Unintended Cultivator-Chapter 49Book 10: : Borrowing

It seemed like a thousand important matters vied for every second of Sen’s attention, but there came a moment when he had to tell everyone to leave him alone. A few people reacted like he was being difficult or surly. At least, they did right up until he told them that he needed to go focus on a solution for the massive formation the spirit beasts were constructing. Some of the cultivators still doubted that spirit beasts could make formations, but he’d put the idea in their heads. He could see the doubt and worry that idea caused. It had clearly been gnawing at everyone since he’d brought it up. However much they might doubt, it was too troubling for them to object when he said it was time to work on a solution for it.

Of course, he’d burned through most of the time he’d thought they had left until the attack would come. Sen should have already been working on that answer since he didn’t actually know how to do what he was planning to do. Some general ideas were tumbling around in his head, but that wasn’t the same thing as a workable plan. He didn’t like working under that kind of pressure, but it had been the case since his arrival. He also might have been underestimating how long they had. Formations could be tricky to make and temperamental to maintain. Problems that were amplified by the sheer size of what they were making. Just keeping the qi flow balanced across the whole thing would be borderline nightmarish based on Sen’s own experience with a large-scale formation. Since they were going through all that trouble, though, it only made sense that they had solutions for those problems.

He would also rather assume they were going to finish sooner and be wrong about it. If his estimations were off in that direction, it would give the human city more opportunities to prepare. Something that could only benefit them. Assuming the spirit beasts would be slower and getting that wrong would be the kind of mistake none of them would live to regret. Sen shook his head. He’d been trying to clear his mind, but had only succeeded in reminding himself of how bad this entire situation actually was for everyone. Even if he succeeded with his idea, it would only solve one of their problems.

“One less problem is a good thing,” he muttered to himself.

“You know,” said Lai Dongmei, “talking to yourself isn’t considered a good thing. Not even for cultivators.”

Sen looked over at the woman. She was sitting on the edge of the castle wall and idly kicking her legs like a little girl. He wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Waiting.”

“For what?”

“To see what you plan to do to save us all from that formation. You certainly made it sound like you had a plan. I do hope that wasn’t merely a trick to keep morale up.”

“I have a plan. Well, I have an idea anyway.”

“Which is?”

Sen looked up at the threatening clouds overhead. He’d been worried that the storm would break before he got a chance to do what he wanted to do. The fact that it had just been sitting up there and waiting just stank of heavenly intervention. Normally, he’d be very annoyed by that, but he’d needed it to do just that. Lai Dongmei peered up at those clouds, frowned, and looked at him.

“You mean to harness the storm?”

“Not exactly.”

Lai Dongmei made a relieved noise and said, “Good. Even nascent soul cultivators don’t normally toy with natural forces on that scale. Mostly because it ends badly for nearly everyone who tries.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Sen. “Nature is shockingly delicate. I expect the heavens take a dim view of anything that threatens it.”

“I’d have to disagree. I’ve seen the devastation wrought by some of those storms coming off the ocean.”

“Something can be powerful and still be delicate. Complicated qi techniques can be powerful, but it doesn’t take a lot to disrupt them.”

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“I suppose that’s true. I’m still not sure it applies to nature.”

“You probably haven’t spent enough time with plants,” said Sen.

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“Plants?” asked Lai Dongmei with a skeptical look.

Sen thought for a second before he produced an apple from a storage ring. He offered the fruit to the nascent soul cultivator. Giving him an amused smile, she took the apple and bit into it.

“There were orchards in the town where I grew up. You’d think it would be a simple thing since those trees grow in the wild. It turns out that it’s not simple at all. Wild trees rarely produce good fruit and never in any abundance. It takes a lot of work to grow trees that produce enough good fruit that you can harvest and sell it. You also wouldn’t believe the number of things that can ruin a harvest. I heard the people talking about it. If there’s not enough rain at the right time, the harvest is poor. If there’s too much rain at the wrong time, the harvest is poor. If it’s too hot or too cold at the wrong time, the harvest can be ruined. If certain kinds of bugs arrive at the wrong times, the harvest is destroyed. There were a host of other things that could go wrong, but I didn’t really understand them.”

