Unintended Cultivator

Sen had traveled alone so rarely in recent years that he was almost never able to truly push himself. With the exception of nascent soul cultivators, no one was able to keep up. It wasn’t something that bothered him particularly. Traveling at a pace that everyone could sustain was just a sensible practice, but it did leave a gap in his knowledge about his own abilities. He supposed gaps like that were the case for many cultivators, especially ones as young as him or those who advanced quickly. He intended to fill that void with knowledge on his way to the capital.

There had been a time when he had pushed the limits of his qinggong technique out of fear and necessity. As his strength grew, the innate limitations of foundation formation had fallen away and allowed him to become lazy about it. He could just ignore inefficiencies and bridge them with more qi. Something made even easier for him than most other cultivators due to his constant passive qi gathering and that strange double helix around his core that he’d never come to fully understand. He had planned or, more properly, hoped that he would be able to retreat from the world for a time and truly explore that mystery and what it meant. At every turn, that hope had grown more and more distant. Now, it felt as far away as the horizon itself.

He felt that it was a mystery that he could solve, given peace and time, and one that he should solve. If anything, he had an intuition that not solving that mystery could prove dangerous for him. It just wasn’t something that he could go at now and then. He’d tried that and gotten nowhere. There had been fragments of insight that slipped away as months went by and his attention was dragged elsewhere. He could recall the shape of those insights, but their substance eluded him when he tried to draw them back out. If he was to grasp them, it would take the whole of his attention.

The issue of his qinggong technique was another matter. That was something he could attack at the moment. So, he did as he had done long ago in the forests outside of Tide’s Rest. He focused inward. He watched the flow of his qi and the way the technique consumed it. He studied it all and found both himself and the technique wanting. He wasn’t just inefficient. His use of qi had grown downright sloppy. If he’d been that slipshod all those years ago, he might well have never escaped that imaginary pursuit that had haunted his dreams. He smiled at that memory. How terrifying that idea of being chased had been. How powerful that small sect had seemed to his inexperienced eyes.

He wondered if those foolish girls who had confronted him on that beach had mended their deplorable ways. He tried to imagine what revelation he had missed in that moment and naturally failed. After all, it was the nature of enlightenment to be ineffable. It had been a long while since he last had a moment like that, not that he was complaining. It seemed like every time heavenly qi flowed into him, it forced an advancement. Or, perhaps, he was coming by his enlightenments more slowly and growing into them organically. He liked that idea of slow growth. That was how trees grew and, for all he knew, how mountains were grown. Both of those could become truly mighty. Bulwarks against the vicissitudes of time and trouble. Sheltering monoliths that kept the storms at bay.

Is that what I seek to become? A monolith that shelters humanity from the annihilation the spirit beasts seek? He poked at that idea and concluded that it wasn’t what he wanted. It wasn’t wholly wrong. He did mean to see humanity preserved, but he didn’t mean to be the sole source of protection they looked to. He couldn’t become that. He was, as he told Jing, just a visitor. He would leave one day. If humanity saw their only salvation in him, they would falter at that moment. They would fall. It might not happen all at once, but it would inevitably happen. No, he decided, that’s not what I’ll be. I can be a sword for them. I can be a shield for them. I cannot be salvation for them. Salvation was a matter of the heart and soul. As he’d told Auntie Caihong, that was more responsibility than he could bear.

He'd continued watching his qi and analyzing the technique as he’d mused about his role in the things that were to come. There was nothing more to gain by watching, so he began the slow process of refining away the inefficiencies in how he channeled qi into the technique. If he’d been more diligent over the years, any gains would have been incremental at best. Instead, he experienced explosive improvements in his speed. The landscape around him had been racing by, but now it threatened to blur under even his enhanced vision. He continued the process until he could find nothing more in himself to change. As always, he sensed that there was still room for additional improvement, but that he still hadn’t come far enough to pinpoint where or how.