Unintended Cultivator

“What kind of task?” asked Sen.

While there had been no overt change in Fu Ruolan, Sen felt a subtle, gnawing apprehension go to work on him. It felt like his intuition had noticed something that had escaped his conscious understanding. He eyed the woman warily, expecting some kind of hideously impossible demand.

“I require three superior quality, air-attributed dusk mushrooms,” said Fu Ruolan.

Sen waited to see if there was more to it, but the nascent soul cultivator said nothing. After a few moments, her expression started growing bored. Realizing that only questions would secure him more information, Sen thought hard about how to phrase them.

“Why do you need them?”

Fu Ruolan glanced skyward for a moment before asking in a casual tone, “Does it matter? Are you saying that you’d refuse to do it if I told you this was a pointless task?”

Sen considered those questions. “No. I suppose it wouldn’t matter. I said I’d do what you asked of me.”

“Good. Ming may have tolerated unchecked curiosity about his motives,” she paused. “Knowing him, he encouraged it. We do not share that approach. My motives are my own to keep or share as I see fit.”

Sen couldn’t say he liked having that knowledge gap imposed on him, but he also knew that there was precious little he could do about it. Even if her motives were off the table, he hoped she might be willing to share more practical information with him.

“I’m not familiar with dusk mushrooms,” said Sen. “We didn’t have them where I was, and Auntie Caihong never mentioned them.”

Fu Ruolan pursed her lips for a moment before she nodded. “I don’t suppose you would have had them on that mountain of Jaw-Long’s. Too far south. Too close to the ocean. You’ll need to head north to Mt. Solace. You’ll find them on the upper slopes if you look hard enough.”

“What do they look like? There are a lot of mushrooms in the world.”

Fu Ruolan snickered. “Well, that’s certainly true. Follow me.”

Sen fell in behind the woman as she led them back to the house she called her own. It was a strange building, constructed of wood, rather than stone or brick. It also lacked the formations that Sen would have expected from the home of a nascent cultivator. He would have thought it was a terrible security risk. Then again, any cultivator with even a scrap of sense would detect the residual qi of a nascent soul cultivator all over the place and flee at the first opportunity. Anyone not smart enough to run away got whatever they deserved as far as Sen was concerned. While he wasn’t a great example of knowing one’s limits, even he knew that there were some mountains you simply didn’t try to climb. Invading the home of a nascent soul cultivator was one of those mountains. Even if you did manage to steal something and escape with it, that was a profoundly temporary situation. More to the point, you’d anger someone with all of the time in the world to hunt you down and turn you into a cautionary tale used to terrify the qi-condensing cultivators.

After all, Sen had seen just a little bit of what nascent soul cultivators were capable of doing. It had painted a very stark picture He remembered very, very clearly the way that Uncle Kho had killed those core cultivators who had so foolishly intruded on his mountain. It had been a terrifyingly casual act on his part that didn’t seem to strain the man at all. While Sen could do something similar, it wasn’t easy. It also wasn’t something he wanted to try to do to more than one person at a time. At least not until he reached peak core cultivation. He had a feeling that when he got that far along, he’d find it a much more manageable task to call down lightning from a clear sky that resulted in total annihilation. Until then, he was content to leave such feats of strength to the nascent soul cultivators unless absolutely necessary.

Fu Ruolan took Sen inside her house. They passed through what would have been the public area if the woman ever had visitors, which she hadn’t to Sen’s knowledge, and into a room he hadn’t been in before. He glanced around curiously, but the room was as sparse as the rest of the house. There was a table and chair, although nothing so pedestrian as papers, books, or writing implements marred the pristine surface of that table. The only other thing in the room was a wide, shallow wooden cabinet that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. Sen’s eyes went wide when he got a familiar feeling from the cabinet. A feeling very much like the one he got from his own storage rings. That cabinet was a storage treasure. Fu Ruolan noticed him noticing and smirked.

“One of the benefits of age, young Lu Sen, is that it lets you acquire interesting things.”

“Apparently so,” murmured Sen.

Sen felt an incredibly complicated interaction of qi between Fu Ruolan and the cabinet. She’s unlocking it, he realized. That process had been so complicated that Sen hadn’t even been able to follow a tenth of it, and those were just the pieces he recognized. With the storage treasure unlocked, Fu Ruolon pulled open the doors to reveal a truly cavernous space inside. With a cry of dismay from Sen, she stepped inside the storage treasure. While Sen knew that certain storage treasures could preserve things like food and plants, he’d been warned, repeatedly, that it was a death sentence to try to enter a storage treasure. Yet, Fu Ruolan had done it without even a pause and to no ill effect, as far as Sen could tell. She just looked back at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Are you coming?” she asked.

