Unintended Cultivator

Having never participated in a large-scale battle before, Sen had no appreciation for just how much work or how much time it would take even for the basic task of gathering the wounded. With core formation cultivators on the field, he thought it might take an hour. Oh, how wrong he’d been. If it had just been gathering the wounded, things might have gone quicker. Except, it wasn’t just that. By basically proclaiming himself “in charge,” every problem had suddenly become his problem. The very first problem he had to solve was how to keep both sides from quietly murdering the wounded from the other side. Heavenly oaths or not, relief that the battle was over or not, there was still a lot of bad blood and anger left over on that field. Sen eventually had to co-opt Chan Yu Ming into service and the pair of them patrolled the efforts to find and collect the wounded from a hovering qi platform. The implied threat of two core cultivators seemed to stem that problem.

Once that logistical problem had been more or less completed, Sen hoped that his role in things would be done. He’d made that observation out loud to Chan Yu Ming, who laughed so hard that she nearly fell off the qi platform. He glowered at her until she managed to get her mirth under control. Wiping tears from her eyes, she shook her head sadly at him.

“You poor boy. You’re probably going to be personally managing this mess until my people are back at our sect compound.”

“Why? Nobody needed my personal supervision to make this mess.”

She shrugged. “Everybody wants an authority figure to turn to. You elected yourself to the role.”

A terrible fatigue flowed through Sen at the very thought of having to deal with this mess, a mess he’d had no hand in creating. “I only elected myself to stop the killing.”

“And you did. Thank you for that, by the way. I’d already lost enough friends for a lifetime before you showed up.”

Sen glanced at her and saw the pain on her face. “Aren’t you still angry?”

Chan Yu Ming shook her head. “I was never angry. I never wanted to do this in the first place. It was stupid, destructive, and pointless. Plus, we came here looking for a fight. They gave us one. I can’t be angry that people died in that fight. I can be sad, though, that so many died. That friends died.”

Sen nodded because he thought that’s what a person should do in these situations. He understood what she meant, at least intellectually, but he lacked the personal experience to really empathize with her. He looked out across the battlefield to the rows of injured people who were laid out in lines both near the fire cultivator compound and farther out near where the water cultivators had established something like a command tent. He frowned as a thought occurred to him.

“Do you bring healers with you?”

Chan Yu Ming grimaced. “Some. Not enough for all of this, though.”

Sen looked over at the rows of injured fire cultivators and the handful of people who were trying to tend to them. He sighed to himself. This was going to turn into a long day. Sen started grabbing people and issuing orders about what he needed and where he wanted it. It took almost an hour before he was finally set up in the middle of the field, exactly halfway between the two groups. Chan Yu Ming had watched all of it happen with a mystified expression. It wasn’t until he had two massive cauldrons set up and water boiling in them that she finally asked.

“What are you doing?”

“At the rate things are going, people are going to die just waiting for care. I’m going to speed things along.”

“How?”

“Just watch,” he said, smiling a little bit.

It had been a while since he made an elixir for anyone but himself. In this case, though, he needed to make something more general. Something that would bolster the healing of any cultivator. He also needed to make it on a scale that he’d never attempted before. Yet, that was the part that least concerned him. As long as he kept things in the proper balance and proportions, he should be able to fix any problems that cropped up with making a couple of hundred healing elixirs. Although, he thought, this will be more like a healing stew. I don’t really have a good way to strain the final product. He shrugged. It shouldn’t harm the value of the elixirs, just make swallowing them a bit less pleasant for the recipients. He suspected that the injured cultivators wouldn’t care.

Of course, making the elixirs chewed through an uncomfortably large amount of his stores of common ingredients and reagents. It’d take weeks, if not months, to gather more of some of those things. There were a few things he used that he’d have to find local substitutes for, having only seen the original ingredients on the mountain. Chan Yu Ming, the gods bless her, took over fielding the endless stream of questions that kept getting directed to Sen. A few of the fire cultivators tried to act haughty with her, right up until the moment that Sen glared at them and let a bit of his killing intent slip free. After that, there were no more problems. Sen kept most of his attention on the cauldrons, though. The kind of general-purpose healing elixir he was making was more forgiving than some elixirs, but he still needed to monitor it closely, add things at crucial moments, and sometimes use his qi to adjust the heat up or down. For all the concentration the process demanded, it was also soothing to Sen. A familiar activity that had brought up fond memories of afternoons spent learning from Auntie Caihong.

As the two cauldrons of elixir neared completion, an idea came to Sen. There was one more thing he could add that would vastly enhance the strength of the elixirs. More importantly, it was compatible with almost everything. Sen went looking in his storage ring and started searching through the heavenly qi-infused beast cores. He found two that had almost none of their original qi-alignments left and withdrew them from this storage ring. He heard a sharp intake of breath from Chan Yu Ming, and then a cry of horror and he crushed the cores into powder with nothing but the brute strength in his hands. He positioned a hand over each cauldron and let the powder fall down into the elixirs. The elixirs bubbled wildly for a moment before they started to give off a faint white luminescence. Without even looking up, Sen pointed to a fire cultivator and water cultivator he’d had standing by.

“Start bringing your wounded here. Start with the people who have the worst injuries but are stable.”

Both cultivators took off at a run toward their respective camps. With a few moments of effort, Sen extinguished the fires beneath the cauldrons and bled the heat from the metal and liquid. Among the supplies he’d demanded from both sides were cups. He started doling out the elixirs into the cups and setting them up on tables he’d also acquired with a few sharp words. It took him a while to realize that Chan Yu Ming was staring at him. He returned her gaze with a questioning look.

