Unintended Cultivator

For Sen, the world stopped for the next two days. His entire universe condensed down until the only thing in it was the occupant of a bed. He simply watched Falling Leaf breathe and waited. He’d been in a flurry for the first hour or two. Then, as his panic subsided and the truth became clear, he realized that Falling was fine. At least, physically, she was fine. Better than fine. His gamble with that insane elixir had worked. He couldn’t pin down precisely how much she had advanced because he simply had no good frame of reference. He’d gotten better over the years at narrowing down how powerful spirit beasts were, and other human cultivators were a snap, but she wasn’t one or the other.

That had forced him to rely on her self-assessments, and she had no more experience with transformed spirit beasts than he did. She only knew the stories her people told about them, but they were to the spirit beasts what Master Feng was to cultivators. Fables. Myths. Legends. Things often discussed but rarely encountered. Both he and she had been forced to make best guesses based on what she could do and the ever-shifting gap between their respective levels of power. In the end, all he knew was that her progress had been substantial. Physically. That was also the crux of the problem. If there was something wrong with her body, he could take action. With a perfectly functional body, that only left her mind. A mind had endured tremendous agonies. He knew what that was like. Pain was something that he’d inflicted on himself or had inflicted on him by others for years now. It was almost an old friend.

Except, she hadn’t gone through those countless cleansings, advancements, and tribulations the way that he had. They had all seemed excruciating at the time, even if he could now look back at that first cleansing and laugh at how trivial it had truly been compared to the towering cliffs of suffering that he had scaled, willingly, intentionally, since then. The heavens were cruel, but he could see now that they were not pitiless. The pain he endured along the way had increased in tight lockstep with his advancements. Almost enough to kill. More than enough to break the weak or unwilling. But it was something that body and mind could survive. It had been like training. Teaching him how to endure things that should not be endured.

Of course, he had always had the advantage of understanding more or less just how terrible it was going to be. Falling Leaf didn’t know. She couldn’t know having never been through it, and there was no adequate explanation to prepare someone for that kind of visceral torment. There was no doubt that she heard his screams during his cleansings and advancements. That may have given her some vague sense of what to expect, but it was no substitute for direct experience. For all intents and purposes, she had jumped into the human cultivator experience in the middle of the process without benefit of everything that came before.

She was strong and brave, but pain didn’t respect those things. Pain had a way of eroding strength and undermining bravery. Enough pain was enough to wash strength and bravery aside altogether. Sen feared for her mind. A mind that was beyond his reach to heal if healing was what was needed. So, he was left with the last resorts of the helpless. He waited. He hoped. For those long, desperate hours, there was no war, no reports, nothing else of consequence. People had probably come in and spoken to him. He had vague recollections of shadows moving in the corners of his awareness and annoying buzzing sounds that could have been people talking. None of it had broken through the shell of his fixed concentration. His vigil went undisturbed until a small, uncertain voice shattered it.

“Papa?”

Rage swelled up inside of Sen. He hadn’t wanted Ai to see Falling Leaf like this. He didn’t want her to see his failure. His shame. There was only one person who would have dared to bring her into this room. An irrational desire to lash out at Auntie Caihong gripped him. How could she do this to me? To Ai? What was she thinking? He grappled with the rage and forced it down. What would it teach Ai about failure if he acted like a child in the face of it? No, he thought, I have to do better than that. If not for my own sake, then for hers. As much as throwing a tantrum might make him feel better, however briefly, it wouldn’t solve anything. He made himself put on a smile. It felt off to him, wrong even, but he did it anyway. He turned in his chair and offered that forced smile to his daughter.

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“Hello, little orchid,” he said.

The hesitant expression on her face vanished as she smiled at him. She darted forward until she could throw herself at him. He caught her negligible weight and gently swung the little girl to sit on his lap. She started to say something before she saw Falling Leaf. Ai stared at the transformed spirit beast with a look that hovered between bafflement and concern, like she couldn’t puzzle out why the woman was still asleep.

“Falling Leaf. Why are you sleeping?” asked Ai in a loud voice.

It was both rude and a kind of terrible innocence. It was clear that Auntie Caihong had not explained the situation to Ai, leaving that awful chore to Sen. When the ghost panther didn’t stir, Ai turned her questioning eyes on Sen.

“Papa. Why is she sleeping?”

Sen flailed mentally for an appropriate answer. There was too much about what had happened that simply wouldn’t make sense to her. While Sen was certain that she knew what cultivators were in a general sense, he also knew that she wasn’t privy to all of the details. He certainly hadn’t been eager to tell her those details. Part of it was to spare her from unpleasant images and concern for his well-being. Part of it was to spare himself from reliving some of the less pleasant experiences of his life. Not that he’d been spared that in the last two days. With no better way to explain it, he kept things simple.

“Falling Leaf got hurt. She’s sleeping until she gets better.”

Ai stared at Falling for a moment with a look that was all concern before her face brightened and she turned back to Sen.

“Give her one of your,” Ai’s face scrunched up as she tried to say the next word, “lictures. They’ll fix her.”

It took Sen’s mind a moment to translate lictures to what his daughter had actually meant. Elixirs. Something inside of him threatened to shatter. Probably my heart, he thought.

“I wish I could,” he croaked out. “It’s not… It’s not that kind of hurt. One of my elixirs won’t help her.”

Gods, how he wished it were that simple. It was even more heartbreaking to see how much faith Ai put in those concoctions of his. He wished he could live up to that flawless faith she had in him and his skills. Sen knew that he couldn’t keep talking about this. It just wasn’t in him.

“What did you do today, Ai?” he asked.

There was a pause that Sen feared meant another question that he couldn’t handle at that moment, but Ai dutifully told him about her day of commanding birds, riding the sky monster, and her writing lesson with Auntie Caihong. She also mentioned something about Uncle Jia Wei slipping her a treat. Sen did his best to make the right noises at the right time, although that bit about Long Jia Wei took him by surprise. He wouldn’t have credited the man with that kind of sentiment. Then again, Sen was aware enough to recognize that staying in Ai’s good graces was a good way to stay in his good graces.

However, he didn’t miss the way that his daughter’s eyes kept drifting back over to the Falling Leaf. He wanted to reassure her. He wanted to reassure himself, but he couldn’t do either of those things. It was all in Falling Leaf’s hands. And, perhaps, it was also in the hands of fickle destiny. Auntie Caihong brought them food. Ai thought it was great fun to eat somewhere other than at their usual tables. She also delighted in Sen making a table rise up from the stone of the floor. He supposed he should be grateful that such small miracles were still enough to ignite her sense of wonder. After the food was cleared away, Ai reclaimed her throne atop Sen’s lap. It didn’t take long after that before her eyes slid shut and sleep claimed her. Sen suspected that someone had made a point of tiring the girl out before bringing her to see him. Once Ai was deep into sleep, Auntie Caihong fixed him with a firm, but empathetic look.

“You can’t continue this way,” she told him.

“I know,” said Sen.

He looked down at Ai. Her features were smooth and untroubled by bad dreams. He remembered holding her after the nightmares she used to have. I guess I didn’t get it all wrong, he thought. Not if she can sleep like this. Of course, to keep getting things right, he couldn’t stay in this room forever. He would have to abandon his vigil, even if that felt like an unforgivable betrayal. He could forsake the kingdom for Falling Leaf. He could forsake this town and the sect. He could forsake almost anything to watch over her. He couldn’t forsake Ai. She needed him to be there for her. But he didn’t have to do any of it tonight. He could push that moment off until the morning. For a little while longer, he could just be here. He could hold his daughter and, for one more night, he could wait, and he could hope.

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