Unintended Cultivator

It was, much to Sen’s deep disappointment, pain that woke him from the warm depths of dreamless sleep. It wasn’t just regular pain, though. He’d learned to cope with garden variety pain years before, ignoring it the way a horse would ignore a single ant on the ground before it. This was something else, something more profound. It was pain that throbbed, that stabbed, and twisted in the deepest parts of him. He felt it in the marrow of his bones, in the tissues of organs, he felt it in his blood. He remembered this pain. Too soon, he thought desperately. It’s too soon for this. It had taken him months and months of slow, steady deterioration to reach this place of agony the last time. That slow descent had given him time to adapt and learn to wall off the desperate howling of his body as it ate itself alive. He hadn’t been this far gone when he’d been making that last pill. He wondered if he had truly completed it or if that was a fragment of some fever dream he’d been in. He was fairly sure he’d finished. An image of a red glowing pill at the bottom of his cauldron had the kind of firmness he associated with things he’d seen in the real world, but he wasn’t sure.

Not that it mattered at the moment. While concerns floated at the edge of his consciousness, it was the pain that occupied the majority of his thoughts. It pressed itself into every thought, as inescapable and irrefutable as an oncoming tsunami. He reminded himself between gasping breaths that he had found a way to function with this kind of pain once before. He had done it once. He could do it again. It was slow work. He had to find something to anchor himself or risk being washed away and lost forever in a sea of torment. He latched on to the image of a jian. In his mind’s eye, he drove that weapon, that symbol of strength, solidity, and purpose into the bedrock of self. He clung to it. Let that strength, solidity, and purpose imbue him, and uplift him.

With a roar that only happened inside his own mind, he pushed the pain away. It was a tiny little bubble of control in the center of his consciousness, but it existed. He had a place where he could think and reason. It was the tiniest bit of progress, but it provided him with a foundation he could build on. He could feel the pain on the outside of that bubble. Feel the pressure of it trying to collapse his minuscule sphere of control. He took heaving breaths in this one place where soul-shivering suffering was not the order of the day. Then, that moment of respite all he would allow himself, he sat down and began the arduous process of expanding that sphere of control. He didn’t have any illusion that he could ignore the pain completely. Pain existed for a reason. It was part of the natural order. As such, neither the body nor the mind was designed to dismiss it outright. If people could do that, they would, and continue to do so right up until the moment the problem killed them. Nature would never allow for anything so suicidally stupid.

No, he knew that he couldn’t push the pain away entirely. He could find a balance with it, though. Blunt it enough that he could do what needed to be done. That balance was his goal. He set his will against the pain and pushed. That sphere of control trembled, threatened to buckle, but it held. He kept up the outward pressure and slowly, so very slowly, the sphere of control expanded. At first, it was everything he could do to reclaim territory inside his mind. Bit by bit, though, he remembered how it had felt the last time, the sensation of keeping the pain at bay. He tried to recall that feeling, emulated it, and let it suffuse his consciousness. Almost grudgingly, the overwhelming sense of pain receded. It didn’t vanish, but it retreated enough that Sen could function again.

He took stock of himself. He wasn’t as far gone as he had been when they’d first encountered Fu Ruolan. Unfortunately, that situation didn’t seem likely to last. He didn’t know how long he’d slept, but Sen didn’t think it could have been for that long. It seemed that Fu Ruolan’s prediction that the symptoms would bounce back fast had been all too accurate. It wouldn’t be long now before he’d be back at the point of no return. He forced his eyes open, pretended that the light from the nearby candle didn’t bother him, and sat up. Someone had moved him from the alchemy lab to his bedroom. It probably hadn’t made much difference in his condition, but they’d at least tried to make him more comfortable. He sat up and took deep breaths as old familiar pains racked his joints and limbs. They were distant and, individually, he could probably have just powered through them. Except, they were everywhere inside of him. There was nothing that didn’t hurt. The sheer accumulation of pain meant that, even with that mental distance, a lot of it still bled through.

