Unintended Cultivator

Li Yi Nuo waited to the side and watched as Sen and Laughing River stood a few feet apart, gesticulated wildly, and yelled at each other like a pair of bickering siblings. It might have even been amusing, like some kind of comical theater performance. That is, it might have been if not for the fact that the bickering pair were two of the most powerful beings she’d ever personally encountered, and they were standing in one of the most dangerous places on the face of the planet. The total disregard that the pair showed for the possibility that some insanely powerful spirit beast might attack them was a more telling and chilling expression of their strength than any claim either might have made. She didn’t dare speak for fear of drawing down the wrath of either man or fox.

She would never, ever have ventured this far into the wilds for any reason except the kind of dire, if implied, threat that the fox had issued. When they first entered the wilds, she had assumed that they would all move with utmost caution. Oh, how wrong she had been. The fox had treated it like a social outing with friends. But she supposed that was to be expected from the elder nine-tail. She had turned to Sen to find a kindred spirit in her fear. His reaction had almost been worse. While he spoke about being so deep in the wilds as though it should be treated as very dangerous, his behavior told a different story. He wasn’t afraid. At best, he was mildly wary of their surroundings.

He'd come back from scouting a few times covered in blood and injured in ways that made her cringe. Then, he’d make an offhand comment about dealing with some beast, drink one of those impossibly potent elixirs as if it wasn’t a priceless treasure, and just ignore the injuries like they were minor inconveniences. Every time he did something like that, treated the impossible like the commonplace, walked off injuries that would have left anyone in her sect calling for aid, or yelled at the fox, it made her look back at their “battle” and realize how lucky she had been that he hadn’t wanted a real fight. He would have crushed her. It was only in hindsight that she realized that she hadn’t felt a whisper of killing intent from the man. It wasn’t until he came storming back from locating what they’d come so far to find that she finally felt a little of it. It had been bleeding off of him and that had been more than enough for her. It wasn’t even aimed at her and had left her shaken.

When he’d grabbed her hand and said they were leaving, she hadn’t even entertained the idea of saying no. Li Yi Nuo had been wanting to leave ever since they started this journey into madness and death. Even if she’d been completely on board, though, one look at his face would have silenced any protest. Granite cliffs in the depths of winter had more give and warmth than his face had shown. They hadn’t gone ten steps before she felt a qi platform manifest beneath them and start to carry them back the way they had come at speeds she couldn’t have produced and wouldn’t have wanted to either. She’d been terrified that a stray tree branch would cut her in half, but Sen created a technique she couldn’t even understand that moved ahead of them like some awful hand of destruction. Anything that might impede the straight line he had chosen was shredded, pulped, shattered, or blown aside.

They traveled for miles that way before the fox finally caught up with them. Laughing River had positioned himself in their path. She was sure that Sen was simply going to drive that destructive technique into the fox. He might have intended to do so, but it seemed the fox was able to disrupt the technique if not the qi platform they stood on. Or maybe the fox had chosen not to disrupt it. Doing so would have sent her and Sen tumbling through the ancient forest. While Sen might have survived it, Li Yi Nuo was certain that she would not have lived to tell the tale. She might be as resilient as most cultivators, but she wasn’t the all-but-indestructible tower of muscle and strength that Sen had somehow become through his body cultivation method. Given the choice between stopping or ramming the qi platform into the fox, Sen had thankfully chosen to stop.

Laughing River did have the good sense to look a tiny bit relieved at that. While his ability to disrupt Sen’s technique had been a display of truly awesome power, getting hit with anything moving that fast would still hurt almost anyone. What was more perplexing was the fact that Sen had not suffered any apparent backlash from having the technique disrupted. Either the fox knew how to do it in a way that wouldn’t result in a backlash, a secret that any sect would bankrupt itself to learn, or Sen had simply ignored it. She wasn’t sure which of those choices she preferred. Laughing Riven had given Sen a patient look when the qi platform stopped a bare foot from fox’s chest.

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“We should discuss this, Sen.”

She glanced over at Sen and saw him working his jaw so hard that the muscles in his face looked like they were twitching. The qi platform had dropped to the ground, and she’d moved to get out of both men’s direct line of sight.

“Discuss this? You want to discuss this? Do you know when the time to discuss this was?” demanded Sen, who immediately cut off the fox's attempted answer. “The time was back on the road when you first arrived!”

