Unintended Cultivator

As her feet carried her away from the stone house that Lu Sen had summoned from the earth with such casual disregard that she’d wanted to slap him for it, Fu Ruolan didn’t see anything around her. Even in a world where the heavens intervened directly, if only occasionally, it was rare to witness anything that one might call truly miraculous. But that was what she had just seen. For perhaps the third time in her very, very long life, Fu Ruolan had witnessed a miracle. That it was a miracle made up entirely of subtlety took nothing away from it. That the person performing it had the same casual disregard for it that he had for the feat of earth qi manipulation that raised his home took nothing away from it. If anything, those factors had enhanced the miracle.

She hefted the vial in her hand. The elixir itself wasn’t some heavens-defying product. Oh, it was a top-shelf healing elixir that would command a fine price if the boy could be bothered to make enough of them to sell. Nobles and royal houses would snatch them up. However, Fu Ruolan had the distinct sense that Sen probably handed them out to anyone who crossed his path with some minor malady. She’d heard vague stories about the impossible acts of healing he’d done after the scuffle between those fire cultivators and a water sect. There had been some rumors about how he’d single-handedly swept away all sickness and infirmity in some village out to the east somewhere. She’d been skeptical about those claims.

Granted, he was a student of Ma Caihong and a year or two of her direct instruction was worth about thirty years of direct experience. Experience didn’t make an alchemist into a healer of legend, though. It made someone competent. In rare cases where talent and practice were joined, it made people brilliant. Ma Caihong was an example of that. It had been a burr in Fu Ruolan’s side for longer than she cared to think about that she would only ever be a competent alchemist. She understood the processes. She possessed vast knowledge about the various plants and reagents alchemists used to create their pills and elixirs. She had devoted countless hours to honing her capacities. In the end, though, she would only ever be competent.

She lacked that spark of insight, that touch of genius, that let Ma Caihong elevate her craft into something more than mere alchemy. That extra sliver of discernment was what made Ma Caihong Alchemy’s Handmaiden. Fu Ruolan had always assumed the woman was simply a once-in-a-cultivator’s lifetime genius, her like never to be seen again. She’d thought that right up until she’d seen that boy craft the elixir in her hands in a battered, unremarkable pot that might be found in any farm kitchen. She’d genuinely thought he’d been boasting or downplaying what he’d learned from Ma Caihong. Alchemy’s Handmaiden would never send a student out in the world making absurd claims and wholly unfamiliar with the process of pill refining. Unless, of course, the boy didn’t need to make pills and could back up those absurd claims. Fu Ruolan imagined the other woman laughing until she cried as those mad, unbelievable stories spread about her student. After all, she would have known they were true.

Her foot bumping into something solid made Fu Ruolan look up. Her steps had carried her unerringly back to her own little home. Sighing to herself, she opened the door and went inside. She found somewhere to sit so she could go back to her brooding about the miracle that had happened in a pot. If she hadn’t been struck so hard by it, she might have been angry with Lu Sen because he didn’t know. An even worse possibility occurred to her. What if he simply didn’t care? Did he understand the sea change what he’d done represented? Did he know and simply couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge it because it mattered so little to him? Fu Ruolan didn’t let herself chase those thoughts. If she did, she might kill the boy in a fit of rage. That would be disastrous for so many reasons.

Feng Ming would come calling with destruction on his mind. That might, might, be a manageable situation. Ming was always a direct soul and misdirection had become Fu Ruolan’s specialty. She thought that she could evade him. Of course, the man was also inexorable. She didn’t want to have to hide from him until all of the universes went cold. Still, he wasn’t the one she was really worried about. In some ways, Jaw-Long made her more nervous. Ming might rain down destruction when he thought it was warranted, but he preferred the personal approach. Jaw-Long’s go-to move was a cascade of lightning that blanketed an area. It was damn hard to hide from something like that because he could keep it going for days if he really put his heart into it.

