CHAPTER 30
Azra'il - POV
Norn arrived at dawn with the sort of stubborn punctuality only babies who've decided to show up right on the midwife's schedule seem to manage, as though she'd checked the official timetable before starting labour.
She had Zenith's blonde hair, Paul's eyes, and the still-undecided face of a newborn who hasn't quite settled on her own features yet, though a few genetic instructions were already coming through loud and clear.
Zenith cried. Paul sobbed like a frightened child. Rudeus stood frozen, his eyes bright with the rigid restraint of someone who'd made a solemn vow not to shed a single tear and was holding to it through sheer visible effort.
I limited myself to observing, checking my new sister's vital signs to confirm everything sat within the expected biological range.
[Healthy newborn. Steady pulse, clear airways. All indicators fall within the ideal range.]
〈Excellent. A promising start to the house's new demographics.〉
Then came the complication with Aisha.
The midwife had estimated Lilia's delivery for a few days later. Lilia herself insisted she felt perfectly capable and asked to go prepare the family's lunch, a suggestion the table vetoed unanimously, including a vote from me, which was rare enough given my usual disinterest in Paul's decisions.
Three hours after Norn's birth, Aisha decided she had no intention whatsoever of waiting for the suggested schedule.
What followed demanded every scrap of medical and cultivation knowledge I'd built up over centuries studying fragile bodies. Aisha came early, too small by any safe measure, her lungs too underdeveloped to manage the expansion needed to oxygenate her blood.
Rudeus moved at once. He poured his monumental mana reserve into a healing spell with that stubborn determination he adopted whenever he decided physics had no right to argue with him.
I applied techniques this world had no knowledge of. I guided invisible threads of energy through the meridians of that tiny body, clearing the internal pathways and coaxing her organs back into rhythm with the precision of someone who had once performed spiritual surgery on emperors and fallen gods.
Aisha accepted the intervention and chose to stay in this plane of existence.
She had Lilia's dark hair and Paul's eyes. Even a few minutes into life outside the womb, her expression already carried the look of someone who'd arrived in the world with a firmly formed and rather critical opinion of her surroundings.
Lilia went quiet for a long stretch after the procedure ended. It was the particular stillness of someone who'd come within a hair's breadth of losing the thing she treasured most and was still working through the fact that the tragedy had been averted.
[Both infant specimens are stable. Aisha will need thermal and nutritional monitoring over the coming weeks, but the prognosis is good.]
〈I know. Her internal structure responded well to the stimulus.〉
[You and Rudeus carried out a remarkable intervention by the standards of this era.]
〈Rudeus supplied the raw force needed for cellular regeneration. I merely adjusted the flow channels.〉
[Noted. With the observation that your modesty is a generous concession.]
I watched the two babies in their respective wicker cots once the domestic chaos had settled. Norn slept with the ease of someone who'd found a comfortable spot and simply assumed the world existed to serve her. Aisha wore the exhaustion of a soldier fresh off a successful campaign, resting with her fists still clenched.
I turned to my reflection in the bedroom window.
Snow-white hair. Blue eyes carrying an inner luminescence with no equivalent anywhere in the Greyrat family tree. Skin noticeably paler than either parent's.
〈Eos, run a quick comparative scan between my appearance and the family markers.〉
[Norn shows Zenith's hair colour and Paul's eyes. Aisha inherited Lilia's pigmentation and Paul's eyes. Rudeus displays paternal features with structural influence from Zenith. You present hair, eye, and thermal traits that match no genetic record from either biological parent.]
〈Which formally establishes me as the house's visual anomaly.〉
[The shape of your jaw bears a vague resemblance to Zenith's if the analytical angle is adjusted by fifteen degrees.]
〈That's the scientific equivalent of a low-grade genetic consolation prize.〉
[It's the only positive morphological data point available in the files.]
Our household's routine changed profoundly with the children's arrival. The house grew louder, more alive, saturated with that chaotic energy that signals a space has reached the limit of occupants it was designed for.
Norn cried.
That was the most precise and comprehensive description I could offer of her behaviour in those first weeks. She cried when hungry, which made sense. She cried when her nappy was wet, which also made sense. But she also cried when the angle of sunlight shifted on the wall, or when she spotted a piece of furniture that hadn't been in her field of vision the day before.
Aisha, for her part, had developed a considerably more efficient operating system.
She'd hear Norn crying in the next room.
