Unintended Cultivator

Sen landed next to Falling Leaf and slammed a lightning-wrapped fist into the face of a demon ape-lizard. The creature was hurled back from the panther girl with its jaw hanging at an odd angle and much of its skull caved in. Whatever the raw force of the blow hadn’t done to kill it, the web of lighting that pounded its brain had finished. Part of Sen was simply revolted by the massive things. While they had the heavily muscled build of apes, most of their bodies were covered in dark green scales. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they had long tails with barbed, bone spikes on the end. He had an ugly puncture wound in the back of one shoulder to prove it.

Falling Leaf had been distracted by her own fight with a different ape-lizard and hadn’t seen the one coming up behind her. Or, she’d taken for granted that Sen would intervene. It was a safe assumption. She had tried to yell at him for interfering in one of her fights a few days earlier. He had answered in a tone that brooked no arguments that he wasn’t going to let her die just to protect her pride or for any other reason. Not that she needed a lot of help. As the equivalent of a peak foundation formation cultivator, the transformed ghost panther wasn’t quite on a level playing field with him, but she was close. What she didn’t have that he did was half a decade of some of the best weapons training in the world.

She fought hand-to-hand, which meant she had to get close and stay focused on her opponent, while Sen could engage three or four enemies at a time with his jian or a spear, depending on the situation. While he couldn’t generally beat that many opponents all at once, he could keep them occupied. That, in turn, let Falling Leaf peel them away one at a time until Sen could finish off the rest. While Sen had privately had his doubts about this plan, it seemed to be working. He was slowly, but surely, purging that anger out of his soul one fight at a time. What he hadn’t found was the right epiphany that would let him manage his anger. So, two weeks in, they kept pushing deeper into the wilds, looking for more dangerous spirit animals to fight. It had been quiet for the first few days. Then, things had gotten more exciting.

They’d fought increasingly strange spirit beasts. In some cases, they were like the ape-lizards, bizarre amalgam beasts that always looked wrong to Sen’s eyes. They’d found more of the disgusting spider things on two occasions. Falling Leaf had assured him, after the first fight, that those human faces were just there to distract and confuse their human victims. They would still liquefy his insides and leave him an empty husk if he let them. In the second fight, Sen had simply cut them all into pieces with an incredibly thin stream of water under intense pressure. In other cases, they found spirit beasts that looked like their mortal counterparts but inevitably wielded some terrifying qi technique. They’d run across a couple of bears that had looked normal enough right up until they roared and revealed the metal teeth in their jaws. Those had seemed to make Falling Leaf unusually nervous. She’d also beaten one of them to death with a wild, almost barbaric ferocity, screaming incoherently the entire time she’d done it.

“What was that all about?” he’d asked her afterward.

“I ran into one of these when I was very young. Not even half-grown yet. It would have killed me if an older member of the pride hadn’t saved me. I’ve always been afraid of them.”

“And now?” He’d asked.

In answer, she reached into the bear’s mouth and tore one of its teeth out in a shocking display of raw physical strength. She held it out to Sen.

“Put a hole in that.”

Sen took the tooth and did as she asked, using metal qi to manipulate the tooth. He handed it back. She passed a heavy cord through the tooth and tied it around her upper arm with the tooth prominently displayed. She looked at it in satisfaction before turning her attention back to him.

“Now,” she said, “they can be afraid of me.”

After the bears, there had been the lightning cranes. Then, there had been one of those snakes that Shi Ping had been so afraid would come and eat him. It had been particularly difficult to fight because it constantly emitted a toxic, venomous cloud of gas. Sen had finally been forced to pin it to the ground using a combination of shadow-metal fused spears and stone spikes. After which, he cooked it to death using a stream of liquid flame. Once the toxic cloud had cleared, though, they discovered that meat was safe to eat. It seemed the giant snake’s venom was confined to its bite and that cloud. Then, Sen finally got the opportunity to do something he’d been wanting to do for some time. They had come across a small stream and found a small group of spirit oxen who were being harassed by stone tigers.

“Why don’t you let me handle this one,” Sen said to Falling Leaf. “I owe the spirit oxen a favor or three.”

He might have left out that he was worried that Falling Leaf’s up-close fighting style wouldn’t work particularly well against tigers that could manipulate stone qi. For that matter, most of his own preferred methods of dealing with spirit beasts weren’t going to work very well against them. This was going to boil down to a contest of their brute force against his brute force and skill. He unsheathed his jian and sprinted toward the nearest stone tiger. He didn’t really think he could get the drop on anything that skilled at stalking and hunting, but he gave it his best shot anyway. He started by hiding. Everything else would be useless if they felt his core-level qi. He used wind qi to carry his scent away and dampen the sound of his footfalls. Earth qi dampened the vibrations of his feet against the ground. Finally, he burned a bit of the liquid qi in his dantian to add extra reinforcement to his body cultivation-enhanced muscles, bones, and organs. Working all of those separate kinds of qi was an awful strain beneath the hiding technique, but it would be worth it if it got him close enough to launch an attack.

