Unintended Cultivator

V12 Chapter 53 – Observer

Shaking his head, Sen returned the manual and chair to their respective storage rings. He wanted to be furious with the heavens for choosing that inconvenient moment to begin Xu Xiao Dan’s tribulation. Unfortunately, he could only fling so much blame in that direction. The Shadow Gate manual had been in his possession for a long time. That he’d waited until a time when he’d known a tribulation might appear before he even started looking at it… Well, he could really only blame himself for that. And the heavens. He felt like it was okay to blame the heavens a little.

Still, this was all an opportunity of sorts. Sen had never actually witnessed someone else going through a true tribulation. There had been tribulations for some of the disciples back in his own sect, but he’d never been there to witness those. The closest he’d ever come to that was summoning half-baked tribulation of his own to kill spirit beasts and demonic beasts. He suspected that there were going to be some fundamental differences between that and the real thing. At least, he hoped there would be differences. The implications would prove more than unsettling if there weren’t.

Just as important to Sen was that this was a nascent soul tribulation for someone more advanced than himself, if only by a few intermediate stages. This could very well be a useful preview of what he might face in the days to come. Although, he reminded himself, I’ll have to temper that expectation. He intended to progress his body cultivation. He still wasn’t sure how he was going to do that without some kind of guide, but he’d already come too far along that path to abandon it now. Successful advancement in body cultivation could mean a fiercer tribulation for him. Or not. The heavens were terribly fickle about these things.

Sen studied the gathering clouds above with his eyes, spiritual sense, and his qi. It was all he could do not to start screaming profanities at the sky. All he could think was, This is it? This is all you’re going to throw at him

? By his estimation, his last tribulation had been a third, if not half again as strong as what he was seeing gathering above. He knew that every cultivator walked a different path, which meant that their tribulations were never going to be identical. Even so, it was very difficult for him not to feel, once again, rather badly mistreated by the heavens. For a more advanced cultivator to get this weaker tribulation right in front of him felt almost personal.He tried to reserve judgment until he saw tribulation lightning descend from the sky, but it soon became clear that no more power was going to gather. Sen tried to figure out the difference. Was it just a matter of their relative personal power? He knew he could punch up better than most, but was that enough to justify what felt like a weak tribulation? Was it truly his body cultivation that seemed to call down so much additional wrath when he advanced? The questions kept swirling through his mind even though he recognized the futility of them. He wasn’t going to get any answers until he ascended, and he suspected not even then.

Despite his frustration, Sen remained observant. He did his best to analyze the tribulation lightning when it finally struck Xu Xiao Dan. His intuition that his homemade tribulation lightning was different turned out to be partially true. However, it wasn’t as different as he’d imagined it would be. It was a difference of degree, rather than substance. His tribulation lightning relied more on the kind of lightning generated in storms, with a rather weak addition of divine qi layered on top. The true tribulation lightning was mostly divine qi wrapped around a weak thread of natural lightning.

That tribulations relied on anything in nature at all seemed odd to him. He wondered if it was necessary to avoid violating some higher order law he didn’t know. That the heavens rarely intervened directly in the lives of mortals or cultivators save for tribulations and inspirations seemed to support that notion. Was the qi offered during inspirations also imbued with something from nature? He struggled to imagine anything that would be equally usable by all cultivators. Then again, as he considered the problem, he realized how pitiful his understanding of the nature of qi actually was.

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He was very adept at shaping and using qi, but that mastery was like the mastery of a swordsman. A swordsman could tell you a lot about how and when to use a blade. However, if you wanted to know anything about the metal that made up the blade, it required a smith to explain it. Sen wasn’t sure that there was anyone in the Jianghu who filled such a role. Even the explanations of qi that he’d received from his teachers seemed elementary in hindsight. They were arguably the people in the best position to know. That suggested that the information wasn’t just obscure but wholly unknown. Given how reliant cultivators were on qi, it struck him as a glaring gap in their collective knowledge.

Sen mentally added that concern to an ever-growing list of questions he intended to ask his teachers someday. Not that he ever seemed to actually ask them any of those questions. There was always some crisis at hand or some other thing he needed to learn about much more desperately. The truth was that, as much as he wanted to know more about the fundamental nature of qi, he didn’t actually need to know it. If his path as a cultivator was going to be hampered by that particular lack of information, he was fairly confident it would have happened already.

With what he felt was a very noble effort on his part, Sen refrained from shouting his many frustrations at the heavens. He chose to walk over to where Xu Xiao Dan was still sprawled on the ground. Sen thought he understood better why the man had been given a weaker tribulation. He had survived the experience, but it looked to have been a very close thing. There were burns and open wounds all over the man’s body. His robes were in tatters. He was also unconscious, and it sounded like his breathing was labored.

An examination revealed that Xu Xiao Dan had successfully advanced. Whether the former patriarch would ever advance again was an open question. There was nothing obvious to Sen’s qi or spiritual sense that would prevent more progress, but he was far from an expert about nascent soul bodies. There could be a dozen things wrong that he wouldn’t recognize. Sen decided that, ultimately, Xu Xiao Dan’s cultivation wasn’t his problem. He had kept his word to the man, made the elixir, and facilitated this advancement. That would have to be enough. The man’s physical well-being, on the other hand, would directly inconvenience Sen if something wasn’t done about it.

He summoned one of the small number of healing elixirs he’d intentionally made for nascent soul cultivators. It took a little effort to get the man to swallow the liquid, but Xu Xiao Dan’s breathing seemed to improve rapidly after that. Nodding to himself, Sen created a qi platform beneath the other man and carried him back to the camp. After depositing the man in his tent, Sen returned to his own. Misty Peak appeared mere moments later.

“So, he didn’t die,” she remarked.

“He didn’t. This time. I never asked. Do nine-tail foxes endure tribulations?”

“You mean getting hit by lightning when we advance?”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t. We have other trials. Things more in tune with our powers and our natures.”

“So, what? The universe surrounds you with hallucinations, illusions, and lies, and you need to figure it out?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite that crudely,” pouted Misty Peak, “but that’s pretty accurate.”

“Wait. Really? I just said that because I thought it sounded funny.”

“You excel at many things, Sen, but I’m sure someone must have told you this before. You’re not funny. Best to accept that now.”

“I am hilarious.”

The look of pity that Misty Peak gave him was so profound that it made him sigh.

“Did anything important happen while I was out there?”

The fox-woman appeared to think it over before she shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t really know. I was napping.”