Unintended Cultivator

Sen stared down at the scroll in front of him. In a bid to undercut Master Feng’s implied assertion that he had too much to do, Sen had sat down and written out a list. It included all of the things he considered important both for the immediate future and for the eventual outbreak of the war. Even for a man who was used to working hard, almost around the clock, the list was daunting. It truly was more than he could handle. Any one task on the list would be simple and easy. The same was probably true of any ten tasks on the list, but the list was much, much longer than that.

There were things on that list that he’d been meaning to do for a year or more. For example, he’d always meant to set up a way for the nearby towns and villages to alert them if a spirit beast attack came. At the time, it had just seemed prudent. Now, it was critical, and it had been all but forgotten. He thought there was a ready solution to it, but it needed more testing. Until he was sure it would work, sanity demanded he look into more mundane options. More recently, he’d meant to establish a system to ensure a regular back and forth of communication between himself and Grandmother Lu. He’d been in and out of the capital often enough that he’d been able to get updates in person, but that wouldn’t always be true. If he ever had to leave the sect to participate in fighting for any length of time, he needed the line of communication in place.

He’d meant to look into the possibility of having more core cultivators from other sects come and serve as teachers. Not indefinitely, but perhaps for six months or a year. Long enough to help refine the students’ fighting skills or provide some alternate perspectives on specific affinities or even crafts. He was still hesitant about bringing in people from sects, and he’d have to make sure his expectations were very clear. Even so, he thought that it would offer more benefits than risks. That had never been more than an idea in his head that he would get to when he had time. The absurdity of that was starkly displayed before him as a giant list. He didn’t have the time and probably wouldn’t have it for years to come.

That was excluding all the things he meant to get done in pursuit of his own cultivation journey. He'd written out a separate list for those tasks. He was still training with Fu Ruolan, although training was probably a strong word for it. He could shadow travel almost as well as she could. The gap in skill was small enough now that she’d even admitted that there wasn’t anything else she could tell him. The rest was a matter of time and practice. He’d have to find his own insights to refine his use. They had ultimately gone back to alchemy. Instead of teaching him, though, she had been pushing him to understand what he did better. He wasn’t sure if it was because she was hoping that he’d be able to teach her a little piece of it or if it was simply to make him better. It’s probably both, he thought.

That made him feel a little guilty. He’d been wandering around with that Shadow Gate Manual since he got back and had barely looked at it. His interest was as strong as ever, there just hadn’t been time to give it the focused attention it needed. A manual like that wasn’t something he could digest in an evening. It would likely take months of intense study to truly understand what it contained. Or, if he devoted what negligible time he did have, it would probably take years. Knowing that, the right move was probably to hand it off to someone else with a strong shadow affinity. The manual would be of interest to Fu Ruolan. He didn’t even need to ask her to know that. But he was loathe to hand it over before he’d gotten a good, long look at it. He recognized the selfishness of that, but selfishness was inescapable as a cultivator. You didn’t give away resources you could use willingly.

Then, there was the fire-attributed ginseng he’d found beneath the former Xie manor. He’d mostly resolved to give it to Auntie Caihong. That had as much to do with getting it out of his possession and into the hands of someone who could truly defend it as it did with her alchemy skills. Except, once he did that, he’d just knew that he’d be forced to explain it to Fu Ruolan. He also knew that, no matter how good or reasonable the explanation, she’d be hurt. It would be complicated pain too. That was an emotional knot he didn’t know how to untangle because only some of it would have to do with him. The rest of it would be tied up with Fu Ruolan’s relationship with Auntie Caihong. That was a problem he had no intention of getting involved with because it really wasn’t his business. Unfortunately, all of that meant he kept putting off giving Auntie Caihong the ginseng.

Beyond that, he still needed to maintain his practice with his martial forms. Realistically, he should be practicing with Master Feng every day. It was quite probably the only way he was going to improve unless he found one of the people that Master Feng considered an equal to teach him. A task that would inevitably involve a journey he couldn’t undertake anytime soon. Not before Ai assumed control of the House of Lu, probably. There was also the matter of developing his own spear style. Uncle Kho had said that everyone did it, but Sen felt like not doing it was ignoring something that might be both helpful and potentially life-saving one day.

He had been a little surprised that he hadn’t gotten to a similar place with the jian. He’d always considered himself more of a swordsman than a spearman. He’d even asked Master Feng about it. The elder cultivator had seemed intrigued but had no definitive answers.

“Cultivation is a personal journey, Sen. What you get and when depends as much on you as anything else. You may just think that you haven’t gotten everything there is to learn yet from what I taught you. Then again, maybe the universe is holding it back for some reason. There’s no way to know.”