Book 5: Chapter 7: Absences
It took around four months, but Sen eventually reached a plateau in his recuperation. While his muscles had filled out and his flexibility had returned, he was not what he had been. He could feel it. His strength and speed, while formidable again, had been reduced by as much as twenty percent. He struggled to pin it down to an exact amount, but it was enough that he noticed. He could use qi to offset that loss a bit by reinforcing his body, but there was no getting around the fact that he was both slower and weaker. He continued to practice and to cultivate, but all he managed was to maintain the gains he had made. If Chan Yu Ming found and challenged me now, he thought, she’d have a real chance to kill me. That loss frustrated Sen. He had worked hard to get where he was, endured suffering, endured tribulations, and to have that progress turned back with no immediate way to fix it left him angry. He sulked for a few days, but Falling Leaf grew tired of that quickly.
“Would you like me to end your suffering?” she asked in a tone that suggested it wasn’t really a joke.
“What?” asked Sen, shocked and appalled at the question.
“You’re acting like it’s the end of your life. I just wondered if you wanted me to make it permanent.”
“It isn’t fair. I didn’t make any mistakes with my cultivation. I shouldn’t have to suffer because some stupid turtle sent me down a path I couldn’t complete.”
“So?” asked Falling Leaf in a confused tone.
Sen’s mouth dropped open in shock. “How can you say that?”
Falling Leaf shrugged. “Life is unfairness. You knew that once.”
Her words fell on Sen like a hammer blow to the head. He had known that once. There was a time when he would have simply accepted that loss in strength and moved on, looking for a different path forward. Hells, he had a path forward. Fu Ruolan hadn’t given him the manual, yet, but he was relatively certain she was going to do it. He would be able to reclaim that lost strength in time. He was just annoyed because he couldn’t do it on his own schedule. That made his anger seem petulant, even to himself. Somewhere along the line, he had gotten used to always moving forward with his cultivation. He’d come to see it as almost a right, but advancement wasn’t a guarantee. He’d known that once, too. Embarrassed by his childishness and pettiness, he turned his mind to something productive. It was something he hadn’t done in a long time. Refining his sword skills.
His months of practice had brought him back up to a level where he could perform at more or less the same skill level, minus a bit of strength and speed. Yet, he hadn’t tried to improve on those skills. It would have been, if not pointless, then largely wasted effort before he plateaued. Every increase in strength and speed called for minor adjustments. With those settled for now, he could focus entirely on improving his form and his precision. While he had initially harbored some doubts about how much room for improvement there really was, he was soon stripped of that fantasy. Some of his flaws he could rightly attribute to the changes in his own body, but not all of them. While he could recognize that someone else might still see him as possessing mastery, he did not. He had achieved competence, nothing more. It was plainly evident to him that he’d been getting by on superior strength and speed for a while.
Sen decided to start over at the beginning. He took each thrust, parry, block, and slash and analyzed it. He practiced each one, searching for inefficiencies, searching for imperfections, and slowly correcting them. Only then, when he had perfected each move individually, did he move on to stringing them together into forms. Again, he sought anything in his execution that wasted motion or wasted energy. He reclaimed that relentless focus he had enjoyed on the mountain and drove himself as hard as he had then. No longer did he concern himself with his blade being fractions of an inch out of place. He concerned himself with the blade being a hair’s breadth out of place. He trained until he could find nothing left to fix.
Throughout it all, though, Fu Ruolan was more like a ghost than an active presence. Sometimes, Sen would feel her spiritual sense wash over him. Sometimes, she would simply stand and watch him train for hours, her face betraying nothing of her thoughts. At other times, she would vanish for days or even weeks at a time. She offered no explanations for these absences, and Sen didn’t ask. Her instructions had been simple, and he followed them. For six months, he didn’t exchange more than two dozen words with the woman. Yet, he knew that everything he did was under scrutiny. It was all a test of some kind, even if he didn’t understand the nature or purpose of the test. All he knew was that she was evaluating him.
