Unintended Cultivator

There was very little talking as the three of them left the site of the battle behind and for the rest of the day. While Sen’s elixir had done a lot to restore Lifen’s and Lo Meifeng’s energy, letting them stay awake, it wasn’t a substitute for genuine rest. So, while Sen had a number of pressing questions on his mind, he kept them to himself and focused on keeping watch both ahead and behind them. For all that getting away from the location of all that fighting felt like a boost in safety, they were still traveling deeper into the wilds. That sense of safety was temporary at best, and a complete illusion at worst. There were true and terrible powers in the deep wilds. Sen had met at least one of them in Boulder’s Shadow. Even after having advanced to core formation, Sen knew that he would stand no chance against powers like that, Heavens’ Rebuke or not.

Yet, for that day at least, all seemed quiet. Sen pushed and prodded them along until he thought Lifen and Lo Meifeng might revolt and murder him. Then, he found them a semi-sheltered spot to set up camp. While the women dozed in semi-consciousness by the fire, Sen did his best to set up an obscuring formation. He kept checking it and rechecking it, looking for some flaw, some error on his part that might let someone find them. Discovering none, he reluctantly activated the formation and returned to the fire. He didn’t stint on the food even a little, instead preparing several courses of food, liberally doctored with some of the more palatable herbs from his storage ring. He wanted the meal to taste good, but he wanted it to help them all recover even more.

For all that Sen hadn’t spent days fighting, he had just gone through a major advancement. Those were taxing at best, and he was nowhere near to being back to full strength. Nor did he feel confident that he knew his limits anymore. Still, he was obviously in the best condition of their little trio, so he took it on himself to handle as many of the mundane duties as possible. After he passed out plates of food, he busied himself with putting up the tents, after prodding Lo Meifeng to produce hers from her storage ring. He also put up a blanket and left water behind it so the woman could bathe in relative privacy. He didn’t think Lifen would care about modesty, all things considered, but he assumed Lo Meifeng would prefer some discretion. After devouring everything that Sen put in front of them, they took turns bathing before collapsing into their tents.

Sen kept watch all night, actively cultivating. He’d fallen back on his old cultivation technique, but it was plainly clear to him that it wasn’t sufficient for his new level of advancement. He’d already been struggling to fill his dantian. Now, he had a core soaking up much of the environmental qi he took in. On top of that, that double helix of strange qi and heavenly qi was also stealing away some of the environmental qi and condensing it into liquid qi. He just wished he knew why it was doing that. Some of the liquid qi dripped down to make a shallow pool in the bottom of his dantian, but some of it was also soaked up by his core. He needed a new cultivation technique sooner rather than later. So, he pulled out the copies of core-level cultivation manuals he’d procured from the Soaring Skies sect and started digging into them.

He’d known from the beginning that none of the approaches were right for him. That would have been too easy. For all the apparent favor he enjoyed from the heavens or the universe or whatever, that favor seemed to come bundled with a lot of other hurdles. Still, it wasn’t like he had something better to be doing at the moment. So, he read. He considered. He hypothesized. Then, he tested his best guesses over and over. He met with a lot of failure, as he’d expected. Sometimes, he’d see a partial success, only for it to dead-end with more tweaking. He’d forgotten how wearisome this kind of approach was, and he was doing it with some guideposts to point him in the right direction. Even so, Sen resigned himself to the very real possibility that this would be work that might take him months to complete. He made himself forget about the end goal and focus on the process. It helped a little. By the time morning rolled around and he heard Lo Meifeng stirring, he was ready to take a break.

He resumed his old cultivation approach and set himself to making breakfast. He made rice porridge liberally spruced up with some pork. Then, he prepared tea. Camp tea was always inferior because making tea properly was simply too complicated, even if there was a traditional tea set available. Yet, Sen had long ago determined that breakfast without tea was just another way of ensuring a disastrous day. So, he made the inferior tea. Lo Meifeng appeared first and went straight for the food. Lifen came out next. While she looked like she’d rather still be sleeping, she no longer had the air of someone who was gripping consciousness by her fingertips. She joined them for breakfast and even seemed to perk up a bit after eating and having several cups of tea. When he thought that they were finally both truly conscious, Sen finally started to get at what had been on his mind since he woke up.

“So, I have some questions,” he said.

“You have questions?” retorted Lifen. “That’s hilarious because I have some questions. Top of the list, why did you decide to advance there? Next up, what kind of enlightenment drops so much qi on you that it’s enough to drive your core formation and push my advancement and let Lo Meifeng advance too? Finally, were you trying to get us murdered by spirit beasts and demonic cultivators?”

