Unintended Cultivator

On the whole, Sen usually liked the spring season. When he’d spent most of his time scurrying from alley to alley, spring meant a release from the cold of winter. It meant months and months without the constant fear that he might freeze to death. It also meant that new kinds of food would start appearing in the market before too long. He liked that things would turn green again and flowers would bloom. Of course, spring wasn’t without its pitfalls. Spring weather meant spring rain. Sometimes, that meant that water would gently fall from the sky and help wash away any dirt that accumulated in the streets and on the houses. Sometimes, though, it meant water fell from the sky in sheets, hammering the ground, the houses, and any poor fool who had no shelter to seek. Sen had never liked that kind of rain. Sadly, Master Feng seemed indifferent to the weather.

That was how Sen found himself standing in the courtyard, water up to his ankles, almost blinded by sheets of rain that the wind hurled into his face. Rather than teaching Sen new forms or the usual sparring, the old cultivator had them doing a different kind of exercise. The two stood within striking distance of each other. It was Sen’s task to throw a series of specific strikes, while Master Feng blocked them. Then, they would trade off. While Sen was holding up his side of things, his master seemed constantly dissatisfied with his performance. What Sen couldn’t figure out was why his master was unhappy. He had been training hard, pushing himself, running farther than ever every morning.

“Again,” ordered Master Feng. “Faster.”

Sen squinted at his master through the downpour and tried to get a sense of what the man was thinking. All he could make out was a cold expression. Sen settled himself into his stance and fired off the strikes. He upped his speed by at least half. Master Feng blocked the blows with a contemptuous look on his face.

“Again,” Feng demanded. “Faster.”

Sen hurled the strikes at his master, pushing his speed to the limit. This was, apparently, no more satisfactory than his last attempt.

“What is the second thing that a warrior needs?” Feng asked.

“Speed, master.”

“Then show me your speed.”

Sen was at a loss. He’d never seen his master in such a state before. He’d pushed his body as hard as he could. Unleashed every bit of speed that he had at his disposal. Yet, it wasn’t enough. For the first time, his full effort had left his master wholly unsatisfied and unimpressed. Sen truly didn’t know what to do.

“Master?”

“Is this all you have for me? Have I wasted my time with you?” Feng demanded.

Sen’s mind raced. There was one other thing he could try. He’d avoided it for a lot of reasons. The most important reason was that he wasn’t entirely confident that he could control it. Yet, Sen couldn’t see another path forward. It seemed that tapping into that ball of energy inside of him was the only thing that might help him satisfy his master’s insistent demands for ever greater speed. Sen reached down inside himself and set that ball spinning. The familiar surge of strength and power filled him up. Setting himself in his stance once more, Sen let fly with his strikes. Master Feng blocked the blows with sounds like wood hitting metal. Sen could barely see his own hands moving, but his master’s movements were an impossible blur.

“Better. Again.”

Sen let himself drop into that state of mental silence that he’d worked so hard to achieve. He let that silence fill him alongside the energy racing through his body. Then, he sent his fists at Master Feng. He wasn’t really aware of what he was doing after that. He simply let his body react, his arms crashing forward with enough force to shatter bone, over and over, never stopping, never thinking, until he felt his fist smack into Master Feng’s open palm. His arm jerked to a halt, and his senses rushed back to him. He stared at his own fist in Master Feng’s hand, trying to understand what had just happened. Then, he collapsed as all of the energy inside him seemed to run out at the same time. He felt numb as his body fell toward the water that covered the stone courtyard. He couldn’t even raise an arm to break the fall.

When his face hit the cold water, it shocked him out of his numb haze. Or maybe it was the pain when his face connected with the stone beneath that water. Sen could never properly remember. Either way, he was in control of his body again. He pushed himself up enough that he was kneeling with the neverending rain slapping against him. He looked inside and saw that the usual ball of energy he expected was just gone. All that remained were a few wisps of that silvery mist. He’d used it all up in one burst of effort. Now, it was everything he could do just to make himself breathe. All he wanted was sleep, but the idea of walking all the way to his bed was almost enough to make him cry. He lifted his head enough to look at Master Feng. The cultivator had a baffled expression.

“Well,” said Feng, “you’re not going to leave it like that are you?”

Sen mustered all of his strength. “Leave what like that?”

“Your dantian.”

Sen was so tired that his eyes kept going in and out of focus. “What’s a dantian?”

“That spot in your stomach where you store your qi.”

Shock lit up Sen’s consciousness for a few brief moments of clarity. “Is that what that is?”

“You didn’t know?” Master Feng almost yelled. “You’ve been playing with your dantian for months, and you didn’t know what it was?”

Sen managed to shake his head.

