Unintended Cultivator

While Sen’s healing elixirs had more or less gotten them back to being healthy, recovering enough qi to travel safely in the wilds was another matter entirely. Sen insisted that they leave the area where they had fought. He found the prospect that other spirit beasts would come sniffing around looking for easy resources or just an easy meal was too much of a risk. He only took them a few miles away, but far enough that he thought they would be able to set up for the night. Raising a galehouse was harder than it had ever been for him, but also more necessary. For once, they truly needed that protection. Falling Leaf hadn’t used up as much qi as he had, but he wouldn’t want to put her in a fight. Setting up the formations was mercifully just a matter of getting everything in the right place, since he had a fresh batch of beast cores to help fuel them, and the wilds were always ripe with environmental qi to draw on.

That night, Sen and Falling Leaf threw around ideas about where the spirit beasts had come from while they recovered. It was more to have something to do while they cultivated than an exercise in figuring anything out. The beasts might have been sent by the spider matriarch. They might have attacked on their own. Fu Ruolan might have directed them. Any of those things were possibilities, but they had no information or even any clues. Most of the beasts hadn’t possessed the kind of self-awareness that someone like Falling Leaf developed. The dragon had been self-aware, but it didn’t feel like chatting with them. Sen had briefly entertained the idea of capturing it. That fantasy had been exposed for what it was in a hurry. It had been everything Sen could do to simply kill it. Capturing it would have taken more power and skill than he possessed. He conceded to himself that a plan might have helped as well, not that there had been any time to make one.

“I’m starting to get the impression that the spirit beast community as a whole just doesn’t like me,” complained Sen.

Falling Leaf shook her head. “Can you blame them? I don’t know that you’ve killed more spirit beasts than any other human being, but you’ve probably killed more than anyone this side of the Mountains of Sorrow.”

“Oh, come on! That’s an exaggeration. I haven’t killed that many,” said Sen before he really thought it through.

“Is it?” asked Falling Leaf.

When he searched his memory, he didn’t especially like the picture he saw. He had personally seen off more than his fair share of spirit beasts. It wasn’t that he went out of his way to do it. Quite the opposite. Unfortunately, he had been present for countless beast tides during their search for Fu Ruolan and those numbers added up fast. He honestly didn’t know how many of those spiders he’d killed. Hundreds? Thousands? It was easy to think of them as a singular mass, but they weren’t. Any of them, possibly even all of them, could have grown into sapient spirit beasts. Of course, that thought didn’t make it any better for Sen. He didn’t like spiders, so he was hard-pressed to feel bad about preventing a swarm of them from becoming smarter and more dangerous. The point still stood, though. In an almost incidental way, Sen had personally reduced the population of spirit beasts in the region by a lot. He wondered if they told stories about him. He doubted those stories were quite as flattering as the Judgment’s Gale stories.

If they didn’t insist on attacking him in giant hordes of bloodthirsty madness, he would never have gone looking for them on his own. He couldn’t decide if he was the bad guy in that scenario or not. He didn’t feel like the bad guy. He hadn’t had ill intent. In most of those cases, it had been pure and simple self-defense. He was aware that he had routinely been intruding in their territories. Yet, he hadn’t been hunting anything. He had left the spirit beasts he sensed alone if they did him the same courtesy. Realizing that he was stuck in a circular problem that likely had no clear answer, Sen gave up trying to decide where he stood morally. The truth was probably that he bore some of the blame, but not all of it. He glanced over at Falling Leaf and her expectant eyes.

“Okay, maybe it’s not entirely an exaggeration. I’d stop killing them if they stopped attacking me.”

“If you asked them, I imagine they’d say that they’d stop attacking you if you stop killing them and invading their homes.”

Sen waved a hand in defeat. “I already had that argument in my head. It doesn’t lead to an answer. I can’t get where I need to go without occasionally passing through the wilds. I’m going to keep defending myself, however much it makes them hate me.”

“You should defend yourself. You should also expect them to keep attacking you in numbers until you reach the nascent soul stage. Most of them won’t dare when you get to that point. There’s anger, but there’s also survival. Right now, one of them might get lucky. The chances of that go down every time you advance again.”

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“There’s a cheerful thought,” said Sen. “I guess we’re staying here an extra day or two. If we have to fight like that again, I don’t have the qi for it right now.”

Falling Leaf shook her head. “You won’t have to fight like that again. It takes time to put together a group of spirit beasts and get them to cooperate. Especially the ones who aren’t self-aware. It’s more like herding than convincing.”

