Unintended Cultivator

Book 4: Chapter 10: Will and Water

Sen had been through a lot in his time off the mountain. Enough that it was easy for him to forget that he’d seen very little of the world. For all the intensity of his experiences, though, they were limited in scope. As a veil was pulled back before him, Sen was given an acute reminder that he was very, very young. He didn’t see anything, at least nothing that he could recall later, but rather he felt something. It was a presence, something so vast that it reduced the unleashed presence of a nascent soul cultivator to nothing. Yet, so very unlike the presence of those often-terrible elder cultivators, this presence wasn’t harsh, oppressive, or crushing. It didn’t need to be. It was old, so old, so far beyond ancient that Sen could sense that it didn’t have secrets as he understood the term. To something as young as him, all of its shallowest knowledge was transcendent beyond the scope of human comprehension and its wisdom fell beyond the dreams of devils.

Sen trembled in naked fear before this presence, fearing he had transgressed across some indelible line in the universe, that he had wandered in his childlike innocence into a place where only gods should tread. Yet, the punishment he expected never came. That vast will was aware of him. Sen was certain of that much. Yet, it paid him scant attention. I’m such a tiny thing, Sen thought. Why would it care? When the initial panic left him, Sen found himself trying to understand what this thing could be. For a time, he just observed in whatever way the knowledge was being carried to him. There wasn’t motion, precisely, but that will did act. He could feel its tendrils stretching out across the face of the world, moving qi, moving mountains, moving people, and, in another panic-inducing moment, Sen realized it had been moving him. Its touch was gentle, but behind that surface gentility there was an obdurate strength that would challenge the ravages of time, challenge the destruction of the void, and persevere in the face of all threats.

Is this the will of the world, wondered Sen. Yet, even that seemed insufficient a description. This was more than the world, more the sun and the moon, this was the will of something deeper, something more profound. For a brief moment, Sen sensed the size of it, sensed just how far its reach truly extended, and his mind recoiled in simple horror. It was too much, far too much, for his mind to understand or even want to understand. Sen retreated out of deeply rooted concern for his own sanity. That single touch, brief as it had been, had very nearly been more than he could bear. He still felt parts of his mind shrieking and wailing, strained by merely brushing against that awful expanse. He pulled himself close, tightened his will and discipline around his own mind, and commanded calm where chaos reigned.

It was a slow process, but this was something he had practice doing. He knew how to endure pain and assert his will over it. Bit by bit, he pitted his will against the insanity that gnawed at the edges of his consciousness. Inch by agonizing inch, he clawed those wayward pieces of his mind back into place. A sarcastic little piece of him that wasn’t even trying to be helpful observed that people wouldn’t think he was such a genius if they could see him now. What kind of fool encountered something that vast and went sightseeing? It would serve him right if he went insane after a stunt like that. Yet, despite that naysaying part of his soul, Sen understood that he was being given some kind of opportunity. There was wisdom to find in this moment if he could locate it.

Sen tried posing questions to that vast will but received no answers. He wasn’t disappointed. He suspected that any answer he got would likely be so profound that it would crack his sanity like a fragile eggshell. Then, he invited that will to show him what it would, and nothing happened. Sen considered the problem. Was he missing the obvious? Sen suspected he was. Maybe the opportunity was right in front of him. He was getting to see how something far beyond the concerns of cultivators managed power and will. So, Sen simply watched for a time. At first, it just looked like chaos to him. There was so much happening. He tried focusing in, but that only made the chaos worse. He couldn’t see how things connected. With that failure out of the way, he tried pulling back and getting a broader picture.

That was when things began to make sense. He didn’t understand all of what he was seeing, that was beyond him, but he understood pieces. He began to see that his sense of how qi should work was simplistic in the extreme. He watched as that will encouraged wind qi to gather in a secluded spot on a mountain. Taken in isolation, it seemed random. Yet, he could sense how that extra bit of qi in that exact spot provided a balance to a dense spot of earth qi hundreds of miles away in a parched place he assumed was a desert. That earth qi was there to help balance out an especially thick concentration of fire qi in an all-too-familiar valley. And all of those individual spots of qi made the sentient spring he was sitting next to possible. Yet, even that was in the service of creating what Sen was able to recognize as a natural formation that would help to stave off…something.

