Unintended Cultivator

The abrupt shortening of the distance he had to travel gave Sen a golden opportunity that he wasn’t about to waste. He’d keep moving toward the capital, but he could take just a little bit of that saved time to experiment. As much potential as this improved qinggong technique had, its usefulness dropped to nothing if Sen couldn’t control it. While hurling his body at an enemy at those speeds might well kill the enemy, it would almost certainly kill him too. He could imagine a situation where a choice like that might be the only option left. There were no certainties on the battlefield, or so all those history scrolls told him. His own experience with lethal conflicts affirmed that sentiment. However, he was fairly certain that he could get more use out of it simply by reducing how much qi he fed into the technique.

He was much more cautious after that initial explosion of speed. Using his new approach, it only took a fraction of the qi the platform required to keep him in the air. He slowly increased the amount of qi he was using and surged straight up. He cut back on the qi until he was hovering again. Sen tried to reason out why he was going up instead of in a direction. He thought back to using the platform. What was the difference? After a moment or two of coming up with nothing, he reluctantly switched back to the platform and tried again. The difference became instantly apparent. While the platform felt like it was flat, he almost instinctively angled it just a touch. He directed qi through it in such a way that it pushed him forward instead of up.

For several long minutes, he just stood in the sky on that qi platform and thought. There was no simple way to replicate that directional flow of qi when he condensed it to just his feet. He didn’t know how to fix that problem. There were a thousand details he’d missed in his first panicked flight, such as how his body had been positioned and any instinctive choices he might have made to preserve his own life. The longer he stood there, the more frustrated he became. This could reshape the conflict with the spirit beasts but only if he could make it work properly. He was so deep in thought that he momentarily lost control of the technique when a bird almost flew into him. He caught himself before he could fall more than a few inches. He glared after the bird, briefly, before he considered it. Birds didn’t fly standing up. They stretched their bodies out.

He couldn’t replicate what birds did exactly. He didn’t have wings, but he would move forward rather than up if he was stretched out like he was lying facedown on the ground. He could already see all kinds of potential problems with that. It would probably be fine as long as he was in motion

, but what about when he wanted to slow down? How was he supposed to get started in the first place? What about when he wanted to turn? Those questions set off a long bout of trial and error that Sen was deeply grateful had no witnesses. He nearly fell out of the sky dozens of times trying to figure out how to hold himself parallel with the ground. He burned through enough qi to make a foundation formation cultivator weep blood in the same process.

At first, the only way he could figure out to make it work was to essentially turn the entire front of his body into a qi platform. That worked, but it was even more egregiously wasteful than just using the qi platform. Then, he tried reducing the size of the platform. That created a truly embarrassing round of twisting, turning, flopping, and more almost falling before he finally figured out that all he needed were tiny qi anchors near his shoulders and his hips. Those offered stability and kept him positioned correctly. He started out with some on his ankles as well but realized that they wouldn’t be needed once he had any forward motion. Of course, that victory was undercut very nearly at the moment it happened when he realized that he was going to have to be able to transition from standing upright to lying vertically in the air.

More experimentation. More near misses with falling. Sen wanted to get frustrated with the process, but he’d gone through far worse when trying to learn how to make pills with Fu Ruolan. It gave him some perspective. Relative to that experience, he was making process at a stupendous pace. It was just more harrowing because there was something inherently unnerving about falling. The knowledge that a fifty-foot fall from a dead stop had exactly zero chance of even injuring him did nothing to dispel that unease. He had a feeling it was something of a primal instinct in human beings. Falling was bad for mortals. Even short falls could injure. Longer falls could kill outright. A feeling that made people want to avoid situations where falling was likely no doubt helped keep humanity alive.

