Unintended Cultivator

Sen tried to make sense of the patriarch’s words. How can they have it, but not have access to it, he wondered. His mind tried to come up with scenarios that might provide sense to the words, but he didn’t have much luck. The few things he did come up with were, even on casual inspection, absurd. Accepting that he wasn’t going to get anywhere without more information, he eyed the patriarch. The older cultivator was frowning out over the spring.

“I’m sorry, patriarch,” said Sen, “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“You strike me as a bright enough boy. Didn’t you wonder how a sect of water cultivators managed such a complex spatial treasure?”

Sen nodded. “I did wonder. I suppose I just assumed that you hired a specialist,” he paused and looked around, “or maybe a sect of specialists to do it for you.”

The patriarch laughed a little. “A reasonable supposition, but no. Long before my time, all of this belonged to one cultivator. She was a specialist, well, the phrase unparalleled genius is probably a better description, in spatial constructions. Our sect took this place over after her death.”

Sen frowned hard at that description. “Your sect didn’t help her along to that death, did you?”

“Rather an impolite question, don’t you think?”

“Your sect members were assaulting those fire cultivators over exactly nothing, as near as I could tell. So, no, the question doesn’t seem especially impolite to me.”

The patriarch frowned but nodded. “Given your experience, I suppose it was a logical question. We didn’t kill her. She died fighting another cultivator. Some kind of rival, if our records are at all accurate. They killed each other. Mind you, this is all practically a legend even for us.”

“Twenty thousand years? More? Long enough ago that we can’t be certain that we even understand the calendar our own progenitors were using.”

“Fair enough and, I’ll admit, interesting. I’m just not sure I see the relevance.”

“Space and time are inextricably linked. If someone works with spatial qi and spatial formations, they are almost always well-versed in time-related matters as well. Among the various things we inherited from her were several time treasures.”

“Time treasures?” asked Sen with a bit of awe in his voice.

“Oh, don’t sound so impressed. One of those storage rings of yours is technically a time treasure. How do you think it manages to keep things fresh or alive? It slows down the passage of time inside the ring.”

“Oh,” said Sen.

“Exactly. It’s always less impressive when you realize that they’re relatively common. Except, in this case, we come back to that unparalleled genius part. One of the time treasures we have is room, a pocket dimension, none of us really understands it, but it essentially speeds up time for whoever is inside of it.”

Sen didn’t have to think very hard to imagine all of the ways that something like that would be useful to cultivators. He could have gotten in twice as much practice, or five times as much practice, in the same amount of time in the outside world. With the right resources on hand, you could jump from an initial core formation cultivator to a peak core cultivator in a matter of years. However, if they had such a thing, why wasn’t the Clear Spring sect absolutely overflowing with powerful core formation cultivators or even nascent soul cultivators?

“I notice a distinct lack of peak core formation cultivators in your ranks, so I have to assume that the treasure isn’t as great as it sounds on the surface,” observed Sen.

“Young man, I think that you drastically underestimate the talent required to reach peak core cultivation. It’s not just a matter of having the right natural treasures on hand. Those can only push you so far. Do you think so many people bottleneck because sects want low-powered cultivators on the rolls?”

“Yes,” said Sen. “I think that’s exactly what happens.”

The patriarch gave Sen a stunned look. “If you believe that, then someone has told you lies, or you’ve been particularly unlucky in your experiences with sects.”

“Really? Just with what you have in these gardens, I could probably personally advance most of your sect by as much as half a major stage of advancement. Some of them, I could move an entire stage. I could probably start most of your qi-condensing cultivators on a road to body cultivation as well. Yet, here these natural treasures sit, unused, unharvested. But, sects fight, and fights do need bodies. Expendable bodies, most of all, and who could be more expendable than hundreds of qi-condensing cultivators.”

For a moment, Sen thought that the patriarch was going to strike him down, then and there, as a look of cold anger crossed the man’s face. Then, the older cultivator visibly forced that anger under control.

“So, you believe that sects intentionally withhold cultivation materials to keep people trapped at lower levels of advancement. All so they’ll have bodies to throw at their enemies.”

“I don’t think that’s the only reason sects do it, but I’d be willing to bet it’s one of them. Then, there’s just plain old human favoritism. Do you honestly expect me to believe that you and your elders don’t pick favorites and funnel opportunities and resources to them?”

The patriarch looked like he very much wanted to protest, but he just shook his head in the end. “No, I don’t expect you to believe that. You have, however, credited me with a callousness that I do not possess. I have no desire to see the youngest members of this sect killed in useless conflicts with other sects. I certainly wouldn’t condone intentionally slowing their progress just to use them for that purpose. Sects can be impersonal, but most of them aren’t heartless or mindlessly cruel.”

“That has not been my experience.”

“Then, what has been your experience?”

Sen gave the patriarch a searching look. “Do you really want to know?”

“I do.”

“In that case, my experience is that sects are arrogant, malicious, and only care about what benefits the sect, unless they’re pushed into a very tiny corner.”

“You don’t believe sects do any purposeful good?”

“No. I think whatever good they do is either incidental or designed to benefit themselves more than it benefits anyone else.”

“By that reasoning, why would we help you?”

“Because you want me to leave.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to simply kill you?”

