Through her expanded senses, Daisy tracked the sounds: T'Challa murmuring rapidly as he crushed the herb, the guards carefully removing the women's outer garments, and laying the two of them side by side in a shallow pit. Sand was packed around them. Their arms were crossed over their chests.
The Heart-Shaped Herb — cool against the skin a moment ago — was reduced to liquid, and as it transformed, a faint warmth rose from it.
How is this happening chemically? Daisy couldn't make sense of the reaction. The herb was dissolving by some mechanism she couldn't parse. She filed it away: this was why stealing the thing outright would have been a disaster. Without understanding the process, she would have ruined it.
On the other side of the chamber, T'Challa was barely holding his urgency in check. The ritual had a specific sequence and it couldn't be compressed — all he could do was speed up the incantation, hammering through the ceremonial words in something that sounded almost like a rapid-fire spoken-word performance. T'Challa noted the priests' visible displeasure and ignored it.
The incantation was short. T'Challa finished it and fed the herb to Storm first.
Naturally, Daisy thought, keeping still. Wife before stranger. She didn't begrudge it — Storm was genuinely dying, and Daisy wasn't in any real danger. Squabbling over a few seconds at this point would have been absurd.
T'Challa was a good man. He didn't leave Daisy behind. After another round of incantation, she received her dose as well. Then he settled in to wait.
Daisy bit back her irritation — all that time she'd spent learning Wakandan, and it had been completely useless here. He'd been going too fast. She caught a few repetitions of a prayer to Bast the Panther Goddess, something about restored health, but the details were gone. She'd specifically studied the language to memorize those prayers for later analysis. All wasted.
The liquid — still carrying that faint warmth — slid down her throat, tracing a path through her chest and into her stomach.
Then Daisy felt herself lift free of her body entirely.
She became pure awareness. She was still wearing her shirt and jeans, somehow, and she was standing on an open savanna, the sky in the distance shifting through a spectrum of colors she didn't have names for. A handful of enormous trees were scattered across the plain, their canopies dense and spreading, their species unidentifiable.
It reminded her of another place — the dimension she'd glimpsed once before while critically injured, a distant view of Shou-Lao, K'un-Lun's guardian dragon. But the quality here was different. Quieter. Something like peace in the air.
She had no script for this. T'Challa could meet his ancestors here — but she had no ancestors in this system, no lineage connected to these powers. She was about to start working out how to leave when the mist arrived.
It gathered slowly, pooling around her feet and rising, until it had taken the shape of a leopard — five meters tall, perhaps fifteen meters in length, its eyes lit with a dim, spectral glow. It walked out of the dark at the edge of the plain and stopped, studying her.
"Hey." Daisy raised a hand in greeting, showing her most unthreatening smile, and stayed very alert underneath.
Bast turned her massive head, examining Daisy from different angles.
First observation: not African.
Second observation: no faith. None at all.
Someone in Wakanda is going to hear about this, Bast thought, with the resigned irritation of a deity whose worshippers never stopped creating complications.
Not that Daisy being faithless was actually the main problem. Storm was the main problem.
Storm was African. Storm had faith. The issue was which faith — she was Kenyan, and her family had worshipped the Eagle God for generations, in the most devout and uncompromising tradition. More than that: Ororo herself was the current holy woman of that line. A living saint of another pantheon, presenting herself for a blessing from Bast.
From any angle, that was strange.
Daisy was reading the situation carefully. This space was a semi-illusory projection — it didn't fully belong to either of them. Most of the landscape had been constructed from her own mental energy; the savanna, the trees, all of it had been shaped by the herb drawing on her consciousness. Bast herself was a projection — a presence sent to judge whether the recipient was worthy of the herb's gift.
If she declared her willingness to serve Wakanda's interests, she suspected that would count as passing.
But she felt like she was wasting an opportunity. A divine presence, apparently communicative, presumably capable of being reasoned with — and all she was being asked to do was make a basic loyalty statement?
Wakanda can wait. You're the priority here.
"I could make you a movie," Daisy offered. "A film. It's a medium people use in the outside world now — storytelling through images and sound."
Bast's smoky form flickered. The concept required some time to process. Then came the calculation.
Which matters more — Wakanda, or me?
Me, obviously.
Working from what she could extract from her own memory, Daisy rewrote Life of Pi in her head, quickly. She swapped the protagonist for an African boy, changed the tiger to a leopard, kept the core idea — the question of which story we choose, the relationship between human and animal, survival and meaning. She ran through it mentally, decided it held up, and transmitted the narrative through her consciousness directly into Bast's awareness.
The goddess received it with initial curiosity — a kind of tilted, half-skeptical attention. Then something shifted as she absorbed the meaning underneath. It was, she had to admit, more compelling than another recitation of protect Wakanda, serve Wakanda.
The enormous head dipped once in acknowledgment.
Under normal circumstances, that would have been the conclusion of the ritual. But Bast, apparently feeling that this warranted something more than the standard sign-off, extended her tongue and gave Daisy a slow, deliberate lick. Above and beyond the standard approval.
Remember your promise.
The words settled into Daisy's mind directly. Then the smoke reformed, and dissolved, and the projection came apart around her as she surfaced back into her body.
She'd been through one enhancement already. She knew what to expect. Even so, the heat hit her like a wall — the herb igniting something deep inside her, as though a furnace had been lit at the core of her body and was radiating outward.
The fractured ribs knit back together. The accumulated micro-injuries from more than a year of vibration training — the ones that had never quite healed — were addressed and cleared. The remaining energy, with nowhere to go, turned on her physiology and began the work of rebuilding it, cell by cell — new structures, more durable, more capable. Her blood moved faster, carrying the enhancement in an even current to every part of her body.
Her Inhuman lineage had already given her one leap forward. Now came the second.
Unlike the White Tiger Amulet — which could only maintain her at a given level, never integrating into her body, and which had in some respects already been outpaced by her own growth — this was different. The Heart-Shaped Herb worked directly on the physical self. It took what her Inhuman awakening had already built and pushed it even further.
Her body underwent fundamental change. The surge in physical capability briefly destabilized her power.
From the outside, it looked like this: T'Challa, the royal guards, and the priests watching the entire mountain begin to tremble.
The overflow energy had nowhere to go, so it bled into the rock and soil around her. The ground shook, the frequency increasing. Cracks opened across the chamber walls, spreading wider as the vibrations built. The floor below split, and T'Challa stumbled back from the edge of a fissure that had opened at his feet.
The quake was scaling up with her enhancement.