Unintended Cultivator

He did take a moment to study his dantian and the odd ribbon of new qi but left off almost immediately. There was no obvious damage to the dantian. Figuring out that new qi was important. He knew it. He also knew that it was something that he wasn’t going to understand with five minutes of casual study. Even so, it was an effort to turn his attention away from it. Any change in his dantian that he hadn’t initiated was a cause for concern. Changes could mean unexpected results, which he’d learned was almost always problematic. Still, he had pressing medical needs that required much more immediate attention. Turning to the problem at hand, he let his mind slip into that hazy place of unfocused focus that let him pick the right ingredients for the problem at hand. He started with the base ingredients, wood-aligned ginseng for general-purpose healing, wind-aligned five-flavor fruit for the blood, and sunflower root as a general reagent for the other ingredients.

After that, the ingredients became more specific to his needs. He used earth-aligned crown flower to help repair and reinforce his bones. Metal-aligned serpent weed would help balance the elixir. Ingredient after ingredient went into the pot until it felt right. Sen had been so consumed by the process that it took him completely off-guard when he sensed a giant looming presence nearby. He looked around and his mouth dropped open in shock and awe. As the fang-filled maw slammed closed around him, Sen had just enough time to think, “Was that a dragon?

***

“That really hurt,” complained Sen, his mind veering away from even trying to remember the details.

“I expect it did. The Five-Fold Body Transformation isn’t for the weak. It is where your body transformation was headed, though. I just helped ensure that you made the last few steps. Although, speaking of pain, you should brace yourself,” warned Elder Bo.

“Brace myself? For what?” Sen asked, sitting up in alarm.

“Tribulation,” said the divine turtle.

Sen remembered Master Feng talking about tribulations. What had he said they usually were?

“Oh no,” said Sen, looking up at thick, dark clouds overhead. “Not lightning.”

“More deadly than lightning?!”

“Yes. You face the tribulation of the peach pits.”

And as if the divine turtle's words had triggered it, a peach pit moving at the approximate speed of a crossbow bolt beaned Sen in the head, drawing blood as it did. Then, it was as if all the light in the world was snuffed out. Sen looked up and saw thousands of peach pits hurtling toward him.

“This is so unfair,” he complained.

***

Once they were out of the city proper, Lo Meifeng seemed to relax a little. At least, Sen thought she did. Her answers to the occasional questions that Sen or Lifen asked were less sharp and terse. It wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but Sen liked to take his victories where he found them. Despite relaxing slightly, Lo Meifeng kept them moving until nearly sunset. At that point, they had moved beyond the city and the dense crush of buildings that had gone up beyond the city walls. Instead, they were traveling through the smaller towns and farming villages that seemed to dot the landscape beyond every city. While Sen would have been perfectly content to simply find a spot off the road, both of the women emphatically declined that option.

“Some of us require a proper bath from time to time,” said Lo Meifeng with an unimpressed look.

“Agreed,” said Lifen, giving Sen a nearly identical unimpressed expression.

Sen just stared at the two of them, not quite believing what he was hearing.

“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. You’re willing to risk exposing us, getting us all captured, and probably tortured to death, all so you can have baths?”

“Yes,” they said in unison.

“Hard pass. You have to know that if we get rooms somewhere, the place will get burned down, or there will be an attack, or some mouthy cultivator that will draw attention to us. I’ll be camped somewhere over there,” said Sen, gesturing at a spot with lots of natural forest cover. “You know, so you can find me when the worst inevitably happens.”

Unimpressed with his words of warning, the two women stalked away. It was almost midnight when two bedraggled-looking figures stumbled into camp. Lifen’s clothes were scorched and covered in ashes. Lo Meifeng had bandages around an arm.

“So,” said Sen. “What happened?”

“The inn burned down,” said Lifen.

“And there was an attack,” admitted Lo Meifeng.

“Anything else?” Sen asked, feeling rather pleased with himself for calling it so well.

“Yeah,” said Lifen. “There was this mouthy guy calling himself Cultivator Chou.”

At that, heavenly qi rushed into Sen as he had a moment of enlightenment about the dao of douchey smugness.

***

Once they got to the city, though, there were only three things to do. They could stay for a while, which both of them agreed was a monumentally stupid plan. So, that was out. They could follow the road south, which was a possibility. Or they could take the road west toward the inner continent. Lifen was curious about everything, so she didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other. Sen was increasingly convinced that they should go west.

“What’s to the west?” Lifen asked when told her as much.

“It’s something Uncle Kho told me about. There’s a legend that says, if you’re pure of heart, you can find a sacred temple that holds the treasure of the ages in it.”

Lifen grew instantly more excited. “West it is!”

It took months, battling their way through the wilds, facing tribulations for every advancement, a journey that would become a veritable legend in its own right. But the day finally came, when the pair burst into a clearing wearing little but rags and beheld a sight that would change them forever. Lifen threw herself forward and dipped her hands into the multicolored miracle before her.

“What is this place?” she asked, her eyes wide with awe.