“You might find it easy enough to kill me, but I doubt anyone else in your sect would. And, I suspect, you know what would happen afterward.”

“That much is true. Killing you would doom this entire sect. Still, it’s very obvious to me that you’ve only ever dealt with sects from the outside.”

“I’d contend that’s where you get the clearest picture of a thing.”

“Perhaps, but there is also much you do not see from the outside. You say that you could likely advance nearly the entire sect with the treasures found in these gardens. Yet, you overlooked a few things in that assertion.”

Sen had grown weary of the discussion, but he did want something from these people. So, he played along. “What are those things?”

“For one, you overlook the question of talent. Regardless of how you may view yourself, I have it on the authority of people I have learned to trust that your alchemical talents are unique.”

Sen tried to brush that off. “I’m not that special.”

“Even I can see that you don’t believe that, as much as you might want to. Yet, it seems that it has truly never occurred to you that other alchemists simply cannot do what you find so simple. Our alchemists are very talented and very well trained, but even they would struggle to convert much of what is in these gardens into something useful. I wonder, is there anything in range of your senses here that you couldn’t find a use for, right now?”

Sen let his senses sweep the surrounding area, soaking up information about the many potent medicinal plants and herbs in the area. He ran across a few things that left him uncertain. So, he pointed them out.

“I’m not saying they can’t be used, but I’d need to study them more before I’d want to try it.”

The patriarch nodded. Apparently, he’d expected that answer from Sen.

“The other thing you overlooked is readiness. Just because someone can advance, it’s not a foregone conclusion that they should advance.”

“That sounds a lot like a justification for playing favorites.”

“It is, sometimes, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Take that foolish boy who tried to pick a fight with you outside. Could you help him advance?”

Sen hadn’t studied the boy all that closely, but Sen reluctantly nodded. “Yes, I could.”

“Should you?”

That brought Sen up short. It had been easy to make his case when he was talking in generalities. Applied to that specific case, though, Sen had a hard time convincing himself about that particular guy. In fact, he thought that more power was probably the very worst thing that could happen to that boy for a lot of reasons.

“No,” sighed Sen. “He’s already got all the makings of a bully. He probably is one to his juniors. Giving him more power would just make the problem worse.”

“Exactly. We’ve intentionally slowed his progress in the hopes that he’ll learn some compassion, if not some humility.”

“Don’t bother,” said Sen without thinking.

“Why?”

“Bullies like being bullies. They like holding power over other people. They don’t want to change. No amount of time will fix that.”

“Alright, then. Imagine that you’re a sect elder. How would you handle it?”

“Kill him. Barring that. Break his cultivation and cast him out.”

“That doesn’t strike you as unnecessarily harsh, callous even?”

Sen snorted. “It’s clear that no one has bullied you in a long time, or you wouldn’t have asked me that.”

“A fair point. I would ask that you please refrain from killing him.”

“No,” said Sen.

“What?” demanded the patriarch, losing some of his friendliness.

“I said no. I won’t seek him out. But if he comes looking for me the way that you know he’s going to do, I’m not going to let him off with a warning. Because we both know that won’t be the end of it. If he can’t kill me in a straight fight, he’ll try to ambush me somewhere, or poison me, or send someone else to do it. That is his nature. You only have to take one look at him to see the hate burning in his heart. I have no reason to invite all of those future headaches because he’s, what, the son of someone important?”

“Something like that,” admitted the patriarch, before he very obviously changed the subject. “It seems we have rather drifted off of the subject of the manual you want.”

Sen nodded. “You said something about a time treasure. I assume that’s related.”

“It is. The reason we can’t access the manual is because one of our elders was attempting the method. They took the manual into the time treasure with them. I didn’t object because very few people are willing to attempt the Five-Fold Body Transformation, so it wasn’t as though the manual was in particular demand. Also, the time treasure is in the sect.”

“I still don’t see the problem. Just send someone in to get the manual. I don’t need it forever. I don’t even need the original. A copy would be enough for my needs.”

“Honestly, I would have let you have the manual. It’s not something that I want to encourage people to try. The problem is that we can’t enter the time treasure. It’s been sealed, somehow, from the inside.”

Sen felt the sting of his own ignorance. “What does that mean, in practical terms?”

“It means we can’t even see how it was sealed, so we have no idea how to break the seal. The only other option is to find someone with the right knowledge of time and space techniques.”

“Where do I find someone like that?” Sen asked.

If he could get an expert, then he could get at the manual. That sounded a lot easier than trying to negotiate with some sect in the capital.

“I don’t know. We’ve had nearly a dozen people in to examine the treasure, the best and most experienced time and space cultivators this side of the Mountains of Sorrow. They don’t know how to get into it either. There may be some hidden master out there, or someone beyond the mountains with the right knowledge, but I don’t know how to find the former, and negotiating with the latter is a time-consuming process given the distances involved.”

Sen felt his hopes collapse. He doubted he’d have much better luck than the patriarch. He could, of course, send a letter back to Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Auntie Caihong. They might know about someone that the patriarch didn’t, but he couldn’t wait around for their answer. He didn’t have that kind of time. It was made all the more frustrating because the manual was actually there, at the sect, but it might as well be at the bottom of the ocean. Much as he wanted to avoid the capital and all of the frustrating nonsense that would be waiting for him there, that was where he was going.

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