Unintended Cultivator

Sen sat cross-legged on the deck of the ship with his senses and qi extended. The ship had many excellent qualities, or so Sen had told himself, but speed wasn’t one of them. Lo Meifeng admitted that the journey was moving slowly, even by the standards of sea travel. She also assured him that wasn’t entirely a bad thing. The longer they spent wholly unfindable, the more likely the demonic cultivators were to assume they’d made a mistake and redirect their forces elsewhere. The demonic cultivators weren’t a government or even a sect that could deploy vast resources to track them down. They didn’t have huge numbers. They could hire people, she’d admitted, but hired help was always of questionable value and loyalty. So, despite having grown a little tired of the slow-moving ship, Sen had tried to make the best of it.

With so much water qi available, he’d started to make a study of it. It wasn’t his strongest qi affinity, but it didn’t need to be when there was an endless supply of the qi type. He’d started small, just trying to make water do simply simple things. He’d made balls of water appear over his hands. Then, he’d moved on to trying to make other shapes. While balls of water were easy, other geometric shapes proved much more difficult. The water didn’t like hard corners and straight lines. He learned how to force the water into shapes like squares, rectangles, and pyramids, but he’d also learned that the energy and effort necessary to do it was much more than would be practical literally anywhere except on the endless water qi supply of the ocean.

The only benefit of those exercises was that they improved his overall control over water qi. So, when he tried to adapt the idea of wind blades into water blades, it was much easier than he thought it would be. Some of it was the curved nature of the blades. The water didn’t resist that shape and all but lovingly embraced it. He also discovered that it was both easier and more difficult than expected to give those water blades a hard edge. When he tried to simply make the edge hard and sharp, the water resisted.

Of course, it took days to figure out how to actually do it. Once he mastered that, though, he found it was a snap to make devastatingly effective water whips. He even tested out running across the top of the water. It was a little like using a qinggong technique, except he was hardening the water, rather than pooling qi. While it worked, he very quickly decided that it wasn’t something he wanted to try in rough seas. Running across water with comparatively gently rising and falling waves was one thing, but the sailors had spent some of their time telling him tales of their narrow escapes in bad weather. He did not want to try running up a wave that was three times higher than the main mast.

While getting those techniques under his belt was satisfying, Sen spent most of his time simply observing how the water moved in the ocean. He was far less interested in the way the surface moved than the way the water moved beneath the surface. The surface conditions seemed to mostly depend on the surface weather. If the weather was nice, the waters tended to be calmer. If the weather was stormy or extremely windy, the surface was choppy. Yet, Sen could feel water moving beneath the surface on a scale that simply left him speechless. He didn’t even have words to describe the amount of water that moved in a specific direction, regardless of surface conditions. The qi that moved in those vast currents was simply frightening. Sen couldn’t even imagine trying to wrestle that much qi under his control. He wasn’t sure anyone could. Maybe a god or one of the greater immortals could do it, but someone still locked into the mortal realm? Sen had his doubts.

Sen understood, on some level, that he was still looking for that last bit of enlightenment from the beach. He didn’t think that this was it, but there was something to learn from those massive qi flows deep beneath the water. So much of what he did with qi was, by comparison, quick and dirty. It was here one moment and gone the next. He’d never even considered what a sustained qi flow might accomplish for him. Of course, he’d also rarely been in a position where he could set up a sustained qi flow in advance of his need for it. Still, it was something to consider. He had a hard time imagining what a sustained flow of earth might do for him, so he wasn’t eager to experiment with it. He had a far too clear picture of what a sustained flow of fire qi might do. Air, though, might have some potential. It didn’t move exactly like water, but there were some similarities there. If he started setting up a sustained qi airflow fifty miles away from somewhere and built it as he went, could he hurl some kind of massive windstorm at his enemies?

Sen was annoyed as he tucked that idea away in a corner of his mind for later consideration. His deep communion with the ocean had revealed that there was a storm coming. If he was reading the water right, it was going to be one of those bad ones that didn’t treat seagoing vessels kindly. He went to the captain and let the man know about the oncoming storm and its severity. The first couple of times Sen had warned the man, the captain had dismissed it as nonsense. Now, though, the captain listened. He frowned and consulted with several maps. He frowned even more deeply as he pointed at a spot.

“There’s a cove there where we could probably ride out a storm safely,” said the captain, “but it’s at least another six hours of sailing away. Do we have that long?”

Sen reflected on what he’d been getting from the water. It was hard for him to estimate things like distance and time. He simply didn’t have enough experience on the water. In the end, he gave a half-shrug.

“Damn. There are a few other places we could stop before then, but they don’t offer good protection from storms.”

Sen knew he had nothing to contribute to that discussion. “I’ll leave that in your hands.”

