Unintended Cultivator

Sen smiled to himself as he ran around the walls that surrounded the house. He remembered all too well the misery of that first run. The desperate gasping for air. The terrible burning in his legs and arms. Yet, as sharp as those memories were, Sen also felt oddly distant from them. Some of it was just the stark change in his body. Sen didn’t dwell on it that much, but he was aware that the bony skinniness he’d arrived with had been replaced by hard, defined muscle. He’d grown taller as well. Where he’d once had to tilt his head back to see the much taller Master Feng’s face, he could now look the man almost directly in the eye. He no longer stumbled or found himself bumping into things. He couldn’t match the sheer overwhelming grace of the three older cultivators, who all made the most casual motions a thing of beauty, but he no longer felt embarrassed by how he moved.

He was also nearly certain that the running didn’t do anything for him anymore. The years of training were part of it, but so were those bouts of body cleansing he’d endured. Every kind of physical effort became easier after that second pill. After breaking through, no amount of running taxed him. He’d tested it one morning by doing nothing but running. Around and around he’d gone for the entire morning. He hadn’t slowed. He hadn’t stopped. He’d just run. He’d exalted in that achievement. His speed was something he couldn’t really wrap his head around. He’d been getting pretty fast before the breakthrough, by his own estimation. Now, though, he didn’t think regular people could move as fast as he did. The benefits of body cultivation had shown themselves to be truly remarkable. Yet, it also left him wondering what it would be like when he reached the peak of foundation formation or core formation as a body cultivator.

As it was, he could carry out the task of running and practicing his new cultivation technique at the same time. It was a little taxing mentally, but not physically. He hadn’t been doing the technique long enough to simply push it to the back of his mind the way he did with regular cultivation. Yet, even that seemed to come easier than it should. He knew that body cultivation refined the physical form. He wondered if spiritual cultivation refined the mind somehow. It wouldn’t surprise him, but it left him a little edgy. Back when Sen had first been learning to read, Uncle Kho had also introduced him to numbers and basic math. Sen hadn't taken well to numbers. Yet, the old cultivator had insisted over Sen’s many objections that the boy master the essentials, such as addition and subtraction. Since his breakthrough, he’d found himself far more capable with numbers. Yes, he had questions.

He also knew that he’d eventually ask Master Feng those questions, but he’d been finding excuses to put it off. In his heart, Sen was a little afraid to learn the answers. At the moment, he knew that he could basically pass himself off as a normal person, at least to normal people. Cultivators would sniff him out pretty fast unless he made a conscious effort to hide, and he didn’t relish the idea of doing that non-stop. He wasn’t even certain how long he could hold that technique before he’d have to stop. With a mental tsk, he added that to a growing list of things he needed to test. However, with a little care, nothing he could do would raise too many suspicions if he was getting noodles or simply walking through a town. Unless you have to fight, he chided himself. Fighting would expose him in a second because, if he had to fight, it would almost certainly mean fighting another cultivator. If that happened, he wouldn’t, couldn’t, hold back. Anything less than his all could easily spell his death.

Still, a part of him feared he would eventually become so different that everyone who met him would automatically recognize him as a cultivator. That was what had seemingly happened to Master Feng when first arrived in Orchard’s Reach. Sen could hardly imagine the cultivator announcing that about himself. On the other hand, Sen had a hard time imagining Master Feng doing anything that people might describe as normal. Sure, he ate and he slept, but only out of habit or because he saw other people doing it. Left to his own devices, the man would spend days at a time in the library studying a scroll. Sen saw things like that and wondered if that was his fate. Would he one day lose touch with all of those things that most people considered basic human necessities?

Sen supposed thoughts like that one also made him feel a little alien to the boy who first climbed up the mountain with Master Feng. While Sen as he was now could recognize himself in that homeless child, he very much doubted that child could have seen himself in the person Sen had become. That boy worried about where he’d get food from and if Grandmother Lu would one day decide not to let him in when it got too cold. For the Sen who was sprinting laps around the manor with a gleeful Falling Leaf keeping pace, it was like he’d stumbled into some other world. Now, he worried about things like cultivation techniques, tribulations, and how best to avoid other cultivators out in the world. Perhaps, he mused, this is what growing up is. It wasn’t so much a drastic change in personality, as it was a change in the scope of what a person faced. It was knowing that you might face problems larger than yourself, larger than everything you knew before, and even knowing that you were competent enough to face them.

Sen stumbled to a stop as something changed. He felt a stirring in the qi all around him and a sympathetic stirring in his dantian. Then, as if drawn to him by an inexorable force, all of that stirring qi contracted around him and was drawn into him. For a few seconds, Sen almost lost track of his cycling technique, overwhelmed as he was by that sudden rush of strength, power, and energy. He bent his will against that feeling, a will forged by years of constant discipline, and focused. That sudden rush of qi was an opportunity that he didn’t plan to miss. He even knew what to do, having done it before in that cultivation room. Sen let as much of that extra qi as he could stand pool into his dantian. Then, he seized that misty churning energy and bore down on it, with the existing bit of liquid qi at its center.

While it took all his concentration, Sen discovered that Master Feng had been right. That one little bit of liquid qi seemed to act like a catalyst under pressure. As Sen crushed the misty qi into the liquid qi, it began to transform. Bit by bit, he gathered up that extra qi coursing through him and squeezed it down. It was slow work, and he lost himself in the process. Eventually, though, he was left only with the qi he normally carried. There was one small, but terribly important difference. The lone drop of liquid qi he’d had in dantian had grown. It was perhaps three times as large. It almost seemed a tiny improvement to him, given how much qi he had compressed. Yet, the difference was also enormous. He let that little bit of liquid qi make a single trip through each of his qi channels. He felt fresh power permanently suffuse his muscles and etch itself into his bones. His organs blazed briefly, his heart even pausing for one eternal moment, before they too were fortified. His body all but hummed with new strength. He was a step closer to middle foundation formation. It was a small step, but one he knew he could repeat. All he needed was time, and maybe the occasional bit of enlightenment.