Some part of the last surviving fragment of divinity recognized whose body it was being offered to and try, on principle, to scream the room down rather than submit.

The plume’s spine cracked vertically with a sound that travelled through bone instead of air.

Black blood welled at the corners of her eyes and slid down her temples in two slow, conspiratorial rivulets that turned, halfway down her cheeks, to gold.

Sienna smiled, eyes still closed.

"Hush," she murmured, in a voice softer than the room deserved.

And the feather at that very moment, recognized the voice of the woman who owned the corpse it had been shed from, broke.

It started to dissolve in a long, rapturous shudder; the barbs softened into liquid gold while the spine surrendered to the bath, every screaming filament of holy agony at last persuaded to forget what shape it had once worn and remember only that it was, henceforth, hers.

Her nether energy coiled through the elixir in obedient indigo eddies, patient, methodical, escorting the dead divinity through the necessary rites of unmaking. Within heartbeats there was no feather left.

Only bath. Only goddess and the slow, terrible bargain about to be struck between her skin and the new refined contents now in the water.

Sienna’s pores opened like hungry mouths.

What followed was not the docile drinking she had once anticipated:

The golden essence flooded in into her hungrily pressing against her flesh from every direction at once and forced itself across the threshold of her skin; it expanded her capacity to receive it by the simple violent expedient of refusing to be turned away.

Holy agony bloomed around her outer skin before it forced itself into her hungry body into her veins like the first brutal thrust of something too large, too divine, too unwilling to be gentle.

Sienna’s body arched once, helplessly, the small of her back lifting from the basin in a long, involuntary curve before settling again. Her skin and nipples drew tight in the gold-singing water, painfully sensitive, traitorously alive, the peaks aching and dark as the corrupted current licked across them.

A low, ragged sound escaped her parted lips; somewhere between a gasp and a moan of satisfaction from the abundant power rushing into her and a noise she would never, in her conscious life, admit to having made.

The corruption did not lap politely at the inside of her ribs...

...It colonised her:

It pushed into her like a lover that refused to ask permission — veining her bones with thin, screaming threads of gold, sliding into her meridians and widening them by force, stretching channels that had not been meant to carry this much radiance, scorching out impurities she had not known were impurities until they were gone.

Holy agony braided with carnal sweetness in a way no holy text had ever warned her about — every inch of her flesh shrieking even as it sang, every nerve set alight in the unbearable double register of pain that was, somehow, also pleasure of the most blasphemous kind.

Her tolerance climbed.

Sienna felt some internal threshold she did not bother to label vault upward in long, violent escalations that shattered her past bottlenecks she had once strained against for years, past her current power rank realm into the next.

Her meridians widened in brutal, successive surges, each new tier of capacity forced open by the sheer volume of dead immortal-god’s essence pouring into her.

The power crashed through her in successive waves, each one higher and more devastating than the last, stretching channels that had never been meant to carry this much radiance and then widening them further still.

Her muscles trembled under the strain. Her breath caught and released in shuddering, arrhythmic pulls as her body fought to contain what no previous version of herself could have endured.

Her hips rocked once beneath the surface, slow and involuntary, as if her flesh itself sought to draw the invading light deeper even while her bones screamed.

She expanded but not in flesh, her broken flesh was already perfected; but in the deeper soul-shaped sense: her dantian and meridians were ballooning violently to receive more of her own sovereignty than she had ever been permitted to hold across two reincarnations.

And then, exactly when the power threatened to cross into unmaking what her body could take; Sienna stopped absorbing — wise, vain, beautifully.

Her pores sealed while meridians sighed shut in raw, exquisite afterburn.

The screaming gold-essence that had been pouring into her dropped, in one slow heartbeat, to a low and respectful simmer in the bath around her — chastened, forced to wait its turn because even dead divinity knew when it had met its match.

Sienna lay in the basin with her chest rising and falling in slow recovery, dark-gold essence drying on her cheeks, every cell of her newly-vaulted body humming with the dazed, sated exhaustion of a cultivator who had just shattered her own previous limits and lived.

The absorption had lasted, perhaps, a shy hour.

When at last her lashes lifted, the violet in her eyes had finished its long migration from accent to truth; no more cool basalt threaded with nether-light or dignified darkness pretending to be ordinary irises.

Her eyes were the deep, sovereign violet of unmasked divinity; her true Nether Goddess eyes at last permitted to wear her own face — and the room around her flinched once more in respect and then held very, very still.

She rose from the tub without ceremony, water cascading from her in long golden ribbons that clung to her skin a heartbeat too long before reluctantly letting go.

Sienna’s flesh shone with a youthful luminosity that bordered on indecent — pearlescent, dewed, lit from somewhere just under the skin by a light that had not, until tonight, fully agreed to live there. Her nipples were still tight, dark, and glistening while the soft curve of her belly fluttered with aftershocks.

There was a great deal more of that essence left in that bath.

There would be many more days of patient absorption ahead before the basin gave up its last drop of essence to her keeping.

Greed was a slow art, and Sienna was not the impatient kind.

She crossed the cool flagstones to the shower; far from the elixir-bath and its quietly humming hoard — and turned the water on.

It was clean and mortal, almost insolent in its ordinariness.

It struck her shoulders in silver sheets, sluicing the last gold-glimmer from her freshly-elevated skin, running in obedient rivulets down the elegant length of her spine and the soft, gleaming curve of her hip.

Sienna tipped her head back into the spray. Smiled. Slow. Sovereign. Newly-crowned.

A goddess in awakening...

...She looked so hot like this.

A sight no man had ever scene before!