“I guess that makes sense. Still, no need to take unnecessary chances when we’re this close.”

“Do we have the time to spend?”

Sen waggled his hand in a so-so gesture. “It’ll cut things close, really close, but dying because we couldn’t fight properly won’t fix anything.”

“I guess there is something to be said for a bit of caution.”

“I know, it’s not my usual style, but getting as close to death as I did… I won’t say it changed me at some fundamental level. It did give me an appreciation for being alive. I worked hard to get this far. I don’t want to throw it away and start over again just because I’m a little impatient to be done with this particular journey.”

Falling Leaf mulled that over while Sen abandoned active cultivation in favor of cooking. His passive cultivation would keep drawing in qi but limit how much he drained from the immediate area. That should make things easier for Falling Leaf. The formation he’d put up to concentrate qi around the galehouse would help as well. It wasn’t a complicated meal. He just made rice, steamed some vegetables, and warmed up some leftover meat he’d made a few days prior. As they ate, Falling Leaf teased him a little about his laziness in preparing such a sparse meal. He rolled his eyes at her but smiled through it. Her understanding of human humor had been developing slowly, often stalling, but he didn’t want to discourage her from doing things like poking fun. It wasn’t always appropriate, but she had to practice on someone. Plus, if she practiced on him, he could help her understand when she might accidentally offend someone through simple poor timing.

When Falling Leaf decided it was time for her to sleep, Sen kept his mouth shut. He knew that she didn’t actually need the amount of sleep she got at her cultivation stage. She probably couldn’t go as long as he did without sleep since she wasn’t on a true body cultivation path, but she definitely didn’t need to sleep every day. He’d puzzled over that for a while before the very obvious truth hit him. She just liked sleeping. She’d done an almost absurd amount of napping when she’d been a ghost panther, and it seemed she didn’t plan on giving up sleep as a pastime. For him, every waking minute was an opportunity to explore some facet of cultivation he didn’t fully understand, improve his techniques, or simply to practice his combat skills. That was to say nothing of breaking new ground.

With that thought in mind, he withdrew the mushrooms he’d collected on Mt. Solace from his storage ring. He spent most of his time examining the dusk mushrooms. They had heavy shadow attributed qi, but he caught hints of other things in there as well. There was a bit of wood qi and at least one other he couldn’t put his finger on. He made a mental note of it and resolved to figure out what the other qi type was, preferably before he used the mushrooms in anything. The dusk mushrooms were exceedingly potent. They threatened to overwhelm the environmental qi with shadow qi, so he put them back in his storage ring. He did take the opportunity to soak up some of the shadow qi for his own use. Finished the dusk mushrooms, he turned his attention to the other samples he’d gathered.

There were some that he quickly realized were simply poisonous now that he was out of the obscuring effect that had been in place in the little hollowed-out area. He wished he had been able to study that effect more. It might have given him insights into his own hiding ability, but he’d had more pressing concerns at the time. One of the mushrooms, a small, pale mushroom with blue spots on the cap drew his attention. As unimpressive as the mushroom looked, it had a truly complex array of qi types in it. The longer he studied it, the more convinced he became that he could use those mushrooms in healing elixirs. With the right reagents and complementary ingredients, he suspected he could improve his general healing elixir’s performance by nearly twenty percent. That was something worth investigating. The problem was that he had a very limited supply of the mushrooms and no easy way to grow more. He didn’t plan on revisiting that mountain for more of them. He decided that he would set some aside for Auntie Caihong. She had more natural aptitude with gardening than he did. Maybe she could do something with them.

Once he finished looking over his dubious prizes from Mt. Solace, Sen settled himself near the fireplace. He let the sounds of the burning wood soothe away his concerns and lull him into a meditative state. Sen could brute force the right mindset for cultivation, but getting there naturally typically garnered better results. His guess was that it had something to do with the pressure he had to exert on himself to force the right mindset. It likely reduced the efficiency of the cultivation process. As he let active thoughts slowly slip away, other concerns surfaced. Most of them were nebulous, temporary problems that he could easily dismiss. The prospect of always facing tides of murderous beasts wasn’t so easily brushed aside. He let that occupy his mind for several minutes and looked for a solution. He considered some ridiculously impractical options, but the conclusion was inevitable. There wasn’t anything he could do to prevent it short of avoiding the wilds entirely. Even that might not do the trick, as the first spirit beast tide he’d faced had happened in a town.

Accepting his inability to resolve the problem let him set it aside. Then, there was nothing left but him, his cultivation, and the slow process of replenishing his qi-starved core and dantian.

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