Gritting his teeth a little against the expectation that he would die if he entered the storage treasure, he stepped through the door. When he wasn’t struck dead immediately, he heaved a sigh of relief. Fu Ruolan shook her head in mild exasperation and started walking. Sen trailed along behind her and tried to drink in everything he was seeing. The storage treasure stretched beyond even his keen eyesight’s reach. It was loosely divided into areas. In one part, he saw rack after rack of weapons, many of them giving off potent qi signatures of their own. They had to be heaven chasing grade weapons or better to do that. In another section, he saw countless storage containers filled with plants, herbs, and alchemical reagents. He stumbled to a stop and just gaped in complete awe of the collection. He could craft elixirs all day, every day, for the next thousand years and not burn through everything she had.

A sharp sound of snapping fingers that sounded more like thunder brought him back to reality and he ran to keep up only to stop moving again when they approached row after row of shelving containing scrolls, books, and manuals. There had to be thousands of them, maybe even tens of thousands, just sitting there, waiting to be read. Sen realized with a start that the Five-Fold Body Transformation manual was almost certainly stored there. With a sinking feeling, he realized that even if he had unrestricted access to that wealth of knowledge, it would take him years of searching to find the manual without help. That was not a problem shared by Fu Ruolan as she confidently blew past shelf after shelf. Once more, Sen jogged to catch up with her. When they reached the right place, she stopped, reached out with delicate fingers, and plucked a scroll off the shelf.

She turned and held it out to Sen. He hesitantly took the scroll from her and, after an impatient gesture from the woman, he unrolled it to see what it contained. There were several carefully drawn pictures of the mushroom which he studied until he was sure that he’d committed the image to memory. With that done, he started reading. He got an overview of what conditions allowed the mushrooms to grow, the general medicinal and alchemical uses of the mushroom – poisons, mostly – and three locations where one might find them. Mt. Solace was the third choice and the closest, based on Sen’s map. There was also some basic advice and tips for harvesting them. Sen took careful note of that information as well. While he was an experienced harvester of wild plants and fungus, it never paid to take for granted that you knew how to harvest a plant you’d never seen before. Auntie Caihong had warned him not to be overconfident and that more than one cultivator had died by harvesting something the wrong way. Like almost everything she’d ever told him, he’d taken that advice to heart. Once he was confident that he’d retain everything long enough to write down the important parts, he rolled the scroll back up and handed it back to Fu Ruolan. She returned the scroll to its place on the shelf and then shepherded him back out of the storage treasure.

He looked back in yearning more than once at the places where she had stored the scrolls, the plants, and even the weapons. Sen only had a good working knowledge of what the plants, herbs, and alchemical reagents were worth. Fu Ruolan could likely buy a kingdom based on the value of what he had seen with his own eyes in that one section. It made the riches in his storage rings seem paltry. Once she had resealed the cabinet with another of those complex qi interactions, she turned to him.

“Are you sufficiently educated on the mushroom now?”

“I am.”

“Anything other pressing concerns?” asked Fu Ruolan, with humor sparking in her eyes.

Sen sighed, knowing full well that he would not be given access to anything in that storage treasure even if he asked.

“No.”

“Not even going to ask?” she prompted.

“I suppose I could, but only someone who was actually insane would give another cultivator access to something like that. I know that I wouldn’t. So, why bother asking when I know the answer.”

“So, they did manage to beat some wisdom into you. That’s encouraging.”

“Thank you?” asked Sen, not sure if there had been a backhanded compliment in there.

Fu Ruolan didn’t answer, choosing to refocus on the matter at hand. “You have three months to accomplish your task.”

Sen almost asked why but managed to hold the useless question back. He was certain that there was a reason, maybe profound, maybe prosaic, but certain to be withheld. He’d operated under a cloud of ignorance before. He could do so again.

“I understand,” said Sen.

“When will you leave?”

“Tomorrow. At dawn.”

“Will you take your cat friend with you?” asked Fu Ruolan, ushering Sen toward the door.

Sen shrugged. “I will if she wants to go.”

“Well then, good luck to you and her if she elects to go along. I’ll see you in three months.”

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