After staring at the fuming Lifen for a moment, Sen realized that he should have expected exactly those questions. They were not only obvious questions, but they were fair questions, at least if someone was only looking at what had happened from outside of his head.

“I didn’t decide to advance there. In fact, I was trying not to advance. The enlightenment was, I don’t even know what that was. Truly. I’m as baffled by it as you are. I was just sitting there, thinking that wanting to advance wasn’t a good enough reason to do it. I was thinking that I should loop the two of you in and make an actual plan for when and how to do it. Mostly, I was thinking that I should exercise some restraint for the good of us all. Then, we were all in the middle of a heavenly qi storm, and I was advancing against my own will. So, in sum, I wasn’t trying to get us all murdered.”

“You got all of that enlightenment qi for deciding to be reasonable, for once?” demanded Lo Meifeng.

“Well, I might not phrase it exactly like that,” hedged Sen. “Still, yeah, that’s probably accurate.”

“That is so unfair that no words exist to describe it,” said Lo Meifeng.

Sen glanced over at Lifen, only to find her nodding along. Sen repressed an urge to be angry with them. They’d had a hard few days.

“I’ll remind you that all that “good fortune” left me unconscious and helpless for days in the middle of a huge fight. Would either of you have traded places with me in that situation?”

That seemed to sober the pair up a bit.

“I suppose not,” admitted Lo Meifeng.

“Yeah,” said Lifen slowly. “When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound so good.”

“Which brings me to what is probably the only question I have that really matters. Seriously, how in all the countless hells did I possibly survive all of that? I mean, helpless, unconscious, I should have been dead five minutes into that fight.”

“It seems your good fortune didn’t abandon you entirely when took your very inconveniently timed nap,” said Lo Meifeng with a shake of her head.

“It was just a few spirit beasts at first,” said Lifen. “That was lucky for us because they really didn’t like that offensive formation you put up. One of them would try it every few hours, get horribly burned, and hit with lightning. Then, they’d all just mill around for a while. When more and more of them showed up, they spent more time fighting with each other than trying to get at us. Gave us time to deal with our own advancements.”

“What were those advancements?” asked Sen.

Lifen’s face brightened up, but Lo Meifeng cut her off before she could start. “Let’s finish the how did we survive story first.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Lifen. “Things didn’t really get ugly until the demonic cultivators showed up. Good news for us was that the spirit beasts wanted them dead just as much as they wanted us dead. Maybe more. And, unlike us, they weren’t all in a scary formation. That fighting went on for quite a while, but the demonic cultivators eventually concentrated enough force to break the formation. That’s when things got really serious.”

“When was that?” asked Sen.

“Maybe a day in?” Lifen had said, half asked.

“Something like that,” said Lo Meifeng, taking over the story. “After that, we got to do some of the fighting.”

“So, I spent two days just lying there, in the middle of all of that, and nobody tried to off me? No spirit beasts took a swipe at me?”

“Are you kidding me?” asked Lo Meifeng. “Everything and everyone tried to kill you. It turns out, spirit oxen are positively terrifying when they’re in a mood to fight. You owe them, Sen. We couldn’t have kept you alive. We barely kept ourselves alive. Those oxen stood guard over you for damn near the entire time you were out. The only part I played in keeping you alive was keeping that demonic core cultivator too busy to go after you.”

Sen glanced over at Lifen.

“I mostly hit people over the head with a club when they got too close,” she offered. “Then, I’d run away. They’d usually chase me until something more dangerous attacked them.”

“You spent two days doing that? Just buying time?”

“Not the whole two days,” said Lifen. “The demonic cultivators would back off for a while sometimes. The spirit beasts kept their distance once those oxen showed up. Let us take a breather now and then.”

Sen let all of that sink in for a while before he spoke. “I’m sorry that all of that happened. Genuinely. I am sorry. Once it started, I did everything I could think of to try to stop it. I just…failed. Thank you for watching over me, as much as you could.”

“Yeah, well, you should be sorry,” said Lo Meifeng, although it didn’t seem like her heart was in it. “It’d be a lot easier to be mad at you if I hadn’t been on the receiving end of you very obviously trying to stall that advancement to core formation.”

“I’ve never seen him look so panicked,” said Lifen.

Lo Meifeng laughed. “I know, right? He looked like someone who just got caught stealing something really valuable.”

Sen decided to let them have their fun at his expense. They’d probably earned it, all things considered. If he found their explanation of their survival less than satisfactory, they didn’t need to know that. They’d been very busy, while he’d just come in at the end. Sen could recognize that there had been another hand at work in their survival. It hadn’t been overt, but it had been there. It was the only plausible explanation for how they actually survived. He even had a suspicion about who. After all, how many people in the world knew that he was, apparently, on very good terms with the spirit oxen?

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