Unintended Cultivator

While he hadn’t expected it, Bahn Huizhong surprised Sen by saying that he would consider Sen’s offer to join the sect. It was a few days later that Sen found himself at the gate of the compound saying goodbye to the man and Li Yi Nuo.

“Here,” said Sen, holding out a box.

Bahn Huizhong took the box and, after a nod from Sen, opened it.

“What is that?” asked Li Yi Nuo leaning in to get a closer look. “Is that a beast core?”

“It used to be,” said Sen. “Now, if it works, it might become a lifeline for us all when—”

Sen trailed off as he realized that he had no idea if Bahn Huizhong had revealed the coming war with the spirit beasts to Li Yi Nuo.

“When what?” she asked, looking back and forth between her master and Sen.

At the slight shake of Bahn Huizhong’s head, Sen decided to keep the secret for now.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Sen.

“That’s enough,” murmured Bahn Huizhong

It was the gentlest rebuke Sen had ever heard, but Li Yi Nuo snapped her mouth closed.

“It was a beast core,” Sen offered, picking up where he’d left off. I’ve modified it with help from Glimmer of Night. If it works the way we hope it does, it should provide a means of communication over long distances.”

Li Yi Nuo gave the core a wide-eyed look of wonder. The better-informed Bahn Huizhong immediately grasped the significance of that modified core. The ability to communicate over distances could let the sects and mortal forces coordinate in ways that were impossible before. It would also let them send warnings or ask for help when attacks came. It wasn’t a cure-all for all of their problems, but it might be a fix for some of them.

“Does it work?” asked the older cultivator.

“So far,” said Sen, “but it’s new. There’s a lot we don’t know yet. They’ve worked successfully as far away as the capital, but they can be temperamental. We don’t know if it’s a problem with distance, the composition of the core, environmental qi, or any of a hundred other possibilities. Right now, we’re mostly testing to see if they work at a distance. If they work approximately the same at different distances, we can start looking at other things that might be interfering.”

Bahn Huizhong was staring down at the beast core like it had dropped from the heavens themselves.

“This could change everything,” he said. “You’ll have to teach others how to make them.”

“No,” said Sen, his voice flat and hard. “I will not simply hand that secret over to the sects. I wouldn’t even if I did trust them, which I don’t.”

Bahn Huizhong looked like he was going to start yelling at Sen. Slowly, though, the anger drained from his face. Then, he nodded.

“If only you can make them, they can’t afford to alienate you by having their young idiots challenging you every other week.”

“Exactly,” said Sen.

“But if you let others in, they could help you refine these.”

“And they would keep that information for themselves. You know they would. Plus, it wouldn’t matter if they wanted to help. They literally can’t. That’s one of a matched pair, and it takes skills that no cultivator in the world possesses to allow communication between them.”

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“This is like that thing you tried to do at the ruins, isn’t it?” asked Li Yi Nuo. “When you wanted to remotely activate that formation.”

Sen immediately regretted sharing that detail with her after they left those ruins. They’d been sharing some of the highlights of the adventure to pass the time, and he just hadn’t thought it was going to be important later. That’ll teach me to keep my mouth shut, he thought.

“What?” Bahn Huizhong almost shouted. “You can do that?”

“Yes,” said a reluctant Sen. “I can do it pretty reliably now.”

Bahn Huizhong went from looking shocked to looking like he wanted to pick Sen up and shake him until secrets started falling out. Sen couldn’t really blame the man. Remotely triggering a formation had seemed very intuitive to Sen since Uncle Kho had taught him about remotely deactivating a formation. If he could turn one off at a distance, why not be able to turn one on? He’d assumed that it was something that other formation experts knew how to do. And they could, up to a point, but the usual method depended on the formation being within the range that the cultivator’s qi could reach.

For someone like Uncle Kho, that was a very long damned way. Even for Sen, that was a meaningful distance, but he just assumed that his reach was not a good comparison. The method he’d come up with that used a pair of expended beast cores eliminated the range problem almost entirely, assuming that you didn’t get yourself dragged off into some other plane of existence or something equally ridiculous. He expected that he’d run into other limitations. For example, if he found himself inside of certain kinds of active formations, such as ones that modified space or time, he suspected it might also disrupt that paired connection. Uncle Kho assured him that such formations were exceedingly rare, so the pairing technique was likely to work most of the time.

Sen could see that Bahn Huizhong wanted to know how it worked, but that was another secret he had no plans on sharing. It was bad enough that someone else knew about it in general terms. Unlike the communication cores, which he was certain only he and Glimmer of Night could make while working together, the remote trigger didn’t require unique skills. Someone else with the right background could figure it out. He’d just need to hope that he could hang on to that secret for a while longer. It would prove insanely useful in paring down the spirit beast numbers if he had enough time to set up large-scale formations. I’ll need to order more formation flags, he thought. I’ll get the cheap ones this time. Bahn Huizhong seemed to recognize that Sen wasn’t going to share that information either because he shook his head and turned his attention back to the communication core.

“How does it work?” he asked.

“You’ll need someone with shadow qi to activate it,” Sen told him. “If they inject a little of their qi, it will trigger the core to activate. After that, injecting any kind of qi will be like sending an alarm that someone wants to talk, so you’ll want to have people monitoring the core. People you trust.”

“Why not activate it now?” asked Li Yi Nuo.

“Because I don’t know how long they’ll last. I think they’ll hold up for a while, but this is completely new ground. They might burn out in a month, or year, or a decade. There’s no value to be gained by having it active while you travel back to your sect. Oh, you can put it in a storage treasure but only until you activate it. Once you do, putting it in a storage ring will destroy the connection forever,” said Sen and held up a hand to stop the question he saw on Li Yi Nuo’s face. “No. I don’t know why, yet. I just know it will happen.”

Li Yi Nuo looked annoyed at having him answer the question before she asked it, but that only slowed her down for a moment.

“Why shadow qi to activate it?” she asked.

“That’s a good question,” said Sen.

“And?”

“And, what?”

“And what’s the answer?” asked Li Yi Nuo.

“I’m not going to tell you that,” said Sen.

Before the woman could start saying all of the things she clearly wanted to say, Bahn Huizhong closed the lid on the box with a sharp snap. The noise seemed to make Li Yi Nuo realize that she was about to start a pointless argument because she slumped a little and looked away.

“I’ll get this activated once we’re at the sect. There should be at least one person there with enough shadow affinity to do it. You said it doesn’t need much.”

“A very minor amount,” confirmed Sen.

“I can’t say I agree with the secrecy, given everything, but I can see why you’re not interested in sharing,” said Bahn Huizhong before he gave Sen a serious look. “Be careful.”

“I will,” said Sen.

“Be careful? Why do you need to be careful?” asked Li Yi Nuo.

“Oxen are heavy,” said Sen. “If they step on your foot, it can be a real problem.”

Bahn Huizhong snorted, while Li Yi Nuo’s eyes flared with anger. Sen supposed he was enjoying not satisfying her curiosity a little more than was necessary. He offered the departing pair a shallow bow.

“Travel safely,” he said.

After returning his bow, Li Yi Nuo and Bahn Huizhong turned and walked through the gates. It’ll be me leaving before too long, thought Sen. Ai is not going to be happy with me. Trying not to consider his unavoidable daughter’s wrath, he started making his way toward his office. He needed to finish handing out responsibilities so he could focus on the last things he needed to do before he left.