“I’ll admit that I probably could have been a tiny bit more forthright about what we’d be doing.”

“A sacred ruin? Really? You actually thought that you could trade a favor for offending the very heavens and damaging my karma? Let me guess. You can’t go inside, can you?”

The fox had gotten a very frustrated look at that point. “No. The monks who used to live there took steps to make sure my kind couldn’t enter.”

“What a shocking level of good sense on their part!” shouted Sen.

Li Yi Nuo thought her heart would stop at those words. She was certain that the fox would kill them both on the spot. Instead of the instant murders she had expected, the fox started yelling back that the only reason the monks did it was because some overzealous initiate had stolen something from a fox in the first place. Sen made the accusation that the fox had probably stolen it to begin with, which made her heart pound in naked terror again. The fox had put on an affronted face and said that wasn’t here or there. Things had only devolved from there to the point where Sen and Laughing River were mostly just throwing insults at each other. It was an activity that Li Yi Nuo could only interpret as some bizarre workaround to the duel to the death that any one of those insults should have demanded. Death by a thousand insults, perhaps? Still, Li Yi Nuo remained silent. While those two might have some obscure reason not to kill each other, she felt supremely confident that she was not included in that unspoken bargain. And then, damn him, Sen pointed at her.

“And why in the hells did you insist that she come along? Did you think I wouldn’t back down from that deathtrap because I’d be too embarrassed to do it in front of a beautiful woman?”

The fox looked from Sen to Li Yi Nuo, seemed to weigh his words with substantially more care than he had been for the last twenty minutes or so, and then he spoke to her.

“Sen’s got that right of that one. A mind-boggling number of young men have done even stupider things because a woman was watching them. I was playing the odds.”

Li Yi Nuo stared at Laughing River and was overwhelmed with lots of different kinds of anger.

“You brought me along as some kind of pride trap for him?” she asked, thrusting a finger at Sen.

“Yep,” said the fox with absolutely no shame or remorse.

“You put me in mortal peril and were going to put me into even more mortal peril as a backup plan?”

“You were there. It was an opportunity. Waste not, want not.”

“And what was I supposed to do while you battled an evil army and offended the heavens?”

Laughing River blinked a few times, frowned, and shrugged. “Cheer? Have lunch? Loot sacred relics? I don’t know. It’s important to have some initiative and seize opportunity when it arrives.”

“So, you didn’t, at any point, take into account that I’m a core formation cultivator with excellent training who might have been able to contribute?”

“It might have given it more thought if you were a nascent soul cultivator,” offered Laughing River.

“He’s not a nascent soul cultivator, either!” shouted Li Yi Nuo.

Laughing River looked over at Sen and lifted an eyebrow. “Well, I suppose that’s true. It’s easy to forget when he’s out there singlehandedly slaughtering spirit beasts by the thousands, toppling regimes, and killing nascent soul cultivators. Oh, that reminds me, Sen. How did things turn out with that princess of yours? I never heard the whole story.”

“Huh,” said Sen, apparently surprised to be addressed again. “Oh, she tried to kill me.”

Li Yi Nuo spun to stare at Sen. “Is all of that true?”

She watched as the absurd man hemmed and hawed before he finally spoke.

“There’s a lot of context missing.”

“Are you kidding me!”

“Why are you yelling at me?” asked Sen while waving a hand at the Laughing River. “Go back to being mad at him.”

“Hey!” said the fox. “That was just mean.”

“You did drag her hundreds of miles into the wilds with the sole purpose of using her to shame me into doing what you want. Then, you basically told her that the, I don’t know, probably decades of relentless work she put into advancing mean nothing and have absolutely no value in a serious situation.”

The fox gave Sen an exasperated look. “You felt it was necessary to remind her of all that right now?”

“It was an opportunity. Waste not, want not.”

“You always were damnably sharp.”

Li Yi Nuo locked eyes with Sen. “Are we leaving?”

He nodded. “Oh, we’re definitely leaving.”

She marched over to him and grabbed his hand with the intention of pulling him along. She never got a chance to even take a step.

“I’m dying, Sen,” said Laughing River.

Li Yi Nuo felt Sen stiffen at those words and knew the fight was over. She’d lost. Sen had lost. She just didn’t know if Sen knew it yet.

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