Unintended Cultivator

Sen and Lifen left the inn quietly, only taking a moment to return their room key. The inn owners seemed startled but weren’t given a chance to protest before the two young guests vanished out the door. Once they got outside, Lifen turned a questioning gaze on Sen.

“Where will we go?”

“For now, we’ll keep heading south.”

“For how long?”

“There’s a western road ahead. It’ll take a while to get there, but it’ll give us options and make the search more difficult.”

Unlike a lot of towns, the one they were in didn’t have a wall or guards to slow them down. Sen assumed that was because the town was situated close enough to the city that the townspeople could retreat there if became a necessity. He was just thankful that they weren’t going to leave behind guards with a story to tell about the pair of travelers leaving in the night. Sen almost automatically fell into the pace he used when traveling alone, but it quickly became apparent that Lifen couldn’t maintain that pace. Not that she complained. Lo Meifeng’s failure to return seemed to have given Lifen’s fears new life, and she pushed herself hard to keep up. Still, Sen knew there was no point in pushing her that hard if she was just going to collapse in an hour or two. Sen made a conscious and persistent effort to slow his pace to something that the young woman could reasonably keep for a while. She didn’t say anything, but she did offer him a grateful look.

Sen had traveled at night more than once, so he was used to the quiet and the occasional explosions of sound that shattered that quiet at night. Lifen didn’t have his experience. Every time an owl screeched out in the darkness, or some spirit beast roared in the distance, she jumped. Eventually, Sen reached back and took her hand. The contact seemed to reassure her and, while she still flinched at the unexpected noises, she no longer jumped or gasped in surprise. While traveling at night was unusual, even regular people did it sometimes. So, Sen never entirely let his guard down. He kept all of his senses extended out around him to provide the maximum possible warning of any unwanted attention from man or beast. He also hoped that it would give them sufficient warning to leave the road before anyone spotted them.

After four or five hours of walking, Sen could tell that Lifen was flagging. It wasn’t anything too obvious, but she was stumbling a little more often and she spent most of her time looking down at the road, instead of looking around at their surroundings. Not that there was all that much to see in the darkness. There was only a sliver of moon overhead, so the world was even darker and more shadowy than it would have been with a full moon overhead. It took Sen another twenty minutes and pushing his senses hard, but he found what he was looking for. Using a bit of air and wind qi, he did what he could to obscure their trail and send people looking in the wrong places for them.

“We’ll stop for a bit,” he told her. “Eat something. Recover our strength.”

He led her off the road and much deeper into the woods than he probably would have just for himself. There was a small clearing and no signs of nearby spirit beasts but with good overhead coverage. Exerting himself a bit, Sen dragged a large stone up from beneath the soil to give Lifen somewhere to sit while he set up formations to obscure their existence from searching spiritual senses, as well as obscuring sound and light from inside the formation. By the time he was done, they and the clearing effectively vanished from the world. With that done, Sen made a small campfire to provide some light. Lifen immediately crouched near the fire and cast uncertain, fearful looks out into the darkness beyond the formations.

“Don’t worry,” said Sen. “The formations should keep anything or anyone from finding us.”

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be. I’m not the formation master that Uncle Kho is, but he drilled the essentials into me. I expect it would take a peak core cultivator to even notice these formations, and they’d need to be looking hard.”

Those words seemed to do the trick. Lifen slumped over onto the ground next to the fire and put her head on her arm. She was asleep in seconds. Sen let her rest while he made some food. It wasn’t anything special, just some rice, vegetables, and meat with spices, but he knew from experience that it would provide energy and stave off the kind of gnawing hunger that extended walking could cause. When the food was ready, Sen gently shook Lifen’s shoulder. She jerked up to a sitting position, her eyes wild and frightened. Sen took a step back to let her calm down. After a few moments, she seemed to remember where she was and some of the fear and uncertainty drained away from her expression. She sniffed the air.

“What is that? It smells so good.”

“I made food. You need to eat. We’ve got plenty of cold meals ahead of us, but I figured that you could use something hot to eat today.”

