Unintended Cultivator

Book 4: Chapter 30: Practicing

As a general rule, Sen found the huge distances between locations on the continent to be irksome. Given the time constraints he was under, that was still true on some level. Yet, for once, he saw the weeks they still had left to travel before they reached the capital as something of a blessing. One, it gave him some time to start processing the truly staggering number of things the dragon had tried to teach him. He’d only barely gotten a handle on the tiniest fraction of those things. Some of that was simply the lack of practice. He also had the sneaking suspicion that the dragon had been teaching him techniques and information meant for nascent soul cultivators. He fully expected that he would spend years unraveling all of that knowledge into practical skills he could use. Yet, that was little more than a background benefit.

The real reason he was happy for that time was because it gave him a chance to help reinforce Shi Ping’s new outlook on life. Sen had seen the man fall back into bad habits at the drop of a hat, so he didn’t give the fire cultivator any opportunity for it. Almost without meaning to do it, Sen put the entire group on a training regimen. In the morning, they all took an hour for dedicated cultivation. While Sen had his moving cultivation technique, he didn’t think that any of the others had anything similar. While an hour each morning wasn’t a lot, it was an opportunity for everyone to focus exclusively on their cultivation with no distractions. Sen did his best to explain his moving cultivation technique to all of them, but it was ultimately something they’d have to experiment with until they either found something that worked for them, or they gave up on it as a lost cause.

Then, they’d travel for most of the day. Shi Ping couldn’t keep up with the non-stop qinggong techniques that Sen, Lo Meifeng, and even, much to Sen’s surprise, Falling Leaf could maintain. Still, the walking pace of a peak foundation formation cultivator was a ground-eating thing, and they made decent time. Late in the afternoon, Sen would stop them for the day. Depending on what kind of weather he expected or the spirit beasts he sensed in the area, Sen would either put up a galehouse or tell everyone to set up camp. Then, the training began. The first couple of days, it was just Sen and Shi Ping. Sen could feel the frustration radiating off of Shi Ping as he corrected a hundred minor defects in the man’s stance and techniques. He kept waiting for the fire cultivator to explode in a rage, but it never happened. As much as he disliked the constant correction, it seemed that even Shi Ping could recognize that his sword work was being slowly transformed from competent to something better.

It seemed that Lo Meifeng and even the perpetually distracted Chan Yu Ming had recognized the same thing because they started joining in on the lessons. Sen didn’t try to teach them his styles of fighting. They didn’t really have the time for that and, on reflection, he wasn’t entirely comfortable sharing that much information with people he might, if things went terribly wrong, have to fight one day. Instead, he focused on helping them improve on what they did know. That was relatively easy with Chan Yu Ming because her style shared a lot of commonalities with Auntie Caihong’s style. They weren’t identical by any means, but sound principles always applied. Helping Lo Meifeng was a bit more challenging. Her style was sufficiently different from everyone else’s that Sen wondered where it had come from. He ended up needing to spar with her several times before he got the necessary insights he needed. Fortunately, Chan Yu Ming was his equal with the jian for all practical purposes, so he’d often turn Shi Ping over to her while he worked with Lo Meifeng.

After the first week of that, he noticed that Falling Leaf would always hover nearby and watch. She didn’t use weapons or have any real interest in learning one, which wasn’t a problem most of the time. When the rest of the group was practicing with them, though, it left her utterly excluded. She never complained about it, but Sen racked his brain for a way to include her that wasn’t just patronizing in appearance or reality. Then, he struck on the obvious. Weapon training was all well and good, but he’d spent almost as much time learning to fight without weapons as with them. He decided they could all use a bit more practice with that. He discovered it was a good decision for a lot of reasons.

Most importantly for his primary goal, it was something that Falling Leaf could meaningfully participate in, benefit from, and provide benefit to the others. He knew firsthand from their time in the wilds just how effective she was at close combat. The others didn’t. Even better, her style of fighting was fundamentally different than everyone else’s. It was clear that Auntie Caihong had spent more than a little time working with her, teaching her some core principles, but it seemed that they had spent most of their time working on ways to adapt her natural inclinations into a method that worked for her. Sen had gotten more than a little amusement out of pairing up Shi Ping and Falling Leaf to spar. The fire cultivator had been quietly, but obviously, dismissive of Falling Leaf. That had disappeared in a hurry when her feline-inspired attacks left him bloody and bruised, while she remained untouched by his counterattacks.

Lo Meifeng, not surprisingly, turned out to be the best unarmed combatant out of the entire group. Sen chalked some of that up to sheer volume of experience. Still, it was a valuable experience for all of them to face off against someone with superior skills. Sen was surprised to find out that Chan Yu Ming’s unarmed combat skills were worse than Shi Ping’s. She made up for some of those deficiencies with superior speed and strength, but the skill gap was still evident. He’d been so surprised by it that he pulled her aside to discuss it one night.

“I don’t understand,” said Sen. “You clearly had outstanding jian instructors. Were your unarmed combat instructors bad?”

“No,” she admitted, only ever half-meeting his eyes.

“Then, what happened?”

“I liked the jian, and I had a lot of natural talent with it. So, they let me focus on that once they pounded the basics of unarmed combat into me.”

“What happens if you lose your jian?”

“It hasn’t happened yet,” she said, a defiant look on her face.

“The fact that it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it never will. This is foundational stuff. Master Feng spent years on this with me before he ever even let me touch a jian. Did no one ever suggest that you hone those skills after you mastered the jian?”

“Some people might have said something about that.”

“And?”

“I always meant to get around to it. It just didn’t seem like that much of a priority.”

“Really?” Sen said in his very best unimpressed tone.

“I know. I know it’s important, but I didn’t have the time.”

“You do now.”

She blinked at him a few times before she said, “No, I don’t. I need to…”

“Keep trying to make a bad plan work?”

“It’s not a bad plan,” she insisted before grudgingly amending that statement. “It’s not an entirely bad plan.”

“Well, you can work on your not-entirely-bad plan the other twenty-two hours of the day. Obviously, a couple weeks of training can’t replace years of practice, but maybe we can shore up the worst weaknesses that years of neglect have created.”

“You’re not in charge of me,” she said.

“Oh,” said Sen. “So, you don’t want to sleep in the galehouse and eat dinner with the rest of us, because you’re not really part of the group. You just happen to be traveling at the exact same time and in the exact same direction as the rest of us.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she said, her eyes going wide with outrage.

“Dare what? You said it yourself. I’m not in charge of you. Of course, the house is mine.”

“You’re actually blackmailing me?”

“I’m encouraging you to do the thing you know you should be doing,” said Sen, before he grinned at her. “Also, yes, I’m blackmailing you.”

“Oh, I see. First, it’s blackmail. What’s next?”

Sen just looked at her for a moment before he stepped so close to her that he could feel the heat coming off her body. He smiled at her again, but this one was entirely wolfish in nature.

“I’m sure we’ll think of something,” he said, casually pushing a bit of loose hair behind one of her ears.

“I’m sure we will,” she said, her voice a little breathy.

Sen leaned his head in and Chan Yu Ming closed her eyes. Only for them to go wide with barely suppressed fury when Sen whispered in her ear.

“You should be practicing.”

“Practicing!” she shouted, only to realize she was shouting at an empty space.

Sen was already standing with the others, grinning at her again. His grin just got bigger as she stalked across the campsite with murder in her eyes.