As agreed, Falling Leaf could come and go as she pleased, and she did. Unlike Fu Ruolan, however, she told Sen where she was going and why. In most cases, she was hunting. While he could advance through the accumulation of qi, enlightenment, and the right body cultivation method, she still needed to consume the cores of other spirit beasts. As she’d grown stronger, she had to find increasingly powerful spirit beasts that also used shadow qi. When he’d grown stronger, Sen offered to go with her, but she always refused. She told him that she got more growth out of it when she was the one who killed the spirit beast. Sen didn’t fully comprehend the why of that, but he trusted that she knew what she was talking about. Other times, she simply grew bored with the galehouse and went off to find, as she put it, something interesting.
“I’m not interesting to watch anymore?” he asked, putting on an exaggerated air of hurt.
“No,” she said. “I’ve seen you train like this before. When you were learning new things all the time and pretend fighting with the Feng, it was interesting. Now, it’s just boring.”
“Well,” said Sen, laughing a little, “when you put it like that, I can’t really disagree.”
Then, for no reason Sen could ever discern, things changed. He was outside of the galehouse refining his spear forms when Fu Ruolan showed up. Sen assumed that she was going to watch him train again, which she briefly did. He had just started to find a rhythm when she called out.
“Enough of that. You’ve regained your strength, or at least as much of it as you’re going to.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“Tell me about your qi specialization.”
Sen frowned at her. Did she not know? Had his use of multiple kinds of qi not been apparent after the incident with the beast tide? Was this some kind of a test? He struggled to imagine that she couldn’t sense the different kinds of qi in his core.
“I don’t really have one,” he said.
“No?”
Fu Ruolan gave him a frown in response to that. “Explain.”
So, he did. He gave her a stripped-down explanation of Master Feng and Uncle Kho’s choice to treat his cultivation experience as something of an experiment. He told her that, as a result, he hadn’t developed a specialization in any one kind of qi.
“Foolishness,” she said. “You’d waste too much time switching between qi types.”
“I did, for a while. Now, I just cycle for them simultaneously.”
“How many can you cycle for at the same time?”
“All of them. If I’m going to cycle and use them for separate techniques, though, I usually try to keep it limited to two or three. Otherwise, my channels become a bottleneck. At two or three, I can still use enough qi to generate some serious results.”
That seemed to give the nascent soul cultivator pause because she just looked at him for a time. It felt like she was waiting for him to say it was all a joke. When he just looked back at her, the woman frowned again.
“Show me,” she demanded. “Three qi types.”
Sen felt like he was putting on a show for her, but he reasoned that was more or less what he’d signed on for in the first place. Since he was already holding a spear, he cycled for lightning. Then, on a whim, he picked earth and wind qi. Once they were all up and running for long enough that she’d be able to tell, he looked over at her. She gestured impatiently. He supposed the gesture could have meant a lot of things, but he took it to mean that she wanted some kind of demonstration. After a moment of concentration, he made a slender spear of stone shoot up from the ground. He sliced a foot off the top of it with a wind blade that went spinning through the air. Then, he sent lightning from the tip of the spear to strike that still airborne piece of stone. It wasn’t the most impressive display of his abilities, but it seemed to at least convince her that he had more than a rudimentary understanding of how to use different kinds of qi effectively. He spent the next several hours demonstrating every technique he was willing to share with her. However, he withheld Heavens’ Rebuke and he didn’t even attempt the technique he’d used on the beast tide. There were some things he didn’t care to explain. Just as importantly, he had the feeling that she’d want much more in-depth explanations about those techniques than he would care to give her.
While he was confident that she knew he wasn’t showing her his most powerful techniques, she didn’t seem to care. She focused on his ability to wield multiple qi types. After that, she grilled him on how he achieved these feats. He gave her another run down on how he’d learned to cycle more than one kind of qi at a time, along with a very vague explanation of his channel-widening experiment. While he could see the curiosity burning in her eyes at that last, she didn’t press the issue. He supposed she didn’t need to do it right then. She still had him for years to come. Plenty of time to extract secrets, assuming she wanted them. Instead, she just nodded.
“Very well, then. I’m satisfied for the moment. I have a task for you.”
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