Unintended Cultivator

Sen suspected it wasn’t an entirely fair question. He’d had a couple of hours to think about the problem and come up with a couple of possibilities. They weren’t what he’d call great ideas. At least one of them would require that he spend some time looking around to see if it was even feasible. Still, he had something to contribute to a conversation about how to get things done. Asking Li Yi Nuo to come up with ideas on the spot without any clear understanding of what he or Laughing River could do made the question substantially harder for her to answer. There was also the knowledge gap about the capabilities of the things in that horde. Of course, Sen was working under similar levels of ignorance there. He only had best guesses about that. The upside of the question was that anything Li Yi Nuo came up with would have to be something that she thought would work for her. That was kind of the point. If she did come up with something that she might be able to pull off, there was a solid chance that Sen and, to a lesser extent, Laughing River could execute a similar idea.

She gave him an incredulous look. He just gestured toward the temple. Realizing that he wasn’t kidding, she gave the scene in front of them a hard look. He watched her eyes darting from place to place. He saw the moment when she recognized all of that open ground as the problem it was. Her grimace said it all. Laughing River watched her, choosing to keep his thoughts to himself for once. Sen took that as a good sign. For all of his easy glibness, the fox did take the actual goal seriously. The longer that Li Yi Nuo stared at the situation, the more unhappy she became. In the end, she shook her head.

“There might be a way to get someone to the ruins, assuming they can actually enter,” said Li Yi Nuo. “I don’t see a way to do it without alerting them that someone else is present.”

“So, if you had to try to get in there, what would you do?” asked Sen.

“Those things down there are in some kind of a mad frenzy. I doubt anyone could sneak past them or through them. One of them would notice you or just crash into you and there’s that fight you wanted to avoid. So, you have to draw them away. Create a distraction. If enough of them leave, it could create an opening. It might be enough time for someone to get in, assuming they’re fast enough. Of course, that leaves the problem of getting them back out again. Maybe another distraction would work but only if we can see a signal to activate it from the forest. Anything we can see those things can see. If any of them aren’t simply insane, they’ll be alerted. That also assumes we can stay out here safely. Depending on the distraction, we might end up running for our lives.”

Sen looked at Laughing River. “At least she sees the problems.”

“She’s right about getting someone out. That’s going to be harder than getting someone in,” said Laughing River. “I’ve been trying to crack that problem ever since I figured out that I’d need to send you, dear nephew, in there to retrieve my little bauble.”

“Dear nephew?” asked Sen.

“Of course, you’re practically the adopted child of one of my hundred dearest friends. Naturally, that makes you my nephew.”

“Oh, you have no idea. It’s always such a tangle to know if you’re actually related to someone. Makes seduction a dangerous business.”

“Is this conversation critical to getting into that temple?” asked a frustrated Li Yi Nuo.

“It could be. There might be foxes in there. I may have to seduce one of them,” said Sen. “What if we’re related?”

That earned him a glare from Li Yi Nuo and a proud smile from Laughing River. Maybe he is having a bad influence on me, thought Sen. He frowned out at the temple one last time.

“I may have an idea about a distraction,” said Sen, “but there’s no point discussing it here. We should withdraw before something out there notices us and decides to make it an issue.”

“Fine with me,” said Laughing River. “I’ve been looking at that damn temple on and off now for years. I’m not going to learn anything new.”

Li Yi Nuo simply nodded. They went back the way they had come until there were nearly ten miles between them and the temple. It was far enough that Sen felt mostly confident that he could put up a galehouse without drawing too much unwanted attention. Sen took extra care to build some formations into the walls of the galehouse and threw up a few more to help ensure they would go unnoticed and have some warning if anything walked too close. Once they were safely inside the building, Sen made a table with a shallow depression that ran the length of the table. He filled it with sand that he made from some of the rocks in the area. He sketched out a primitive representation of the temple, the open area around it, and where the forest started. Laughing River smirked.

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“Very accurate,” said the fox.

“Every cultivator dreams of being an artist,” said Sen. “Behold, my art!”

“Can’t the two of you be serious for five minutes?” demanded Li Yi Nuo. “This is dangerous business.”

“That’s the time when not being serious is most important,” observed Laughing River. “Too much seriousness will take you down a bad road. Especially when things are dangerous. You get all grumpy and morose.”

