Unintended Cultivator

V13 Chapter Nine – Excavation, Part 2

“Is this when the terrifying part starts?” asked Falling Leaf. “You look happy.”

Sen rolled his eyes and said, “Not quite yet. I still need to prepare a few things.”

Glancing over to the table, he saw that it was completely empty of food. How long had he been thinking about the problem? He peered up at the sky only to discover that it was evening. Late evening. He hadn’t even noticed the darkness gathering around them.

“We need to move that table away from here,” said Sen.

Falling Leaf looked around, and then, as if to say that one patch of forest was as good as another, she shrugged. After putting the table and chairs in a storage ring, he led her several miles away to a spot that shouldn’t be affected. He paused to consider how long it would actually take him to finish setting things up. Hours, he thought. With that basic assumption in hand, he chose to create a small galehouse. Falling Leaf didn’t need it for protection. There wasn’t anything nearby that could threaten her, but it would let her start a fire or sleep in a sheltered place if she wanted. He finished by loading up the stone table inside with more food. Half the dishes were chosen at random, and he genuinely had no idea how long they had been sitting in his storage rings. Some of them might well have been made years before. Not that the ghost panther cared. She cheerfully sat down and started eating again.

Heading back outside, Sen thought that he might have given Falling Leaf the wrong idea when he said he needed to set up a few things. The truth was that he was going to need to create several interlocking formations. Formations that would need to work perfectly with each other and still require his direct assistance when the time came. Sen allowed himself a moment to wonder if he’d taken on something too complicated. He’d never even heard of someone attempting something like this before. If any part of the plan didn’t happen exactly right, he could end up destroying the city. Alternatively, he could just dig the city out.

It was tempting, on the surface, but that would leave a hole in the ground hundreds of feet deep. A hole would still leave him with the problems of rain and mud. It wouldn’t be a hazard to regular people since no mortals were likely to come out this far. Letting the city get covered in water or mud would destroy almost anything of value, though. Sen wavered for a moment before he nodded to himself. Even if the plan failed, he still wanted to try. He wanted to see how far he’d come, and whether his confidence was justified. Committed to his decision, Sen started looking around for the best place to start building his formation.

As with any large-scale formation, he needed to precisely position the formation flags for the highest efficiency. This far out into the wilds, there was a lot of environmental qi to draw on, but it wouldn’t be enough. He began unloading beast cores from his storage rings to sacrifice to the formations. The heavens know there are enough of them, he thought with an internal wince. He’d never tried to count them, but even a rough estimate put the total into the thousands, if not the tens of thousands. He wrenched his mind away from that reality. It wouldn’t help him here. He refocused his attention on building the formations. It took four of them, and he didn’t finish the process until after dawn. He was standing on a qi platform and considering the formations from above when Falling Leaf arrived. She held out a cup of tea.

“Thank you,” said Sen, sipping the hot beverage without really tasting it.

“Are you not ready yet?” she asked, eyeing him curiously.

“I think

I am, but it’s not like I get to try again if I got something wrong.”“How long have you been standing here?”

“A few hours,” admitted Sen.

“If you haven’t found a problem by now, you never will. Waiting gains you nothing. It will either work, or it won’t.”

Sen once again found himself envying the ghost panther’s perspective. Everything was firmly fixed in the now for her. She never seemed weighed down by the what-if questions that occasionally bogged Sen down with indecision. He took a deep breath, drank the rest of the tea, and handed the cup back to her.

“I’m going to start. You might want to go back to the galehouse. This will probably get loud,” he said. “And the ground will probably shake a lot. And there’s going to be rocks and dirt going in every direction.”

“I want to see it,” said Falling Leaf with an eager gleam in her eye.

“If you like,” said Sen.

Flying down, Sen landed on the ground. He sank his qi and spiritual sense deep into the earth in preparation. Only after he was certain that he could influence the entire area that would be affected did he trigger the formations. There were several long seconds when anyone observing would have thought that nothing happened. For Sen, those seconds were an eternity. He had wildly underestimated how complex things were going to get beneath the earth. Nor had he accounted for just how many things he was going to need to handle personally.

One of the formations existed solely to move the loose material beneath the city away and deposit it outside of where the city would rise. Except, the material beneath the city wasn’t uniform. If it had all been sand or all been loose rocks, it would have been fine. Instead, it was a mixture of everything from fine grains of sand up to rocks the size of boulders. All of that careful precision and efficiency he’d worked to create in the formation was immediately thrown out of balance because the qi demands across the area were irregular. A second formation was there to perform a similar function for all of the material over the buried city. It faced similar problems with some parts of the formation trying to draw in extra qi to meet the demands.

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He hadn’t made the formations to deal with those problems because he hadn’t expected them. Not that knowing about them would have made a difference. Sen wasn’t sure that even Uncle Kho could have designed a formation complex enough to manage all those different demands on its own. So, Sen found himself needing to make constant adjustments just to keep the formations from destroying themselves. An event that would have been cataclysmic for everything within a few hundred miles, considering how much qi the formations were drawing from the environment and the beast cores. He wasn’t tracking the amount precisely. Even so, Sen suspected that he could flatten a good portion of the continent-spanning Mountains of Sorrow with the qi he’d gathered into this tiny area.

