Unintended Cultivator

V13 Chapter 25 – People Are the Problem

At first, the sounds of Master Feng working in the forge distracted Sen. The heat would have been a distraction, as well, if he’d been trying to study the Shadow Gate manual years earlier. Yet, the periodic, rhythmic sounds of a hammer on metal soon faded from Sen’s awareness as he was finally able to give the manual his undivided attention. It had been years since he was able to give his complete focus to a single task, and it felt luxurious. Even in battle, he was never focused solely on one thing. Yes, if there was an enemy directly in front of him, that enemy got most of his attention. But never all of it.

Sen was constantly monitoring his nearby allies, the large-scale movements of the enemy, and keeping a wary eye out for someone looking to assassinate him on the battlefield. There had been two attempts so far. In both cases, he’d done what they had planned to do. Used the battle to cover up that he’d ruthlessly killed someone on his own side. That was what happened publicly, at any rate. Privately, those events had led to quiet, but determined, investigations and the mysterious disappearances of certain individuals. The situation held a certain grim irony.

Sen’s original plan had been to shake up the leadership of the mortal army by arranging for the deaths of particularly troublesome generals. Instead, he’d been forced to have cultivators in leadership positions killed. Not that he’d completely given up on the plan to eliminate those mortal generals. He still didn’t trust them. He also had no intention of ever letting them get back to his capital city alive. Unlike the cultivators, however, they seemed to have grasped the magnitude of the threat against them. That had led them to focus most of their attention on actually leading the army, which he’d found a welcome change.

Fortunately, he didn’t need to think about any of those concerns for the immediate future. Not that focusing on the manual made comprehending it easy. While not as bad as some manuals he’d read, the language was more obscure than he’d like. If he’d lacked direct experience with using shadow qi and the shadow travel technique, Sen doubted that he’d have made any immediate progress with it at all. As things stood, though, it was just monumentally difficult to understand, rather than flat-out impossible to understand. He knew that part of the problem was that the foundational technique it described felt like it should work the same as shadow travel.

There were some similarities, but they also diverged in fundamental ways. With shadow travel, Sen had to suffuse his entire being with shadow qi and then step through to that in-between place. With this technique, if he was reading it correctly, he needed to suffuse two shadows with his own shadow qi. If he did it properly, he should be able to step directly into one shadow and out of another with no time spent in that in-between place. Or, he thought, maybe you only spend a fraction of a second there to cover the distance. That made a little more sense to him, but there was a lot to this technique he didn’t understand. It wasn’t for a lack of effort, either. It felt like the person who had written the manual had deliberately left out key parts of the technique.

“Or they didn’t understand them,” whispered Sen under his breath.

The longer he thought about that, the more likely it felt to him. All it took was imagining how an alchemy manual written by him would read. How many parts of his process would he find it altogether impossible to describe coherently? Given just how few people there were who could use shadow qi, it wasn’t that surprising that the person who wrote this manual had gaps in knowledge. Cultivators weren’t well-known for sharing knowledge, but there was some exchange of information. Even if it was just a genius Auntie Caihong who could blithely disregard any prohibition set by a sect regarding who could learn what information. It only took her teaching one or two students to get a lot of new ideas out into the Jianghu at large.

Yet, the rise of a genius like Auntie Caihong required numbers. Her brilliance could only be expressed because alchemy was already widespread enough for her to learn it in her youth. Sen had no idea how many alchemists there were, but there were at least twenty or thirty traveling with his army alone. He wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that there weren’t twenty shadow qi cultivators in the entire world. Nor would it shock him to learn that most of them didn’t take students or even try to pass down their knowledge.

It had only been dumb luck, or the interference of the heavens, that had put Fu Ruolan in his path. A person uniquely qualified to help him develop skills with shadow qi. Without their lives coming into contact, Sen would probably never have done anything with shadow qi. Well, he would have died if they hadn’t met. But, if his body cultivation hadn’t been killing him, and if he hadn’t met her, he likely wouldn’t have bothered with shadow qi. Even with a teacher, it had been horribly difficult to even start understanding it. Maybe some actual cultivation genius could have figured it out for themselves, but he never would have.