Sen retrieved plates and utensils from his storage ring and dished food onto the plates. He wasn’t all that hungry, but eating wouldn’t hurt him. He took his time, but Lifen devoured the food on her plate like she hadn’t seen food in a week.

“Have as much as you want,” he told her. “This is plenty for me.”

“How can that possibly be true?” she demanded while loading her plate with another healthy serving.

Sen shrugged. “Body cultivation. I still need food, but not like before when I was mortal or even at lower stages of cultivation.”

“How long do you think you could go without eating? Days?”

Sen nodded. “Days. Maybe even a week if I was pushing it hard.”

“So, when do we start my body cultivation?”

Sen frowned at the question. He’d been idly wondering that himself. He didn’t dare start her on it in their current situation. There was too much uncertainty. He shrugged.

“When we find somewhere that’s a little safer. Somewhere I think we can stay for a week or two. Body cultivation is intense and grueling. You usually need a couple of days to recover afterward. The last thing you want is to come off a body cultivation advancement only to find yourself needing to walk twenty or thirty miles to escape some incoming threat.”

Lifen didn’t seem to like that answer, but she took it at face value. It wasn’t as though he said he wouldn’t help her with it. He just didn’t want to do it under the cloud of imminent danger. Sen watched as Lifen finished her second plate of food. The young woman was pensive, her thoughts clearly on something else. Eventually, she looked at Sen.

“Do you think she’s dead?”

Sen didn’t need to ask which she Lifen was referring to. She could only mean Lo Meifeng. Sen had managed to push those concerns to the back of his mind for most of the journey into the night. With Lifen asking about the missing cultivator, though, all of the fears and concerns rushed to the front of his mind.

“I honestly don’t know. I hope not.”

Lifen was quiet for a long time before she finally said, “Do you think we should go back? Try to rescue her?”

Sen was surprised that Lifen had suggested it. Part of Sen did want to go back and mount some kind of rescue operation. Of course, he also knew how futile the effort would be.

“Where would we look? I got some vague answers from Lo Meifeng about how she gives her reports, but it isn’t like she told me the name of her contact back in the city. There might be ways to quietly get that kind of information, but I don’t know them. If we went back, we’d have to be loud to find out what we want to know. Plus, if she is dead, that means she ran across people that she couldn’t handle. I don’t like our chances against people like that. Being loud would get their attention.”

“I just hate how it feels knowing we left her there to die. As much as I don’t like her, I wouldn’t have condemned her to that kind of death.”

“I understand that. I really do. I won’t pretend I’m okay with all of this because I’m not. But if we get ourselves caught or killed after she died trying to prevent that, what did she die for? Plus, we don’t know what happened. I don’t get the impression that she’s all that easy to kill, but something else might have delayed her. She may have decided to lead people away from us. She might have gone to ground somewhere to make sure no one could follow her to us. Since I don’t know, all we can do is what she told us to do. Run. So, we run, and I do my best to keep us alive.”

Lifen gave Sen a searching look. “Can you? Keep us alive?”

“I think so. I might have to do some things I don’t want to do. Take us places neither of us would want to go. But, yes, I think I can. For a while at least. Which reminds me, there’s something I need you to work on.”

Lifen lifted an eyebrow at him. “What’s that?”

“Cultivating while moving.”

“Nobody can do that.”

Sen just looked at her.

“Are you kidding me?!” she shouted at him. “You are the most ridiculously impossible person I’ve ever met!”

Sen gave her a faint smile. “That may well be true, but moving cultivation is entirely possible. And, you’re going to have a lot of opportunities to practice in the near future.”

Sen spent the next half hour telling Lifen what he understood about moving cultivation. He couldn’t explain the part about devoting part of his mind to it, since he didn’t really know how he’d done it in the first place. He did give her that information, though. When he’d answered what questions he could, Sen packed up their makeshift picnic site and got them back on the road. Even as they walked, though, Sen couldn’t help but wonder what had become of Lo Meifeng and if he was a coward for not going back to find out.

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