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It took Sen a lot longer than he would have liked to dress himself and step out into the common area of the galehouse. Fu Ruolan and Falling Leaf sat at the table, talking quietly. When he came out of his room through, they turned to give him speculative, concerned looks. He wanted to brush those off, but it was probably too late for that.

“How are you?” asked Fu Ruolan.

He beat back the urge to downplay his condition. Underselling it wouldn’t do him any good.

“I suppose we did,” said Fu Ruolan.

“How long was I asleep?”

“A day and a little,” said Falling Leaf.

Those words fell on Sen like rocks tumbling down a cliff. Only a day? I’m this bad after just a day? He didn’t have the concentration to spare for things like controlling his expression, so his shock and horror bled through in a pure form.

“I take it that’s not what you expected,” said Fu Ruolan.

“No,” said Sen, his voice shaky. “If I’m this bad now, I’ll be useless in another day.”

“Well then,” offered Fu Ruolan, “I suppose we should be glad that you didn’t sleep for another day.”

Sen did his best to shake off his shock and focus on the essentials. His condition didn’t matter. He needed to make the pill for his body cultivation before he was too broken to use the damn thing. It was entirely possible he was already too far gone to use it now.

“Did I finish the pill? The one you gave me the recipe for?”

Fu Ruolan nodded. “I don’t think you managed to reduce your usual improvements very much. It’s frighteningly powerful.”

Sen heaved a sigh of relief. He had done it. Everything from that last day was so blurry and uncertain that he had truly wondered if he’d hallucinated it, but he hadn’t. He didn’t think he could call himself a master pill refiner. Then again, he didn’t need to be a master pill refiner. Competent was enough. At least, it was this time around. Nodding to himself, he fixed his attention on Fu Ruolan.

“I’ll need the manual. I have to make the next pill for my body cultivation.”

Fu Ruolan didn’t say anything for so long that Sen felt a cold sweat break out across his body. Terrible thoughts crashed around inside his head, threatening the sphere of control that kept the pain at bay. Had she been lying to him this whole time? Did she not actually have the manual? Was she going to keep it from him? He’d never actually confirmed that she had it. She’d said she did. He’d just assumed that she was telling the truth, but he hadn’t demanded to see it. You didn’t make demands like that of nascent soul cultivators if you enjoyed being alive. Before he spiraled into a complete mental breakdown, she shook her head.

“I thought you put it together already. That pill you made before you collapsed is the pill for your body cultivation. Which isn’t to say that I think you should take it. I wasn’t joking when I said it’s frighteningly powerful. I can’t tell you what to do, but I’d try to make a lesser version of it. Taking that pill as you are now, it’s an even bet that you don’t survive it.”

Sen digested that in silence. He supposed it was obvious in hindsight. If it had just been part of the training cycle, why not put the recipe in the primer? He’d thought that she wanted that last pill for herself, but he didn’t think she’d ever said it was specifically for her use. She’d just told him that she wanted it and let him do whatever he wanted with that information. He’d drawn wrong conclusions. All things considered, though, it was probably better that he hadn’t known. Knowing would have made him overly cautious. He would probably have fumbled the pill refining and, considering his present condition, that lost time might have proven fatal.

“I don’t have the time to try again. It took me nearly twenty-four hours to make that pill the first time, and I was in better shape then. I don’t think I could complete it now. If I failed, lost another day to sleep…” he trailed off.

“Take the pill,” said Falling Leaf.

Fu Ruolan started to object, but a swift and murderous look from Falling Leaf shut that down immediately. Falling Leaf looked at Sen again.

“Take the pill. You will survive.”

There was no second-guessing in her tone. The only thing he could see in her was bedrock certainty. If she was putting on a show, it was a very, very good show. He wanted to believe he would survive. His lack of faith eroded his confidence, so he borrowed hers. It was enough.

Nodding, Sen said, “Breakfast first. I’m hungry. If I’m going to face down death, I should do it on a full stomach.”

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