Unintended Cultivator

“You’re not going to participate?” asked Sen.

Auntie Caihong glanced at him before returning her eyes to the sky, where the figures of Uncle Kho and Master Feng were swiftly disappearing. He’d assumed that there would be extensive discussions about how to approach the mortal and sect leadership. There was not. Both of the elder cultivators had assured him that they knew what to do. While Sen had doubts, he also lacked any experience to draw on that would qualify him to offer advice. He’d experienced a brief moment of worry for their safety and then felt foolish for the thought. They weren’t invulnerable, but the odds that the spirit beasts could assemble a force capable of killing either without extensive planning was almost preposterously low. He hadn’t been sure what Auntie Caihong would do. She had gone hunting for that cabal of demonic cultivators, after all.

“This isn’t really the sort of thing I’m best at,” she said. “Besides, someone responsible needs to be here to make sure that nothing happens to Ai.”

“Yes,” said Sen dryly. “If only she had a father.”

Auntie Caihong nodded in agreement and said, “Oh, that would definitely help.”

Sen knew better than to take offense. In years past, his eyes would have missed the tiny quiver around her mouth or the slight increase in tension around her eyes. He might have felt a stab of hurt at what sounded like an offhand judgment about his love for and care of Ai. With senses and a mind honed by advancement after advancement, those all but invisible signs of suppressed amusement stood out as sharply as lightning against a cloudy night sky. Sen rolled his eyes and let his gaze fall onto Ai. She sat on the back of that sky monster she’d adopted and was waving wildly at the elder cultivators who had surely passed far beyond her sight.

“I’ll see what I can do about that,” offered Sen thoughtfully. “Perhaps I can buy one for her.”

Auntie Caihong let out a brief huff of laughter.

“I’m pretty sure I saw a few for sale in the market just the other day,” she offered.@@novelbin@@

“Almost certainly,” agreed Auntie Caihong. “The question is, what will you do in the meantime?”

It was a question that Sen had been asking himself. There were some obvious things that needed to be done for the safety of everyone who would remain behind. While Auntie Caihong would likely do her best to protect everyone here in the event of an emergency, there was no doubt in Sen’s mind what she would do if it came down to a choice. Everything would burn as she carried Ai away. While Sen struggled to imagine what could force the nascent soul cultivator into a decision like that, it wasn’t wise to assume such a thing impossible. That meant that he had to do everything he could to ensure that the people here would be enough to prevent events from escalating to that level. The cultivators here who could advance needed to advance.

It was an option he’d been hesitant to make. He’d recalled a conversation with the patriarch of the Clear Spring Sect about the difference between could and should when it came to helping people advance. Sen could help nearly everyone in his sect advance. In some cases, it might be a small step forward, but even small steps forward for core cultivators could mean substantial gains in power. In the cases of qi-condensing and foundation formation cultivators, he could potentially push them to the brink of the next major stage. It was up to them if they’d make the leap through those bottlenecks. There were also drawbacks to that kind of rapid advancement, as Sen well knew.

Gaining power wasn’t the same thing as gaining mastery over that power. He’d been racing through advancements for years. Opportunities to really master the power he’d gained along the way had been few. Not that he’d been idle. He’d taken steps to bridge that gap, but it had been a slow process that happened around everything else in his life. Just as importantly, there was simply no substitute for decades or centuries of experience. Listening to more experienced cultivators helped with that, but secondhand learning had limitations all its own. He estimated that a cultivator needed to practice a new technique hundreds, maybe even thousands of times before it became second nature enough to rely on in battle. It was why he fell back on familiar techniques over and over again in the heat of most fights. He didn’t need to spend precious fractions of a second to think about them the way he did when he was getting creative and making things up on the spot.

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It was only an educated guess, but he thought it likely took almost as many practical applications of a technique to understand when, where, and how to deploy those techniques effectively. Could he throw around enough fire to reduce a small city to ash and molten rock? Probably. Was he likely to ever need to use fire that way? No. An inexperienced cultivator with a sudden surge in strength might end up using power like that by accident, either failing to understand its strength or failing to understand how a smaller technique might work better. It was one of those problems that the normal nature of cultivation seemed to solve all by itself. Rapid advancement, especially like his, was so rare that it almost fell into the category of myth. Most cultivators had no choice but to take the time to master their power as they went.

Unless, that is, some freak of nature comes along and upends the cart by advancing everyone in one possibly catastrophic stroke, thought Sen.

The more nebulous but equally pressing problem with widespread advancement was that he didn’t know everyone in the sect. His process for weeding out people with the wrong kinds of characters was pretty good, but he wasn’t close to naïve enough to imagine that it was flawless. Long Jia Wei had also done his part to cull the ones who slipped past that process. Unfortunately, it only took one. One foundation formation cultivator who loved violence or power over others a little too much advancing to core formation could be a disaster for the sect. There’s that should question, thought Sen. It wasn’t a problem unique to his sect, but it didn’t make it any less troublesome. Of course, other sects had layers of senior sect members and elders to help identify the real problems. His sect had far too few layers. The people in positions of authority who weren’t already overwhelmed were on the brink of it.

With the war at hand, though, he realized that it was a risk that he’d just have to take. It wasn’t just his sect that needed that power. It was humanity as a whole that needed every cultivator to have as much power as they could muster. If a few bad ones got more power than was safe, at least there was a convenient enemy to point them at for a while. After that, though, they’d need to be dealt with. The thought of helping cultivators advance and using them as weapons, only to kill them after, made Sen feel dirty and compromised. It was a feeling that he suspected he’d be facing more and more as time went by. ŕ𝐀ΝỖ฿Èş

Still, he’d promised Falling Leaf he’d help her advance, and he finally felt like he might be ready to try it. He recognized that for the lie it was immediately. He’d expended a small mountain of money on tracking down everything that might give him even the tiniest insight into how to help a spirit beast advance faster. A task that was complicated by her transformation into a human form. Sen believed that there was a good chance that he was the expert on that very niche subject by now. A possibility that positively terrified him because he understood the exact limit of that weak and shallow bed of knowledge. Again, though, he was simply out of time. She would never let him go off to war alone, and he couldn’t bring her with him as she was now.

She was smart and powerful for her advancement, but the gap between them meant that most direct combat he faced now would necessarily force her to the role of watcher. Or lead directly to her death, thought Sen. Whatever his misgivings and fears about his own lack of knowledge, he’d have to put those things away. The feeling of Auntie Caihong peering at the side of his head brought him out of his contemplative near-trance.

“I need to start advancing members of the sect,” said Sen. “I’d appreciate any help you could give me with that.”

A faint frown marred Auntie Caihong’s expression. She understood the potential pitfalls as well as he did. She might even understand them better.

“In other times, I’d probably say no,” she admitted. “There are risks. You can undermine their cultivation in the long term if you advance them too quickly. You can kill them with the attempt.”

She gave him a sidelong glance, no doubt checking to see if he was hearing something he hadn’t thought about. He just nodded.

“Cultivation is risk. I won’t force anyone,” he told her.

“Like any cultivator will turn down a chance to advance faster,” she said. “Young cultivators are, by definition, stupid cultivators. And every cultivator here is young.”

Sen gave her a wan smile and asked, “Including me?”

“Of course, including you. You might not be quite as bad as the rest, but you’re still young enough to be very stupid about things like risk,” she snapped before softening her tone. “However, given that we all might be dead in the next few years, I don’t feel strongly enough about it to deny you or them help.”

“You have my gratitude,” said Sen.

She gave him an opaque look and said, “See if you can still say that after the first one dies while trying to advance.”