Unintended Cultivator

When he’d agreed to help Falling Leaf try to advance faster, Sen knew that they were both going to be taking risks. He’d be betting on his intuition and experience, and no little help from Auntie Caihong and Fu Ruolan, to help him overcome a stark lack of information. She’d be betting her life based on, as far as he could tell, nothing more than almost blind faith in him. Those realities had stayed his hand for a long time as he had people scouring the kingdom and spending money like water for any scrap of knowledge, any obscure resource, anything at all that might improve their chances. As he stared down at the stone vial in his hand, he had to pray that it had been enough. That he wasn’t sure what he was praying to was a rather pointed indicator of his conflicted relationship with the heavens. Perhaps, it was a prayer to unknown gods. Ones that might elect to treat him and Falling Leaf a bit more kindly.

He'd spent more than a little time examining Falling Leaf with his spiritual sense and his qi. He’d delved into the minor miracle that was her transformed form and found himself wanting. It wasn’t all beyond his understanding. Her new body shared traits with a human cultivator’s body. For example, she did have a core. Unlike a cultivator, though, she didn’t have a dantian or at least not one that he could recognize. She possessed qi channels, but they were wholly unlike the ones in a human. Human qi channels tended to be large, like the major veins and arteries, and often followed parallel paths. They allowed for small rivers of qi to move through the body. In Falling Leaf, there were hundreds of tiny qi channels that permeated her flesh and bones. He understood that they moved qi but had no clear sense of how they did it. He’d even had her channel qi while he watched and still found himself baffled.

The composition of her body was almost like a human’s but not quite identical. The muscles and bones were denser than a core cultivator’s would be at a similar level of development, which helped to explain her strength and speed. However, the joints and connective tissues were structured a little differently. He suspected that those differences contributed to better flexibility, but that was just an educated guess. There were also oddities in the positioning of her organs, as well as a few structures that he didn’t recognize. He didn’t know if those were some kind of holdovers from when she had her big cat form or if those were from after her transformation. Those mostly minor differences left him with a kind of unease that seemed to stem from the familiar and unfamiliar in such close proximity.

Of course, all those minor and major differences meant that he couldn’t take for granted that her body would react the same way as a human body. He had what he felt was a strong theory that the multitude of minor qi channels were part of what allowed spirit beasts to consume cores and use them to strengthen themselves. The channels would distribute the power gained throughout their entire bodies, not just to their cores. In essence, they would do naturally what Sen had done rather unnaturally when he suffused his entire being with divine qi. If he could widen those channels as he had done for himself, it should facilitate faster progress by allowing more qi to flow into her flesh and bones. Unfortunately, that still left the primary mechanism of the process hidden.

He had a much shakier idea that the difference lay in the core itself. While human cultivators formed a core inside of their dantian, the absence of a dantian in Falling Leaf suggested to him that her core was doing all of the work that was divided in humans. It made him wonder if spirit beasts were actually intended to cultivate as a part of their growth cycle while humans could only do it through a variety of inelegant, brute force methods. that was a question for another time or maybe even another lifetime, as compelling as it. If he was right, and it was the only explanation he could come up with, that meant that he needed to dramatically strengthen her core at the same time that he was widening and reinforcing her qi channels.

That was a dangerous proposition since he couldn’t examine its interior workings. He could sense it, feel the qi inside of it, but he couldn’t look at what it was doing. He could only guess, and he hated that guesswork so much. He hated the way it would threaten Falling Leaf’s safety. Part of him wanted to rescind the offer and destroy the vial in his hands. The elixir it contained was a volatile concoction. He’d ventured deeper into the wilds than was probably safe even for him to find spirit beasts that were strong enough and had shadow affinities to harvest cores from. He’d ventured into deep caverns to retrieve plants and fungus that had never seen the light of the sun. A few of them would have killed a foundation formation cultivator to even touch. Some of them didn’t even have names to his, Auntie Caihong’s, or even Fu Ruolan’s knowledge.

He was trying to fundamentally alter the way that Falling Leaf’s body wanted to progress, which meant undermining it while also reinforcing it. That was the trickiest of balances to strike. If he got the mixture even slightly wrong, it would kill the ghost panther faster than it could restore her. His closest friend, the person he trusted most in the world, would die in unspeakable pain, and it would be his fault. An almost overwhelming urge to destroy the elixir took him. I could just tell her I failed, he thought. She’s seen me fail before. She never needs to know! Qi raced to his hand and manifested as a nearly physical mass of light around the vial. It would only take a thought. That qi would transform into an incandescent flame hot enough to vaporize the stone vial, to say nothing of the elixir inside of it. She doesn’t need to know, he told himself again.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

But she would know. She would sense the lie in him. It took an unreasonably long time to reign in that qi. It was responding to what he wanted to do, rather than what he knew he had to do. In the end, reason won out over want and the light winked out as the last of the qi was drawn back inside of Sen. He bowed his head, muttered one last prayer to unknown gods that he hadn’t gotten this horribly wrong, and turned to the only door in the small building he’d erected solely for this purpose. He walked over to the door, steeled his nerves, and opened it. Falling Leaf was standing nearby, her expression so calm it bordered on serene. She gave him a questioning look.