“No? You’ve always seemed to possess a perfectly adequate mind to me.”

“I was a street rat with no education. I understood rain, temperature, and bugs because they were a bane to me most of the time. So, that’s what I remember. I learned more after I spent some time up on the mountain.”

“Kho’s mountain,” she said with a shake of the head. “We’ve all heard about that mountain.”

“We?” asked Sen.

“Nascent soul cultivators. It’s one of the places that we’re all warned not to go.”

“He hasn’t lived up there for that long, has he?”

“No, but he did kill a bunch of cultivators who went there and bothered him in the early days. It didn’t take long for word to spread.”

Sen recalled Uncle Kho doing exactly that to three core cultivators with overwhelmingly powerful bolts of lightning. He’d learned how it was done, could even replicate the feat to some degree, but the memory still gave him chills.

“I guess that’s fair,” said Sen with a mild shudder. “Anyway, after I moved up to the mountain, I learned about how soil can be rich or poor, to say nothing of how qi can influence a specific patch of earth. I also saw how light or a lack of light can mean healthy plants or plants barely clinging to life. The more I saw of how everything interacts just to make it possible or impossible for something to live, I realized how fragile nature is. It wouldn’t take many changes to turn a healthy stretch of farmland into a wasteland.”

“Would it really be that easy?” asked Lai Dongmei with a pensive look on her face.

“Doing it on purpose would be obscenely easy,” said Sen. “Just about any alchemist could pull it off with the right resources. Of course, no alchemist will do it because we all depend on herbs, roots, and natural treasures. You can’t get those things from a wasteland.”

“It turns out that even self-interest does occasionally benefit everyone.”

“I suppose so,” said Sen. “Now, I have almost no understanding of how weather works, but weather is everywhere. I also suspect that it’s fragile in its own way. Maybe playing with the weather will change when, where, or even if it rains somewhere. I assume that someone in the heavens is responsible for things like that. If changing the weather will mean some horrible side effect that no one can predict, it makes sense that they’d take action to punish anyone trying it.”

“That’s a lot of speculation,” said Lai Dongmei.

“That’s true. It just lines up with the things I’ve observed. I might be entirely wrong. I’m still not going to try to change the weather in any meaningful way.”

“If that’s the case, what are you going to do?”

“I’m just going to borrow some lightning.”

“Borrow?”

Sen shrugged and said, “It sounds better than stealing.”

Lai Dongmei rolled her eyes and asked, “You think lightning will be enough to stop their formation?”

“Not by itself. If I add a few things to it, though, it should be enough,” said Sen as he patted one of the spikes embedded in the top of the wall.

The other cultivator fixed Sen with a hard look then.

“And just how do you expect to borrow the lightning that’s all the way up there without also calling down enough of it to destroy this palace?”

“Yeah. That is the tricky part. It’s also why I said it was an idea and not a plan.”

“You don’t know how to do it, do you?”

“Yet,” corrected Sen. “I don’t know how to do it, yet.”

“And you think that you’re going to come up with a solution in the next few hours?”

“I do.”

“Why so confident?”

“Because we’re all going to die if I don’t.”

“That is not a reason for confidence,” said Lai Dongmei. “Have you at least asked the other sects to help you figure out a way?”

“I haven’t.”

“Why not?” she demanded.

“Because they’ll want to know what I’m going to do with it, and I have no intention of revealing that secret.”

“Why wouldn’t you—” Lai Dongmei started before her eyes went wide and two whispered words escaped her lips. “You madman.”

Sen grinned at her and said, “Not mad. Just very motivated to live.”

“Can you control it at that scale?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“You must work on inspiring more confidence.”