Unintended Cultivator

Despite almost daily practice with shadow walking, Sen had come to a frustrating conclusion. It was never going to get better. It still jarred his senses every time he made the transition. He’d initially assumed that exposure would reduce the effect and, in some ways, he supposed it had. Knowing it was coming let him recover faster. He could close his eyes in the instant before he crossed over. In the end, though, the place always felt wrong. It was too bright, too disorienting, and too alien. That sensation of wrongness was only amplified by the fact that shadows were inconsistent. Shadow walking from and to the same place was never the same experience twice.

The landscape around him changed based on everything from where the sun was in the sky to how much cloud cover there was. It was a slightly better inside of buildings where light sources were a little more stable, but even there nothing could be considered certain. The only truly firm rule was that the darkness of the shadow was proportional to how bright its shape was in that in-between realm. That was helpful during the day when there was a lot of contrast. At night, it was almost blinding. Granted, that provided some benefits since it meant he could exit almost anywhere, but it also made navigation difficult. Of course, since it was always pitch-black inside of solid objects, it made figuring out when he was through something like a wall fairly easy. It went from him seeing nothing but uniform brightness to seeing varying degrees of brightness.

Staying in that other place wasn’t pleasant, and he had to stop himself from huffing out a breath of relief when he stepped back into the familiar darkness of night. He peered around cautiously. Even hiding and wrapped in shadow, this was in many ways the time when he was most likely to face immediate failure. Despite what his spiritual sense had told him, there was no way to be absolutely sure he wasn’t going to be spotted by someone. It seemed that the distraction on the far side of the compound was still compelling most people’s attention. Sen was very aware of the guards on top of the wall. Fortunately, the nearest building was quite close. He didn’t see any light coming from the windows, which he took to mean that it was either empty at this hour or anyone inside was asleep. That was good enough.

Bracing himself mentally, he slipped back into the other realm. Making sense of the bizarre shapes in the brightness was always a challenge, but he could use that same uniform brightness to tell when he’d moved from outside the building to inside. Once he was confident that he was inside, he stepped out of a shadow and into what he could only assume was some kind of storage area. A quick investigation revealed that the room was used to store heavy sacks of rice. Sen supposed that there was probably a similar room somewhere at the academy as well. He cautiously opened the door and glanced out into a narrow hallway. Not seeing any evidence of other human beings, he stole into the hallway and investigated the other room. Most of them were also filled with dried foodstuffs. Well, everyone has to eat, thought Sen.

There was one empty room, though. Based on the layer of dust on the floor, it appeared not to have been used for some time. If he didn’t find something better, he could always use that room as a place to retreat and then escape into a shadow. Now that he had a clearer sense of where things were, it would be easy enough to get from the empty room to outside the wall. Still, there was most of the night left, and he meant to make good use of that time. At the very least, he wanted to explore as many buildings as he could without exposing his presence. If the opportunity presented itself, he also wanted to start setting up his trap.

Moving to an exterior wall, he very slowly extended his spiritual sense. It was always a minor strain to focus that sense in only one direction, to say nothing of keeping the strength reduced to something that wouldn’t automatically make people suspicious if they stepped into the field. When he felt confident that he wasn’t about to step into an occupied room in the next building, he shadow walked. As jarring as the experience was, he couldn’t help but marvel at how much easier the technique made it to avoid the eyes of the guards on the walls and any passing patrols. Reappearing in the next building, he found more of the same. It was just storage for tools and what looked like crop seeds. He wondered why they didn’t keep things in storage rings, but he supposed the sect thought those were better employed to house cultivation treasures and other key resources.

The next several hours largely consisted of Sen finding empty buildings that had utility purposes. There was more storage than he would have credited. He also found buildings that were used for some kind of group education. He supposed with so many outer disciples, they couldn’t really do direct instruction for basic cultivation exercises and general information. After all, the basics of something like alchemy were the same for everyone. Better to impart that information to fifty or a hundred people at a time than try to do it one by one. Eventually, though, he found a building where there were people inside. He went back and forth on what he should do but eventually decided to take the chance.