as she did before... more! You want her to love you *more* and more because you’re trying your best like she is!"
Her stomp as she stood made a small crack in the stone underneath her - because her Trigger activations were still working quite well, having been completely worked out through practice in this life. She looked down at it, then at the twelve others in a sort of spiral around the area... that she kept moving a few feet over and away from before each new physical energy rehabilitation session.
’This is what I get for forgoing the spiritual barriers and relying only on the unstable energy surging around in my body...’
The glistening mint eyed girl was sure that it was going to be closer to a very long month, after these four days.