Unintended Cultivator

The inside of the hut was little more than one big open space. Some attempts had been made to establish areas of privacy with old, tattered clothes hanging from the ceiling. It appeared that the sleeping area was off to the right, while the kitchen and literally all of the home’s storage were off to the left. The moment they walked in, Sen could smell the sickness in the place. Yet, he sensed nothing of it on Luo Min. Odd, he thought. She was young and, sometimes, that let people avoid or weather illnesses. Still, close proximity like the family had in the tiny hut tended to mean an almost inevitable spread of whatever illness affected anyone in the home. Luo Min saw him examining the space, and he could almost feel the embarrassment humming inside her body.

“Your mother,” he prompted.

“This way, Cultivator Lu,” she said.

She walked over to what Sen had thought of as the sleeping area and pulled back the tattered cloth that hung there. Sen ducked beneath it and found Luo Min’s mother. That there was something wrong with the woman was obvious. Her skin was sallow, and it hung too loosely on her face and arms. Sen made a mental note to ask if the woman was eating or not. He was having a hard time figuring out how old the woman was, even in general. She wasn’t deeply wrinkled, but she still gave off the air of someone whose every joint ached at every movement. Of course, at that moment, she was staring up at Sen with bewildered eyes.

“Min,” the older woman croaked.

“Yes, Mother,” said Min stepping up next to Sen.

There was so little room that her arm was pressed up hard against Sen’s.

“Who is this man?”

Sen bit back a moment of frustration. The older woman seemed afraid of him.

Min opened her mouth, but Sen cut her off before the girl could say anything about him being a cultivator. The last thing the sick woman needed was fear.

“This one is called Lu Sen, Madam Luo. I am but a humble student of alchemy. Your daughter asked me to come see if I might provide you some small bit of comfort.”

“Alchemy,” said the older woman, her tone a strange mix of wonder and disbelief. “Min, where did you meet him?”

Min froze, clearly uncertain about what to say. She was probably terrified to lie to her mother and equally terrified that she might offend the cultivator standing next to her. Sen took pity on her.

“By the road, honorable Madam. I was collecting medicinal herbs for my work.”

This exchange seemed to sap most of the older woman’s energy. “Min, I hurt. bring me my medicine.”

The girl vanished for a few moments before bringing back a plain, stoppered bottle. When she uncorked it, Sen could detect a few medicinal herbs in the brew, but it seemed to consist mostly of some kind of strong alcohol. Sen maintained a rigidly neutral expression while the old woman took a few sips from the bottle with Luo Min’s assistance. With a guilty expression, the girl vanished with the bottle. Sen knelt down next to the older woman.

“Madam Luo, will you permit this one to examine you?”

The older woman gave him a dubious look, clearly doubtful that one so young could do anything to help, but she nodded. Sen gave her a short bow and then proceeded to do a mostly made-up examination. While he checked her pulse, looked at her eyes, and made a show of closely examining the joints of her fingers, he let a touch of his qi slip from his body into hers. There were problems everywhere, so many that it nearly overwhelmed Sen. He focused and began making a mental checklist of the things he found that were wrong. Slowly he began slotting them into different areas of concern, such as potentially lethal in the immediate future and potentially life-threatening in the long term. It was a testament to the damage inside the woman that Sen, with his vast inexperience, could so easily make such a list. In the end, though, the list was mostly to give Sen a way to organize and dismiss information. With something so widespread and damaging, there had to be a root cause. That was what he sought. In the end, his attention qi brought his attention to one of the woman’s legs.

“Madam, do your legs pain you?” he asked.

The older woman’s expression turned from doubtful to surprised and, unless Sen missed his guess, a touch hopeful.

“Yes, the one hurts me all the time.”

“May I see it?” he asked.

When the woman had trouble moving the blanket, he simply pointed to one leg and then the other. When she nodded, he gently lifted the blanket to one side to get a look at her leg. It was swollen and mottled. For a moment, Sen feared that some kind of rot might have set in, but things hadn’t progressed that far yet. A fist let go of his heart at that revelation. Auntie Caihong had set very few boundaries on what Sen could or couldn’t do with his studies, but she had issued one or two stern warnings.

She had told him coldly, “Alchemy and medicinal herbs can work many near-miraculous wonders, but every art has its limits. When the flesh begins to truly decay, there is very little to be done at that point except remove the limb.”

Even knowing it was the right thing to do at that point, Sen doubted he had the nerve to cut someone’s arm or leg off, at least outside the confines of a fight to the death. Doing his best not to let his overwhelming relief show on his face, he gave the woman another bow.

“Thank you for your patience, madam. I think I may be able to provide you with some small help.”

“Thank you,” the woman said.

