Book 9: Chapter 1: Completion
Sen sat with his legs crossed and eyes closed. The sun would rise soon, but it wasn’t up yet. It was a quiet time when the night creatures had retreated to their lairs and nests, yet before the day creatures had roused themselves to go about their sunlit activities. He let that gentle hush wash over him and through him. It was an indulgence in serenity that he rarely allowed himself, but given what was about to come, he felt he’d earned this indulgence. He was aware of the pill in his hand. Its actual weight was negligible, especially to someone like him, but it still felt like it might drag his hand to the earth. It had been a long time coming, that pill, the last one in the Five-Fold Body Transformation.
Of course, as Elder Bo had rather cheerfully told him, Sen was on uncharted ground. When he’d suffused his body with divine qi, he had stepped off the true path of the Five-Fold Body Transformation and onto a new path. He was walking the path of the Six-Fold Body Transformation. Like all new paths and uncharted ground, the dangers were unknown. With any form of body cultivation, there was always the chance of failure. That wasn’t the greatest danger, though. The greatest danger was some kind of unchecked or unbalanced transformation. Sen felt a certain kinship and empathy with those body cultivators of old, the ancient geniuses who had walked undaunted into those dangers, hewing a path through the jungles of ignorance.
He had done everything he could to minimize the dangers. He had gone over the recipe again and again, making modifications both large and small to better suit what he understood about his own body. Then, he had discussed those changes with both Auntie Caihong and Fu Ruolan, explaining his reasons and asking for their input. For all of his own intuitive talent, he was not about to ignore their combined centuries of experience and insight. Then, he had set it aside for a month so he could return to the problem with fresh eyes. He had been fortunate with the last pill. Everything went smoothly. He even managed to avoid a tribulation.
Of course, that was only ever a delay of the inevitable. A cultivator never truly escaped tribulations, only postponed them. Every advancement that went by without one simply increased the odds that the next would draw heavenly ire down on one’s head. With this pill, though, he’d be functionally transitioning into what would be considered the nascent soul realm of body cultivation. There would be no reprieve this time, which was why he had chosen to venture into the wilds. A tribulation would come. In all likelihood, it would be a terrible thing. He had no intention of drawing something like that down onto the heads of the townspeople or the people at his academy. Everyone else called it a sect. He knew that it was a sect, but he persisted in calling it an academy. It was almost spiteful on his part, denying everyone there the supposed dignity of calling a sect, but that was his prerogative.
Sen pushed away those distracting thoughts. Those were truly problems for later because there was a good chance that he would not survive the advancement. The heavens were not known for their lenience, and the closer one drew to ascension, the less forgiving they became. While failure was the most common bottleneck at the lower stages, that wasn’t the case for those entering the final stage before ascension. The most common bottleneck there was death. And I’ll have to face it twice as often as any other cultivator, thought Sen a little bitterly. He knew that being a body cultivator was a big part of the reason he was still alive. All of that extra durability, resilience, and raw strength had helped him bridge the gap with opponents who should have crushed him. Even so, it didn’t make him any more excited to face multiple, increasingly lethal tribulations.
He shook his head at his own balking. It wouldn’t change anything. The only way to avoid the extra tribulations would be to abandon his body cultivation, and it had been made painfully clear to him that doing that was more than merely courting death, it was embracing it. He supposed he could stop after this pill, but not before. A little part of Sen was amused. Wasn’t that such a perfect description of cultivation? Too dangerous to stop, and almost too dangerous to keep going. It was only by sprinting successfully on a jian’s edge that one could succeed. Smiling a little, Sen opened his eyes to take in the pre-dawn light and look at the trees around him. If he was to die this day, at least he would die somewhere that was pretty. Better by far than dying on some road in some useless duel for honor, or on a battlefield surrounded by the dead and dying. Although, finding himself in such a place might be unavoidable if Master Feng was right but, again, a problem for after.
Sen reached out a hand and brushed it across the grass. His hand came away a little wet from the morning dew. He rubbed that moisture between his fingers. It was a strange sensation. He remembered how water felt from before, when he’d still been living on the streets, and this was the same, but it wasn’t. It felt muted somehow. He supposed some of it was that he’d become all but immune to things like heat and cold, but it felt like more than that. It was as if he’d already started to leave his world behind in some fundamental way. Like he was already a half-step into whatever place that people went when they ascended. Maybe, I am, he thought.
He’d often said that cultivators were little more than guests in the mortal world, their true domain the Jianghu. Perhaps, as one approached and joined the ranks of nascent soul cultivators, they also became like guests to the Jianghu. Beings who were simply too powerful to truly participate, save in direct conflict with those of similar advancement. Sen wasn’t sure if he was quite there yet, but he thought he was getting close. Not that he thought himself so powerful that he couldn’t be brought down in the right circumstances. There were certainly nascent soul cultivators powerful enough to do it. Gather enough peak core formation cultivators, and they could probably do it if he didn’t have any time to prepare. But the threat of death from others had become a more distant concern to him of late. No, the most pressing threats came from his own advancement and the heavens.
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