Unintended Cultivator

Sen had fully expected Falling Leaf to yell at him or possibly hit him. Once he stepped a bit closer to the fire and she got a good look at him, though, the anger mostly bled out of her expression. I must not look very good, thought Sen. He glanced at Uncle Kho who also gave Sen a considering look. While not as angry as she had been, Falling Leaf was apparently unwilling to let things go entirely.

“You took too long,” she said.

Sen nodded and said, “It was a little more complicated than I expected. I’ll tell you what happened, but I need to sleep first. That was taxing.”

Uncle Kho and Falling Leaf didn’t seem entirely happy with that announcement but didn’t object. Sen walked over to the tent he hadn’t seen in more than a week. Before he crawled into it, he looked back.

“Where is Glimmer of Night?”

“He went to discourage the nearby spirit beasts from bothering us,” said Uncle Kho with a bit of amusement in his voice.

Sen didn’t quite know what was amusing about that, but he decided that it could wait for as long as it wasn’t an active problem. He hadn’t left anything inside the tent, so he needed to summon some blankets and a pillow from a storage ring. The true depth of his mental tiredness struck him when Sen realized he’d been staring at one of his storage rings for most of five minutes just expecting blankets and pillow to fall out of it. Rousing himself he exerted a bit of will over the ring and retrieved the bedding. He didn’t stretch out on the blankets so much as fall onto them. He only had the vaguest sense that his head was on the pillow before sleep claimed him.

It was a mercifully empty sleep that he woke from with a start. He still felt a little foggy, but he took comfort from the fact that he hadn’t dreamed. He’d half-expected to have bad dreams about getting caught or those two cultivators he’d killed in that copse of trees. Now that his mind had gotten a chance to rest, the memory of all those close calls sent chills down his spine. Particularly when he’d been outside the patriarch’s house. He still didn’t know what that technique was that had almost made him walk out into the open. He’d never even known that such a thing was possible.

It hadn’t been working on his mind so much as his feelings. Like it had been dredging up impulses that he’d thought he’d mastered long ago. A shudder went through him. He had to assume that such abilities were rare. He struggled to imagine that it was a proper qi technique, now that his mind was a little clearer. What qi type could exert that kind of influence? No, it had to be something obscure or Master Feng would have warned him about it if not prepared him for it. They had warned him about illusions, even though none of his teachers used them. Trying to shake off the chill of that experience, he sat up and rubbed at his face. He felt the stubble on his face. It might even be thick enough to qualify as a beard. He hadn’t been taking time out of his day to shave, but it was another sign that he’d been inside the Twisted Blade Sect for far longer than planned.