Unintended Cultivator

For Sen, the world stopped for the next two days. His entire universe condensed down until the only thing in it was the occupant of a bed. He simply watched Falling Leaf breathe and waited. He’d been in a flurry for the first hour or two. Then, as his panic subsided and the truth became clear, he realized that Falling was fine. At least, physically, she was fine. Better than fine. His gamble with that insane elixir had worked. He couldn’t pin down precisely how much she had advanced because he simply had no good frame of reference. He’d gotten better over the years at narrowing down how powerful spirit beasts were, and other human cultivators were a snap, but she wasn’t one or the other.

That had forced him to rely on her self-assessments, and she had no more experience with transformed spirit beasts than he did. She only knew the stories her people told about them, but they were to the spirit beasts what Master Feng was to cultivators. Fables. Myths. Legends. Things often discussed but rarely encountered. Both he and she had been forced to make best guesses based on what she could do and the ever-shifting gap between their respective levels of power. In the end, all he knew was that her progress had been substantial. Physically. That was also the crux of the problem. If there was something wrong with her body, he could take action. With a perfectly functional body, that only left her mind. A mind had endured tremendous agonies. He knew what that was like. Pain was something that he’d inflicted on himself or had inflicted on him by others for years now. It was almost an old friend.

Except, she hadn’t gone through those countless cleansings, advancements, and tribulations the way that he had. They had all seemed excruciating at the time, even if he could now look back at that first cleansing and laugh at how trivial it had truly been compared to the towering cliffs of suffering that he had scaled, willingly, intentionally, since then. The heavens were cruel, but he could see now that they were not pitiless. The pain he endured along the way had increased in tight lockstep with his advancements. Almost enough to kill. More than enough to break the weak or unwilling. But it was something that body and mind could survive. It had been like training. Teaching him how to endure things that should not be endured.

Of course, he had always had the advantage of understanding more or less just how terrible it was going to be. Falling Leaf didn’t know. She couldn’t know having never been through it, and there was no adequate explanation to prepare someone for that kind of visceral torment. There was no doubt that she heard his screams during his cleansings and advancements. That may have given her some vague sense of what to expect, but it was no substitute for direct experience. For all intents and purposes, she had jumped into the human cultivator experience in the middle of the process without benefit of everything that came before.

She was strong and brave, but pain didn’t respect those things. Pain had a way of eroding strength and undermining bravery. Enough pain was enough to wash strength and bravery aside altogether. Sen feared for her mind. A mind that was beyond his reach to heal if healing was what was needed. So, he was left with the last resorts of the helpless. He waited. He hoped. For those long, desperate hours, there was no war, no reports, nothing else of consequence. People had probably come in and spoken to him. He had vague recollections of shadows moving in the corners of his awareness and annoying buzzing sounds that could have been people talking. None of it had broken through the shell of his fixed concentration. His vigil went undisturbed until a small, uncertain voice shattered it.

“Papa?”

Rage swelled up inside of Sen. He hadn’t wanted Ai to see Falling Leaf like this. He didn’t want her to see his failure. His shame. There was only one person who would have dared to bring her into this room. An irrational desire to lash out at Auntie Caihong gripped him. How could she do this to me? To Ai? What was she thinking? He grappled with the rage and forced it down. What would it teach Ai about failure if he acted like a child in the face of it? No, he thought, I have to do better than that. If not for my own sake, then for hers. As much as throwing a tantrum might make him feel better, however briefly, it wouldn’t solve anything. He made himself put on a smile. It felt off to him, wrong even, but he did it anyway. He turned in his chair and offered that forced smile to his daughter.

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“Hello, little orchid,” he said.