And start crying in unison, at matching volume.
[Aisha appears to operate on the logic that if Norn identified a threat to wellbeing significant enough to warrant an alarm, the data is reliable enough to replicate without independent verification.]
〈That's called conserving analytical effort, Eos. A rather clever survival strategy for something weighing under four kilos.〉
[For a newborn, the heuristic is perfectly functional.]
〈Rudeus and I never subjected the household to that particular kind of noise pollution as infants.〉
During feeding times, Rudeus would drift towards Zenith's lap under the academic pretext of checking "the efficiency of the neonatal latch and the nutritional quality of breast milk." He kept his lips faintly parted and wore that look of deep scientific concentration he trotted out whenever trying to smuggle an act of depravity past as medical curiosity.
I intercepted his approach by raising a heavy wooden spoon a few centimetres from his snout.
"If you don't get that face away from our mother's chest in the next two seconds, you chubby little pervert," I said, keeping my voice flat, "I will use this household implement to perform some structural corrections to your skull."
Rudeus recoiled at once, coughing to mask his panic. "I was merely exercising my brotherly concern for Norn's hydration!"
"Her hydration is doing perfectly well without your optical supervision. Return to your duties before I test the reach of this spoon."
He retreated to the corner of the table with commendable haste, adopting a posture of caution I'd consider exemplary for healthy sibling relations.
Aisha watched these episodes with those eyes of Paul's, already carrying an unusual analytical focus for a baby of only a few weeks.
〈She's mapping my movement patterns.〉
[Eye-tracking data confirms the hypothesis. Aisha displays early cognitive activity.]
〈Excellent. We'll have at least one pragmatic mind in the next generation of this house.〉
------------(*)------------
The Golden Muscles stage settled into place one cold morning at the waterfall, with the stillness of cultivation processes that reach maturity without needing any fireworks to announce it.
My muscle fibres now answered with surgical precision. To any outside observer, I still looked like nothing more than a skinny girl with white hair. But I felt the difference with the clarity of someone who knew every nerve ending in that structure: contraction now cost less energy, relaxation was complete, and my reaction speed had improved by a measurable margin.
[Golden Muscles stage complete. Fourth level of Corporeal Refinement consolidated. Next objective: Jade Body.]
〈What are the practical improvements to my physique?〉
[Raw physical strength has increased by sixty per cent. Mechanical energy distribution in movement is more efficient, allowing you to produce greater impact vectors with less biological wear. The physical host is finally integrating with the cultivation rather than merely housing the energy flow.]
〈Then it's time for a field test.〉
[I had already anticipated that decision from your behavioural history.]
The forest around Buena had a geography I'd learned to read across centuries of fighting on every kind of terrain. I read the density of the foliage, the moisture of the soil, the sudden absence of animal noise that gave away some foreign presence in the area.
I walked deeper than Paul's usual patrols or the local hunters tended to cover, reaching the point where the forest forgot civilisation and became simply wild territory.
〈Eos, access the dimensional inventory. Drop the box's disguise and pull out the training Jian.〉
The wooden sword appeared in my hands. Not a large blade; it had been shaped to the exact proportions of a body that understood swordsmanship as an extension of its own will. The wood carried that dark colouring of materials aged past ordinary organic decay, into something approaching mineral hardness.
Golden kintsugi veins ran the length of the dark wood like the branches of an ancient river. Each gold line marked a fracture I'd repaired with gold dust in a past life. The blade had broken in battles across eras I could barely name, and each break had been mended so the joints came out denser and more resilient than the original material.
More than a thousand reincarnations. And the same weapon rested in my hands once again.
I ran through the first warm-up movement in the air, the classic arc I'd learned centuries ago. My fingers found the grip with the precision of a reflex no childish biology could ever erase.
〈Let's get to work.〉
The first Treants that crossed my path were a pointless waste of physical effort.
Their roots surfaced from the ground with a wet groan, reaching for my ankles with the slow clumsiness of forest creatures that had never crossed paths with a real opponent. I sidestepped the advance before the branches got close. The Jian traced a short, precise horizontal arc, splitting the first monster's core with a dry crack.
[Three additional units detected to the east.]
I didn't break stride.
The momentum from the dodge carried straight into the next step. My body accelerated between the trunks with the fluency of someone who'd already run that exact combat choreography in dozens of different bodies. The Jian crossed the line of the three cores in a single clean rotation. The monsters stood frozen for a fraction of a second before collapsing together into the damp earth.
