Unintended Cultivator

Sen very nearly panicked at the thought of being incapacitated on the street with less than friendly strangers around. He was even more frightened of the idea of coming out of it just to find himself about to be killed. Once that first second or two of wholly irrational thinking crashed through his head, Sen made himself calm down. This wasn’t a major stage breakthrough. He wasn’t even breaking from middle-stage foundation formation to late-stage. This was a minor breakthrough inside the middle stage. He just needed to keep a grip long enough to get somewhere safe. If he could do that, he doubted the breakthrough would even last until the next morning. Of course, to get somewhere safe, Sen would have to keep all of the qi contained in his body while he moved. He was about halfway between the shop and Grandmother Lu’s home. There were likely to be fewer people at her home, so that’s the direction he went.

Sen could move very fast when he ran full out, but even he wasn’t sure he could make it back to the house in time. He weighed his options. He did have one potential way to move faster. It might even help keep the breakthrough at bay for a little while. He’d had a lot of trouble with the technique up on the mountain, but Sen found that desperation and an overwhelming amount of qi in his system made for an ideal situation to learn his qinggong technique. He was still haphazard at first, but quickly found a rhythm and began hurtling past, around, and occasion over people and obstacles. Despite a brief surge of happiness at that minor success, all of the extra qi was putting a lot of pressure on Sen’s dantian, channels, and body. It was beyond distracting and bordered on painful.

The experience gave Sen a very clear picture of why nobody ever put off a breakthrough. His only solace was that the qi he was pooling around his feet to drive the qinggong technique did help bleed off some of the pressure inside him. It downgraded the experience from very painful to simply miserable. Even so, a part of him loathed the waste. Giving up so much qi that he could have potentially converted into the more potent liquid qi that now kept his dantian about half full stung. Under the circumstances, though, he was willing to accept it as a necessary sacrifice for his own safety. He could always accumulate more qi the slow way. He couldn’t count on restoring his freedom if he lost that. As for his life, well, everybody got another chance at that, but he wouldn’t be Sen anymore. It’d be the same soul, carrying some of the same debts, but all the memories and knowledge that made him Sen would be washed away on the Naihe Bridge. No, he decided, it’s a tiny sacrifice compared to what might happen.

Even with his greater speed, Sen was growing desperate by the time he reached Grandmother Lu’s home. He burst through the front door bellowing for Zhang Muchen. In the process, he scared a maid so badly that he thought she might faint or possibly suffer some kind of fatal heart condition. He mumbled a quick apology as he staggered. Without the qinggong technique, the pressure had built back up inside him. He gritted his teeth against the pain until the older man hurried into sight with a deeply worried look on his face. The older man waved the maid away and, after hesitating for a moment, caught Sen’s are to steady him.

“Young master, are you injured?”

“No,” said Sen. “It’s a breakthrough.”

The confused look on the man’s face told Sen everything he needed to know about the servant’s working knowledge of cultivation. No wonder he acts so impressed around me, Sen thought. He doesn’t know the difference between me and someone like Master Feng. We’re all just stories to him. Sen realized that his mind was wandering from the pain. With an effort of will, he focused on the servant.

“I need a room. Private. No intrusions.”

That, at least, the servant understood perfectly well. He hurried Sen through the house to what appeared to be a bedroom. After seeing that Sen was situated in the room, Zhang Muchen quietly left and closed the door behind him. With a gasp of pain and relief, Sen let himself collapse onto the reliably stable floor. Sen was disappointed to discover that the process had not grown any easier since his last breakthrough. He had harbored a minor hope that getting his dantian to half full with liquid qi would make converting more of the misty environmental qi easier. There wasn’t even a good reason for why Sen had hoped that. It was just an idea that popped into his head one day. He supposed that he just liked the idea of it. Unlike so many other ideas, Sen knew that one didn’t harbor any traps in it. It would either prove true, which would make him happy, or not true, which would leave him no worse off than he was. The world of cultivation was filled with many unknowns, but very few that lent themselves to such simple and comparatively safe answers. He knew he could have just asked about it, but it had been to run a little experiment of his own, instead of being the experiment.

