Unintended Cultivator

Book 2: Chapter 56: The Danger Is What You Don’t Know

It took another week to fulfill the last of his invitation obligations. Fortunately, no one else tried some stupid power play like Shen Kang had. Instead, most of those meals and events were simply boring. Yet, the dinner with the Celestial Arch sect was by far the oddest of the lot. While Sen had expected something like the Wandering Winds sect, what he got struck him as more of a religious order. The lack of ego on display was so profound that it made Sen feel almost self-conscious, like simply by having an ego he was somehow disrupting their well-ordered world. If he hadn’t known that they were cultivators, felt core cultivators in the room with him, he would have assumed that he’d stumbled into some kind of bizarre temple.

The meal they ate was simple, brown rice, steamed vegetables, and some kind of steamed fish that Sen didn’t recognize. He reasoned that it was mostly likely some kind of ocean fish. This was followed up by a serving of fruit. There was plenty of it, but it was unadorned by dressings, sauces, or even sugar. There was a kind of calm about the whole thing that Sen enjoyed. He wasn’t forced to stop eating every few seconds to answer some new variation on a question he’d already answered at least four other times. In fact, almost no one spoke while they ate. There was no rush to finish before a new dish was served. After the fruit was served, someone that Sen assumed was an elder asked him a few questions that didn’t make much sense to him. He answered as well as he could. Then, a different elder asked him questions he did understand about progressing cultivation through moments of enlightenment. Sen shared a few examples from his own life, and that seemed to finally generate some interest in the group.

He ended up staying far later than he expected to, settling into a long conversation with an elder, two core formation cultivators, and another foundation formation cultivator who looked stunned to be included. Sen used the opportunity to explore some ideas he’d had about the nature of enlightenment. Deep rumination was useful for cultivators, but sometimes simply having someone else knowledgeable around to bounce ideas off of was invaluable. Sen fielded several questions about how useful he considered travel to be in prompting those moments of enlightenment. Once he discovered that even the elder had only left the city a handful of times, Sen gave very straightforward answers to questions about the dangers of travel. He didn’t know if his answers would change anything for the sect or its junior members, but he wasn’t about to encourage people to travel without giving them fair warning about what could happen.

“In the end, the biggest danger in travel is simply the unknown,” said Sen. “Dangers you know about, you can prepare for in general or in specific. If you know that an area is populated with spirit beasts that use fire qi, you can prepare defenses for fire attacks. If you know that there are bandits in a specific area, you can arm yourself or hire guards. Honing your martial prowess and your qi techniques prepares you in general. It’s all of the other things, the things you don’t know, that put you in real danger. If you don’t know that the next fresh water is a week’s travel away, you can find yourself slowly dehydrating to death. If don’t know that a place is prone to rockslides, you can find yourself buried in your sleep. In the end, you can never assume that you’re safe.”

The other foundation formation cultivator, who had remained largely silent throughout the conversation, look at him with her brow furrowed. “If it’s so dangerous, then why would you risk it?”

He gave her a half-smile and paraphrased something Uncle Kho had told him once. “Where you find danger, you also find opportunities.”

That comment seemed to confuse her even more. “Opportunities to what? Die?”

Sen laughed. “Well, yes, I suppose so, but also opportunities to change, to grow, to see yourself in a fresh light. Something I learned the hard way is that it’s easy to convince yourself of ideals when there’s nothing around to challenge those ideals. It’s easy to think that you’re above doing something when there’s no chance that you’ll ever be put in a position to do that exact thing. When you travel, when face new circumstances, the world has a way of confronting you with those choices. You’ll frequently discover that you’re not as committed to an ideal or a course of action as you imagined you were. Especially when your life is the cost.”

“And this leads you to enlightenment?” asked the elder.

“Sometimes. There are no guarantees, just opportunities. Sometimes, those opportunities pay off,” said Sen, and then he sighed. “Sometimes, they don’t.”

When he got back to the Silver Crane that night, he found Lifen waiting for him. She didn’t say anything, just helped him undress and then pushed him into the bed. She crawled onto the bed after him.

“Finally,” she muttered. “I didn’t think you were ever going to get back.”

***

The next morning, Sen found his mind drifting back to his own words from the night before about the biggest danger coming from the unknown. His thoughts turned to a small pouch in his robes that he had been very actively trying to not consider. Yet, he also knew it was something he couldn’t keep avoiding. With the last of the cursed social engagements finished, his time in Emporor’s Bay was swiftly coming to an end. Yet, he also knew he couldn’t leave with a clear conscience until he dealt with that last lingering problem. Muttering to himself, he pulled the pouch from his robes and just held it for a while. Considering how little weight it contained, the pouch felt terribly heavy in his hand. Finally, Sen just upended the pouch onto the bed.

A brief rain of storage rings dropped onto the blanket. He’d carefully marked the rings from the demonic core cultivator with a bit of chalk, and he separated those out to do last. He wasn’t sure what he’d find in them, but he suspected none of it would be personal. He wasn’t nearly so confident about that with the rest of the rings. He hesitated again, feeling vaguely ghoulish, before he picked up the first ring. While every storage ring worked in approximately the same way, they weren’t identical. Different makers added their own little twists, maybe even their own perspectives, to the process. So, he had to learn how each ring worked one at a time.

