Unintended Cultivator

Book 3: Chapter 42: Inferno’s Vale (1)

Sen was crouched down, carefully removing the roots of a medical plant from the ground, when Lo Meifeng wandered over to him. He glanced up at her, but she looked to just be curious about what he was doing.

“I have to make elixirs from something,” he offered.

“I know. I just wondered what caught your attention.”

“It’s called a coiled serpent root,” said Sen.

He lifted it out of the ground and brushed the dirt away from it. It really did look like a coiled serpent. He trimmed the plant away and buried it where he’d pulled the root up. That approach didn’t always work, and the plants didn’t always grow back. For the coiled serpent root, though, it often did. He pulled out a water gourd, rinsed off the root, and gave the freshly buried plant a healthy drink. Once he put the root into his storage ring, he started back toward what he’d decided to generously call a road. It was more of a well-established path where the trees had been cleared and traffic kept the dirt tamped down hard.

“What’s it for?” asked Lo Meifeng.

“The root?”

“Yeah.”

“A bunch of different things. It’s probably best known as a catch-all treatment for poison.”

“Does it work?”

Sen waggled a hand in the air. “Depends. It will slow most poisons. So, it’s a good thing to have on hand if you’re traveling. It buys you time to get to a doctor or alchemist. It’s also good for buying time to figure out what the specific poison was if the person doesn’t know. It will cure some poisons, but not as many as people think. It’s also good against some kinds of snake bites.”

“And you know which poisons it cures, and which snake bites it helps with?”

Sen nodded absently. “Yeah.”

Lo Meifeng pointed at a random berry by the side of the road. “What’s the good for?”

Sen looked at it, then at her, and then he laughed.

“What?” she demanded.

“In very small doses, it helps with constipation. If the dosage is too high, though, it’ll get messy.”

Lo Meifeng squinted at him for a moment and then her eyes went wide. “I’m glad I never ate any of those.”

“I’m sure.”

“So, if you wanted something to help advance someone’s cultivation, you could just walk out into these woods and find what you need?”

Sen eyed her. “Are you asking me to make you something to help you advance?”

Lo Meifeng rolled her eyes. “No. I expect I’m years away from my next advancement. I’m just trying to get a handle on what you can do.”

Sen let his spiritual sense spread out into the surrounding forest. He poked, prodded, and probed for a few moments before he withdrew it. Then, he nodded.

“Yeah, probably, depending on what they needed. It’s not like everyone gets the same pills or, in my case, elixirs. For example, the kinds of cultivation aids you need would be pretty easy to make with what’s here because your main qi type is fire. There are a lot of fire-attributed plants and reagents floating around this area.”

“Not for you, though?”

“There are things here I could use, but I couldn’t find even close to everything I needed for my spirit cultivation. As for my body cultivation, I won’t be touching that until I can I find a manual for it.”

“Why’s that?”

“I didn’t even have a name for it before we bumped into that turtle. And then, I think I may have accidentally gone off the prescribed path for it during that enlightenment. I need information before I do anything else. I don’t want to find out I’m about to dead-end my body cultivation ten years from now because I didn’t bother to find out what should be happening with it now.”

“That makes sense. Is your spirit cultivation really that much more complicated than mine?”

“Oh, I couldn’t speak to that. For all I know what you’re doing as your cultivation method is actually harder than what I’m doing. Advancing it, though? Yeah, that’s way more complicated because I need to balance out way more things. Why the sudden interest?”

Lo Meifeng shrugged. “We always had other, bigger concerns before. We never really talked about these things. I’m surprised you never asked about my cultivation. You’re pretty curious, even if you keep it on a tight leash.”

“Honestly, it just didn’t seem like it was my business.”

“You stuck your nose in a lot of things that weren’t your business.”

“I got dragged into more things that I stuck my nose into,” said Sen. “I just wanted to travel. See new things. Find balance.”

“How’s that working out?”

“It’s definitely a work in progress,” said Sen before he came to an abrupt stop. “I think we’re here, but our timing may have been a bit bad.”

“What?” asked Lo Meifeng, looking up sharply. “Why?”