For Sen, though, it was an annoyance that he couldn’t do anything about. Like an insect buzzing in his ear that he kept swatting at but never managed to kill. It distracted him when he wanted to be focusing. He supposed that if he meant to make this new qinggong approach work, it was something he’d have no choice but to overcome. It did make him wonder if it was going to be as helpful as he imagined. Would there be cultivators who simply couldn’t overcome it? He pushed that thought aside, refusing to borrow tomorrow’s troubles when he had more pressing concerns right now.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Once he had a handle on transitioning between standing and being horizontal in the air, he moved on to making himself move forward. He started very slowly with that and only increased his speed incrementally. It was then that he remembered he hadn’t come up with any way to easily turn in the air. He tried using birds as his reference again but soon realized that they weren’t a good example. They were literally born to fly. They had those wings and, undoubtedly, a whole set of instincts that he would never possess about moving through the air. However it was that they turned, he was pretty sure that wouldn’t work for him.

He finally settled on just using his hands. He had access to wind qi and could blast himself in a new direction. It wasn’t very elegant, and he was convinced he was missing some simpler solution, but he’d already used up way more time than he’d expected. At least going higher was easy. He just needed to point himself up at an angle using the qi anchors on his shoulders. With the biggest hurdles he could think of addressed. There were only two things left to practice. First up was moving from the ground to the air. That took the better part of an hour to get right most of the time. Even so, he found himself brushing off his robes repeatedly. The last thing was the most dangerous thing. He needed to figure out how fast he could move and remain aware of his surroundings.

Rather than rush into it, Sen sat down on the ground and spent several minutes taking controlled breaths and actively cultivating. The familiar processes helped to calm his mind and let him find his center again. He needed to be calm for this next part. He needed to be in control. It was only when the last ripples of worry had stilled in his mind that he stood up. He had learned a lot in a very short time, and taking even that brief period had let the information settle a little more firmly. He no longer felt a need to rush. Rushing this would only lead to mistakes. He took a few quick steps and launched himself into the air. He set the qi anchors at his shoulders and hips, moved his body so he was parallel to the ground, and activated the qinggong technique with just a modicum of qi.

He started to drift forward more than fly, which was fine for a start. He slowly increased the amount of qi he fed into the technique until he was moving at the speed he would normally move using a qi platform. At that point, he practiced changing directions, going higher, and then moving closer to the ground. Going higher was fine. It was almost too easy. Moving toward the ground turned out to be trickier. When he tried it, he started dropping far faster than he intended to go. He had to use the qi anchors to jerk himself to stop. As the day slipped away, that was what Sen did. He practiced. It was only when he felt confident that he wouldn’t accidentally crash into something that he finally turned to finding out the upper limits of his senses.

It wasn’t going to be the upper limits of his speed. He knew that much already. He gently increased the qi flowing into the technique. The trees and ground started racing by faster and faster. Finally, they transitioned from distinct objects in his vision to unidentifiable blurs of color. He eased back the qi until they once again became things he could identify at a glance. He tried to figure out how much faster he was going than he could on a qi platform, but he couldn’t. It might be five times as fast or ten times as fast. He had no ready way of calculating the difference.

What he did know was that the number of cultivators capable of doing it was absolutely going to be limited. While his reinforced body could withstand the physical pressures that he was subjecting it to without complaint, those who didn’t follow a body cultivation path would find it unbearable. Bones would crack and soft tissues would tear. At best, most might be able to sustain half of his current speed. It would still be a monumental improvement, but he’d need to recruit body cultivators to serve as a true fast response force. Still, these were surmountable problems. He’d take those over a seemingly unstoppable army of spirit beasts any day. Feeling much better about things than he had in a very long time, Sen raced over the wilds, abandoned or burned towns and villages, and even a few places that were still holding firm.

He made note of those places as he swiftly closed the distance to the capital. He wouldn’t get there by nightfall. He’d spent too much of the day on his experiments. But he would arrive the next day. He didn’t know what kind of reception to expect. Would there be assassins waiting for him? Would the nobles finally go into full revolt? Would Jing resent him? It was nothing but open questions on that front. The only thing he was certain about was that he couldn’t ever appear weak. He shuddered at what that might require him to do, but there was no getting around it. Everyone had to line up behind him. Everyone. Dissension would doom them all. Anyone not willing to do what was required had to be cast out. Or they have to be killed, he thought bitterly.