Unintended Cultivator

Sen used his qinggong technique to kick off the ground at terrifying velocity, just to slam his knee into the underside of a dragon’s open maw. The knee struck with enough force to shatter stone and it forced the mouth closed right in time for the dragon’s breath technique to erupt. With no way to escape into the outside world, the technique exploded inside the dragon. Sen was aware that it happened, but he didn’t actually see it. He was looking the other way and sending waves of lightning down onto four of those damnable bear-cat spirit beasts that were trying to flank Falling Leaf, who was busy fighting with some kind of shaggy beasts with burning eyes and long floppy noses. If they weren’t so hideously dangerous, they might have looked comical. Sen didn’t wait to see if the lightning killed the bear-cat beasts.

Instead, he whirled in the air and swiped the heaven chasing spear across the dragon’s eyes. The beast was powerful, probably the most powerful thing Sen had ever fought in earnest, but it had also been stunned by Sen’s blow and its own technique going off inside its mouth. The qi defenses it might normally have mustered and even the simple solution of dodging was unavailable to brain-rattled creature of myth. Between the physical sharpness of the spearhead and the brutal destructive force of the lightning, the dragon’s eyes exploded. Its mouth opened in a terrible roar that left Sen bleeding from both ears, but he refused to lose focus. He cycled for wind and let loose a scream to rival the dragon’s as he drove a wind blade down its throat. The wind blade split the dragon’s head and neck, the two parts flopping in different directions as blood sprayed everywhere.

If it had been anything but a dragon, Sen might have turned his attention elsewhere. Despite what looked like a lethal wound to the beast, he wasn’t satisfied. Launching himself upward from a platform of qi and aided by a quick air qi technique, Sen flew high over the violence. He hung in the air like a celestial object for a heartbeat or two, then he hurled himself back down toward the dragon. He drew back a fist and brought it down between the dragon’s wings. There was a thunderous boom that Sen could hear through his damaged ears followed by an almost equally loud crack of breaking bone. The dragon plummeted toward the earth, wings flopping uselessly, the split pieces of its neck twisting and spinning the air. It touched down with so much force that trees were snapped in two from the shockwave. Still not satisfied that the beast was well and truly dead, Sen let his gaze drop to the ground, cycled for earth, and drove that qi before him. As his feet touched down razor-tipped stone spikes as big around as his legs shot up into the dragon’s body sending another spray of blood into the air.

Mad with fury, Sen began spinning his spear overhead, using it as a focal point for his next technique. It was something he’d been toying with and now seemed like the perfect opportunity to take it out for a test. He fed the technique more and more power, going so far as to tap into the qi stored in his core. The world itself seemed to protest as the technique caused a howling cacophony in the air. The technique built and built until it was at the very edge of Sen’s ability to control it. He fixed his gaze on Falling Leaf and shouted one word.

“Down!”

Falling Leaf dropped as though she’d gotten a command from the heavens. With a howl of primal rage, Sen loosed his technique, and for everything in a half-mile radius, hell became utterly real. It was part wind blade and part fire. It exploded out from Sen in a ring that hovered exactly a foot off the ground. The ring itself was three feet thick from top to bottom. The leading edge was a wind blade backed with enough force to rival a hurricane. Immediately behind that wind blade came the small wall of blue flame. Together, they made no distinctions between wood, flesh, and bone. Everything in that half-mile radius that stood more than a foot tall simply died. The top part of trees crashed down, the lower parts of their trunks sliced and vaporized. The partial remains of spirit beasts dropped to the forest floor with wet, stomach-turning splats. With a final effort of will and expulsion of qi, Sen doused the fires that would turn the forest into an inferno if left unchecked. Falling Leaf rising to her feet momentarily captured Sen’s attention before all the strength left him. He collapsed to his hands and knees, vision swimming dangerously, and his…everything crying out for qi.