“Humor eases the tension. It might look frivolous, but it’s not,” translated Sen in a distracted voice before pointing at the drawing. “Is that area of cleared land consistent all the way around?”

“Yes,” said the fox.

“I don’t suppose there’s some incredibly useful thing out in the nearby forest we can take advantage of?”

“Like what?” asked Li Yi Nuo.

“I’d really like some monks,” said Sen. “Those spirits out there make me nervous.”

“More than the devilish beasts?”

Sen shrugged. “You can kill devilish beasts with a sword or with qi techniques. There are some risks to that, but they’re manageable. Restless spirits are supposed to be harder to deal with.”

“That’s the truth,” said Laughing River. “I wouldn’t mind some friendly monks to help with them myself. Not that monks would help me, but they might help you two if you asked nicely. Sadly, there’s nothing out there that I know about except more forest.”

“That’s too bad. I usually have more advantages than this.”

“Yes, your overwhelming strength is such a pitiful advantage,” said Li Yi Nuo. “Didn’t you order two sects to stop fighting and they actually did it?”

“That’s what I’m talking about. I had advantages there that don’t exist here. Those sects were made up of people who had just watched a lot of their friends die. Their morale was terrible. They were tired. None of them wanted to be there anymore. They all wanted an excuse to stop. I gave it to them.”

“I heard you set the sky on fire,” said Laughing River.

“I did not set the sky on fire. That’s a complete exaggeration.”

“I heard you threatened to kill everyone there,” said Li Yi Nuo.

Sen sighed. “That part may have actually happened, which is irrelevant because it wouldn’t work here.”

“You said you had an idea about the distraction, though, right?” asked Li Yi Nuo.

Sen pointed at a spot just beyond where the forest started on the makeshift drawing. He ran his finger in a big circle that stayed beyond the cleared land.

“I think I can set up a formation that will do the job. I’ll have to go wander around out there for a while to know for sure. Assuming the qi concentrations aren’t too different from where we are now, though, I should be able to set one up that will hurl fireballs into that horde from a particular area. It should be nice and distracting and help pull some of those things away in a specific direction for a little while. I mean, anything that destructive won’t work for very long, but we don’t need it to work for very long. If it can keep going for five minutes, that should be long enough. In an area that big, there must be at least one or two potent qi flows that I can tap into. Maybe lightning would be better,” muttered Sen, thinking about how to make the formation work.

When no one said anything right away, Sen looked up to find Li Yi Nuo and Laughing River giving him odd looks. The fox looked startled. The sect woman looked like she thought Sen was utterly mad.

“What?” Sen demanded.

“You’re going to set up a formation that stretches for miles? A formation that can hurl fireballs for five minutes?” asked Li Yi Nuo.

“Yes. That sounds like an accurate summary of what I literally just said less than a minute ago.”

“Sen, I know that Jaw-Long taught you some things,” offered Laughing River in a conciliatory tone, “but what you’re describing is incredibly difficult to do.”

“Not really,” said Sen. “It’s a bit more trouble to set up than a small formation because you have to cover so much ground. There are a few extra variables you have to account for, but it’s not like the principles change. It’s the same thing, just bigger.”

“It is most certainly not the same thing,” said Li Yi Nuo. “What you’re describing is the kind of project that formation masters talk about doing someday.”

“They should set their sights higher. I’ve got this idea for a formation that will use water, fire, and ice qi. Well, originally, I wanted to do one that was inspired by the seasons to give it balance. Water for spring, fire for summer, ice for winter, but I couldn’t think of anything for autumn. I mean, if there’s such a thing as decay qi, that might work. If it exists, though, I’ve never seen it, and I don’t have an affinity for it. So, I decided to just go with three…” Sen trailed off at the looks he was getting. “Well, I guess that’s neither here nor there.”

After a long silence, Laughing River spoke up. “After we escape that horde of doom, but before I go off and ascend into foxly godhood, there’s this other place we should go, Sen. It turns out that another little treasure of mine was stolen away. I’ve been meaning to reacquire it.”

Sen’s shoulders slumped as Laughing River started making grandiose plans about a stealing spree the likes of which Sen had never even heard of before.

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