Pain.

White-hot, searing through every vein, every cell, every atom of her body.

Aria's entire existence was agony. Blinding, all-consuming, every thought drowned out by a primitive, basic desire for the pain to stop. She wanted to pull away from whatever was hurting her, but the pain was all around. No matter what she did, where she moved, there was only pain surrounding her, boxing her in on all sides.

Some small part of her, some minuscule kernel of consciousness, remained sane within the burning storm. The pain was undeniably real, certainly, and mind-shatteringly potent, but so was the power contained within, and she would not permit it to escape her grasp.

She shut out the pain, shut out her body in its entirety. Small blessings, but the pain was, for once, entirely physical. She severed emotion, severed instinct, severed reflex. With all else gone, all that remained was that which needed to be done.

Little by little, with the utmost care, that precious, purposeful agent tugged at the raging threads of power immersing her. They answered readily, far more than the disordered Radiance surrounding her, yet they also had far more weight to them, needing to be dragged into position rather than gently placed.

Thankfully, that went both ways. Dimly, the little agent was aware that the body would occasionally spasm violently, and while the energy would shudder with those movements, it wouldn't truly move.

Slowly, a winding spiral was constructed, leading down into the eager maw of the basin that sat at the center of her soul.

As the pattern resolved, the whole thing vibrated gently, just once, before resolving into its clear, resonant hum.

Immediately, the pain…subsided wouldn't be the right word. But it lessened, by orders of magnitude. It still overpowered every other sensation, but it didn't drown out all attempts at thought.

It was, in a word, manageable.

Aria tried to keep her breathing steady, though it came shallow. Her body was so hot. Beyond feverish. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking, but after a few attempts she finally managed to get a solid enough grip on the zipper to be able to remove her jumpsuit, and the rest of her clothes followed suit to the floor fairly promptly.

With legs that betrayed her on every step and arms that could barely find the strength to lean on the walls, Aria stumbled into her bathroom, grabbing the shower valve and letting the weight of her collapsing body turn the cold water open as she collapsed to the floor.

The cold water cascaded through her hair, down her back and over her face, between her breasts, over her stomach, and onto her legs. She groaned with relief as the water washed away the feverish heat of her skin, but her insides still burned.

Aria felt sick to her stomach. Like the most awful childhood fever she'd ever contracted, the sort of thing you still flinch from the memory of, the worst pain you'd ever felt in your minuscule body by then.

But she wasn't small anymore. She'd suffered immense pains, far above and beyond this, and she'd come out the other side mostly whole. She could do this. She would do this.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Rise in stillness.

Descend as lightning.

She still didn't fully understand what that meant, not intuitively, but she was beginning to get a better picture of it. Radiance accumulated within her core, gradually, a dense, syrupy trickling flow. Yet its intensity, its purity, its strength was blinding, like nothing she'd ever seen. She couldn't imagine what it would do, unleashing so much of it all at once.

Though, she idly remembered, she didn't have to. She'd never been one to take joy in seeing the carnage of war, but the Admiralty's archives had countless hours of footage. Her curiosity had, at times, gotten the better of her, and she'd seen the records of what an adequately motivated cultivator could do to mortal bodies, without even breaking a meaningful sweat.

There was a damn good reason why the Conclave, the Imperium, and the Synod all maintained mortal armies. The extent of havoc a careless cultivator — or one pushed to fight for survival — could wreak precluded most strategic objectives. Even atomics and asteroid redirection didn't quite rise to the same level of sheer indiscriminate ruin.

And now that same power was coursing through her. The thought was exhilarating, in part. But more than that, it was terrifying, in a way that Aria couldn't bring her mind to truly reckon with. So she shut it out, and turned her senses inwards, focusing on her cycling to the exclusion of all else.

The autoinjector was still sticking out of her neck, and the steady tide of Radiance still trickled into her Constellation. But something was wrong. There was too much. Far too much. Even if she'd been completely empty before she'd started, with totally unsaturated Facets, this was still far beyond what her soul could possibly contain.