Nineteen seconds of activity.
〈That was pathetic, Eos.〉
[For the resistance parameters of ordinary Treants, the result was expected.]
〈For my own level of development too. I needed a stress test, not a spot of gardening.〉
The Greater Treant announced its attack by splitting the ground beneath my feet, a gesture I appreciated as a courtesy before hostilities properly began.
Roots as thick as young tree trunks burst from the soil in six directions at once. I leapt clear, the roots slamming into the space I'd occupied with enough force to send earth and stone flying. I closed in before the creature could pull its limbs back, striking the Jian against the central trunk. The blade sank into the wood, but the bark healed over instantly, sealing the gash as though the impact had never happened.
〈Active cellular regeneration through local mana flow. Finally, an opponent with something worth calling a tactic.〉
The upper branches came down in a swift arc, thick as roof beams. I dodged the first strike. The second clipped my left shoulder, throwing me a few metres sideways.
I didn't lose my footing. My body, strengthened by the Golden Muscles, absorbed the blow without any structural damage. If anything, the collision sparked a renewed interest in the fight.
The creature combined roots and branches in a rapid sequence, adjusting to my evasions in real time. Every gap I tried to exploit was closed off by its constant regeneration. Something that had survived long enough in the deep forest to develop even a rough instinct for combat deserved, at the very least, a decent technique from me.
I fell back three quick paces and shifted my breathing pattern.
"Flow Breathing, ascending variation."
I sent mana surging into my legs all at once, launching into a vertical leap with no prior warning in my body's posture. The monster tried to raise its guard too late. At the peak of the jump, with the forest air freezing still around the blade, my Jian blazed with compressed mana, and I brought the strike down with the full weight of my body concentrated in the dark wood.
"Heavenly Strike, First Cut."
The impact produced a sharp, thunderous crack that sent a green rain of leaves falling from the nearby trees. The Greater Treant's structure collapsed from within, its life energy dissolving into the ground.
I landed steadily, feeling only a slight strain in my left shoulder, which my energy channels would mend within a few hours.
〈Forty seconds of honest physical resistance. The best specimen this forest has produced today.〉
[Which isn't exactly a glowing endorsement of the local fauna.]
〈It wasn't meant to be.〉
The Magic Boar gave no warning sound before charging, a stance I respect as sound military philosophy, though rather rude given that I hadn't provoked it.
The ground shook, and the mass of muscle and ivory tusks burst from the undergrowth in a straight line, running with the blind conviction of creatures that had never met a physical obstacle capable of resisting their impact. I dodged diagonally at the last possible instant. The animal's hot breath swept across my face, its tusks passing so close the displaced air produced an uncomfortable buzz in my left ear.
Its speed exceeded what its body mass should have allowed.
〈Acceptable.〉
The animal spun without losing momentum, launching a new charge with no gap between attacks. This time I used the terrain's angle to my advantage. I dodged the line of impact and, with my free hand, applied precise pressure to the side of the boar's snout as it passed, its tusks tearing through nothing but air, while the Jian found its flank in the same motion.
It was a shallow cut on the thick hide, but enough for the boar to register the threat.
It stopped running, turning slowly towards me. Its small red eyes fixed on my position with an attention entirely different from the first blind charge. That was animal intelligence waking up, the instant a creature processes that it's found a predator capable of neutralising its raw strength. The irrational fury was gone, replaced by silent assessment.
The silence between us lasted a full three seconds.
It was the most interesting stretch of time I experienced that afternoon.
Then the boar lowered its head and charged at full force. Its legs tore through the roots at every stride, cutting a trench of churned earth and dead leaves behind it. I waited until it reached the edge of safe distance, then advanced straight into the line of impact instead of the usual lateral dodge.
"Storm Breathing, Lightning Step."
My Golden Muscles contracted in a burst of energy. My body crossed the distance in a single linear motion, placing me at the boar's vulnerable side in the exact millisecond it no longer had the traction to correct its collision course. Mana compressed around the Jian with enough intensity to visibly bend the light, and the crosscut split one of the animal's ivory tusks with the dry crack of old wood snapping.
The boar shrieked in pain, stumbled over its own momentum, but managed to stay upright.