When Sen tried to reach out for that knowledge, he instantly withdrew. He could learn what it was, but it was another one of those things that was so vast and intricate that his flimsy mind couldn’t contain it. That was the tiniest shred of what was happening at any given moment. Yet, Sen thought he had learned the lesson he was best equipped for, or at least touched it enough to piece together what he’d need later. There were other ways of using qi than what Sen had learned, and his particular method of cultivating qi would let him explore those possibilities. He could build techniques the same way he built alchemical elixirs and, if he understood what he was seeing correctly, generate similarly outsized results. It would probably take him years to really work out the intricacies. If he could make it work, though, he might actually be able to create the kinds of miracles people thought he was creating now. Of course, he had to survive long enough to do it.

That jarring thought shattered whatever state of mind had granted him access to that look at the mechanics behind the world. Sen’s eyes snapped open, and it took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. While he had started out sitting on the ground next to the spring, he wasn’t there any longer. Instead, he was floating on a platform of qi he didn’t recall summoning, hovering over the very center of the spring. As if that wasn’t strange enough, the water of the spring had risen up around him, as if to shelter him in a bowl. Sen debated about whether to return to shore but decided against it. He had a feeling that if the spring didn’t want him right where he was, he wouldn’t be there. Sen still felt a bit wobbly from what he’d just experienced, but he wasn’t about to pass up the chance to see if he could talk with the spring.

Sen took most of a minute to try to calm and center himself. He didn’t want to mess up whatever chance he might have at communicating with the spring because he was too rattled and rushed things. He brought the passive cultivation he did all the time under conscious control, not because it needed his help, but because the action was familiar. He felt the qi from the environment slide into him, move through his channels, and take up residence in his dantian. From there, he felt most of that qi pulled into that strange double helix formation and another drop or two of liquid qi was added to the substantial pool that had collected. As he kept that process moving, he felt his racing heart slow, and with that slowly coming under control, his thoughts slowed as well. He was careful to store away the insights he’d gathered, and just as careful to push away those thoughts that might all too easily drag him into madness. Only then, with his body and mind restored to something like equilibrium, did he release conscious control of his cultivation and turn his focus to the spring.

It was only then that Sen ran up against the very obvious problem that he didn’t have the first idea about how he might communicate with the spring. He could try talking to it, but it wasn’t like the spring was a spirit beast. It didn’t have any obvious way of listening to his voice, like a convenient set of watery ears. Then again, Sen thought, what do I know? Maybe it can hear. Deciding there was no harm in trying the obvious, he spoke.

“Can you understand me?”

Sen gave it thirty seconds before he concluded that, if the spring could communicate, it wasn’t going to be through anything so simple as speaking and listening. He considered what something like water would recognize and understand. Sen cycled for water qi and, unlike his usual directed approach, just sort of spread it around inside the water bowl the spring had formed. That got a reaction. Sen immediately felt an outside force of water qi press against his own.

“Okay,” said Sen. “I got your attention. Now what?”

Committing himself to trying anything that came to mind, Sen tried pushing a sense of his curiosity about the spring into the qi he had spread out. Again, there was nothing. Well, it was worth a try, he thought. With no better ideas to hand, Sen tried to push his consciousness out toward the spring. It was an odd experience, like how he imagined moving an organ to somewhere else in the body might feel, if less painful. He once more tried to infuse his curiosity in the presence of his expanded consciousness. That worked. It worked too well. His mind was immediately overwhelmed with thousands, maybe tens of thousands of impressions, images, and bright little gemstones of knowledge about using water qi. Unfortunately, that massive rush of information was too much for him. He felt hot blood splash across his lips from his nose before he lost consciousness.

