Unintended Cultivator

It took a long, long time before the tears ran dry, and Sen came back to himself. He thought he’d felt empty before, but that had been nothing. He was utterly hollow now. It seemed that the faintest breeze would be enough to shatter the fragile shell of him. He let himself sit like that for a little while. He knew he couldn’t sit there much longer, but he needed at least a few moments of calm before he faced the rest of the world and all of its demands again. Almost of their own volition, his hands rose to his face and scrubbed away the drying remnants of wetness on his cheeks. He rubbed his eyes, but they still burned a little. Part of him knew that wouldn’t last. Soon, all physical evidence of his pain would be scoured away in the regenerative powers of his body cultivation. He just wished that was true for the wounds inside of him. He forced himself to stand. There were still things that needed to be done.

“It’s a lot different than in the stories,” said Uncle Kho.

Sen looked at the elder cultivator. He saw empathy and concern there. Uncle Kho had done things like this countless times if one believed the tales, which Sen mostly did. He tried to understand how the other cultivator could stand the weight of all those deaths. Then, he thought about the story that Uncle Kho had told about his sister. He remembered the rage that had rolled off the man like an endless tide. Sen had thought he hated all of the sects, but he saw now that he had fundamentally misunderstood hatred. His feelings about the sects might rise to the level of intense dislike. Uncle Kho genuinely hated them. That hatred shields him, thought Sen. It’s not a perfect shieldor he wouldn’t be concerned, but it blunts things for him.

Sen wasn’t sure what to do with that insight. A piece of him envied the distance that hate put between Uncle Kho and all those deaths. He also wondered if building that kind of emotional distance was necessary to survive as a cultivator in the long term. Given what he’d seen of the world, he worried that it might be. It was still hard not to think that, for whatever benefits it offered, that hate would also hold Uncle Kho back. Sen didn’t dream that ascension required a person to be perfect. If it did, no one would ever ascend. Advancement, though, depended at least partly on a person’s own thoughts and perceptions. If the elder cultivator could never find an accommodation with his grief and rage, would he get stuck at a bottleneck?

Sen almost dismissed the thought as something he didn’t need to worry about until he remembered that he was one advancement away from the nascent soul stage. He wasn’t some foundation formation cultivator anymore, even if he felt like one in his head most of the time. His cultivation had outpaced his self-image, but he couldn’t let that continue. He did need to worry about things like what might bottleneck a nascent soul cultivator. Fu Ruolan had warned him that self-knowledge and understanding were crucial to the initial advancement. It only followed that those things would become more important as he moved through the nascent soul stage, not less important.

The thought that he might one day advance past Uncle Kho had never really occurred to him before. The man had always seemed so impossibly powerful. He was a juggernaut in Sen’s mind. Just reaching that level of advancement had always seemed like some distant flickering possibility lost in a hazy time called someday. It was with a bit of shock and mild dread that the reality struck Sen that his hazy someday would become now all too soon. All of those jumbled thoughts pressed down on him. They amplified a deep weariness that he hadn’t even begun to recover from. Sen decided to ignore that tangled mess until a time when he was better able to consider them.

“It is very different than in the stories,” Sen agreed.

His voice sounded hoarse in his own ears. It was like he’d been screaming for hours.

“The Twisted Blade Sect’s patriarch is dead,” offered Uncle Kho.