He was deeply relieved when the first few rings contained nothing but practical items. There was food in some, a smattering of coins in others, and even a few weapons. Although, most of those were mortal-grade weapons that Sen would need to simply get rid of somewhere. He supposed there were smiths or weapons shops in the city somewhere that would take them off his hands. The next ring was a different matter. While it also contained practical items, it also contained letters. Some were from the previous owner’s family, while others were clearly from a lover. Sen did little more than skim the first line or two of those, just enough to establish that they ought to be returned. He set the letters aside into their own pile. The next few rings contained a few things that looked like mementos. One such memento was a small piece of jade carved to look like a rooster. A zodiac sign, perhaps, Sen wondered. Another contained a small painted portrait of a very young boy. Probably a younger sibling, thought Sen.

It was very clear to Sen when he reached the rings he’d taken off of the foundation formation cultivators he’d killed. Those rings contained fewer personal things, but items of more value. He found cultivation manuals, higher-grade weapons, money, and even a handful of pills and elixirs. The few personal items went into the pile with the letters and mementos. Sen sat back and just stared at the piles. On the one hand, it was troubling to see people’s lives parceled out this way, into piles of things that Sen wanted, didn’t want, or meant to return. On the other hand, it gave him pause that so many lives could be parceled out into such small piles. Intellectually, Sen knew that they surely had other belongings stored at the sect, other things to mark the passage of their lives through the world, but maybe not. After all, everything he owned in the world was in his storage rings.

Picking one of the now empty rings, Sen stored the personal items he intended to return to the sect inside of it, then slipped it onto one of his fingers. Next, he considered the other storage rings. He certainly didn’t need all of them or want them for that matter. Too many storage rings seemed like a great way to invite trouble he didn’t want. He’d never considered the problem of too many storage rings before, so he didn’t have a plan in place to deal with them. He supposed he could just gift them to one of the sects. Even if they didn’t have an immediate use for them, they would eventually hand them out to people. Sen shook his head. He was putting off looking at the last four rings. He was honest enough with himself to know that he was a little worried about what he might find in those rings. The actual information he had about demonic cultivators and their practices was thin. Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Auntie Caihong had all said the same thing when he’d asked about demonic cultivators.

“Kill them all.”

While Sen appreciated their straightforward advice, he realized that it hadn’t prepared him particularly well for dealing with what those cultivators left behind. Forcing his hand to remain steady, he reached for the first ring. When he finally managed to access the ring and poured the contents out, he let out an explosive breath that he’d been holding. In his imagination, he’d been expecting something truly terrible, like severed body parts, or pickled organs, or, or, he didn’t even know. That ring contained much the same things that Sen had in his own rings. There were supplies for a long trip, such as a tent, basic camping tools, and easily stored food. There were even some formation flags, although there was something about those flags that left Sen a little unsettled. He put everything back into the ring and, after a moment of thought, put it into an inside pocket in his robe. It never hurt to have backup supplies.

The next two rings contained things that mostly held limited interest for Sen. One seemed to contain the cultivator’s entire wardrobe. The other seemed devoted entirely to weapons, but only a couple of them were spirit-grade weapons. He set those aside for his own use and added the rest to the pile of weapons to discard. The final ring was an entirely different story. That ring contained cultivation manuals, but not like any manuals Sen had ever seen. The covers felt strange to Sen, like some kind of leather. When he finally realized that the covers were made from human skin, he had to fight the urge to burn them immediately, not trusting that he wouldn’t burn down the Silver Crane in his zeal to destroy the disgusting things.

He found pills of all kinds, and every last one of them gave off a sense of wrongness that grated on Sen’s soul. He even found alchemy components, but they had all been corrupted somehow. Sen wouldn’t have sworn an oath on it, but he was convinced that at least some of the plants had been grown with human blood as part of their food supply. The last two things that had fallen out of the ring were pouches. Sen groaned to himself, fearing that he’d find yet more gold. It wasn’t that Sen was philosophically opposed to gold, but rather that it was uncommon. Having it marked a person in ways that Sen preferred not to be marked. Opening the first pouch, he was relieved to see that, while it contained money, it was the usual assortment of bronze and silver tael that normal people carried around. Picking up the second pouch, he opened it and found a small notebook inside. Curious, he flipped through a few pages.

The cold that ran through him as he read had nothing to do with the temperature in the room. The words contained in that little notebook were worth more than his life. Just having it put him in danger. His first impulse was to send it to Master Feng. Yet, that would mean weeks with the notebook riding around with whatever courier Sen could find. That courier would make an easy target. No, he needed to get this information out of his hands and into the hands of someone capable of doing something with it. Barring that, he needed to put it in the hands of someone capable of protecting it. There were limited options available to him. Gritting his teeth, he put everything except the money back into the ring. Then, still deeply frustrated, he started writing a message to the last person he wanted to see again.