Thinking of experiments at that moment triggered the eternally mysterious mechanism that birthed new ideas. Part of the reason why Sen was in such a desperate state when he arrived was because of the size of his dantian and his channels. He knew that the dantian could stretch, and it stood to reason that his channels could as well. Can I use some of this qi for that, instead of converting it all? It wasn’t just a matter of stretching the dantian or the qi channels. For that work to matter, they’d need reinforcement. Otherwise, they could rupture the next time they came under pressure. The idea was risky, but it also came with rewards.

If Sen could stretch them, his channels especially, it could open up enough room for him to use even more kinds of qi at the same time. There were limits to that ability. Sen could only split his concentration in so many ways. Of course, wider channels would let him use more qi when he used different kinds simultaneously. He did have all of that qi, and he’d told Grandmother Lu that he could mix an elixir that would repair channels. Could he mix one that would reinforce them? Could he mix it while stretching his channels and dantian? As appealing as the idea was, and as much as he needed to do something with all that qi, Sen took a moment. If he went down the stretching path, he was committed to it. He couldn’t undo that stretching.

In the end, he simply couldn’t overlook the advantage of a larger dantian and wider qi channels. He had the rest of his life to advance his cultivation. More opportunities would come. A minor in-stage boost to his cultivation would make him a little bit stronger, but stretching those qi channels could potentially save his life in the very near future. He couldn’t depend on all his opponents being substantially weaker than him like those idiots in the market had been. If he came up against someone stronger than he was, which seemed highly probable to Sen, he’d have to beat them with something other than main strength. He’d need surprise, and throwing up multiple kinds of qi was exactly that kind of surprise.

With the decision made, Sen went to work. Like most new and difficult things, stretching his dantian and qi channels was grueling in ways that only experience could show a person. It called for him to stuff each channel as full of qi as he could stand, hold it in place, and then force more in. It hurt. It hurt enough that it made him sweat. It made his hands shake. A few times, it hurt so much that Sen couldn’t even breathe. Yet, he carried on because he had to. Splitting his attention to prepare an elixir made the work even more taxing. He had to think through every ingredient, consider the proportions, consider the oddities of his own body. His natural affinities for fire and shadow meant that his body used those kinds of qi with far greater efficiency than other kinds of qi. That meant he had to, contrary to what most people might expect, reduce the proportion of fire and shadow qi in the elixir.

Bit by bit, though, he stretched his channels. One by one, he assembled the medicinal herbs and alchemical ingredients. Finally, he began stretching his dantian. As the pain of that process tried to double him over, he began dumping the ingredients into a pot. He’d chosen his ingredients with care. He’d picked ones that would work directly with the reagents he had on hand without the need to heat the pot. Normally, he could have just heated the pot with qi, but even the idea of sending qi down his channels was enough to send a deep shudder through his body. When he had stretched his dantian as far as he dared, he looked down at the liquid in the pot. It looked and smelled far too much like one of Master Feng’s pills for Sen’s liking, but it didn’t matter. He lifted the pot to his lips and dumped the contents down his throat. It was thick and a little cloying, but he forced it down. Then, for a few blessed seconds, nothing more was required of Sen.

He slumped down on the floor again and just let himself rest. He’d managed to use up some of the qi with his channel stretching, as the energy sometimes slipped from his control and leaked out into his body. He relished those few moments of doing nothing because he knew what came next would be terrible. And it was. The agony started in the walls of his dantian. It felt as though someone was ramming a thousand white-hot needles into those walls. Then, the sensation spread up and down his channels. Sen had enough forethought to shove a folded-up piece of cloth into his mouth before he lost the ability to do anything but clench his jaw and suppress his screaming. Sen lost any notion of time in the haze of torment. When it did finally wind down, though, he felt inside. Much as he had needed to suppress his screaming, he had to suppress the need to howl in triumph. It had worked. He sent qi cascading down those wider, newly reinforced channels. What had once felt like a potent stream of energy now felt like a river of power rushing through him. He’d wanted a way to surprise stronger cultivators. Now, he had it.

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