Unintended Cultivator

The assembled mortals from the town looked nervous but not afraid. They were all respectful toward him, but Sen’s relationship with these mortals still borrowed a bit from the more casual approach he’d taken with them in the early days. He was happy about that today. He didn’t want them to be frightened of him today. That would come soon enough. It was one thing for them to know he was powerful. It would be something else entirely for them to feel the tremendous gap between his power and the power most of them were about to acquire. He saw Wang Bo and Li Hua in the crowd. If Li Hua was in the crowd, though, it made him wonder where little Zhi was at the moment. He was sure that Li Hua had left her daughter somewhere safe, but he still worried about her. Sen expanded a little of his spiritual sense outward.

He had to suppress an annoyed sound when he found Zhi and Ai half a mile up in the sky on the back of Dancing Cloud. He didn’t particularly like the idea of his very breakable daughter and niece of choice that far up in the sky. Not that he thought that the sky monster would let either of them fall, let alone fall all the way down to the ground. He’d had a private and pointed conversation with the Fenghuang about what she could expect if such an event came to pass. The sky monster had seemed both offended and horrified that he would even entertain the notion that she might let Ai fall to her doom. Despite some fledging attempts to understand just what in the thousand hells kind of power his daughter wielded over everything bird and bird-like, it remained a mystery to him.

Some of that was simply his unwillingness to do anything too intrusive to her. She was still very young and, as far as he was concerned, didn’t need some cultivator poking at her insides with qi without great need. He had defined great need as serious illness or injury. All those connections to the birds didn't appear to harm her. So, that great need was absent. The other part was time. He could either choose to spend time with Ai as her father, or he could engage in research to satisfy his own curiosity. He didn’t have the time to do both. That was a choice that wasn’t a choice. He would choose to be her father without hesitation and without fail. Every time. He could live with unsatisfied curiosity.

Still, the presence of Li Hua and the woodcutter Wang Bo gave him a moment of pause. He’d been thinking about all of this in general terms. He hadn’t considered that people he was friendly with, if not exactly friends, would be included in his bid to turn almost cultivators into actual cultivators. He didn’t want to see either of them sacrificed on the battlefields to come. Just as importantly, he was concerned about how well Li Hua would make the transition. Most of the mortals who had been invited were young men and women who had come to learn how to use weapons at the academy. Wang Bo was probably the second oldest at nineteen or twenty. Sen considered him to be on the outside edge of what might be deemed a safe age for a mortal to begin cultivating. Even then, Sen had concerns about the viability of the young man’s long-term growth.

Li Hua was closer to Sen’s own age. She wasn’t old for a mortal. She could conceivably live another fifty or sixty years. For a cultivator, though, there were reasons they started so young. The qi channels tended to atrophy as mortals aged. They grew brittle. The demands of cultivation could shatter them if they were too brittle. There was also the problem of purging impurities. Sen had overcome those problems once before with Tiu Li-Mei, but their situations were different. Tiu Li-Mei had been a skilled warrior. She’d endured harsh training and conditioned her mind to cope with pain. Even then, it had been an arduous road for her.

Sen didn’t imagine that Li Hua’s life had been easy, but persevering through mentally trying experiences wasn’t the same as learning to push through physical torment. He was not even remotely comfortable with the amount of agony this choice would bring into Li Hua’s life. At the very least, he would need to have a frank conversation with her about the suffering she would be volunteering to endure. After a moment of thought, he realized he should have Tiu Li-Mei talk with the seamstress. The former court guard would be more knowledgeable about the details of that grueling process than Sen himself. He had been a mere witness. Tiu Li-Mei had lived through it. Yes, he thought. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll have the two of them talk.

When Sua Xing Xing subtly poked his arm, Sen brought his attention back to the present. The mortals were growing a little restless as he stood there not saying anything. He lifted a hand in both greeting and as a signal. The mortals grew still and attentive.

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“As you all know, we are living in dark days. Spirit beasts are savaging the kingdom. We have reason to believe that the same is happening elsewhere. Villages and towns have ceased to exist. Sects have vanished beneath that tide of death. Cities are under siege.”