Chapter 263: Choices, Limits, and Thresholds

At first Kai felt nothing but disorientation. All of his senses seemed to be missing... except for one. He could still feel the hunger surging within him, as ravenous as always. And yet it was part of him, and it wasn't mindless even if it was always hungry. When he reached out to it, he saw a new piece of his own soul.

Thunderbird (???)

>

So he had done it. Those symbols floating in his mind's eyes were what he needed to pull himself together, and everything else came with it. Behemoth's Heart was beating furiously, but it seemed to be healing his scorched flesh. In fact, that final experience had finally tipped him over the edge to Physique D-3. He couldn't have been unconscious long, based on the smoke he saw rising around him.

When he sat up he saw that he'd fallen on top of the Thunderbird in the center of a blackened crater. A huge bite had been taken from its chest, including the monster core that he'd consumed. Other than that, it looked surprisingly intact: the feathers spread over the stone, still crackling with lightning. He felt like laughing in victory, but his throat hurt too much.

"Came down to the wire, didn't it?" Omilaena walked onto the corpse, stepping gingerly on the crackling feathers.

"But we made it. And I couldn't have done it without you." Kai hopped up and grinned. "I didn't have to sacrifice any long term power, so I should be able to use the Thunderbird to its fullest potential. That's still an open question, since I need mobility more than flight, but now I can-"

"That's nice and all, but are you going to put on some clothes?"

Kai looked down and realized that the lightning had thoroughly blasted off... pretty much everything. His regeneration had restored his body, but nothing else, and he instinctively moved to cover himself while Omilaena chuckled.

"I mean, I'm not complaining." She exaggeratedly lowered her head to stare. "Very nice. But it might make the wrong impression on the elves."

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up." Kai reached into his spatial ring, which was one of the only intact items on his body, and summoned a piece of cloth. Once he wrapped it around his waist and tied it he looked more like a conquering barbarian than a naked madman.

"Do you just have a bunch of cloth in your spatial ring?"

"I mean, this is a recurring problem with my powers."

"If you find yourself so frequently naked you develop a system, I think the problem has more to do with you." Omilaena chuckled, but there wasn't any mockery in it. She put her hand on one hip, not seductively but just easing a weary body into a more comfortable position. "Are we finally done for a little while?"

"For a while." Kai sighed and rubbed his aching jaw. "I've probably been pushing too hard. If I don't rest I get less efficient, but learning that lesson never seems to stick."

"It seems to me that you're not suited to just doing nothing. You need to relax to something, not away from something."

Kai stared at Omilaena for a moment, surprised to hear something like that from her. Maybe she was right. Even if he'd grown to like training, he didn't want to spend his entire life doing it, but the problem was that he needed something more than just kicking back and resting. Of course, realizing that didn't help much when all he had to do was train.

Still... at the moment, he stood atop the corpse of the Thunderbird. It had been his quarry for a long time, and even longer for the elves. He could feel the new power pulsing within him, filled with potential.

As the night moved on, some of the elves started going off in little clusters. Seemed like the Bludshards weren't much for monogamy, or prudery, or in some cases public decency. Kai wasn't quite the uptight boy he'd once been, but when three extremely attractive elven women approached him, he turned them down and moved off for more privacy. She recognized his smile as the false one he wore when he wasn't comfortable and pursued.

"No teasing tonight," Kai said quietly.

"I won't." She came to stand beside him and didn't push his boundaries. "Most would call you crazy for turning them down, though. I would have taken them up on it."

"Not really my thing."

"Are you serious? That's what a lot of men dream about."

Kai shrugged and she almost thought that he was going to push her away, but eventually he spoke up in an odd tone. "Back in Rayakan, there... I guess that's not important. I had a chance and it just made me feel... it wasn't what I wanted. And in Krysal, none of that... I don't know, it wasn't really satisfying. I'm a man, sure, but not an animal."

Omilaena had hoped to get closer to him but wasn't sure what she could say to that, so she just stood with him, not judging. Internally, she wondered whether it was his nature or something else that made him so stupidly loyal. Refusing to be unfaithful to a committed partner was one thing, but he was going abstinent because of a weird half-promise to a virgin girl who needed to get her own head on straight. If the two of them launched into a long, awkward courtship she was going to vomit.

She wished someone would care that much about her, but she'd probably never earn it.

Once they separated, Omilaena rejoined the festivities and took the opportunity to drink as much free chakra wine as possible. By stretching her Heart of Poison to apply to alcohol she could filter out the effects and just absorb the chakra without getting drunk. It still made her feel loose and confident, relaxed after so much time in the wilderness.

As the evening wore on, a trio of elves approached her: two strikingly handsome men and a woman who was just her type. And Omilaena turned them down. Not as clumsily as Kai, but she did. What the hell was wrong with her?

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..

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Zae Zin Nim could barely see the number in her soul - it said 100%, but the meager symbols were overwhelmed by the sense of fullness. She had cultivated so much qi over so much time, it felt simultaneously overdue and impossible that she should be this close.

How long had she been cultivating in the Deep Vital Pool? Just a little over two months, she thought, but the time all blurred together. For her it was a meditative experience, but she knew that other things had been going on, from hunts to local politics to celebrations. She felt a moment of fear that Kai and Omilaena had simply left her and smothered it, because she had no time for emotions now.

Instead she focused on the mechanics of the last details, making sure everything was in place, both in the chamber and in her soul. Then she notified the guards and locked the door from the inside. After one more circuit around the chamber, settling her spirit, she sat down in the center.

It was finally time to advance.