Unintended Cultivator

Sen learned a lot about himself over the next few months. He learned that his body really had benefitted from body cultivation. He was harder to seriously injure. Things that might have once left him with cracked bones only left bruises on his much-improved body. He learned that he healed a lot faster too. Small cuts and bruises would simply vanish overnight. Deep bruises would look weeks old by morning. Sen also learned that he could withstand a lot more pain than he ever thought he could and keep fighting. At first, blows that sent him crashing into the courtyard stones or bouncing off the walls were enough to stun him into near immobility. That lasted right up until Uncle Kho casually walked over and drove his spear into the stone right next to Sen’s head. Uncle Kho didn’t need to explain the lesson. If you stay down, someone will make sure you stay there forever.

So, bit by bit, Sen learned how to focus through the pain. At first, he thought there must be some secret technique for ignoring pain. Surely there was some method of meditation to lock it away. Yet, Uncle Kho and Master Feng assured him that there wasn’t. Sen wasn’t entirely convinced, but it was clear no one would teach it to him until after he’d learned the lesson they wanted him to learn. He learned it, though, through agonizing weeks, he learned to push himself back onto his feet, even while his muscles spasmed and his bones protested. Even when he hurt so much that he was half-blind, he made himself get back up. Once he mastered getting back up, he had to master getting back in the fight. He discovered the physical fighting element of that was pretty easy. After thousands upon thousands of forms and drills, his body would work almost as well without his mental input as with it. Act. React. Attack. Defend. It was all disarmingly familiar.

No, it was the mental element he struggled to master. Pushing past it all to get back on his feet was relatively easy to convince himself to do because survival depended on it. Convincing himself to go and fight some more, rather than flee the scene of so much pain, always sounded like a terrible idea to his battered consciousness. It was that battle that he fought day after day, and then week after week. In the end, it was simple repetition that won him the fight. It was as if his mind was only willing to try arguing with him about it for so long before it finally just shrugged, gave up, and said, “Fine, have it your way, you mad bastard.” After that, if he could get back to his feet, he could get back into the fight.

Sen also learned that he’d never truly trusted his intuition. He’d had a kind of sixth sense for trouble when he’d lived on the streets, but he’d only ever listened when that sixth sense was clamoring for attention. If it wasn’t screaming at him, he usually pushed it to the back of his head. When Uncle Kho and Master Feng had started Sen on learning to fight more than one person at the same time, he swiftly learned the folly of that old habit. They hadn’t been two minutes into the first day of training when Master Feng had casually batted him to the ground from behind. Then, a few minutes later, Master Kho did the same thing. On and on it went with Sen acting as little more than a training dummy for the two. It was a brutal way to learn, but he started to trust those tiny twinges in his gut. It wasn’t always enough to save him from the blow, but he was almost never caught wholly unaware. It also taught him not to lock his spiritual sense facing forward. He didn’t always succeed at maintaining that sense in all directions, but he got increasingly skilled with it as time went by.

It took about a month, but Sen even got over his phobia about pills. He had apparently come in bloody and bruised from one too many of those training sessions because Auntie Caihong had grabbed him and put in him a seat. Then, she retrieved a pill from her storage ring, handed it to him, and ordered him to take it. He’d tried to protest, but she gave him a look that she usually reserved for when Uncle Kho was moments from doing something he’d regret forever. Sen had shut up and taken the pill. It had helped. It wasn’t every day after that, but it seemed that when Sen reached some invisible threshold of injury, Auntie Caihong would give him a pill. Sen still didn’t like them. He didn’t think that would ever change. Yet, he could see that there were important differences between the cultivation aids. Not taking a healing pill when someone offered it after you suffered an injury wasn’t noble. No principle was served. It was just stupid. Looking back later, Sen thought that pure mental and physical exhaustion probably helped. It was hard to get worked up about anything when falling asleep while eating was a distinct possibility.

Sen also discovered an ability that he might have found exciting in other circumstances. While he’d been limited to using two kinds of attributed qi before, he learned that his channels could support at least four different cycling patterns, as long as he didn’t push any of them too hard. The reduced qi flow certainly put a hard limit on how strong his qi techniques could be, but it opened up a lot of horizons for him defensively and offensively. He found that hurling a small fireball behind him and a wind blade in front of him while wreathed in mist was surprisingly effective at driving back opponents. Unlike before, he pushed his natural affinities hard. He developed techniques for shadow screens that hid him and even helped mask other techniques before they burst through the screen. He honed the fire whip spell until it could extend several feet. If focused exclusively on fire or shadow, he could do even more impressive things.

He learned to form several fireballs at once. He could throw a ring of fire around himself that made getting close enough for an attack a gamble. He even found that, with enough concentration, he could form a solid blade using shadow. Sadly, it didn’t do anything special. At least, it didn’t do anything special that Sen could identify, since it couldn’t cut Uncle Kho or Master Feng. That was the problem with most of Sen’s qi techniques. Both the older cultivators could tone down how much of their cultivation they used. It was that sole fact that prevented them from killing Sen every time they landed a blow. Yet, they couldn’t really make their bodies more vulnerable. All of those centuries of body refining and general qi infusion had made them all profoundly difficult to injure. It made practicing qi techniques against them a mixed blessing for Sen. On the one hand, he was getting in a lot of practice. On the other, he wasn’t any closer to understanding how those attacks or techniques would play out against people at his own cultivation level.

Despite small problems like that, though, Sen was accomplishing his goal. He was learning how to fight when the odds were stacked against him. He didn’t go easy on himself either. He specifically asked Master Feng and Uncle Kho to use a cultivation level equal to that of a peak foundation formation cultivator. Sen knew it would mean taking a lot more hits and suffering a lot more injuries, but it would also prepare him better for the fights ahead. If he could stand off two incredibly skilled fighters like the two older cultivators for even a few minutes, he’d give himself fair odds against a handful of people at his own level. If he could level the field even that much, he’d trust himself to find a way clear from there. After all, he didn’t need to achieve absolute victory every time. All he needed was to make sure the fight was so painful for the other people that they’d rather quit and go home. So, he fought, and pushed, and the part of his mind he’d trained so long ago cultivated in the background, inching him closer and closer to another breakthrough that had no place in his thoughts.