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After staring at the bound, unconscious nearly-god almost until their eyes started hurting, they finally made a decision.
They were not going to take his face. His name, his title; his position; his spiritual device - they would take all those, everything but his fate, which was apparently now to lie chained at the mercy of his betters, subject to the whims of anyone who could overpower him, because the heavens in truth cared nothing for justice. (Justice was something you had to take for yourself, like a dog savaged in the street, stealing a bite from another with growls and yelps and teeth.)
But they would not take his fate, and they would not take his face.
Perhaps it would fuck them before they’d gone ten steps in the heavens. Perhaps all the heavenly officials would know the face of Ming Yi, and know it was not this, and rip all the sinews of this constructed body asunder with all the spiritual powers and righteous weapons they possessed.
Not that it would matter. They’d been brutalised before, beaten until they couldn’t stand and the black of their eyes wouldn’t close for the light. They’d been gouged, kicked at, stabbed, in futile self-defense until their body was practically a husk, leaking a great trail of blood between each ostentatious courtyard in the houses of miserable, unrepentant sinners. And all of that while they were still alive.
They hadn’t been alive in over a century.
So now it was all just simulacra: flesh sculpted just like the real thing and made flawless, like a heavenly official should be - Black Water barely recognising itself in the still reflection of a pond, even if - because - this was what they could have been.
Like this, they could bleed - gouts and gouts, everything inside this new body they’d formed over the old. It would be enough to send a mortal or even a god into senseless collapse, and it would do nothing to them, so long as they had the power left to retain their form. How cheap was blood? They could make more. They had the power of so many lesser spirits swallowed and digested inside of them. They’d notice it less than the loss of any real blood as a human.
Or so they assumed, anyway. They couldn’t quite remember. (They’d have to remember though, at least enough to pretend. Or - no. What god ever needed to be injured, where others could see? Only the foolish. Black Water did not intend to be foolish.)
But they were stalling.
They turned away from the almost-Earth Master, secured in his exitless chamber. They paced through the manor they’d built, knowing it was time to go; reluctant to leave its cold comfort of stone and water. Being bowed to and hailed in the unclouded light of day had never seemed so unappealing.
When they stopped in front of the lake in the middle of the island again, that old, living face stared back up at them.
It felt disgusting. It felt so breakable. Black Water grit its teeth and growled.
With impulsive rage, the nails on one hand lengthened to claws. A second later, like the flash of a knife, those claws raked across the live flesh of the body’s forearm, and let it run wet with rivulets of blood that dripped into the earth.
It didn’t feel like anything.
And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Just another reminder of why they had to do this. As if the four back inside hadn’t been enough.
It would have to do for now.