He heard Feng sigh. “Of course not. Why does this keep surprising me? That means you don’t know how to cycle qi into it. I knew you didn’t know much, but this is just, it doesn’t matter. Why didn’t you ask me about it?”

Sen thought about answering, but that seemed to drain what little energy he had left. He felt himself start to tip to one side. Master Feng grabbed him and pulled back upright. His exasperation was gone, replaced by a focused intensity.

“Listen to me carefully. You need to replenish the qi in your dantian. There’s a lot you need to know, but for right now, I want you to picture yourself reaching out around you. You need to grasp the qi in the environment and pull it inside yourself. There’s qi everywhere here, so it should be easy.”

Sen didn’t have the energy to argue. Although, he did wonder why he’d never thought to look outside of himself for more energy. He realized he was getting distracted and tried to focus. He sent those same mental fingers he’d used to adjust the ball inside him out into the courtyard. Master Feng was right. The entire place was filled with misty energy, although it wasn’t all like the kind inside him. Sen grasped for the little bit of silvery mist energy he saw around them. It felt like trying to hold steam. He slumped as the effort drained him even more. Master Feng had told him that it should be easy, so Sen assumed he was doing it wrong.

Sen mustered what little mental energy he had left, and just grabbed for whatever he could get. He got hold of something that time and heaved at it, pulling it into his body. Once it was there, it stopped resisting so much. He managed to slowly push that new energy into the empty spot where that ball of energy usually sat. With a halfhearted effort, he sent the ball into a lazy spin. The energy didn’t race out into those channels the way it usually did. It was more like a steady trickle. Yet, it helped to restore him. He no longer felt like he’d fall unconscious at any moment. He also knew that it wasn’t even close to enough. He peered at the qi he’d managed to capture. It didn’t look the same or feel the same. It was rougher and it almost felt violent to him. He didn’t know exactly why, but he knew he needed something else to temper that violence.

Sen cast his mind out into the courtyard and focused again on that silvery qi. He grabbed at it again and managed, barely, to keep a hold of it. He pulled that inside himself, adding it to the ball. No, he corrected himself, to my dantian. What a strange word, he thought. When he’d grabbed what little of the silvery qi there was, he started grabbing little bits of all the qi around him. Different parts of the qi felt different. Some of it gave off a sense of stability, while other bits felt full of energy. Much of it possessed a liquid feel. He assumed that qi was some kind of water qi or closely related. For what little he could understand, there was plenty he couldn’t make sense of. The energy embodied so many impressions he couldn’t understand. So, Sen tried to balance all of what he could feel. It took a while, he didn’t know how long, but eventually he managed to fill up his dantian enough that he felt mostly normal again.

Sen cracked his eyes open and groaned as a fresh sheet of rainwater crashed into his face. He reached up and shielded his eyes. His master sat only a foot or two away, legs folded in the same uncomfortable way Sen had seen him sit on a number of occasions. The old man was soaked through, although it didn’t seem to bother him at all. As if the man could sense Sen’s eyes on him, Master Feng opened his own eyes and fixed Sen with a firm look.

“Let’s go inside,” said Master Feng. “There are some things we should discuss. Starting with why you never came to ask me about any of this.”

Sen winced but nodded. It seemed that Uncle Kho was paying attention because he met Feng and Sen at the door with towels. The towels weren’t enough to get dry, but they helped leech away enough of the water that Sen was able to make it to his room without leaving a shallow stream in the house. He changed into dry robes and pulled his hair into a more orderly topknot. Then, with no other way to stall, he slowly made his way out to face his master. Feng had also taken the chance to change into dry robes. His face was as stern as Sen had ever seen it as the man stood with Uncle Kho. Kho didn’t look stern, much to Sen’s relief, but he did have a concerned frown. When Sen arrived, Kho excused himself with a vague statement about checking on something.

Feng regarded Sen in silence for a long moment before he said, “Well?”

Sen tried to put his thoughts in order. “At first, I thought that maybe I was just imagining it. Then, when I understood that I wasn’t imagining it, I wanted to figure it out on my own.”

“Why?”

“You said that we face the heavens alone. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it sounds,” Sen hesitated. “It sounds serious. Maybe even life or death serious. If I’ll have to do that alone, it seemed like I should probably figure out the energy ball thing, the dantian thing, alone.”

Feng actually winced at those words. “I see.”

“When I couldn’t figure it out, I thought I just needed to try harder. Practice more. When that didn’t work, I was embarrassed. So, I waited. The longer I waited, the more embarrassing it felt. Then, it was just easier not to say anything.”

“It didn’t strike you as important?”

Sen gave Feng a truly perplexed look. “Why would it?”