“This is the Temple of the Divine Gummy Bear Waterfall.”

***

Control. So much in cultivation depended on it. Without it, strikes would not find their mark, or be turned aside with ease. Without it, one could shred their qi channels to uselessness. Without control, techniques could run out of control. That was a lesson Sen had learned the hard way. Seeing the destruction he’d wrought in that abandoned town with his poorly controlled use of Heavens’ Rebuke had very nearly convinced him to swear it off altogether. Even as he directed the same technique at the thrashing, howling, impaled demonic cultivator, he focused on control. He would kill this man, Sen promised himself, not vaporize half a mile of forest. Yet, for all that cultivation called for control, for all that cultivators relied on it, there had to be room for the unknown, for the unpredictable, for the flower of strange fortune to bloom in their lives. Sen had been the recipient of that as well. Yet, in the moment, the blooming of that flower could look like a hideous, terrifying loss of control.

That was what Sen experienced as, in the barest sliver of time before Heavens’ Rebuke flew from the spearhead, something he didn’t plan for happened. To his horror, a tiny thread from that ribbon of strange qi flew free and lodged itself in the heart of his technique. There was no time to stop it, or even consider what it meant. There was only time for one brief upswell of uncertainty and fear as Sen felt the technique fundamentally change. Then, it was loosed on the demonic cultivator. While Sen expected the lance of purple-hued blackness with lightning crackling around it, what he got instead what was appeared to be…a house cat, albeit one he’d transported straight from the depths of the countless hells. Its body was made of iridescent light and wreathed in that purple-hued black lightning. The demonic cultivator took one look at that cat, screamed like a child, and tried to run away. Sen was used to techniques fading quickly, but after the first forty-five minutes of the cat using whatever passed for its claws to “play” with the demonic cultivator, Sen got bored and wandered away.

Years later, when someone asked him if the cat killed the demonic cultivator, Sen’s only answer was, “Well, I never saw that guy again.”

***

“I know this was my suggestion,” said Lo Meifeng, “but she’s got a point. I go where you go. So, if you keep going, I pretty much have to go. If you decide we should take a pass, and I really want to you decide that, I will gladly slog through another hundred miles of this forsaken forest in any other direction.”

Sen kept his mouth shut for a minute and tried to think it through. That tugging inside his chest had turned into a relentless feeling that almost dragged him along. Yet, there was no guarantee that he was going to get anything of value if they reached the right destination. Even more importantly, the others weren’t experiencing that tugging feeling. Even if he got something valuable from it, there was a good chance that they wouldn’t. That oppressive feeling that just got worse and worse the farther they went was a pretty solid indication that something or someone ahead did not want to be bothered. Even a month ago, Sen might have pressed forward regardless of anything anyone else had to say. This time, he reminded himself of the lesson he’d struggled toward during his core formation. I can be more than one thing. He could be reckless and headstrong, but he didn’t have to be that way all the time. He could also be the kind of person who did silly things like listening to good advice. He looked in the direction they’d been heading, then made his choice.

“Then we go somewhere else,” he said.

“What? Really?” asked Lifen, sounding a little stunned.

“You made your case. Lo Meifeng agrees with you wholeheartedly. I’m not dumb enough to think I know better than everyone else.”

“They are wise to fear this place,” said a voice from the trees.

Sen let his spiritual sense and qi swirl out all around them, but he sensed nothing. The voice continued.

“You are wise in that you would heed their advice.”

A positively ancient old man stepped out of the forest. He eyed them all the way sometimes eyed a hot meal.

“Where did you come from?” Sen asked, wondering why his senses had failed him so utterly.

“From the forest. I guess they keep you around because you’re pretty,” said the old man before he reached into a pocket and held something out. “Would you like a piece of candy?”

Even Sen knew better. “Oh no, I’ve seen this show. You own a creepy van, don’t you?”

“It’s not creepy!” shouted the old man. “It’s a classic!”

***

Gathering himself, Sen stood and glared around the battlefield. Then, he took a step up into the air on a cushion of qi. Then he took another, as though he were climbing a stairwell into the heavens. He began cycling for the things he thought he’d need, shadow, fire, wind, and lightning. He tapped his core qi for this to make sure that the statement he was about to make was grand enough. He climbed until he hovered above the field nearly twenty feet in the air. He could feel the collective attention on him, waiting to see what he would say and what he would do. He started weaving the qi into something new, something he’d never made before, and lifted his jian.

“I am Judgment’s Gale,” he projected across the field, using air qi to amplify his voice like it was the voice of creation itself.

Then, he shot that woven technique into the sky. A swirling mass of fire, shadow, and lightning began spinning overhead. As it swelled outward, the unnatural storm swiftly blotted out the sun and cast the vale into a darkness akin to night. Sen added the final touch to the technique. He cycled up metal qi and sent a beam of that skyward. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, a massive, glittering spinning metal ball descended from the clouds.

“This battle is over,” he boomed across the field, “but the disco dance battle has just begun.”

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