When things started making sense again, Sen had the impression that more than a little time had passed. He wasn’t sitting anymore. He was sprawled out on something that was firm but had some give to it. Had someone found him and brought him back to the sect compound? The pounding in his head made him not want to open his eyes, but his training was ingrained too deeply to give up such easy knowledge. He forced his eyes open and, again, had to take a moment to understand what he was seeing. He appeared to be in some kind of water cocoon that had been hardened to keep everyone and everything out. He looked down and realized that the spring had created a platform of hardened water for him to lay on while he was being useless and unconscious.

Sen pushed himself back up into a sitting position and reestablished his qi platform. The water beneath him dropped away, but the cocoon remained firmly in place. Sen reasoned that the spring was trying to protect him until it was sure he could protect himself. Nice of it, he thought. Sen once again pushed his consciousness out. This time, he thought he caught a sense of mild pushback, so he stopped there and just tried sending out a gentle hello. What he got back was tentative, hesitant, and vaguely apologetic. He got a trickle of images of jumping fish and swiftly moving water insects. It took a second, but he managed to interpret the message. It had gotten excited.

Sen lost track of time as he and the spring worked out a kind of shorthand language of images and impressions. Once they did that, though, and fine-tuned how much information Sen could handle at any given moment, things smoothed out. It wasn’t talking, precisely. Sen didn’t know if the spring couldn’t do that or simply hadn’t learned how. Still, it was good enough. Having achieved his initial goal of communicating with the spring, though, Sen wasn’t sure where to take things. He was confident that he could push his understanding of water qi by leaps and bounds if he provided the right prompts. He just didn’t know what those prompts might be. In the end, he settled on simply showing the spring his techniques or toned-down versions of them.

That was when things got interesting from Sen’s point of view. In some cases, he got the impression that the spring found what he was doing hilariously inept. In other cases, he got vague approval. Yet, inevitably, he would get shown something that clarified what he was doing wrong or how he might do it better. After a few hours, he started to understand that with water qi techniques, it almost always came down to some combination of hardness, softness, and flow. To Sen, ideas of hard and soft had always been fairly absolute. To the spring, though, these ideas came in so many variations that Sen had trouble distinguishing them. He spent hours simply trying to mimic the varieties of hard and soft that the spring showed him. Often with the spring providing a perfect example right in front of him.

The idea of flow was both familiar and foreign to Sen. He was used to the idea of qi flowing, but the spring once again dissuaded him from the notion that he should think of flow as one thing. The flow of a gentle creek, for example, was nothing at all like the flow of a river during a torrential downpour. While he could execute different kinds of flow, he knew there was more there to understand that he simply wasn’t grasping. He decided that was alright. He didn’t need to learn everything now. He had the rest of his life, however long or short it might be, to expand on what he'd been shown. Yet, it seemed the spring wasn’t quite done with him yet.

Sen felt a pressure on his heart and his soul. It wasn’t so much in a specific place, as it was touching a specific thing. Something he’d been trying not to think about while communicating with the spring. Yet, the spring had spotted his anger just like the patriarch had. Sen did his best to communicate a sense of helplessness about the anger. Sure, he knew it was there. It didn’t mean he could do anything about it. The spring applied a little gentle pressure again, and then it sent Sen images and impressions of water in varying states of hardness. Then, it followed that up with images of soft, flowing water. Sen frowned. The spring repeated the same cycle of pressure and images several times. Sen thought he had an idea of what the spring was getting at, so he pressed a sense of understanding at the spring.

He wasn’t dealing with his anger. He was caging it. Useful in the moment perhaps, but not a long-term fix. He thought the spring was telling him that if he continued on as he was, that anger would harden into something permanent that would become far more difficult or even impossible to dislodge. The spring was telling him that he needed to let that anger flow or his heart would never soften again. It was probably right, except that wasn’t a practical solution for him. He had to deal with people, which meant keeping a tight leash on that anger. Still, there might be other ways to purge that anger without simply killing everyone who bothered him. Sen hoped there was. Realizing that he had spent far more than the one day he had meant to at the spring, Sen did his best to communicate his gratitude to the sentient body of water. He struggled to interpret what he got back, but he thought it amounted to an invitation to visit.

“If I live long enough,” he said quietly. “Maybe, if I live long enough.”