Unintended Cultivator-Chapter 26Book 10: : Fearless

Sen froze. Part of him wondered if he’d just wanted to hear that so badly that he’d hallucinated it. That uncertainty was swiftly put to rest when Falling Leaf gave him a bleary-eyed glare.

“Hungry,” she repeated. “Food.”

Sen surged forward and dropped to his knees next to the bed. He didn’t know how to feel as elation, relief, and a fresh surge of guilt battled for supremacy in his soul. He was certain that he’d burst into tears while words tumbled out of his mouth in no particular order as he tried to ask several questions at once.

“How are alright pain feeling now you?” he asked in a rush.

Falling Leaf blinked at him, clearly trying to decide if he’d been acting insane or if she heard him wrong. She seemed to settle on the problem being him because she reached out and gently slapped the side of his head. The act itself proved more jarring than the blow, which had been exceptionally mild by cultivator standards, only moving his head slightly to one side. It had the intended effect, though, as Sen forced himself to do basic tasks like properly ordering words.

“Are you in any pain?” he asked in a calmer voice.

“No,” said Falling Leaf as she let her arm drop back onto the bed. “Just tired.”

Sen took a shuddering breath. She was alright. Everything else could wait. All that mattered was that she was awake, and she was alright. Even as he thought that, another thought he’d had recently resurfaced. I can never do this again. He knew that Falling Leaf was haunted by the idea that she wouldn’t be able to advance fast enough and get left behind. He also thought he knew that her real fear was being alone. After losing her people the way she had, being alone on that mountain for all those years, how could it not be a fear? He understood that fear. He’d been alone often enough as a child to understand just how deep and dark that kind of loneliness could be. It wasn’t something he’d wish on anyone.

On the other hand, he couldn’t face this kind of uncertainty a second time. He might want to do it, for her sake, but he knew he couldn’t. He didn’t know if that made him a coward or if it just made him sane. He supposed that Master Feng had steeled himself against these worries. The truth was that any time a cultivator took a cleansing pill or advanced, there was a very real chance that death would claim them. His teachers had stood by time and again while Sen faced down the risk of death. Maybe, I’ll still too close to being a mortal, thought Sen. Or, maybe they just hid their worries better than me.

It did occur to him that the situations weren’t good parallels. Cultivator advancement was dangerous, but it was also an established process. That was especially true in the qi-condensing stage and early parts of the foundation formation stage. There were naturally variances between cultivators. However, he’d come to realize that what had looked like huge differences to him were fairly trifling when considered in relation to all of cultivation. It was far, far easier to feel confident when long history backed up your belief that a cleansing or advancement would probably go as planned.

What he and Falling Leaf had done was entirely new to his knowledge. They’d gone into it without the assurance of having seen it work hundreds or thousands of times before. There had been so many guesses on his part, and so much faith on her part. This must be what it felt like in the earliest days of cultivation, he realized. No knowledge to draw on because it didn’t exist. Just intuition to guide and hope to sustain. He understood, better than maybe anyone else, what a terrifying way that would be to undertake advancement. He’d done it for himself with the Five-Fold Body Cultivation technique and now with whatever the hell he’d done for Falling Leaf. It was with that direct experience in mind that he concluded those early cultivators must have been utterly fearless or brave beyond comprehension. Or desperate, he conceded.

It had been desperation that drove him with his body cultivation. He’d been driven by that supremely selfish and universal desire to live. It had been a different kind of desperation that drove Falling Leaf. She had wanted above all else not to be left behind. It looked a little different, but it was desperation all the same. He tried to imagine what might have pushed those early cultivators to those extremes and found it all too easy to conjure reasons. Spirit beasts roaming the world. Tyrants lording their power over everyone. Even the desire to live a longer life might be enough to do it. The same things that would drive people now.

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He supposed that there was something sad in that. The idea that people hadn’t really changed all that much. The fact that the world probably wasn’t any better than it had been in those early days. His reading of history told him as much. There were occasional, sparkling gems sprinkled through those histories. Golden times when benevolence ruled supreme and peace reigned, but it never lasted. Those kingdoms were always brought low by greed, stupidity, or basic self-interest trumping all other considerations. People were always, in the end, people.

He had thought, briefly, that cultivators could have changed all of that, but he only needed to look as far as his own teachers to see the folly in that thought. They were ancient, powerful, and filled with knowledge both arcane and practical. Yet, all of that power, experience, and knowledge didn’t change their core personalities or remedy their flaws. He’d found the same to be true of every cultivator, himself included. If anything, becoming cultivators seemed to amplify people’s flaws, although he wasn’t wholly convinced of that yet. He thought, or maybe he just hoped, that some of that was learned in sects and passed on to wandering cultivators by exposure to those from sects.

He’d hoped to test that idea with his little sect, but the world had seen fit to prevent that. There just hadn’t been time for him to instill the things he thought were important into the hearts and minds of the people who had joined him. There might be some hope for the younger ones, but the people who had left their sects or had their sects destroyed out from under them were firmly entrenched in that sect mindset. Even Sua Xing Xing, who Sen had to admit had come a long way, was still prone to fall back on sect thinking whenever the pressure mounted. He couldn’t even be angry about it. People fell back on what they knew and what they thought worked when the pressure was on. He did it in battle all the time. Experimentation was great, but you wanted something you could rely on when things got uncertain.

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Sen shook off that depressing line of thought. There were more important matters at hand. He stood and smiled down at Falling Leaf.

“I’ll make you something delicious,” he told her.

“Bring me anything edible. I don’t care what,” she told him.

That pronouncement was met by an audible growl from her stomach. That focused Sen. Falling Leaf had always eaten more than him even when things were normal. She’d been through a trying situation that put her body and mind under strain, and then gone without food for three days. He suspected that when she said hungry, she meant ravenous. Sen swiftly started pulling things from a storage ring that could be eaten immediately, such as fruit and dried meat. He made a large pile of it next to her on the bed. At the sight of food, there was a shift in the ghost panther’s eyes that made Sen very glad that he wasn’t made of something that Falling Leaf might want to eat. She began consuming food at a pace that left him speechless. He dropped more food onto the pile before retreating from the room to let her eat in peace while he hurried to prepare her something hot.

Thankfully, she didn’t storm out of her room in a hunger-fueled frenzy. Sen had enough time to make some meat, rice, and vegetables before she came out. The meal was in no way extraordinary, but he had the feeling that quality was not foremost on Falling Leaf’s mind. He set the food out on the table and let her have at it. She dug into the hot food with the same intensity that she’d shown in her room. It was only when she’d cleaned out all of the dishes that something primal seemed to drain out of her. Sen was about to pose a question to her when there came a pounding on his door. He started to grind his teeth. Whoever was out there was a strong enough cultivator that the sound of them pounding on stone would be loud enough to wake Ai. He stalked over to the door and yanked it open. He was speaking before he even saw who it was. 𝐑АNＯ𝖇ĚṦ

“If the sky isn’t literally falling or there isn’t a beast tide approaching, I will kill you,” he snarled.

Sua Xing Xing flinched and took a hasty step back from him.

“There’s a beast tide approaching,” she told him.

Sen ground his teeth even harder. This had to be the work of some god that didn’t like him. The timing was too obnoxious for anything else to be the answer. He looked back at Falling Leaf. He wanted to talk to her, not deal with problems that came from the outside world. Someone was going to pay for this interruption.

“I need to go deal with a pest problem. I’ll be right back.”