Unintended Cultivator

Sen gave himself the rest of that day to recover and spend time with Ai and Falling Leaf. While his body’s transformation had seemingly restored him, he felt drained. At the very least, he knew that there was a near-certainty that he would kill someone who came to him with a frivolous problem given his current mood. Aside from occasionally poking his now absurdly pale skin and asking if it hurt, Ai seemed to take it all in stride. He supposed that she had been through far worse upheavals and was still young enough that his skin changing just didn’t hit her as a crisis or something that warranted a lot of attention. Falling Leaf, on the other hand, seemed more uncertain about the new him. Enough so that it prompted the usually quiet woman to pose a question.

“What does this change mean?” she asked.

“I’m stronger,” said Sen with a halfhearted shrug. “Beyond that, I’m not entirely certain. I’m going to have to go out and push my limits to see what this really means.”

“You said the manual wasn’t vague, but it surely said something about what to expect.”

“There were some cryptic statements that meant absolutely nothing. There certainly wasn’t anything about being this pale. I don’t even know if it’s permanent or not. I’m hoping not. I can say that I’ll be more durable and resilient than I was before. That much is clear. And I guess improved survivability is never a bad thing.”

“Not as a rule, no,” said Falling Leaf with an amused smile. “Will you continue on this path?”

“Body cultivation?” asked Sen.

The panther-woman nodded.

“I honestly don’t know. It has provided me with benefits, but it’s also nearly cost me my life more than once. I’m not convinced it’s worth the risks. Of course, I did just go through a tribulation. It’s hard to want to do anything that might trigger another one of those when it’s so fresh in my mind.”

“You almost died, again? Up on that new mountain?”

“Yeah,” said Sen, shuddering at the memories of that fresh hell. “It was a terrifyingly close thing. So close that I never, ever, want to be that close to death again.”

Falling Leaf gave him an uncomfortably intense look, and he struggled to unravel its meaning.

“Then, perhaps you should spend more time building this place of yours and less time chasing ways to die.”

Sen was startled. That had sounded a lot like a rebuke to him. No, he thought. That didn’t sound like anything. That just was a rebuke. He gave Falling Leaf a thoughtful look. She had been happier living here, close enough to the wilds that she could easily escape the humans that she’d never really managed to find common ground with. But happier wasn’t the same thing as happy. He was once again reminded that while he wasn’t her only connection to humans, he was her main connection with them. Even though he trusted that Auntie Caihong and Uncle Kho would always provide a safe harbor for her if something were to happen to him, her relationships with them were not like her relationship with him. She treated them as family, but it reminded him of the oddly formal relationships he sometimes saw between younger people and their aged elders. There was respect, but affection was often absent.

Sen also knew that he hadn’t been recklessly risking his life. Taking that last pill had to happen. She knew that as well as he did. After all, she had been there when not getting the next pill in the sequence had been killing him. For whatever reason, though, the possibility of his death seemed to be hitting her harder this time. Was it just her realizing that same thing he had long feared? If he died, she would be largely adrift in the world. She’d shown nothing but disdain for most other spirit beasts, not that he could blame her for that. It had been spirit beasts that killed most of the ghost panthers, not humans.

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“You know I’d never abandon you willingly,” said Sen.

Falling Leaf jerked a little. Apparently, he’d gotten pretty close to the mark. She looked away then and seemed to be struggling to figure out what to do with her hands.

“I know that,” she snapped before her voice went small. “It’s just that I… I thought we’d have centuries together. That I’d have enough time to prepare. But you’re advancing so fast. I can’t keep up. You’re going to ascend. And it won’t be a thousand years or three thousand years from now. It will be soon. You’ll leave me behind.”

Sen wanted to reassure her that the day of his ascension wasn’t that soon, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell the lie. It might not be in the next five years, but he doubted he’d last another fifty years before he got pushed off this world. At least, not if the heavens got their way. For Falling Leaf, that was soon and approaching at a breakneck pace. There was always the possibility that he’d die in the meantime, but that would probably be even worse from her perspective. If he ascended, then he was still out there somewhere. The possibility of seeing him again, joining him in ascension was a distant but real prospect. If he got cut down, that was it. His soul would be moving through the steps of reincarnation, but even if she managed to find him through some miracle, it wouldn’t be him. Not in any meaningful way. Everything about the man she knew now would be nothing but a memory.

Sen thought of Tiu Li-Mei. He had done what most people considered the impossible with her. It had been outrageously expensive and some of the most difficult alchemy he’d ever performed, but he had done it. If he could make that happen, how hard would it really be to speed things along for Falling Leaf? It’ll probably be unbelievably difficult, thought Sen. If there was an easy way to do it, she’d be doing it already. He also knew a lot less about how spirit beasts advanced than he should, but that was a problem that could be remedied. Sen smiled at the ghost panther.

“What?” she demanded.

“If that’s the problem, we’ll just have to figure out a way to speed things up for you.”

“It doesn’t work like that spirit beasts. We can’t use tricks to make it happen faster.”

“Says who?” asked Sen.

Falling Leaf looked like she was about to speak, but she frowned instead.

“It is just known.”

“I don’t know that,” said Sen, projecting a confidence he didn’t feel. “Besides, just because no one has ever done it before, it doesn’t mean that no one ever can. There’s always the first person.”

Falling Leaf gave him a searching look, as though she was trying to spot a lie on his face. He couldn’t really blame her for that. If anything, he suspected that the only reason she was even entertaining the possibility was because he was the one who suggested it. Well, that and she’d seen him do the seemingly impossible before. There was a trace of hope in her eyes, but it was offset by a great deal of fear. He wasn’t even sure what the fear was about. Fear of being left behind? Fear of trying only to fail? He almost asked but restrained himself. That was her fear to share or keep to herself as she saw fit. It wasn’t for him to try to drag it out of her.

“Do you think you can?” she asked in a painfully tentative tone.

“I don’t know if I can. I also don’t know if it’s beyond me. I do know that it’s worth trying. You were there for me during all those years of training. You’ve saved my life. I dragged you across half of this country looking for Fu Ruolan. You never complained. You never asked me for anything. You keep watch over Ai when I have to be away. Trying to make this happen is the very least I can do for you. If it succeeds, I will maybe, maybe, have paid back some tiny shred of what I owe you.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” said Falling Leaf.

Sen could see it on her face that she meant it. It was a fact to her. It was one of the things that he’d always appreciated about her. She didn’t look at the world and see debts and obligations. Of course, just because she didn’t see them, it didn’t mean Sen was oblivious to them.

“You may not think so, but I know better. Because, if I don’t owe you anything, then the entire notion of debt is meaningless.”

Falling Leaf seemed perplexed by that declaration. It took her a while to find a response.

“If you say so,” she murmured.

“I do. So, let’s have a long talk about just how it is that spirit beasts advance. I know that you consume cores as part of the process. So, tell me about the things that I don’t know.”