Yet, after all that effort, it still wasn’t enough. The tiger still sensed his approach somehow. The only good news was that Sen had gotten within about ten feet of the tiger. He dropped his hiding technique and cycled metal qi to reinforce his jian. The tiger whirled to face him, crouching a bit to protect its belly and possibly prepare to spring at him. When he got within range it swiped at him with a paw that could have covered his chest. In the heightened battle state he was in, Sen could see the shiny, black claws extend. They looked like polished obsidian. Given that it was a stone tiger, the claws probably were obsidian. Sen’s jian moved almost of its own volition in a blindingly fast parry. Of course, at those speeds and backed with his strength, he supposed it was probably like getting hit with a ballista bolt. He heard a noise like stone shattering as the paw was slapped aside. Before the beast could so much as roar in pain or defiance, Sen had brought the jian back on line and driven the full length of the blade into the tiger’s eye and out the back of its skull. He twisted the blade to help ensure that the beast was dead and pulled the jian free.

He would have liked to enjoy that fast victory, but fate wasn’t going to smile on him that way. He’d had it easy once. He wouldn’t enjoy that luxury a second time. Then again, things weren’t as one-sided as they might have looked from the outside. Where there had been five tigers harassing the pair of spirit oxen, there were now only two. The other two had focused on Sen, clearly seeing him as the bigger threat. While Sen didn’t know that the oxen could kill two stone tigers, he was pretty confident that they could fend them off for a while. Now, all he had to do was survive. He glanced over at the stream and considered how he’d killed those ghastly spider things. He’d only used one thread of water with them because there hadn’t been much water qi handy at the time. Here, there was water qi for the taking.

As the tigers started trying to flank him, water whips with edges as hard as diamonds started lashing them. They would have been lethal strikes on almost anything else. On the stone tigers, they opened wounds that bled freely enough but didn’t come close to cutting the beasts into pieces. Once Sen saw that, though, he reassessed his initial evaluation of the situation. He didn’t need to personally brute force them to death. Instead, he took a bit of inspiration from the spirit of the water spring. He called water to himself and hardened most of it around him in a sphere. It might not stop the tigers, but it would certainly slow them down enough for him to change tactics. The water that he didn’t turn into a sphere, he used as whips. He was perfectly willing to engage in the death of a thousand cuts. The tigers were fast and managed to dodge some of his blows. He also couldn’t keep track of them as well through the visual distortion of the water sphere. Still, enough blows landed that he could see the blood discoloring the ground.

During that moment of distraction, something slammed into the water sphere from behind. The sphere held, barely, but it went careening away and Sen found himself bouncing around inside of it. The hardened interior was no more forgiving with his body than the exterior had likely been to the tiger that slammed into it. When his momentum slowed, Sen changed tactics. If he was the tiger, he’d only be a second or two behind, getting ready to bring down as much crushing force as he could. Sen took the idea of the water whip and expanded on it. Instead of a few whips with razor-sharp, hardened edges, he created a spinning mass of hundreds of tiny water wires that were razor sharp and diamond hard. There was an almighty howl of agony as one of the tigers was caught in that trap. Sen let his earth qi drop into the ground and looked around for the presence of something getting ready to pounce. He didn’t feel anything, so he retracted those water wires and let the technique drop. It was useful, but that technique had been mentally draining.

There wasn’t an identifiable body left of the tiger that had gotten caught. There was just a spray of shredded flesh, blood, and stone fragments that were probably the tiger’s bones in a circle around him. Sen couldn’t have named the primal instinct that warned him, but he dove forward. It almost worked. The second stone tiger had dropped onto him from above, no doubt using the heavy branches as a means to escape his wheel of watery death. Sen bellowed in pain as the tiger’s jaws clamped down on his calf. Its stone teeth punched straight through the muscle, but then they hit his bones. Much like the tigers themselves, his bones had been transformed and transmuted. It seemed that his bones had done better than theirs because the tiger’s teeth met the bones in his leg and shattered. In the back of his mind, the healer in Sen was already wincing at the thought of having to pull those stone fragments out of his leg. The rest of Sen was very fixated on surviving the next five or six seconds.

The tiger jerked its head away, shredding muscle and pretty much anything else those shattered stone teeth came in contact with. The fresh burst of agony drew another roar pain and a swell of vicious anger. Sen did something he hadn’t tried, hadn’t dared try, since Emperor’s Bay. He tried to fuse two of his qi types. He was surprised to discover that, unlike shadow and metal, fire and earth qi didn’t fight him very hard. It wasn’t so much that they wanted to be together, but they didn’t really mind either. Sen used his good leg to push him a little farther away from the tiger. Then, he unleashed the technique. A massive hand of molten stone shot out of the ground and seized the tiger. The sounds the tiger made were things that Sen knew would haunt him, but he didn’t relent.

The hand dragged the tiger down into the ground where Sen had prepared a small, molten pool. He didn’t imagine the tiger would survive long in that environment, but he gave it thirty seconds anyway. That gave him a chance to pull out some old cloth he hadn’t gotten rid of and wrap it around his calf. He knew that wound would need proper attention, very soon, but the fight wasn’t over. With a gesture and a careful application of qi, he turned the molten pool into a block of stone with whatever was left of the tiger inside of it. Groaning, Sen pushed himself up to his feet and started limping toward where he’d last seen the tigers pestering the oxen. It turned out the oxen didn’t need his help once he drew off the other two tigers. They had killed one and run the other off. The oxen walked over to him and offered gentle moos. Sen gave them a formal bow, or as close as he could manage on his very unsteady leg.

“A small gesture of thanks, for the benevolence the spirit oxen have shown me.”

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