However, it was the idea of Ma Caihong seeking vengeance that poured true dread into the soul. She was the least likely to go on the hunt for someone, but Fu Ruolan had heard and confirmed some of the stories about what the woman had done when Lu Sen went missing for half a year. Only a true madwoman would tempt the fury of someone who could turn the air you breathe or the tea you drink into something that could melt even nascent soul flesh from bone. As a fellow if lesser alchemist, she was better equipped than most to understand the magnitude of the threat someone like Ma Caihong posed to those who crossed her. Fu Ruolan did not want to join that particular group because, to her knowledge, its ranks were composed entirely of corpses.

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She forcefully pushed those thoughts aside. She wasn’t actually going to do anything to Lu Sen. No matter how it might look, she didn’t think he was intentionally trying to frustrate her. If he’d been of a different sort of character, she might have thought differently. Observation had taught her that he wasn’t malicious by nature. For all the destruction he’d left in his wake, it sounded like he’d spent more time trying to avoid fights than find them. He’d been polite to her, even when he hadn’t been sure what she would do or how she would act. She suspected that he’d much prefer to spend his time in libraries and alchemy labs than going out and carving his name into history. She wasn’t certain about it, yet, but she had the notion that outside forces were working very hard to keep him away from that preferred life. And no wonder, she thought.

She let her mind drift back to what she had witnessed. He’d started the process out innocently enough by bringing some water up to temperature. He’d moved on to throwing ingredients into the pot. She’d been a little appalled at how little he prepared them. Most ingredients needed to be processed to some degree. Some things were chopped, some were crushed, and others ground, but it was rare that you just tossed a whole ingredient into the cauldron…or pot, apparently. That was usually reserved for the rarest ingredients where the fundamental benefits were carried throughout the entire plant, not just in the stalks, roots, or leaves. Just as importantly, it ought to reduce the quality of the end product. Still, she’d kept her mouth shut. He could fail on his own terms. Everyone had that right, as far as she was concerned. That was when things started to get strange.

One of the reasons why every alchemist used a cauldron was because temperature control was so critical. A true alchemist cauldron was made by master smiths in sects to ensure the metal maintained uniform thickness throughout the base of the cauldron and the sides, which typically thinned out a little near the top. Sen’s ridiculous cookpot was not uniform anywhere. So, by all logic, it should have been heating everything unevenly. The second he started throwing things into the pot, though, he’d started doing something to even out the heat. She assumed it was fire qi, although her own lack of affinity there made it hard to judge. More to the point, he hadn’t seemed to be doing it actively. It was like a reflex. What she could observe was what was happening inside the pot. She’d been keeping a close eye on the reactions.

She had always believed that those reactions were governed by immutable laws. Add certain ingredients, apply the right amount of heat, and you could replicate the same reactions over and over again. It was the very heart of alchemy. What Sen did bore only the faintest resemblance to those familiar processes. She watched as reactions that should have failed were cajoled by Sen, infused with qi at precisely the right moment in precisely the right amounts. She watched as overheated or underheated reactions suddenly found the right temperature. She had heard other alchemists theorize that such things could be done, but everyone had given it up as a lost cause. The sheer number of adjustments that you’d have to make would overwhelm anyone because you’d need to calculate the temperatures, the amount of qi, everything, on the fly. The math alone would stun the minds of even nascent soul cultivators. Unless, it seemed, you just didn’t bother with the math.

She watched as he made those adjustments on instinct, often doing dozens of them simultaneously without so much as breaking a sweat. If anything, he’d looked like he was in a state of peaceful meditation. To make matters worse, she could tell he’d been doing other things, things she couldn’t clearly perceive, things at some substructural level of the ingredients or the elixir. While she didn’t know what he’d been doing, it had helped turn a bunch of ill-prepared ingredients that had been dumped into a cheap damn pot into a superior-grade healing elixir. She resisted the urge to hurl the elixir at the wall. It’s not fair, she thought as frustration seethed inside of her. She’d been chasing the mysteries of alchemy for a thousand years, devoting her time, energy, and kingdoms’ worth of resources to it. Even if she’d never be its true master, she had hoped to one day find a worthy student. She’d prayed to find someone she could push to greater heights than her own, and it was Ma Caihong who got this prodigy dropped in her lap to shape and mold as she saw fit. To add insult to injury, the woman hadn’t even trained him to use a cauldron! It was the most basic piece of equipment in the alchemist’s trade.

“It’s not fair,” she said, elixir still clutched in her hand.

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