A third formation was designed to draw rock up from far deeper and fuse it together. That monumental pillar of stone would support and raise the city. He’d expected that formation to be the one that needed no attention from him. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Thinking back, Sen realized that all those times he’d pulled stone up from that deep, he’d almost unconsciously reshaped the stone to fulfill whatever purpose he’d had for it. His qi and spiritual sense were telling him that the pillar slowly forming and rising beneath them wasn’t a column with a smooth, flat surface. The top of it was a jagged thing that would certainly punch through the bottom of the city and turn the ruins into rubble.

The final formation was designed to create a massive qi platform beneath the city for a short time. It was supposed to support the city until the column of stone rising from below could begin the slow process of pushing it to the surface. However, much like the top of the column, the bottom of the city wasn’t precisely even. It had been harder to discern when all of that loose material was stationary beneath the buildings. Now that it was all in motion, Sen could tell that the city hadn’t sunk evenly. If the qi platform activated as it was intended to do, it would cut buildings in some parts of the city in half, while leaving other parts of the city to drop as much as thirty to fifty feet in some places.

This is too much

, thought Sen frantically. There are too many things to keep track of. Too many adjustments to make. I can’t do this! No one could do this! While panic threatened to seize him completely, a stray thought made it ways through the maelstrom. This is no different than a complicated alchemy recipe. That thought almost created the catastrophe that Sen was trying to avoid. It was so unexpected that he almost lost his grip on the countless things he was managing manually in the formations, in the stone, and in himself. When he could spare the fraction of a second necessary to consider the idea, he realized that it was true.This wasn’t that different. Not really. He thought it was different because there were formations, and this was all happening in the world instead of in a pot or cauldron. The most complicated elixirs he’d made had required far more adjustments than what he faced here. Some of those had needed hundreds or thousands of adjustments every few seconds. The difference here was that he was trying to do it all consciously. He was trying to assert control, rather than trusting his intuition to guide him to the best outcome. If all those failures when Fu Ruolan had tried to make him follow the traditional path of alchemy had taught him anything, it was that he needed to trust his intuition.

Over what felt like about a thousand years, but was no more than a second or two, Sen relinquished his conscious control over the formations and the processes. He let his intuition start to guide his choices. As he did that, his panic receded as Sen sank into a familiar state of mind. He wasn’t there to control all of this. Control was necessary, but he’d accomplished that when he’d set up the formations. Those would give all of these individual processes structure. What he needed to do was make sure that none of those processes got out of hand. It was like lowering the temperature in one part of a cauldron to ensure that an ingredient didn’t burn, while raising the temperature somewhere else to ensure that an ingredient dissolved.

Here, instead of working with individual ingredients, he was just working with qi. Make sure enough of the right kind of qi went one place, while reducing the amount of qi going somewhere else. As long as the formations continued to guide everything the way he’d built them to do, this would all work. So, Sen let himself sink into the place where he wasn’t thinking but feeling his way toward the right outcome. All of the thoughts about cataclysms and all the what-if questions fell away as he became the fixed point of calm in the center of a storm of qi. What he hadn’t expected was just how taxing it would all become. It had been years since Sen last worried about running out of qi. Yet, it felt like a distinct possibility here. As his reserves were siphoned away, his management of the process almost slipped again.

He couldn’t be distracted. Now that everything was in motion, he had to finish it. The time to change his mind was before he started. Which, he realized, was true of most dangerous things. Sen was only vaguely aware of the ground beneath him being dragged away by the formation and added to a tremendous and growing mountain of mixed materials. He simply formed a small qi platform beneath himself to keep his position. Nor was he aware of the way the sky was changing color above them, or the rapid growth of the forest around their position from all the excess qi bleeding off the formations. He only knew he needed to finish.

That moment finally arrived when the battered stones of what had probably been a street long ago rose to meet the bottom of his qi platform. Sen felt the formations shutting down, now that their prescribed functions had been accomplished. The terrible drain on his qi vanished to be swiftly replaced by a sense of hollowness. Raising the city hadn’t quite run him dry, but it had been a chillingly close thing. He didn’t know how long it would take to replace all of that qi, but a small part of him was relieved. He couldn't advance again while he was so depleted. This mad idea may have bought him an extra few years before ascension. That brief flicker of happiness was soon crushed beneath thoughts that he was far more vulnerable than he’d been in years as well.

“I guess I can’t have it both ways,” grumbled Sen.

Before that gloominess could settle on him, Falling Leaf landed next to him. She was looking around with intense curiosity. Sen lifted an eyebrow at her.

“You didn’t seem nearly this interested before.”

“Do you think there’s anything to eat here?” she asked eagerly.

Sen pinched the bridge of his nose and said, “Probably not.”

Falling Leaf’s eagerness immediately vanished.