Sen withdrew from the deck and went to find Lifen and Lo Meifeng. They were both in the small galley, drinking tea, but not with each other. Sen wanted to give them both a slap to the back of the head. He wouldn’t actually do it, but only because he was certain it wouldn’t actually change anything. The two women simply didn’t like each other. Sen didn’t fully understand the reasons why. Lo Meifeng seemed annoyed by the fact the Lifen would potentially slow them down. Lifen seemed annoyed by Lo Meifeng’s annoyance that she hadn’t progressed farther in her cultivation. Yet, he got the distinct impression that those were reasons they were telling him, rather than the actual problem. Whatever was really bothering the women about each other, he was out of the loop. A place both Lifen and Lo Meifeng seemed determined to keep him.

Most of the time, he didn’t really care. It wasn’t like they’d ever been friends to begin with. There was no relationship to repair. On occasions where there might be danger approaching, though, he found their squabbling obnoxious. It made him either have the same conversation twice or made him force the women to interact with each other. He didn’t enjoy either option. Today, he wasn’t in the mood to have duplicate conversations.

“Lo Meifeng. Lifen. Would you join me please?”

The two women gave each other opaque looks before truculently rising to their feet and coming over to him. He glared at both of them. “Knock it off for the next two minutes.”

“But-,” Lifen started to object.

Sen held up a hand. “Listen. There’s a storm coming.”

Both women stopped giving each other catty looks and focused entirely on him.

“How bad?” asked Lo Meifeng.

“Bad. The captain knows about a sheltered cove, but we may not make it there before the storm hits. I don’t know if he’ll try to make it there or look for somewhere closer, but it’s going to get rough before the day is out.”

There were several more questions from both women, most of which Sen answered with a shrug or a simple, “I don’t know.”

Once they got tired of asking him questions that he couldn’t really answer, the women went back to their cabins to do, well, Sen didn’t really know what. Put away breakable items, maybe? For his part, Sen returned to the deck and kept his eyes on the horizon. He saw the first edges of the storm in the distance and glanced over at the captain. The captain grimaced.

“We’re going to have to ride out part of that storm if we want to make it that cove,” said the captain. “She’s a sturdy ship. As long as the seas don’t get too bad, we should be fine.”

After weeks aboard the ship, Sen knew where he could stand and not get in the way. So, he took up station there and just watched as those ominous black clouds got closer and closer. He eyed the surface as the waves grew larger and more hostile. The edge of the storm caught them. Sen watched as a hazy wall grew closer and then rain was crashing down on the ship. Sen’s mastery over water qi was good enough that he thought he could probably divert the rain away from the ship, for a while at least, but he didn’t want to burn through his available qi when some more desperate moment might arrive later. Instead, he limited himself to keeping the rain off of him. It would have been a taxing exercise a few weeks earlier. After all of his practice with water qi, it was a casual effort. Even so, he watched the growing size of the waves and the ever-heavier rain with growing alarm. If this was the edge of the storm, he didn’t even want to imagine what the inner storm might look like.

He wasn’t sure exactly what alerted him to it, but something inside Sen warned him that there was danger nearby. He felt around with his all of his senses, all of his qi, and his blood ran cold. There was foreign qi out there in the storm, part of the storm. Someone was making this storm happen. Worse still, he could feel them pushing the worst of the storm at the ship he was on. Then, his vague sense of alarm became a blaring beacon of alarm. There was a wave, if anything that big could be called a wave, heading their way. If it crashed down on them, the ship wouldn’t survive. Hell, he’d be surprised if anyone aboard survived. Sen didn’t think about it. There was no time to warn anyone. He leapt to the center of the deck, threw his hands out to either side, and cycled for water qi. It rushed into him, unbalanced his dantian almost immediately, but he’d have to worry about that later.

Uncertain that he’d have the strength to do what needed to be done, he sacrificed a drop of his liquid qi to the effort. Then, he hardened a shell of water around the ship. For a brief moment, there was quiet and calm as his technique cut off the fury of the storm. Then, there was screaming as sailors saw the colossal wave that was about to crash down on them. Sen gritted his teeth in preparation, but the true force of that wave crashing down on them very nearly made Sen lose his grip on the technique. He felt blood spurt from his nose, and he crashed to his knees. He was vaguely aware that the ship had been pushed beneath the surface of the ocean. The crushing pressure that now bore down on the fragile shell around them was proof enough of that. Darkness clouded the edges of Sen’s vision as he fought to hold the technique, to hold back the ocean itself. He could feel blood trickling from his eyes and ears now. Then, blessed relief, the pressure vanished from around the ship. Sen let the technique go before it failed on its own and hit him with a backlash. The last thing he remembered was a deluge of rainwater driving him to the deck and the captain screaming for someone to, “Grab that man!”

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