Unintended Cultivator

Sen’s eyes cracked open. He sat up on the bed and sighed. The sleep had helped, sort of. While he’d felt fine during the fight with the wyvern, the cost of that fight had hit him hard in the aftermath. Everything was hitting him hard lately. No, it wasn’t just hitting him hard. It was hitting him and sticking with him. He could feel it even now. Things were going wrong deep inside of him. It had been accumulating for months. He’d been able to ignore it at first and just power through. That wasn’t true anymore. He was tired all of the time now. It was a tiredness that kept building day by day, and no amount of sleep could fix it. He could just tell that things that once had been smooth, efficient processes in his body were breaking down. They weren’t broken yet, but he’d been forced to grow ever more efficient with his qi control. He couldn’t rely on his body to support him through a sustained fight.

There was a certain irony to it. His mastery over qi, his ability to exercise power in the world, was probably at the very zenith that it had ever been. He’d become an expert in overwhelming, single-strike techniques. It wasn’t that he’d particularly wanted to master such skills. With the certainty that his body would fail him more and more, it was a necessity for survival. Sen tried to push those thoughts away, knowing they would only lead him through a mental spiral that would make it hard to convince himself to even get out of bed, and he needed to get out of bed. They needed to resume the search. After the previous day’s fight with the spirit beasts, it was highly unlikely that anything would bother them for a few days. He wasn’t entirely sure why that was, though.

Part of him thought that the spirit beasts were temporarily frightened, but he and Falling Leaf had slowly accumulated a small mountain of spirit beast corpses since they’d set up at their current location. If the sheer volume or frequency of death was going to inspire fear, he suspected that the spirit beasts would have abandoned attacking them altogether. There was something else at work there. He also suspected that he wouldn’t solve that mystery any time soon. It wasn’t a lack of interest, so much as a recognition of his need for singular focus. He had one all-consuming goal. Find Fu Ruolan. Unless or until that happened, he didn’t dare spare any of his focus for anything else.

Sen just let himself sit on the bed for a few moments to gather himself for the day. They had spent months traveling to the area where Fu Ruolan was supposedly located. They had spent months systematically searching the area since then. He would occasionally move the location of their temporary home when travel times became too unwieldy. He’d done so recently and hoped that it would be the last time. He didn’t believe it would be, but how he hoped. Having allowed himself to briefly wallow, he put on a more upbeat attitude along with his robes. He walked out of the room that served as his bedroom and gave Falling Leaf a smile. She’d cobbled together something that vaguely resembled breakfast. She hadn’t really mastered cooking but had taken more of an interest lately, so he did what he could to encourage her. He ate the very basic fare she had prepared, a basic rice porridge and some fruit she’d no doubt conjured from the literal warehouses of food she had in her storage rings.

“Thank you for making breakfast,” said Sen.

Falling Leaf shrugged it off. “You were asleep.”

“True enough,” said Sen.

He waved his hand over the dishes and used a combination of techniques to render them clean and safe to use again. He noticed Falling Leaf staring at what he’d done with an expression that wasn’t quite envious but came close. He supposed he had started taking his ability to use multiple types of qi a little too much for granted. Then again, he was taking almost everything not related to finding Fu Ruolan for granted. He studied the transformed spirit beast for a moment and decided that distraction was the best medicine for what ailed her.

“We went north yesterday. Shall we go south or west today?”

Falling Leaf pondered that question with far more seriousness than Sen thought was really justified, but he kept his mouth shut. Better that she takes it too seriously than not seriously enough, he thought. Although, taking it seriously had never really been a problem for Falling Leaf. She knew the stakes as well as he did.

“South,” she finally declared.

“South it is,” agreed Sen.