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Still, if his ideas about how shadow qi cultivators behaved were even close to right, it would explain a lot. Rarely teaching or writing manuals would drastically cut down on the opportunities for shadow qi cultivators to develop a shared base of techniques, information, and even terms. It also meant that gaps in knowledge that one cultivator had were unlikely to be filled in by another. While he was making a lot of assumptions and guesses, it felt right. Not that coming to that conclusion had done anything to help him understand the technique. It just helped clarify why the manual was so seemingly obtuse.

Whatever ancient cultivator had written it was probably trying to obscure their own lack of understanding. An understandable reaction given the usual arrogance that cultivators seemed so desperate to nurture in their hearts. Still, that fact left him in a poor position to master the technique. All the manual had really done was tell him that the technique was possible and given him a few clues. If he wanted to make it work, he’d have to experiment with it. That wasn’t something he was terribly eager to do, especially if the technique touched the in-between space. He had the suspicion that errors involving that rather unique place would prove fatal.

However, if the technique worked the way the manual suggested, it would be extraordinarily useful. He couldn’t ignore that just because figuring things out might carry some extra risks. He just wished he had more information to go on. Part of him wanted to go on and study some of the other techniques later in the manual, but that would likely prove futile. If this was the first technique in the manual, it was likely the simplest. The chances that later techniques would be simpler or explained better were poor. There was really only one place to start. Sen looked around the forge. There were plenty of shadows to choose from. He picked one close to him and another that was well away from Master Feng. He started to suffuse the shadows with his qi when Master Feng shouted.

“Stop!”

Sen immediately released his qi and gave his teacher a perplexed look.

“Master Feng?”

“What were you just doing?” demanded Master Feng, a hammer gripped hard in one hand.

The man looked angry and, unless Sen missed his guess entirely, a little afraid.

Holding up the manual, Sen said, “I was doing what you told me to do. Well, sort of. I found this manual years ago. I’ve been meaning to get back to it for a long time, and this seemed like a good opportunity. Why? What’s wrong?”

Master Feng glared at the manual before he did some things that Sen didn’t understand with a glowing piece of metal. Putting the hammer down, the elder cultivator walked over to Sen and held out his hand. Sen’s first instinct was to put the manual back into a storage ring and run away. There was a voice in the back of his head warning him that Master Feng was going to destroy the manual. Reluctantly, Sen handed over the manual. His teacher thumbed through the first few pages.

“The Shadow Gate,” he said in a voice that suggested he was talking to himself. “So, that’s what they called it.”

Master Feng spent the better part of five minutes reading and rereading parts of the manual. Then, with what looked like almost as much reluctance as Sen had felt earlier, the elder cultivator handed it back. The man’s eyes never left the manual.

“Is there something I need to know?” asked Sen.

“I’ve seen that technique you were trying to do before. A very long time ago. The person who used it—” Master Feng trailed off before shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter. You’re not like her. The technique isn’t the problem.”

“What is the problem?”

“People, Sen. People are the problem.”

“So, it’s safe?”

“I honestly can’t say. Shadow qi isn’t something I understand. Fu Ruolan or that fool, Jin Bohai, might be able to tell you more. Then again, I’m not sure that they actually know any more about it than you do at this point.”

A twinge of disappointment sparked inside of Sen. He had really wanted some reassurance from Master Feng, but the elder cultivator was right. When it came to shadow qi, Sen was one of the experts. A frankly terrifying prospect when he considered exactly how little he actually knew about it.

“I think you warned me about this a long time ago.”

“Warned you about what?”

“That the higher you climb up the mountain, the more you have to rely on yourself, because there simply isn’t anyone to advise you beyond a certain point.”

Master Feng studied Sen for a few seconds before he shrugged.

“Yeah, I probably said that.”

“You don’t remember?”

Snorting as he walked back over to the anvil, Master Feng said, “Sen, when you get to be as old as I am, trying to remember every little thing you’ve ever said is a fool’s errand.”