“Best settle in,” Warcry told Sushi, and I heard bedsprings creak. “Could be a while.”
A couple seconds later, the tinny voice of a fight commentator filled the black.
So I was on my own. I didn’t know how to get out—the animation when I’d first been accepted by this thing hadn’t shown me—and if I thought about that too much, I started to panic again. To keep my mind off being trapped, I focused on cultivating like I’d seen the line drawing of the guy in the coffin do. Swallowing the Universe and Reclaiming the Dead.
At first it was like trying to breathe through a nose, mouth, and throatful of concrete, but gradually, a tiny passage opened up. The pressure was still there, constricting my lungs, but if I just kept working on it, I could keep dragging air in.
Miasma came with it. Not much, but when that little drop hit my Spirit sea, it jolted through my system like adrenaline. My head got clearer. Reclaiming the Dead and Swallowing the Universe got a little easier.
“Why doesn’t Ylef kill Mantid?” Sushi’s voice shook the casket walls.
“Pros get disqualified if they kill their opponents,” Warcry said.
Sushi hmmed. “Sushi eats a Mantid once. Crunchy.”
Warcry snorted. “Yeah, I saw it, fishstick. Proper savage, that was.”
I let my attention drift away from them, but it didn’t stick to the breathing techniques. It landed on the Bailiff and what he’d said about Kest, wishing I’d killed him outside the dance hall tonight. Maybe when I got out of here, I could go after him. There had to be a way to figure out where he’d gone.
Part of me had been chewing away at that problem ever since I woke back up from the six-armed dancer’s psionic attack. How do I get to the Bailiff? How do I kill him before he kills Kest or Rali or Warcry?
Had the six-armed dancer taken that into account when she decided I wasn’t a devil yet, how much I wanted to track the Bailiff down and kill him?
Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe the right question was whether she’d been talking about how much devil corruption I’d taken from the Lunar Scythe or if she meant some natural evil I’d had all along that was only now starting to show. It had to say something bad about me that I not only didn’t feel worse about killing Fugi, but I wished I’d gotten the Bailiff and Shogun, too.
Whatever the answer was, at least she’d been right about the casket necklace. The stabbing pain in my skull was gone. I twisted my head from side to side. No tent stake through the brains.
Was it my imagination or had the casket gotten larger? It felt like I had slightly more room. Not enough to practice taiji or move around, but enough that it wasn’t quite as claustrophobic as before.
Breathing had gotten slightly easier, too. The pressure from a thousand tons of grave dirt was still sitting on my lungs, but the lungs themselves were getting stronger, better able to breathe in spite of that weight.
Even my cultivation was getting better. I’d used up most of the Miasma from the first spiral outside the dance hall, but as I pulled more into my Spirit sea, the remaining spiral turned faster and tighter, corkscrewing down smaller and harder like a lump of coal being compacted into a tiny diamond.
Weirdly, I felt like that, too. I flexed the muscles in my arms and legs and felt every muscle fiber respond in perfect order. The image of a blade going into the casket and coming out sharper and stronger flashed through my brain. The Crucible Casket was like the Proving Forge elixir, except it made you stronger and harder in every way, not just bodily.
“Crucible Casket, how do I get out of here?”
Transferring information. The image of the guy, now with his Spirit compressed and his muscles hardened to diamond, put his hands to the casket lid, then pressed his forehead to it, sort of like an inverted bow.
I followed the instructions, the black wood cool against my face.
Then I was kneeling on the floor of the hotel room.
Warcry was snoring on my bed—thankfully with his boots on the rug nearby—and Sushi was asleep over his shoulder. They must’ve fallen asleep watching fights, because his HUD arm was propped up on a pillow in front of them, and the player was still blinking Would you like to continue watching? Y/N
I stood up, and it was like I’d never stood up before in my life, like every other time I’d just accidentally managed to get to my feet without killing myself. This was perfect motion. Controlled. Agile. Every muscle in my body was working in perfect unison. There wasn’t a single wasted motion.
And all that was just standing up.
Taking a meditation stance, I tried some taiji. The movements and breaths flowed like water over smooth river rocks, perfect and natural.
I raised my hands in a high guard and sent Death Metal to my arms. The Miasma moved with flawless efficiency, and Reclaiming the Dead grabbed what little bit tried to escape. I threw an Eight-Elbow into a stop kick. The combo flew like bird wings battering a predator. The kick chopped like an axe. It would’ve knocked the legs out from under an elephant, but there was no elephant in the room, just a washstand. The whole mess crashed over, the bucket clanging to the floor and spilling water everywhere.
“’S this now?” Warcry jolted awake. Fire flared down his arms and covered his fists.
Sushi tumbled off his shoulder and into his lap. The noise must’ve freaked her out too much to remember how to talk because when she got up, she chattered a bunch of angry fish nonsense at me.
Someone downstairs yelled
