Unintended Cultivator

Sen pushed, and pushed, and pushed to suffuse his body with shadow qi. After months of effort, he finally felt like he was teetering on the very edge of success, like all he needed was one last infinitesimal iota of strength, one last smidgen of insight, and he would finally achieve victory. However, it seemed the strength was not in him. That insight was elusive. He felt suspended there as if he were a rope bridge pulled taut between opposing sides of a deep canyon. He could touch both sides but was a part of neither. As the moment stretched out, the very fibers of his being almost hummed under the strain of maintaining the effort. I’m missing something, thought Sen. I know it. I can feel it. There was too much resistance. Back on the mountain, what felt like several lifetimes ago, he would have tried more brute effort in his ignorance. Even back in the capital city when he and Lo Meifeng had been trying to escape from Tong Guanting, he had pushed his hiding ability beyond its limits and suffered for it. Fortunately, experience was the most fundamental of all teachers.

He knew that he might be able to dredge up a last bit of strength and force the technique to work. If his life had been on the line, he might have even done it. The costs be damned. Forcing things to work the way he wanted them to, though, was not a winning strategy. When he’d first started using his qinggong technique, it had been hard, very hard, but not because the technique was resisting him. It had been hard because the qi costs were so high. He had improved that technique with finesse, incrementally growing more efficient with it until, now, he harbored the suspicion that it would take a nascent soul cultivator to match his full speed. He needed to borrow from that experience to figure this out. Where was the resistance coming from? Where were the inefficiencies? Was the problem his entire approach?

Sen had relied on the age-old wisdom his teacher knew best until he had evidence otherwise. This was the approach that Fu Ruolan had provided. He had worked with it and worked with it, only to meet with failure. Had she, however unintentionally, led him astray? A mental head shake cut that line of thought short. Start with the simplest explanation, he reminded himself. The simplest answer was that he was the problem, not the approach he had been provided. He did his best to solidify his tenuous grasp on the technique and turned his attention inward. He watched the shadow qi course through his channels, dark as the void itself. He followed the qi as it bled out of those channels and entered his muscles, bones, and organs. He drifted with the qi as it spread out and approached his skin and… Understanding bloomed.

Shadow might exist under the heavens, but it carried more in common with the void, with nothingness, the very antithesis of the eternal heavens. Based on the way the divine qi in his skin was reacting, shadow qi was a barely tolerated stepchild. The shadow qi was trying, and failing, to cover over the nodes of divine qi that lived in his very skin. The divine qi was continually shredding the shadow qi to let its own light blaze, even if it wasn’t visible to the eye. No wonder I haven’t run into any shadow cultivators, thought Sen. If he had to guess, he would expect that they faced obstacles that people who cultivated other qi types simply did not. If nothing else, the heavens might simply weed them out with particularly brutal tribulations.

As much as Sen loathed his tribulation experiences, he wasn’t foolish enough to think that the heavens had truly tried to kill him. It was a test. A means to discover if cultivators possessed the skill and the will to endure the demands of the next stage. The survival rate of tribulations said it all. Yes, some people died during tribulations, but they were the exceptions rather than the rule. But if the heavens wanted to kill people with tribulations, it wouldn’t be that difficult. Send a tribulation with the strength normally used for the next stage, and the cultivator would die. Of course, Sen recognized that he was just speculating. It was just as possible that there were so few shadow cultivators because most people had no affinity for it. Having witnessed what was happening in his own body undermined his confidence in that possibility, but he couldn’t reject the notion outright. Whatever the actual answer was, he’d have to put aside looking for it for now. It wouldn’t help him solve the problem in front of him.

He needed to suppress the divine qi’s natural reaction to shadow qi. Somehow. This was a demand wholly outside of Sen’s experience. Cultivation was all about working with the natural tendencies of a qi type. You didn’t call up wind qi and then ask it to stop moving. You didn’t summon water qi and expect it to leave things dry. Complicating the problem was that he couldn’t simply discard the divine qi the way he might with qi that he had cycled to produce. It had been… Sen struggled to find the right word to describe what had happened. He supposed that it had been cooked into his very body. It was literally part of him now. That idea brought him up short. It is a part of me, isn’t it? I can tell other parts of me what to do, he thought. Maybe the same is true here. Rather than try to think of some complicated cultivation solution to the problem, he treated it more like he would if he wanted to slow down his heart. It wasn’t quite an active, conscious process, but he could do it.