Sen stared down into the valley that, unfortunately, seemed to be living up to the name Inferno’s Vale. It looked like half the valley was on fire and, where there wasn’t fire, there was fighting. Most of it was too distant even for Sen’s enhanced eyes to make out much. What he saw looked like a pitched battle between fire cultivators and water cultivators. He supposed there was some kind of logic to that. Those elements didn’t normally interact well, but to see it played out along military lines seemed to be taking the conflict to absurd levels. Were they opposing sects? Was this some kind of long-standing feud that sparked periodic reprisals? Does it really matter to us, wondered Sen. Having been dragged unwillingly into several conflicts, Sen was perfectly ready to turn around and go somewhere else. Whatever conflict was playing out in the valley had nothing to do with him. Then, Lo Meifeng punched him in the arm so hard that it probably would have snapped if not for all the reinforcements his bones had undergone over the years.

“Ouch! What was that for?” he demanded.

“This is your fault!” she said, waving a hand in the general direction of the fighting below.

Sen glared at her. “We literally just got here. How could any of that possibly be my fault?”

“Because things are on fire and people are fighting. Those are always your fault.”

“Yeah, except I didn’t bring us here. We weren’t following one of my questionable soul tugs. I just came along for the ride. Which means that this probably isn’t my fault, for once.”

“Maybe,” admitted Lo Meifeng.

They stood there for a few minutes, watching the battle lines slowly shift back and forth as what Sen thought had to be advanced core cultivators reinforced the lines in one place, while the opposing side lost ground in others. No one seemed to have a clear advantage, which surprised Sen. It looked like this fight had been going on for a while. In long fights, it usually became obvious which side was going to win after a while. Here, though, unless something fundamental changed, it looked like they were going to continue fighting for a while. It wasn’t quite on the scale of some of the military engagements he’d read about in Uncle Kho’s scrolls, but there had to be at least a thousand people running around down there between the two sides. Lo Meifeng was scowling down into the valley like she could glare both sides into submission. For his part, Sen started looking around for a place to set up camp. When he actually started setting up camp, she looked at him like he’d lost his mind.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Exactly what it looks like I’m doing. Setting up camp.”

“Yes, I can see that much. I meant, why are you doing that?”

“Because I’d like for there to be somewhere to cook and sleep tonight. What do you think I should be doing?”

“We need to make a plan,” said Lo Meifeng.

“To do what?”

“To help.”

“Help?” asked Sen, suddenly very confused. “Help who?”

“The fire cultivators, obviously. They can’t teach us anything if they’re all dead.”

“They also can’t teach us anything if we’re dead. We don’t know anything about what’s going on down there or even why it’s happening. Going down there now would be stupid. You know this. In another day or two, that fight will be over. Then, we can go down and help the survivors.”

Lo Meifeng looked like she was ready to stab him in the throat. Sen frowned at her, and then down into the valley. Then, he glared at her.

“What’s really going on here, Meifeng? You didn’t just pick this place because they’re fire cultivators in an out-of-the-way spot, did you?”

The angry bluster went out of Lo Meifeng. She suddenly looked…sheepish.

“I might have left out a detail or five.”

A dark thought crossed Sen’s mind. “Did you know this was happening? Did you bring me here to fight someone else’s battles?”

“No! I swear to you, I didn’t know anything about this fight.”

“Then, spill it. Why are you all fired up to race headlong into a pitched battle?”

Lo Meifeng looked away and Sen could practically see her talking herself into telling him the truth. She finally looked at him again.

“I wanted to come here because my brother is here. If I brought you, then I had an excuse.”

“Why would you need an excuse to come see your brother?”

“We had a falling out. We haven’t seen each other in a long time. That’s not the point. He’s down there fighting, right now. We need to go,” she said, turning toward the valley.

“Wait!” ordered Sen. “How long has it been? A year? Five? How furious is he going to be when he sees you?”

Lo Meifeng mumbled something that Sen couldn’t make out.

“What?” he asked.

“I said a century. It’s been a hundred years.”

“A hundred years? What? How does that even happen?”

“We were both angry. That made it pretty easy at the beginning. Then, life happened. Can we go now, please?”

“Life happened,” repeated Sen. “I don’t even know what to do with that. Listen, I’m going to have a lot of questions, but they’ll hold. We can go. Quietly, if you please. We can’t help him if we don’t reach him.”

As they started making their way into the valley and toward the battle, Sen mumbled things under his breath. The word century played a prominent role in those quiet mutterings.