It spun with a roar that scattered birds from the treetops. Missing a tusk, its balance compromised, its movements grew slower and more predictable. But raw strength at that scale becomes more dangerous, not less, once precision is gone, and I'd inhabited bodies that hadn't survived that basic lesson before.
I waited for it to close in. Ten metres. Five. Two.
"Heavenly Strike, Third Cut, Reversed Flow variation."
I advanced to meet the final charge, turning the animal's own kinetic energy against its physical structure. The Jian traced a perfect rising arc, finding the joint beneath the skull where all that weight and speed became an unavoidable mechanical weakness.
The boar and my wooden Jian met at the same point in space.
Only one of us remained standing afterwards.
The forest's silence returned gradually, with the slow pace of ecosystems settling back into rhythm after a violent disturbance passes through. First came the distant, cautious birdsong; then the steady sound of wind through the high leaves.
I stood still in the clearing, my breathing perfectly even, the Jian resting in my left hand. The golden kintsugi veins caught the last rays of sunlight filtering through the canopy.
I looked at the fallen boar, then at the wreckage of the Treants, and finally at the vast green expanse of the Buena forest. It was a landscape that had just handed over the full extent of its technical challenge.
〈Two weeks of intensive training, Eos. And this was the toughest opponent this stretch of forest had to offer.〉
[Records confirm the data. The local fauna presents no specimens with higher mana density or structured combat ability.]
〈I've fought cultivators who forced me into three straight days of duelling without a moment's rest, Eos. I've duelled demigods whose side-effects alone tore entire mountain ranges apart. I've faced anomalies with no name in any civilised tongue.〉
[Records of all those battles are archived in our system.]
〈And the pinnacle of what Vila Buena can offer is a pig with tusks and a tree with combat ambitions.〉
[Vila Buena is unanimously catalogued as a low-risk area by every available agency and geographical guide.]
〈Which was an invaluable tactical advantage back when I was a baby who couldn't walk past the edge of our beaten-earth yard.〉
The Jian sat warm in my hand, an object that had already taught me to fight in battles making this afternoon look like a basic warm-up drill for beginners. Every one of those gold kintsugi lines told the story of a break suffered in a different body, under a different sky, that my soul had stubbornly stitched back together with gold.
It had survived every one of my deaths. And the best test the Buena forest could offer it today had been a wild boar.
〈Eos, we need to have a sober, analytical conversation about our medium-term prospects.〉
[I had projected the start of this conversation some weeks ago.]
〈Vila Buena is a peaceful environment. It offers excellent conditions for raising small children and for a safe start to cultivation.〉
[But?]
I looked at the deep forest one last time. At the monster carcasses beginning to dissolve into mana dust, and at the distance between the tree trunks, which somehow seemed to have shrunk over the past weeks.
〈But a good start is exactly that: a starting mark. And I passed the starting point of this development a long time ago.〉
Buena was an extremely peaceful place to live.
There were tea leaves acceptable for my daily infusions. There was the waterfall with clean mana flow for the first stages of bodily refinement. There was Zenith with her spontaneous, practically useless embraces that I'd learned not to reject. There was Lilia with her reliable home cooking and tea served at exactly the right temperature. There were two small new sisters still working out the mechanics of existence. There was the chubby little pervert and our daily sibling squabbles, which I accepted with the patience one reserves for unavoidable weather. There was Sylphy with her wide red eyes and that genuine laugh appearing more and more often.
It was a perfectly well-structured life for an ordinary child.
The core problem was that I'd stopped being just a child at some point over the past year.
〈What's my margin for meaningful growth if I stay confined to the area around Vila Buena?〉
[Cultivation projections indicate the Jade Body can be fully consolidated using the pills and the local waterfall's flow. However, the next stage, the Adamantine Body, will require an ambient mana density considerably higher than what this forest can hold. Additionally, refinement of your combat reflexes and swordsmanship techniques will stall due to the total absence of opponents matching your actual capabilities.]
〈A rather inconvenient geographical limitation.〉
I returned the Jian to the dimensional inventory and started back along the beaten-earth trail.
I had no intention of leaving that afternoon. There were still cultivation stages to consolidate, small sisters who needed physical protection, and people who relied on knowledge I had available to give them. Time existed, and I managed its logistics better than anyone on this plane.
But the word "eventually" stopped being an abstract future concept that cold autumn afternoon.
And reality had already taught me, across dozens of lives, that "eventually" tends to show up at the door far sooner than our planning would like to predict.