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He bent his attention on getting the divine qi to stop interfering with what the shadow qi was doing. The divine qi threw up immediate resistance to the idea, but he kept focusing, almost yelling at the divine qi to just let it happen. Slowly, reluctantly, the divine qi slowed and finally stopped shredding the shadow qi that got near it. The shadow qi slid over those divine nodes and that terrible resistance he’d been struggling against simply vanished. It was so abrupt that he almost lost control of the technique. Pride and happiness swelled inside of him at succeeding where he had failed so often. That glorious moment was cut short as a sensation of falling backward was accompanied by an almost panicked shout from Fu Ruolan.

“Wait!”

Everything that Sen had been sensing in his environment with his spiritual sense disappeared in a blink. It was replaced by a world filled with things that felt insubstantial, like objects made of mist. It was a world where he feared any motion would punch straight through the membrane of reality. In short, everything felt wrong. His eyes shot open at the same time he lost his grip on the technique. He looked down at his own hand and watched as inky blackness receded to expose smooth, pale skin. The color in that skin jarred against the monochrome world around him where everything was a shade that sat somewhere on a spectrum between white and black. The total absence of color in anything except himself and his clothes was disorienting. That feeling was only made worse by the chaotic shapes that surrounded him that bore no resemblance to anything made by the hand of man. It made him want to squeeze his eyes shut to deny the sheer alien nature of the place any hold in his psyche. The only thing that kept him from doing exactly that was the warning that Fu Ruolan had given when she first started him down this path. He only had so much time before this place would start to kill him.

He shook off the disorientation and looked around. He was standing in a wedge of bright white that looked like, well, it didn’t really look like anything. It was just a bizarre shape with hard edges. That must be how the shadow I was in was shaped on the other side, he thought. He was relieved that he hadn’t done something stupid like start walking around. He’d do that eventually, but not when he’d come here by accident. Even his natural curiosity was hiding in a hole somewhere, not even remotely interested in exploring this unsettling place. Focus, he ordered himself. He worked backward this time and focused on suppressing the divine qi first and then suffusing his body with shadow qi. It was still hard. Every new technique was like that at first. He was sure that as he developed experience and strength, it would grow easier. Even so, it no longer felt like he was trying to lift an impossible weight over his head and keep it there. By contrast to what it had been like, this felt easy to him.

He watched with an almost detached interest as that inky blackness covered his skin again. Casting one last look around and shuddering, Sen stepped into the wedge of whiteness and stumbled back into the Fu Ruolan’s home. He instantly released the technique, not wanting to chance an accidental return to that awful place. He stared around him, drinking in the familiar shapes and colors, and was overwhelmed with a sense of rightness restored. He took a few heaving breaths and then forced himself to calm down. He was back. He had made it. Everything had worked out.

“Well,” said Fu Ruolan, “that was a stupid thing to do.”

Sen huffed out an almost involuntary laugh. “You say that like I did it on purpose.”

The nascent soul cultivator gave him a deeply suspicious look. It was clear that she didn’t believe he’d accidentally moved between planes of existence. He wasn’t sure that he would have believed it, either, if he was in her shoes. The first thing most cultivators did when they figured out a new technique was use it. It was the only way that Sen knew for someone to master a new technique. Of course, most techniques didn’t come with the serious risk of being trapped in some awful other place where nothing made sense, everything felt wrong, and staying too long meant your likely destruction. That kind of deadly risk was usually enough to make even cultivators wary about experimenting too much, at least without experienced guidance. After studying him briefly, Fu Ruolan seemed to conclude that he wasn’t outright lying to her. He had to think that his near-immediate return and manifest happiness at being back probably lent his words some credibility.

“You made it work. Congratulations,” said Fu Ruolan without much enthusiasm.

“You don’t sound that happy about it.”

“Of course, I’m not happy about it. Do you have any idea how long it took me to do that for the first time?”

Sen could almost feel the jaws of doom closing around him at that question. He just couldn’t see a way to avoid them.

“A month?” he ventured, hoping that massaging her pride might help.

“A month? A month, he says. Not all of us are cultivation geniuses kissed by the heavens like you,” said Fu Ruolan, even as Sen felt those jaws locking tight. “Try two years.”

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