Unintended Cultivator

It took the rest of the day and then most of another before Sen finally started seeing the kind of environment that the mushrooms would grow. The ascent also came with a few other benefits. The number of attacks by spirit beasts went down. Granted, that happened because the higher they went, the more powerful the spirit beasts became. That meant longer fights, but ultimately resulted in them making better time. The higher quality beast cores also became useful to Falling Leaf as they could provide potential fuel for advancement, rather than simply replenishment of her qi stores. They only acquired two shadow-attributed cores, but that was more than they had when they’d started up the mountain. The other main benefit was that the trees thinned out. They were high enough up that it was simply too cold for most trees to maintain a real presence. That dramatically improved visibility, which cut way down on the ability of things to surprise them with an attack.

Sen was a little surprised that mushrooms could survive this high up in the mountain, but he supposed they weren’t really mushrooms in the traditional sense. They were more like vessels for a very specific kind of qi, and qi was often indifferent to such pesky mortal concerns as the temperature. Still, he also became more cautious as they started looking around. He was searching for shadowy areas with a lot of moisture. At the heights they were at, there weren’t many of those. Sen was expecting a fight when they did finally find the mushrooms. Of course, that was tricky in and of itself. Fights between core cultivators and core equivalent spirit beasts were often hard on the surrounding environment. Sen had flattened more than one area of the wilds in his travels. Mushrooms were delicate, at best, and it wouldn’t take much to destroy them. One errant wind blade, one poorly aimed fireball, and they’d be starting over from scratch.

They spent a couple of hours searching before Falling Leaf waved him over to what from his angle, just looked like a crack in a rock face. When he got closer, though, he saw that the crack went straight through to some kind of an open area. He could see sunlight on the far side, although the details remained obscured. He could also feel the moisture coming out of the crack and see condensation on the walls. Sen frowned at the narrow gap. He was pretty sure he could get through, but it was going to be a tight squeeze. Sen tried to get a sense of what was on the far side of the crack with his spiritual sense, but all he got back was a hazy, muddled impression. That could mean that the qi there was particularly dense, or it could mean that someone or something was intentionally obscuring the area. That left Sen feeling a little nervous. He didn’t want to lead Falling Leaf into a trap, but he didn’t want to leave her waiting outside the crack where anything could launch an attack on her.

“I can’t tell what’s on the far side,” said Sen. “Someone or something is obscuring my spiritual sense. Can you sense anything?”

Falling Leaf’s eyes went a little distant before she shook her head. “I can’t. I don’t smell anything dangerous.”

Sen just looked at that crack for a while before it was his turn to shake his head. Procrastinating wasn’t going to solve anything.

“Do you want to follow me in or wait out here?” he asked.

“I’ll follow you in,” said Falling Leaf after a moment’s consideration. “If there is something dangerous in there, it’s better to fight it together.”

“I hope that’s true,” said Sen, not feeling at all confident that it was, in fact, true. “Alright. I guess there’s no point in waiting.”

Turning sideways, Sen started to shuffle through the crack. It was just as tight as he’d feared it would be. During one particularly claustrophobic moment that made his heart pound, Sen thought he was stuck. It took a moment before he remembered that he could just manipulate the rock with his earth qi. He snorted at himself for being foolish and started cycling for earth. Since he wasn’t sure precisely what was above them, he was careful to just shift the rock enough that he could pass through it without getting stuck.

“Do you have enough room?” he asked since he couldn’t easily look back at Falling Leaf.

“Yes. I’m fine,” she answered in an unconcerned voice.

Satisfied that she wasn’t having the same troubles, Sen proceeded through the crack. He didn’t enjoy the feeling of dampness that soaked through his robes and made a mental note to dry them as soon as they got out of the crack. It made the spot between his shoulder blades feel clammy, which was a little too close to the feeling of being watched for Sen to feel comfortable. It wasn’t until Falling Leaf gasped in abrupt pain that Sen realized something was wrong. Foregoing any worries about displacing something above, Sen shoved enough rock away himself with his qi that he could spin and face Falling Leaf. He could see that she had crushed a positively huge spider against the wall, but she looked ill.

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An intuition came in time for Sen to grab Falling Leaf and haul her against him before he wrapped them in a cocoon of fire. While he couldn’t see what was happening outside of the cocoon, he could see the spots on the cocoon where the fire concentrated briefly. It happened over and over again, often with multiple bright spots happening at the same time. Sen realized that there must have been a colony of the spiders living in the crack. While Sen had been ready to simply ride out the spider storm, Falling Leaf hunched over, nearly putting her head into the fire cocoon. That spider must have bit her before she killed it, he thought. A spider that big would have injected a positively massive dose of venom, which meant Sen didn’t have the time to simply wait things out.