Those words seemed to steal whatever tiny bits of energy the woman had left, and her eyes fluttered shut. Sen took a moment to compose himself before he slipped out of the meager privacy the tattered cloth provided. He found Luo Min dutifully stirring up a fire in the small stove. Sen gave it a hard look. The stove looked positively ancient. He cycled metal qi, and let it brush up against the stove. He was shocked to discover that it was basically sound. Still, there were a number of weaknesses in the metal, irregularities that would lead to uneven heating. That wasn’t a crisis, but it made brewing his elixirs more difficult. He walked over to the stove.

“A moment, please,” he said to Luo Min.

She stood back from the stove and then cried out when Sen placed his hand directly onto the hot metal. He supposed that he did notice a vague warmth in his hand, but he was far more concerned with sending his metal qi down into the metal of the stove. It was a hundred small things. Fuse together a tiny crack here, then there. Even out the metal there. Reinforce the whole thing. Done. Sen removed his unharmed hand from the stove and stepped back. He looked over at Luo Min who had a stunned look on her face.

“There. It should hold up for another hundred years now,” he said, before he went outside to think.

At first, he was just letting the information he’d gleaned from the woman’s body settle in his mind. There was just so much wrong. He took a breath and refocused. He didn’t need to fix everything, and certainly not immediately. Focus on the most pressing problems. Her leg was the true source of her illness, although Sen had not been able to see any specific cause for it. Had there been an injury of some kind? An animal bite? An insect bite that grew infected? As he started cataloging possibilities and brainstorming treatments, Luo Min came outside. She stood there in silence for a long while as Sen thought.

“I had to do something,” she said. “For her pain.”

The words actually made Sen jump. He’d been lost in the process of visualizing how he would make the elixir. So, it took him a moment to take his mind away from that and consider the young woman’s words. When he did, he felt the grimace cross his face. He understood why she had done what she did. He’d seen enough people on the streets dulling their pain with alcohol. Unfortunately, he also knew that it didn’t actually help. In the absence of a doctor or the ability to afford one, though, Sen didn’t know that he would have found a better solution. He just nodded.

“I understand. I’ll make you something else to give her for now. Something that won’t be as hard on her.”

Luo Min looked relieved. “Can you help her?”

For a moment, Sen wasn’t looking at Luo Min, but at his grandmother’s maid, Lin, as she asked virtually the same question about the injured Zhang Muchen. How he wished he were back there now. How simple those injuries seemed in comparison to all that ailed Luo Min’s mother.

“Her leg,” he said, stalling a little, “did she injure it somehow? Get bitten by something?”

Luo Min took a moment to gather her thoughts. “I believe so, Cultivator Lu, but I do not know for sure.”

“How long ago was this?”

“A few months ago.”

Sen rejected the idea of a bite. If she’d been bitten, it would have either healed by now or killed her. It didn’t tell Sen what had happened, but it did narrow down the possibilities. It also made treating the woman a little simpler. There were things he could try now that he wouldn’t have tried in the event of an animal bite. Hating every word that he was about to speak, Sen made himself do it anyway.

“I think I can help her, but I promise nothing. I’m no true healer. If you wish it, I will simply make you something to relieve her pain and be on my way.”

“That won’t help her, though?”

“No,” he admitted.

“She’s dying,” said Luo Min.

It wasn’t a question. The young woman just seemed to be admitting it out loud for the first time. Sen answered her anyway.

“Yes, she is.”

A part of him thought that he should just go fetch a doctor and pay the fee, whatever it was. Yet, that wasn’t sustainable. There would always be another sick person, another needy soul. While he was well-off compared to the Luo family, his funds were limited. His time, on the other hand, was a different matter. He could afford to spend the next week or three or five, if need be, brewing elixirs for Luo Min’s mother. He had no pressing work or destinations where people expected him. He had a few messages to deliver should he ever wander into specific parts of the continent, but even those were to be delivered if he found himself somewhere. Time, of all things, was something he had in abundance. For her part, Luo Min stood and studied Sen for a long time. Whatever questions she was asking herself or qualities she sought in Sen remained opaque to him. In the end, she nodded to herself.

“Will you try to help her, Cultivator Lu?”

Sen studied her back for a long moment. She seemed resolute to him, committed, but not overly optimistic. He was a desperate last chance. A gamble that she was willing to take in a bid to save her mother’s life. She wasn’t expecting a miracle from him. She might be hoping for one, in her deepest heart, but she wouldn’t feel betrayed if he failed.

“I will, on one condition.”

The young woman looked wary at that. “What condition?”

One final time, Sen summoned a handful of coins from his storage ring. He held his hand out to her. “I want you to take this damn money for those plants I harvested.”

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