Radeon could feel the river mist creep over his toes now and then, cold as a thief's fingers.
His body lay there like a near carcass, too still, too quiet, pecked at by birds brave enough to try him, and even worried by flies that kept coming back as if they could not believe he still breathed.
He had the blood ruby. He could press it to the ruin of his eye and buy back his missing vision.
He did not.
'Waste,' he told himself.
The ruby could act like a salve, but Radeon chose not to spend it.
He could not measure the vitality sealed inside. He did not know if it held a cup or an ocean.
Guessing wrong would mean watching a drop of life leak away from his hand, wasted, only to curse himself later when he needed that same strength to stitch his ruined body back together.
Four days. He counted them by the way the heat shifted through his feet.
Still no Fay. No sign. No footsteps, no voice, no shadow cutting through the mist.
Just water whispering over stones, and the steady, impatient buzz of flies as they waited for him to stop pretending he was alive.
Radeon could only work the blood pills he had looted from the Ashlime Crag.
He tried a sip from the river water and tasted what it was at once, a thin branch of the Underworld's river of forgetfulness.
His soul might had been torn near to oblivion, yet it still stood at a level that reached past godhood.
What touched his tongue was only a fraction of the river's true potency.
The real waters would wipe a soul clean before reincarnation. One plunge, and even a name would not survive it.
This means that the original six realms of samsara had regressed back to one form.
From this, Radeon may surmise something with his experience but he did not dare to.
Because in his mind, if he was the strongest of this plane, he could harvest all the benefits and subdue all the living beings in one swoop.
A common thought of those with great ambitions but there was none of those. There wasn't even a single deity for mortals to pray for.
"Great. Now it's snowing."
For now he needed to preserve his body heat. Sure, he was a cultivator, but even so, calling him crippled right now would be an understatement.
Four senses were gone. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, and whatever else the lightning took when it struck him down.
What remained came through his soles and his throat. Cold creeping into his toes. The scrape of mud.
The burn in his lungs when he swallowed wrong.
He could still draw on qi if he forced it, but three quarters of his meridians had been burned down to a crisp.
The last quarter was a thin, aching thread. He would not spend it on comfort. Not unless the need was real.
So he worked with his feet. Radeon began kicking at the mud along the beach, slow at first, then with a practiced rhythm.
His toes found clay and he scooped it up, dragging it into a mound.
Radeon was so adept at it, so quick to find purchase and pull, that watching him you would think he had been born half dead, scorched by lightning, and taught to live with in.
When he had a heap big enough, he found a strip of bark from a small branch and fashioned it into a crude straw.
Then he wriggled into the wet clay, turning his body with careful, grinding patience until it swallowed him.
Cool and slick at first. Then heavy. Then still.
Once he was fully encased, he circulated a thin portion of qi around his body, just enough to warm the clay and start it hardening.
He took a long pull of air through the bark and held it, swelling his chest on purpose so the fit would not set too tight around his torso.
The clay tightened as it dried. When it had taken hold, he rested again.
He felt a little better. Not healed. Not safe. But less exposed, less likely to wake to a beak at his flesh or insects worrying at his wounds.
The silk still tied to the toe showed outside the clay, a pale strand against the mud.
Radeon gave it a tug from time to time, testing it, making sure it had not slipped away into the river mist with everything else.
Another day passed.
A beggar came stumbling along the riverbank, soaked through, golden hair stuck to her cheeks in wet ropes.
She drifted close to where Radeon lay hidden under clay. He did not dare to move. Not a toe, not a breath that might change the mud's shape.
Still, he gathered himself the only way he could, a thin coil of readiness in the ruins of his body, in case this stranger meant to take what he had scraped and suffered for.
The beggar's gaze snagged on the silk thread. She crouched and reached for it with a care that did not belong on a riverbank.
Her fingers slid along the strand as if it were a keepsake, something too precious to touch with dirty hands.
She stroked it again, slower, then frowned and scratched at her head, searching her heart for the missing piece.
"I know this... It's part of something important." She frowned, her features scrunching with effort. "Where have I seen it?"
A tremor ran through her. She clutched the silk tighter, knuckles whitening, and her mouth twisted as if she were trying to drag a name up from the bottom of a dark well.
Her lips moved, a broken mutter, and anger flashed through her face, sharp and sudden.
"If those men would stop crawling out of the reeds," she rasped, voice raw with river water and hunger, "I wouldn't have to keep dipping in these blasted rivers."
She grunted and pulled the thread to her chest like it could anchor her.
Radeon probed for who she was, reaching with the only sense he could trust.
Feeling the faint tug of that silk through his toe and into the ache of his throat.
The answer landed like a stone. Fay.
His breath caught behind the bark straw. No sound came out, only a tight, useless pressure.
In the dark under the clay he gave her a silent apology, because he had no other gift left to offer.
He knew. He knew it was his fault she had ended up like this.