Unintended Cultivator

Sen’s first instinct was to return to the galehouse, make sure everyone was safe, and then sleep. He ruthlessly suppressed that instinct. Fu Ruolan and Falling Leaf were survivors. Fu Ruolan had survived what was possibly the least forgiving process of all, cultivation. Falling Leaf, well, she’d survived a genocide and then forged a place for herself on a decidedly hostile mountain. While both might appreciate his concern, it was highly improbable that either of them actually required it. He was also very confident that Fu Ruolan would have protected Falling Leaf if it was necessary. Letting his best friend get injured or killed would not make Sen more receptive to anything that the nascent soul cultivator wanted to teach him. So, there was a certain level of self-interest involved in ensuring that Falling Leaf didn’t die from something stupid and avoidable, such as the fallout from one of Sen’s advancements.

Sen also knew that his galehouses were built to withstand a staggering amount of punishment. In all likelihood, the two of them could probably have ridden out his entire advancement undisturbed while drinking tea inside the galehouse. Sen briefly worried about some kind of damage to Fu Ruolan’s less obviously sturdy home, with its wood construction and glass windows. He snorted at that and let the thought pass from his mind. Sen didn’t know for sure what protections she’d put in place, but he was quite certain that she had placed them. A flurry of boulders would probably just sound like a gentle rain from the inside. She simply had too much of value inside to leave it unprotected. No, neither of them needed Sen’s concerns at the present moment.

That was for the best because he needed to gather himself in case a tribulation came for him. He’d find it profoundly petty of the heavens to send him a tribulation after all of the suffering he’d been through. He had nearly died a slow agonizing death finding Fu Ruolan, and the pill itself had come within a hair’s breadth of snuffing him out. Sen felt like that was suffering enough, but that didn’t mean that the heavens agreed with him. After all, the last time he’d advanced his body cultivation, the heavens had been very keen to express their displeasure. However, he had to accept that he didn’t know why that tribulation had happened or been so intense. It might have been aimed at him or it might have been because of Elder Bo’s interference. In fact, the tribulation might have been a message directed at Elder Bo, rather than at Sen. It had been terrifying at the time, but it had also ended before it did him any real, lasting damage. He was quite certain that the heavens could have kept it up until he was nothing but a dark stain on that beach. Sen sighed. There was just no way to know, which was probably the point.

Still, he couldn’t go back until he was confident there wasn’t a tribulation coming his way. He kept his gaze turned to the sky, waiting for any indication of heavenly wrath about to descend. The sky remained a pale, placid winter blue. Everything Sen had heard suggested that tribulations were almost immediate. His own experiences supported the idea, but he wasn’t comfortable just assuming that’s how it always worked. Half the things in his cultivation journey didn’t make any sense, so it seemed foolhardy to assume that tribulations would make sense either. After an hour passed without incident, though, Sen finally let himself relax a little. Mostly, that meant he only spent half his time checking the sky for threats.

He stood up from the kneeling position he’d been maintaining and moved around in the clearing, trying to get a feel for what had changed. He’d known that there were changes, but it was largely impossible to judge them without actually testing out his body a little. Just walking around, he could feel surges of unfamiliar physical strength. This wasn’t merely a restoration of what he’d had before, but a fundamental step forward. He tried throwing a basic punch at nothing in particular and was nearly dragged off his feet by his own momentum. He stared down at his fist in consternation. That hadn’t even been a full power strike. This was… It was beyond his expectations. It also meant that he was going to have to relearn how to do everything, again. Still, that was to be expected. More important to him, though, was the feeling of being healthy and free to advance again.

The entire time he had been with Fu Ruolan, there had been a subtle wrongness to his body. Bodies weren’t meant to be held in a static state for indefinite periods of time. He hadn’t complained about it because it had been the only thing keeping him alive, but it made his body feel separate from him in ways that he hadn’t experienced before. He hadn’t recognized just how alien his body had felt until now. With his body once more behaving as a body should, undergoing infinite tiny changes and adjustments in every moment, he finally felt like himself again. It was as though his entire physical being had been locked in a cage with no room to move for more than a year, only for the cage to have suddenly fallen away. Sen took a shuddering breath of relief. He’d have to continue down the path laid out in the Five-Fold Body Transformation manual to keep feeling healthy and normal, but that was just the way of things with body cultivation. The key was not to get trapped part of the way through the process.

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Sen took an hour to work through some of the basic martial forms he’d learned from Master Feng. He took it slowly, building up his speed until he reached the tipping point between control and strength. That gave him a much clearer sense of how much he had gained and how much work was truly in front of him. He estimated that he could exert about seventy percent of his new strength and speed while maintaining actual control over his strikes and blocks. Months, he thought. It’s going to take me months of persistent work to get back to the level of control I’m used to having. It wasn’t that he couldn’t still defend himself. He was sure he could do that if necessary. He’d just have to be incredibly careful not to lose his temper. If he lashed out with his full strength now in a fit of anger, he could easily kill people he had no intention of harming.

Sen settled back down onto the ground. Now that the actual advancement was more or less done, the recuperative power of his body was back, not even back, working even more efficiently than it ever had before. He didn’t feel weak or tired. If anything, he felt energized. Of course, the physical fallout was only half the battle. Advancement taxed the mind as much as the body, and Sen wanted to give his mind a little time to recuperate before he went back and faced the flurry of questions that he was certain that Fu Ruolan had prepared for him. He wasn’t concerned that they would be worried for his well-being. He hadn’t gone so far that he was beyond the reach of Fu Ruolan’s spiritual sense. She would know that he was still alive and could tell Falling Leaf as much. For that matter, he might well be within range of Falling Leaf’s spiritual sense. Not that he’d felt either of them scan the area, but he hadn’t been paying particular attention. He’d had a lot going on just recently.

Sen let himself fall into a meditative calm, something he found far easier now that he was weighed down with the looming threat of death, the desperate need to advance, and the haunting fear that he might fail to make a functional pill for his advancement. Much like the statis of his physical form had been like a cage for his body, those worries had been like a cage for his heart and soul. Sen lacked the words to describe the joy he felt as those burdens dropped away from him. Oh, there was always a bit of pressure to continue advancing, but he didn’t mind a little pressure. It had been the absolute nature of the pressure he’d been under that Sen was happy to cast aside. When everything had taken on a do-or-die quality, it started to taint his perspective. There had been no room left for what Sen wanted. All that had existed was what he needed. Finding calm in the middle of that had been challenging at best.

With those weights no longer bearing down on him during every waking moment, it was almost comically easy to slip into a state without thought or concern. He let himself drift like that for hours. It wasn’t true sleep, but it was a kind of rest that was almost as important for him. For a little while, his mind could just rest. It didn’t need to run through a complex balancing act of weighing rewards and risks. It just could be. He sat that way, wholly indifferent to and even unaware of the freezing air around him or the snow that was slowly accumulating on top of him. He was nominally aware that a bird landed on his shoulder and eyed him curiously, no doubt wondering what kind of strange new tree had sprung up in the forest. He remained there, motionless and untroubled by thoughts for a full day. This time also allowed his body to finish making whatever small adjustments it needed to make. When he opened his eyes, though, he knew it was time to go back. Falling Leaf would leave him out there for a time, but her patience would only stretch for so long. Standing and stretching, he snickered as the snow dropped off of him in wet clumps. Then, he began the walk back to the galehouse and took stock of the damage he’d done along the way.

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