She needed to vent some of it out. She couldn't. Her sole, constricted aperture was busy drawing in the influx that was about to overflow the all-too-small vessel of her soul.

She was going to rupture.

She had a painfully slow, lucid moment of realization in the last few seconds before it happened. The Radiance kept flowing in. She had no way of expelling it. Even if she did, she wouldn't be able to get it out fast enough.

The energy gathered together, impossibly pure, unfathomably dense, within the overflowing basin that resided at the center of her soul. She couldn't hold it anymore. The walls of her soul, and some strange ordering substance that lay beyond them, something she'd never had cause to even know existed before that moment, couldn't hold it anymore.

The Radiance pushed out.

Her soul pushed back in.

Her soul won.

Overwhelmingly so.

The Radiance compressed down, ever finer, and for one, beautiful, resonant moment…Aria understood. In a way she never could've before, and in a way she doubted she ever would again.

It was such a shame she was about to die. But she was glad she got to see this before she did.

All at once, the Radiance collapsed inward, into an infinitely fine point of light.

Fusion.

Energy exploded outwards.

Her Facets, paper thin that they were, were barely even a stumble for the unbelievable outpouring of immortal energy. They disintegrated in an instant, unmade as though they'd never been. Body. Mind. Presence. Externality. All gone. Turned to nothing but a thought. An idea.

An imprint.

The edges of her soul, that ordering presence, put up a slightly more meaningful fight. The tide of energy actually had to push against it, but it, too, collapsed in time.

The energy shot up through her Channels, into her entire soul. Probing it. Testing it. Finding it wanting.

Annihilating it.

Finally, with nowhere else to go, nothing else to ruin, the brilliant violet Radiance lanced out through her one singular aperture, goring it in the exit, widening the gate, expelling all the accumulated cruft, filth, and impurity of a mortal existence as though it had never been.

Aria's eyes beheld a brilliant, black star. Not within her soul, but within the true, corporeal world. A violet corona crowned the deceptively cold-looking sphere, and forks of cerulean lightning spiked across its surface, raging, indignant, seeking satisfaction.

It was beautiful, and better than most people got, in terms of the last thing she'd ever see. Her soul was ruptured, the Facets gone. The Mind and Body existed now, only because they did not yet seem to realize they no longer were.

And yet, deep within Aria, something persisted. Something intractable, something that would not be shaken even by the raging power that had been arrayed not only against, but within it.

Slowly, something accumulated, at the edges of Aria's newly vast constellation. Dregs, shreds, of that ordering presence that had been so trivially rent asunder moments ago, coming back together, as though merely shoved aside, rather than annihilated.

In an instant, accumulation turned to release. Something locked in place, within Aria's soul. Something rigid, unquestionable, unbending, and something that most certainly would not be cowed by mere starlight.

Within its fractal forms, it imbued itself with newfound power. It borrowed from the very power that had moments ago rendered it a nonexistence, and from its threads it wove the structures of the Soul anew.

Channels, rigid, unyielding, thick as sinew, strong as bone. An immortal's channels.

From the imprints, the Facets were remade.

Body, lithe, tense, a stout bough bent but unbroken in the storm. Immortal persistence.

Mind, broadened, accelerated, comprehending of the truths that were just now laid bare before it. Immortal sense.

Presence, Will, Intent, Domain, granted meaning, granted weight. Immortal claim.

Externality, remade with a glutton king's hunger, a killer's ruthlessness, a soldier's discipline. Immortal execution.

The vast, glaring empty basin that sat at the center would be a Constellation in truth, soon. Beginning with one star, the one that had so audaciously deigned to defy its cradle. Through the Aperture it had so graciously torn open, a wound turned boon, the Soul drew it back in, taking hold, in truth, of the power it so proudly radiated.

Thus was the Soul remade. An Immortal Soul in truth.