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He did his best to soak up qi and catch his breath, desperate to avoid passing out. He felt air moving over exposed skin and open wounds. His robes were little more than tatters. He’d been clawed across his back, bitten in a leg, and one of the dragon’s claws had punched through his chest and out his back. He’d been burned in half-a-dozen places and there were worrying places where he couldn’t feel anything from his body. Gathering what focus he could, he summoned healing elixirs from his storage ring. They were general-purpose elixirs and the best he could do at the moment. One after the next, he tipped them into his mouth, barely even registering it when they hit his stomach and started going to work. That’s bad, he thought. He heard Falling Leaf’s quick steps racing up to him and he groggily summoned more healing elixirs, scattering them on the ground where she could get them.

Don’t pass out, he ordered himself. Don’t you dare pass out. It was a horribly close thing as tunnel vision threatened him more than once. It was only after the wound in his lung healed up that he stopped feeling unconsciousness loom over him like an unwelcome guest. He focused on dragging qi into his dantian. He hated that he needed to spend attention on it to keep the qi in the proper balance, but life was full of hard things. It wouldn’t do him any good to feel lousy about the ones that let him perform superhuman feats like killing a dragon. Granted, it had been a small dragon, probably young, but he didn’t care about that. He had killed a dragon. While part of him exulted at the accomplishment, another part of him was deliriously happy that no one aside from him and Falling Leaf would know about the accomplishment. He did not want that particular tale to become part of his Judgment’s Gale legend. He’d never get another moment of peace if it did.

When he was certain that he wouldn’t just lose consciousness at any moment, Sen pushed himself into a sitting position. He saw Falling Leaf hovering nearby with concern etched into her features. He waved off the show of concern.

“I’ll be fine,” he rasped.

An arched eyebrow and discontented noise told him all he needed to know about her opinion of that little comment.

“Eventually,” he added.

Falling Leaf shifted her gaze past Sen for a moment. He turned his head to see what she was looking at. It was the smoldering remains of the dragon, not that there was all that much left of it. There were fleshy stumps where its legs used to be and most of its underbelly had survived. Sen could see parts of its spine that had been higher than that last destructive technique he’d fired off. He idly wondered if the beast core had survived. Then, he wondered if any of the beast cores had survived that brief inferno. It’d be a waste if none of them had. Sen would like to get something out of all of that fighting other than the dubious benefits of naked fear and experience.

“You killed the dragon,” said Falling Leaf with some awe in her voice.

“It was a small one,” observed Sen.

She shot him a look. It had some pointed things to say that mostly boiled down to shut up. Sen shut up. Falling Leaf glanced at him, clearly trying to decide if he was safe to leave on his own. Satisfied that he wasn’t going to die that very minute, she walked over to the dragon's remains. Sen kept half an eye on her as she grabbed a heavy stick and started poking around in the pile of dragon parts. Mostly, he focused on cultivating. His body was soaking up the qi almost as fast as he could drag it in from the environment like soil long deprived of rain. He sat like that for nearly an hour before he actually felt well again. His dantian was still nearly empty, but the mere thought of standing didn’t leave him feeling exhausted. When he stood up and took a hard look around at the destruction he had wrought, Falling Leaf came back over. She gleefully summoned a pile of beast cores from her storage ring. Sen looked them over.

“Take whatever you can use,” he told her.

She frowned at him. “These are yours. Your kills. Your cores.”

He just smiled at her. “Take what you can use. I’ll take whatever is left. There’s no point in me hoarding cores that you can use for advancement. That doesn’t help either of us.”

The panther girl looked deeply dissatisfied with that response, but she picked out a couple of cores and stowed them. Sen gave her a flat stare until she started to blush. She picked out several more and put those in her storage ring. He took the rest, pausing only to look at the largest of the cores. He assumed it came from the dragon, but he was still too tired to do much of anything aside from looking at it. He’d have to give it a more thorough examination later. Assuming there was a later and fresh wave of spirit beasts didn’t come to kill them. Frowning around, Sen finally got a chance to ask the question he’d been thinking about all through the fight.

“Where in all the hells did these spirit beasts come from?”

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