Unintended Cultivator

V13 Chapter 30 – You’d Think So

It turned out that Master Feng didn’t know what had happened. He'd heard stories about weapons that endured tribulations, but had never actually seen it happen. He hadn’t even met anyone who had seen it.

“I’ll admit,” said the elder cultivator, “I thought that it was a myth right up until I saw it happen with my own eyes.”

They were standing inside the forge, staring down at the swords that had been placed on the bench. Sitting there, they looked innocuous enough, save for that iridescent sheen. Even that could probably be explained away as some novel experiment or technique on the part of a particularly creative smith. What couldn’t be explained away was the way that the swords showed up in both Sen's and Master Feng’s spiritual sense. As long as Sen was carrying the swords, his own presence would probably be enough to mask them.

If he ever left them sitting out and moved any distance away, they would be readily apparent to any cultivator. It wouldn’t quite be an invitation for thievery, but it would be the next best thing. Sen had his doubts that most cultivators would be willing to hazard stealing from him. Unfortunately, most was decidedly different from all. Worse, he wasn’t sure if he could put them into a storage ring. That would be the best way to secure them from prying eyes and stealing hands. If the swords were alive in some sense, and the way they were actively absorbing environment qi suggested they were, putting them into a storage ring might kill them.

He knew that there were storage rings that could keep things alive, but had never felt the need to get one. They were primarily used by cultivators who tended and grew spiritual herbs and medicinal plants for sects, not by alchemists. If he had one of those, he wouldn’t be worried about this problem. As things stood with the storage rings he did have, the only way to learn what would happen would be to put the swords into one. That wasn’t a risk he was willing to take.

“I guess I’ll need to keep these very close for the time being. At least until I can get one of those storage rings that keeps things alive.”

“If you weren’t already a nascent soul cultivator, I’m not sure I’d dare let you out into public with these,” said Master Feng. “It’s still going to be dangerous for you. Every nascent soul cultivator you meet will want them.”

“Including you?” asked Sen.

“You’re damned right, including me. I’d like to spend the next however many years it takes to figure out what these actually are. If we didn’t have this war to fight, I might have even asked to hang on to them for a while. I’m not an idiot, though. If I were meant to have something like these, it wouldn’t have been you that triggered that tribulation.”

“I’m not sure that I triggered it.”

“Semantics. It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t… I’m still not sure I understand what you did. Walk me through it again.”

“I didn’t do anything after I put that odd qi into it. I got pushed to one side by something. That’s the part that I’m worried about.”

“Has something like that happened before? I seem to recall you describing something similar years ago,” said Master Feng.

“I think something like that happened once before. That’s how I remember it anyway. I’m wondering now if it happened to someone else, and I’m just misremembering. So many strange things have happened to me that I’ve started losing track.”

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“That last part just gets worse the older you get. As for the rest, I can’t imagine what it’d be like to have something just take charge of my body like that. That would be truly alarming.”

“It was.”

“At the same time, I’m not sure you should worry about it.”

“How am I supposed to not worry about that?” demanded Sen.

“From what you said, you couldn’t stop it. Correct?”

“That’s true.”

“Then, there’s no point in worrying about it. It’s beyond you. It doesn’t seem to be out to get you killed. If it were, there have been countless opportunities where taking control would have accomplished that. So, since there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it or to stop it, there’s nothing to be gained by worrying about it.”

Sen understood what Master Feng was saying. It was true that nothing Sen did had the slightest effect on the thing that took control of him. The same was likely to be true in the future. If that thing, whatever it had been, wanted to take control of him again, it could do it. Any energy he spent worrying about that possibility was energy he wasn’t putting toward a goal he could actually achieve. Still, it frustrated him to throw his hands in the air and think, Well, that’s just how it is.

“I’d still like to know what is doing it,” said Sen. “If I knew what it was, maybe I could do something to stop it. If nothing else, I’d feel less helpless if I had more information.”

“You’d think so. It’s been my experience that things like this rarely have easy answers. After all, would you feel less helpless if you discovered it was a god? A being that is, for the foreseeable future, entirely beyond your reach and with power you can’t hope to match.”

Sen sighed and said, “No. I would not feel less helpless then.”

“And that’s just the easiest possibility. You know from personal experience that there are powers at work out there that we can’t comprehend. Things so vast and terrible in their strength that we can’t even look at them. What would you think or feel if you discovered that one of those things was responsible?”

“Even more helpless,” admitted Sen.

“Exactly. And I’m not telling you to ignore it forever. For right now, though, you have far more pressing concerns than falling into that old cultivator trap.”

“What old cultivator trap?”

“Cultivators know a lot. We understand things that the mortals don’t. You’ve taken that even farther than most with what you can do with alchemy. That tends to give cultivators a false sense of assurance that we can understand anything that comes our way. More than one cultivator has gone chasing knowledge that they weren’t ready for or even that none of us were ready for.”

“I take it that most of them didn’t come to good ends.”

“I assume so,” said Master Feng. “Most of them just disappeared entirely. A few of them might have found what they were looking for and, I don’t know, ascended, maybe. The rest, though? Just gone. Likely killed for not knowing their limits.”

“And you think that will happen to me?”

“It’s more that I don’t want that to happen to you. That’s why I’m telling you all of this. No one can stop you from chasing that knowledge. You might find it. You might be summarily killed for finding it. You might also waste years and not find anything. Is that how you want to spend your, by your own admission, limited time left in this world?”

All it took was one thought of Ai and little Shui to get his answer.

“No,” said Sen. “No, that is not how I want to spend that time.”

“Like I said, I’m not telling you to ignore this forever. You’d be mad to ignore it forever, if I’m being honest. For right now, though, focus on what needs to happen here. Once you ascend, however, you’ll be in a much better position to find out what you want to know.”

“We hope,” said Sen.

“We hope,” agreed Master Feng. “Now, it’s time to figure out our lies.”

“Our lies?”

“You’re getting careless, Sen. You didn’t notice all those cultivators waiting right outside the walls. That tribulation wasn’t subtle. Unless you plan to announce that your swords had a tribulation, we need another explanation.”

Sen pinched the bridge of his nose and said, “Just once, couldn’t one of these things be easy?”