Unintended Cultivator

Sen watched as some of the qi-condensing cultivators worked forms with their weapons. It took a true effort of will to keep his expression calm and neutral. None of them were bad. He reminded himself of that repeatedly. They were all adequate. Some might even rise to the level of gifted for their level of advancement, but they weren’t what he would consider good. I really was spoiled when it came to my weapon instruction, he thought. He didn’t consider the failings he saw before him the fault of their teachers. Cultivators were as hamstrung as mortals by the limits of their talent. That applied to teachers as well as students. He was faced with the hard truth that if he wanted cultivation or martial geniuses, they needed dedicated attention. It was attention that no one had the time to give them.

If these cultivators wanted to achieve greatness, they would have to seek growth through the harder path of experience. Something that the world was conspiring to give them in abundance. Sen had very intentionally distanced himself emotionally from these cultivators. The odds were very good that the majority wouldn’t live to see the end of the war. That was another grim truth that he was forced to accept. They had sheltered here in relative safety under his explicit protection and the tacit protection of the nascent soul cultivators who came and went, and those who stayed. That protection would soon come to an end. He would have to leave. Some of these woefully underprepared cultivators would have to leave. It was only a matter of time before Master Feng and Uncle Kho returned. It might be days or it might be another week or two, but the moment was swiftly approaching.

That he had burned weeks of time trying to crack the problem of communication nodes and come up empty did nothing to aid him in appearing calm. Part of him knew that the successive string of failures was inevitable, but he felt pressure to produce the miracle that they all needed. Worse, this was one of those handful of things that he honestly could not pass off to anyone else. He could leave Glimmer of Night to work on it alone, but the two of them were the experts in this particular area. He’d even gone to ask Auntie Caihong if she knew of anyone that would be able to help with it. She’d given him a few names, but only after stating repeatedly that they might, maybe, possibly could offer some assistance… If the wind was blowing right that day.

All of those qualifiers that she had put in front of the names had told him everything he needed to know. It was possible they could help, but it wasn’t likely. It had been disappointing, if not much of a surprise. People with an understanding of shadow qi were all but nonexistent. He had tried to rope Fu Ruolan into helping since she was on that rarified list. She had listened patiently, well, she had listened to him and Glimmer of Night explain what they had done and what they wanted to do. Then, the elder cultivator had bluntly asked them what in the thousand hells they were doing talking to her about it. Another answer that had oh so clearly communicated that her knowledge of shadow qi was insufficient to the task. It was also an answer that suggested he wouldn’t find anyone else with the requisite expertise. At least, he wouldn’t do it quickly enough to be useful.

“I don’t suppose there are any other spiders we could ask about this?” Sen had asked Glimmer of Night in a moment of desperation.

The spiderkin had done him the courtesy of not just saying that was a stupid idea. Instead, he had asked the most pertinent question.

“There are a few that I am aware of,” said Glimmer of Night, “but could you trust them with this information?”

The answer was, naturally, that he couldn’t do that. He might want to do it because desperation was the mother of so many terrible choices, but too many lives hung in the balance to let desperation push him into taking that final, critically moronic step. It was that answer that had driven Sen outside to see the sky and breathe some fresh air. Of course, it had also been an ideal time for him to see the exact state of fighting skill these poor fools were going to take into battle with them. He could only console himself with the knowledge that they were infinitely better prepared than all of the mortal soldiers who were fighting and dying. Even so, he might be able to give them all a slightly better chance of survival if he did a little instruction himself.

It couldn’t be anything too extreme or too far from what they were learning already. Of course, what they were learning at this stage was so far behind what Master Feng had expected Sen to have fully mastered that he could probably show them almost anything. Still, it also needed to be something they could accomplish, which ruled out teaching them Heaven’s Rebuke. Most of them weren’t so entrenched in the mindset of mastering only one kind of qi that it was impossible. What they lacked was sufficient killing intent. He knew that killing intent itself could be wielded as a weapon directly if you had enough of it. It could also be used to buy a precious half-second of time. At the qi-condensing stage, a half-second was often enough to decide the outcome of a fight. The length of those moments grew shorter and shorter as one ascended up the stages of cultivation, but there was little he could do to prepare them for fights against something that much stronger.