Unintended Cultivator

V13 Chapter 27 – By The Heavens, No

By the time the third day of forging the swords had arrived, Sen had started to understand why Master Feng had said it would take so much experience to master smithing. The elder cultivator hadn’t slept or even taken a meaningful break the entire time. In addition, he’d been subtly using his qi to do…Sen wasn’t entirely sure what his teacher was doing with that qi. All he knew was that it had been a very nearly continuous process. Possessing some experience with using qi for extended periods of time, though, Sen understood how draining it could be. However, Master Feng’s work was steady and controlled. They were the two other things that tended to slip when continuously working with qi for days at a time.

Sen knew that was also a product of practice. Most cultivators lacked the reserves for prolonged qi usage until they were near the peak of core formation or in the nascent soul stage. So, accumulating the necessary experience could only begin at that point, and it wasn’t easy. While Sen could stay awake for months on end, that was only when normal demands were being put on him. What Master Feng was doing required substantial focus. Keeping any mind, even a cultivator's mind, at that level of concentration started to feel like lifting something heavy.

It was fine at first. The longer it went on, though, the more it required from you until, inevitably, your muscles gave out. In Sen’s experience, the mind was similar. You could only put a heavy demand on it for so long before you had to give it time to rest. However, it seemed that Master Feng’s limits in that regard were tremendous. Not only was there no evidence of strain in the man, but he’d frequently carry on conversations with Sen. Granted, they weren’t conversations about the deepest mysteries of cultivation. Even so, Sen suspected that he would have struggled with even simple discussions after three days of nonstop qi manipulation.

Sen actually felt a little guilty about the whole thing. His only contribution was to occasionally push his qi and killing intent into the blades. He had gone back and spent some time studying the first technique in the Shadow Gate manual, but that hadn’t yielded anything new. Well, nothing new save for his growing certainty that he was right about why it was missing crucial information. He’d also considered testing the technique, but refrained out of consideration for Master Feng. The last time Sen had tried it, it had clearly upset his teacher.

There was nothing to be gained from intentionally doing things that bothered the man. Sen would experiment with the technique after the swords were finished. That would free Master Feng from the forge. Then, he could decide if he wanted to stay and watch Sen experimenting, or if he preferred to be elsewhere. That had left Sen with little to do except what Master Feng had originally suggested. He cultivated and started going through the first of the manuals and scrolls salvaged from the Golden Pavilion Sect library. In one respect, Sen found them fascinating. They were documents from a time in history about which comparatively little was known. The things that were recorded felt more like legends than the histories he’d read of more recent times.

In terms of cultivation knowledge, however, they were largely disappointing. Sen focused on the manuals that described techniques for the types of qi he could use at first. He figured that would give him the best odds of evaluating their quality, and it did. What he found were techniques that felt primitive or unfinished. Some of them advised cycling patterns that he knew from experience were inefficient or even counterproductive. With those last ones, it made him wonder about people’s qi channels and dantians. Did some people possess channels and dantians that broke with what he’d come to see as the normal pattern?

It was the only explanation he could think of, other than pure incompetence, that would justify recommending those cycling patterns. If some people’s dantians and qi channels deviated, though, they might legitimately need patterns that looked wrong to him. He’d be very interested to know if that was the case. Unfortunately, it was a difficult notion to test. The only way to do it would be to find someone with channels or a dantian that broke the pattern he knew. That’s assuming that they even exist, thought Sen. There was no guarantee that they did. If they were out there in the world somewhere, Sen couldn’t even begin to imagine the amount of time it would take to find them. They’d have to be rare, or it would have come up at some point in the many, many discussions he’d had with his teachers and other cultivators.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Sen shook his head and went back to looking at a lightning technique that seemed, well, it seemed useless to him. He understood that it was supposed to make the ground around the cultivator a lethal prospect. Except, he’d seen lightning hit the ground. The bolts dispersed into the soil and robbed the technique of power. The sheer amount of power it would take to make the technique work made it not worth the effort. Sen could create a similar effect in the air

that would take a fraction of the qi the technique would demand. Scoffing a little, he closed the manual.“What’s in there that’s annoyed you so much?” asked Master Feng, who walked over to where Sen sat.

Sen looked at the anvil where his teacher had been working and saw the swords being heated...again. Shrugging, he described the technique and its problems to the elder cultivator, who just laughed.

“I did warn you,” he said. “Cultivation has changed in the last few thousand years.”

“I know you did. But this,” said Sen, holding up the manual, “is just foolishness. Any cultivator who paid the slightest attention would have realized the problem.”

“True, but I assure you that there are things we see as obvious now that were not obvious then. Just wait until you come across some of the alchemy manuals. They’ll probably make you want to scream in frustration.”

Sen gave his teacher a skeptical look and asked, “That bad?”

“Worse. So much worse than you can imagine. There are medicinal plants that I’ve seen you use that we didn’t even know had value back then. That’s to say nothing of the things we didn’t even know existed. Taking pills when I was a qi-condensing cultivator was always a gamble. It might work, but it might also kill you. That prospect tended to weed out the people with weak wills.”

“I imagine it would. Not that pills are exactly safe, now. Not even mine or Auntie Caihong’s. Give the wrong one to the wrong person, and they’ll still kill.”

“Agreed, but you make a salient point. The risk these days comes from taking the wrong pills. In my youth, taking the right pills still carried that risk because alchemy wasn’t nearly as developed. It wasn’t something that sects had entire groups of people devoted to. In any given sect, there might be one or two alchemists with one apprentice apiece. And they guarded their secrets jealously. If you got pills from a bad alchemist, there was little chance that you’d survive to complain. Also, because they guarded their secrets, they could blame the disciple. Say that they must have had a weak foundation or suffered from qi deviation because of improper cycling. It was easy to shift the blame, and it happened a lot.”

“I’ve struggled to imagine how sects could be worse than they are, but now I know.”

“They were worse in some ways, but a lot of them were also better. The sects were less insular back then. They took protecting people much more seriously.”

“Fewer arrogant young masters?” asked Sen.

“Oh, by the heavens, no. They’ve always been a problem, and probably always will be. You can’t call someone a genius every day and expect them to have a realistic view of themselves.”

“Maybe sects should stop throwing that word around so much. I’ve met some of these geniuses. I wasn’t impressed by most of them.”

“A lot of people think that you’re a genius young master.”

“I’m not,” said Sen, suddenly very serious, “and we both know it.”

“Well, at least your humility is intact. I suspect that’s a good thing.”

Sen glanced from his teacher to the still unfinished swords and asked, “How much longer, do you think?”

Master Feng turned pensive and said, “Not too long, I think. Those qi channels in the blades are forming the way I want them to. As long as that holds true, it shouldn’t be more than a day or two.”

Nodding, Sen stored the useless manual and picked up another from the small pile he had next to him. He leafed through it before holding it out to Master Feng. The other man took the manual and lifted an eyebrow at Sen.

“It’s a manual for wind qi. You’re the expert.”

Master Feng opened the manual and glanced through the first few pages before he burst into laughter.

“What?” asked Sen.

“I actually learned this technique for wind blades,” said Master Feng. “I forgot just how terrible it was.”

“Why is that funny?”

“Oh, that’s not the funny part. The funny part is that this technique was considered one of the most effective and lethal wind qi techniques for something like two centuries.”

Sen plucked the manual out of Master Feng’s hand and really studied it for a few minutes. It was beyond bad and, in Sen’s mind, reached the level of appalling.

“I think I might have actually become a worse cultivator just by reading that,” said Sen.