With nothing left to do at the galehouse, the pair set off to the south. They didn’t follow a straight line. Instead, they moved back and forth with the limits of Sen’s spiritual sense as the border. He always made sure it overlapped a little with each pass. They had discussed different ways to do it. Falling Leaf had even suggested that they separate to cover more ground. Sen had rejected that idea with what might well have been the firmest “no” in all of recorded history. When the sheer panic that the idea induced in him wore off, he explained that he didn’t want to chance her coming face-to-face with the mad cultivator while alone and at a distance. He’d left out that he planned to use himself as a human shield to buy her time to flee if it became necessary. It might have been her choice to come along, but he’d concluded long ago that she would live if it came down to a choice between his life and hers.

After all, she could live for centuries, possibly even for millennia more if things cut her way. That made it a simple math problem to Sen. If Fu Ruolan reacted badly to them, he was a dead man anyway. The difference was that he’d be sacrificing a year to possibly buy her thousands of years of life. As far as Sen was concerned, some trades were so obviously right that even he could see it. Of course, as the weeks had turned into months, Sen had grown increasingly more certain that they weren’t going to find her. He was ever more certain that she simply didn’t wish to be found. And if a nascent soul cultivator decided that core cultivators weren’t going to find them, they didn’t get found. That didn’t stop him from searching relentlessly, day after day, because there was nothing else to do. So, they worked their way south, flitting through the heavily forested area at absurd speeds. When they reached the absolute outer limits of where people thought Fu Ruolan might be found, they traveled west for a time and ran the same pattern moving north again.

Sen was glad to discover that he’d been right that the spirit beasts had decided not to bother them that day. What spirit beasts he sensed either ran away or hunkered down. As long as they were willing to pretend that they didn’t see him, Sen was perfectly happy to pretend that he didn’t see them. He hadn’t come out to the wilds to fight spirit beasts, no matter how often they pushed the issue. To him, it was just time wasted that he’d much rather be spending on other things. He figured that they’d get at least one more day without interference. If they were lucky, they’d get two days. Another attack would come the day after. It always did.

Not for the first time, Sen wondered if he could figure out how to advance in Five-Fold Body Transformation by himself. It sounded good, in theory. With his alchemy knowledge, he was confident that he could make anything he needed to do the job. The problem was figuring out what to make. Knowing, in general, what elements he needed to focus on just wasn’t a good enough starting point. There were simply too many possible routes to take, too many possible ingredients to use, and if he got it wrong, his life was reduced from a year or so to minutes. All too likely, minutes defined by unspeakable agony. Yet, as the time available to him dwindled, he found himself returning to that possibility more and more often. He also had to admit to himself that a time would come when this approach to searching would simply be too much for him. He feared that time was coming sooner than later.

Once that happened, he would have to turn to a desperate measure like trying to stumble his way through the dangerous body cultivation method. He didn’t even necessarily need to figure it out. Even if he could simply stabilize his body cultivation, that could buy him some time. He knew that wasn’t a real fix, but it would be a vast improvement over the certainty of death. By the time they were ready to call it off for the day, the afternoon had bled away into evening. Sen had been trying to wring as much value out of each day as he could, and that day had been no exception. Still, he felt the ache in his eyes as that persistent tiredness clawed at him, sapping his endurance and making him crave the comforts of sleep. The disappointment of yet another failure added to that desire to slip into the oblivion of unconsciousness or at least the surreal landscapes of dreams.

When they returned to the galehouse, Sen made himself stay awake and cook a real meal for them. He knew it wasn’t strictly necessary. Neither of them really needed food the same way they once had. Even in his current state, he rarely experienced hunger. Still, it was one of the only things he could do for Falling Leaf as a wholly inadequate gesture of gratitude for her continued company. He didn’t deceive himself. If she hadn’t been there, he might well have crawled into bed one day and simply not gotten back up for days or even weeks. He was, however, grateful that Falling Leaf was comfortable in silence. He didn’t have much to say about anything not directly related to their search anymore. So, he cooked, and they ate in silence. When the meal was over, he did his trick to clean their plates and utensils. That last necessary task completed, he shambled to his room and collapsed into bed. Then, he did his best not to dwell on the very real possibility of his death.

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