While he couldn’t rely on his spiritual sense to give him accurate information about his surroundings, his earth qi could give him exacting information regarding the crack if he pushed it hard enough. With Falling Leaf making increasingly distressed noises, Sen pushed his earth qi very damn hard. When he had a clear picture of the exact length, width, and height of the crack, he dropped his earth qi in favor of fire qi. With a roar of effort, he bathed the crack in fire from one end to the other at ground level. Then, with more a little malicious spite, he sent a wave of fire up the crack like it was a chimney. Even if he couldn’t spot the spiders with his spiritual sense, he felt them die by the hundreds as his fire consumed them like so much dry tinder. When he couldn’t feel any more spiders dying. He let the flames die and scooped Falling Leaf up into his arm. Not caring what he found on the other end of the crack anymore, he blasted away the rock at ground level so he could carry Falling Leaf out the far side.

After the briefest scan of the area to look for more threats and finding none, he put Falling Leaf down on the ground. In other circumstances, he might have tried to make something for her, something built specifically for her, but he could tell that she didn’t have the kind of time. Instead, he dug into his storage ring and pulled out one of his last two healing pills from Auntie Caihong.

“You need to swallow this,” said Sen.

He hoped that the words would penetrate the clear agony that she was suffering. Understanding that he was taking a chance, Sen all but pried open Falling Leaf’s jaws and stuffed the pill into her mouth. He huffed out a relieved breath when his fingers got clear of her teeth. The relief didn’t last long when he didn’t see her swallow. He didn’t think she was even aware of the pill. He jerked a gourd of water out of a storage ring and poured some of it into her mouth. She swallowed reflexively, choked a bit, and then curled in on herself. Sen knelt next to her, hands clenching and unclenching in impotence as he waited and hoped. When he became certain that the pill wasn’t going to help at all, the tension started to go out of Falling Leaf. It happened slowly enough that Sen was terrified he was imagining it, but she slowly eased out of the fetal position she’d been all but locked into.

Sen slumped in relief. He stared down at the blood on his palms where his fingernails had cut into his own flesh. That was a possibility he’d never considered, but it was also a visible statement about how afraid he’d been in that moment. He still felt remnants of that fear thrashing around inside of him. He took several deep breaths and beat that fear back until he felt he’d mastered himself again. With his fear no longer out of control, Sen managed to examine Falling Leaf with his spiritual sense and his qi. It was an effort, even at close range. She was unconscious, and it would be a while before her body finished flushing out the venom, but Sen was fairly confident that she wasn’t on the verge of death anymore.

Finally able to think about something other than keeping Falling Leaf alive, Sen looked around. They were in a relatively small, hollowed-out area. A little waterfall fed a small pond and there was a bit of plant life around the edges. Yet, the high walls clearly kept direct sunlight out most of the day. Where Sen would normally expect to see more vegetation, there were mushrooms. Thousands of them lined the ground and much of the walls. Just at a glance, he saw dozens of varieties, but here and there he saw what they had come all this way to collect. Dusk mushrooms. They were by far the rarest of the mushrooms available, but there were more than enough for his needs. Sen felt a brief moment of elation before he shifted his gaze back to Falling Leaf. They might have accomplished their goal, but seeing her unconscious form made it feel like a hollow victory.

Not knowing how long it would be before she woke up, Sen decided that he’d get what he came for and get them out of this awful place. It didn’t take long to collect the mushrooms he needed. It would have been quicker, but he kept a very close eye on Falling Leaf. He wasn’t going to chance something taking a shot at her while he was distracted. He did take samples of other nearby mushrooms on the off-chance that they might be useful for something. He couldn’t really get a clear sense of any of them, so he’d have to examine them more closely after they left. He did make a point of getting triple the number of dusk mushrooms he needed. Sen knew better than to assume that any alchemical process was going to go right the first time, and he never wanted to visit Mt. Solace again. Glaring around at the little hollowed-out area in the mountain, he picked up Falling Leaf and made his way back through the crack, blasting out the parts that he hadn’t on the way in to clear a path.

He very briefly thought about setting up a galehouse right there but dismissed the idea. Just because he’d killed a lot of spiders, it didn’t mean he’d gotten them all. Better to put some distance between them and the possibility of a swarm of angry, venomous monstrosities. Cradling Falling Leaf in his arms, Sen activated his qinggong technique and headed back down the mountain. He was shocked when nothing attacked them. It was only later that he realized he’d reflexively unleashed his killing intent in a vast circle around them like a promise of death.

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