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

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.

Stolen story; please report.

Next, he turned his attention to the technique. The qi platform was the standard method for anyone at his level of advancement. It worked by exerting pressure against things both natural, like the air, and the hidden, like the qi that pervades everything. Yet, as he looked at it, he found himself asking the essential question that every cultivator ought to ask themselves when examining a technique. Why? Why use a platform? It might make sense if you meant to carry someone with you, as he often did, but it made no sense when moving alone. Then, the obvious struck him. He was looking at someone else’s laziness. Whoever had first come up with the technique had, no doubt, just wanted something that worked. And they found it. In short, it was stupidly easy to imagine a platform.

His biggest concern was that he was playing with something dangerous and didn’t know it. Cultivators had been using qinggong techniques for about as long as cultivation had existed. It seemed likely that someone must have thought of what he was considering before. Unlike his dangerous experiments in expanding his dantian or the ludicrously treacherous body cultivation method that had almost killed him, there were no obvious pitfalls or immediate threats to his cultivation. Finally, Sen shoved off those concerns and embraced a sense of adventurous experimentation that had been largely absent from his life for years. There was an exhilaration to trying something new when his continued existence wasn’t on the line.

Sen condensed the qi in the platform until it was only beneath his feet. What came next answered some questions for him about why nobody did it that way, while simultaneously scaring him half to death. The sheer amount of force that the technique put on his body would have been enough to kill a cultivator without the kind of physical reinforcements he enjoyed. Even with those reinforcements, Sen experienced a moment of pure panic when he wasn’t sure that his bones could hold up. Of course, that was a background concern because his speed increased so much that the world became a true blur of colors, and there was no sound but an inhuman howling roar that admitted nothing else. He abruptly realized that if he hit anything, anything at all, it would likely shatter his body.

He cut off all but a trickle of the qi he’d been pushing into the technique. It still took longer than he would have liked to slow enough that he no longer felt endangered by absolutely everything. He finally drifted to a stop, held aloft in the air by that faint trickle of qi. He took several breaths and tried to calm his racing heart. Sen had thought he understood what it meant to move fast. Now, he realized that his ideas about speed had been laughably narrow. He looked around and tried to orient himself. He had no meaningful sense of how far he’d come during those terrifying moments when sight and sound had been meaningless to him. All he could do was consider the terrain.

It took him most of a minute to understand the true distance he had come. Traveling as he normally did, it would have taken him most of a day to move that far. While he’d never dare to travel that fast again until he was at least into the nascent soul stage and had found an appropriate body cultivation technique, the implications were staggering. Moving at even a fraction of that speed would let him reach the capital in no time. Maybe even by the end of the day if he was a little incautious. If he taught this technique to others, they could move fast enough to intervene in fights that would have been out of reach before. It wasn’t immediate communication, but this was probably the next best thing to it. A weight that had been dragging at him since the war began, a sense of inescapable doom for humanity, broke free from Sen’s soul. This war, he thought, might just have become manageable.