“You, you,” she spluttered.

“Yes, I have some alchemy training,” he said, knowing full well that wasn’t what she cared about.

Then, he went back to putting appropriate amounts of the elixir into cups. He could answer her questions after all of the injured people had at least gotten something to help them survive the day. The first arrivals were carried in on makeshift litters, each of them too wounded to make the trip under their own power. Sen handed out the first few elixirs but then drafted a couple of people from each camp to help. They were tasked with things like handing out the cups or washing them between uses. Sen just kept filling the cups with the elixir. Before too long, though, he was interrupted by a healer from the water cultivator camp who strode up with the expression of someone who was on a mission. The slight man pushed his way past the other water cultivators and up to the cauldrons where, for nearly a minute, he just stared down into one of them. Then, he turned his gaze on Sen, his eyes almost wild. Sen returned the man’s look with a bland one of his own while he continued filling cups.

“Who trained you?” demanded the man.

Already feeling tired of the man, Sen fixed him with a very, very hard look. “I don’t owe you explanations.”

The water cultivator paled under Sen’s hard look, perhaps realizing that he had wildly overstepped the bounds of politeness if not position. More importantly, he’d done it to someone who had ordered hundreds upon hundreds of cultivators to stop fighting…and made it stick. The man hurriedly offered Sen a deep bow.

“I apologize. It’s just that if you can do this,” he said, gesturing at the cauldrons, “I hoped that you might be able to help others. The most grievously wounded. There are a few that are beyond our ability to aid, at least here. I had to try.”

Sen felt a bit of sympathy for the man, but he wasn’t sure he should help that way. What he was doing here, offering general aid to all, said very clearly that he was taking a neutral position. If he went to the water cultivators and helped their most desperately injured, that could look a lot like taking sides. On the other hand, he’d taken sides at the beginning of the fight and killed more than his fair share of water cultivators. He might not owe the man in front of him anything, but he did owe something to the water cultivators as a whole. He glanced at Chan Yu Ming, but her face was an opaque mask to him. He couldn’t tell what she thought or wanted him to do. Pulling a dagger from his storage ring, he made a mark on the ladle he’d been using to portion out the elixir. He held the ladle out to Chan Yu Ming, who took it without changing her expression.

“Up to the line. No more, no less.”

“It will be as you say.”

He turned to one of the fire cultivators who tried to hide the dirty look they’d been giving Sen.

“Send someone to the compound and inform them that I will be treating the most seriously injured of the water cultivators. I will do the same for the fire cultivators if they wish it.”

Some of the hostility Sen could feel in the fire cultivator vanished when the man realized that Sen wasn’t handing out preferential help. The fire cultivator nodded.

“It will be as you say, Judgment’s Gale.”

It took a huge effort of will to resist the urge to yell at the man not to call him that. It was how he had introduced himself to everyone. He couldn’t very well get angry that people used the name he’d given to them. He gestured at the healer to lead the way and followed the man back to the water cultivator’s bivouac area. Sen steadfastly refused to acknowledge any of the looks he was given, whether they were hateful, grateful, or anything else. He was just there to see if he could help some people. The healer led Sen to a spot that had been isolated with hastily built canvas walls. Once he stepped behind those walls, he understood. There were perhaps a dozen people laid out on the ground, and Sen was simply astounded that they were alive at all. Most of them had been injured in direct combat, with missing limbs or gaping head wounds. He saw one who had been caught in the wake of that steam explosion. As gently as he could, he examined them with his spiritual sense and his qi. He could tell that at least three of them were truly beyond help or his help at any rate. For the rest, though, he thought there was a chance.

He started with the one who had been so hideously burned by the steam. He could tell that their injuries weren’t just external, but that their lungs and windpipe had been seared by the steam as well. He picked a corner and set up his pot. Then, he started asking for the ingredients he needed. The water cultivator healers promptly started handing him what he asked for, mostly. In some cases, they'd simply run out. In other cases, they didn’t know what he wanted. A quick explanation often yielded viable substitutes, but Sen all too often found himself dipping into his own stores. The work turned into a blur for him as he built elixirs from the ground up to treat incredibly specific problems. The only bright spot was that they were all water cultivators, so he didn’t have to customize around different qi specializations. Except, then there were fire cultivators.

He was so deep into the process of analyzing the injuries and trying to dream up creative ways to heal them that the implications were lost on him. He just kept working. He wasn’t successful every time, which hurt him more than he liked to consider. Of course, most of those cases were borderline. He’d never know if it was that their bodies were too injured or if their wills to live just weren’t sufficient to endure the healing. He’d have to console himself with the knowledge that he’d done all he could for them. As the hours blurred together into days, though, Sen was surprised to find that he was gleaning new insights into alchemy. He didn’t know if it was his utter focus, the diversity of injuries, or some combination of factors, but he saw so many things he’d missed before. He saw ways to use metal qi-attributed ingredients to reinforce the fundamental structures of elixirs, so they’d be more stable. He saw how to connect water and fire qi-attributed ingredients, not simply as balancing agents, but at a more fundamental level that would let him temper them to work on injuries that might resist healing otherwise. The universe of alchemy opened before him like a map, and he followed its winding roads to places he might never have gone otherwise.

When the trance finally broke, Sen nearly collapsed in exhaustion. How long was I like that, he wondered. He looked around and saw that there were no new people to treat. There was, however, a mixed group of water and fire cultivators kneeling on the ground around him. When they saw that he was aware of his surroundings again, the group pressed their heads against the ground three times. Oh, that can’t be good, thought Sen.

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