The other thing that Sen spent his time on was something that he’d been neglecting at least partially on purpose. He’d return to the park each afternoon and sit on a large rock by a small pond. Sen suspected the pond was artificial, but he decided that didn’t bother him. The spot was shaded and buried in a well-maintained but densely packed group of trees. It was nearly a forest in miniature. While it didn’t fully dampen the constant noise of the city, it muffled it enough that Sen could relax a little. With a relatively secluded, quiet spot, and his heart demon seemingly well and truly behind him, Sen was reexamining an idea that had come to him in the wake of his core formation. It was an idea that he had avoided because he’d been too angry or simply too busy desperately trying to survive.

“Heavenly shadow,” he said aloud, as he’d done on a day that seemed so very long ago.

The words had come to him then unbidden, but carrying a spiritual weight that he’d recognized immediately. That they had accompanied his core formation suggested that they were inextricably tied up with his future, although he had no true sense of how. For the moment, he was simply trying to understand if the words were meant to, however obliquely, inform him that there was a technique to learn, or if they had been intended to alert him of something else. He even had to acknowledge the possibility that both things might be true. A part of him wished that these kinds of things were more straightforward. The rest of him understood that the obscurity and accompanying struggle to understand were purposeful. The harder he had to work to grasp the meaning, the more he would value it. Unfortunately, that understanding didn’t make the process less frustrating. He’d found that particularly true in this case because he had so little information to work from in his exploration.

There was the obvious. The first layer of his core had been formed largely using the shadow-dominant pill Auntie Caihong had given him and that flood of heavenly qi that triggered his advancement. Beyond that, though, he had precious little to guide him. More to the point, he suspected that, if he wasn’t on completely uncharted ground, there were likely very few people with the expertise to guide him, and none that he knew. Nor did he intend to spread around the exact nature of his core. While some might be able to get a general sense of it, he had too many enemies or potential enemies to go handing out the details. That meant that, like so much else about his cultivation, he had to figure it out on his own.

He couldn’t help a little twinge of resentment toward Master Feng. The elder cultivator explicitly said that Sen was an experiment in cultivation. That was all well and good looking down from the peak of the nascent soul stage, but it made life at the beginning of core formation damnably difficult. Sen could admit to himself that, given the choice, he might have picked a cultivation path with a bit more certainty, even if it did come with less flexibility. He let himself wallow in those feelings for a while before he shook it off. Wondering what he might have picked if he’d known what was ahead wasn’t a productive avenue. He didn’t pick those other things. He’d picked a path with maximum flexibility. If that meant he had to work harder than literally everyone else in the world to survive and thrive on his path, then that’s what he would do. He just needed to stop moping about the work and get on with doing the work. Otherwise, he’d start sounding like the Shi Ping of the not-so-distant past.

Sen let his vision turn inward toward his dantian. He felt more than saw his core because it was completely submerged in a pool of liquid qi that was putting pressure on the boundaries of his dantian. Sen knew he was going to have to do something about that and soon. The problem was that he wasn’t sure about the nature of his core, so he was hesitant to add a layer on top of it. It was the same reason he so rarely drew on his core for qi techniques. Without a full understanding of his core, he was gambling anytime he used the qi in it. He’d gotten lucky so far, but luck was the ficklest of friends. It was as likely to abandon him as help him the next time he drew on his core.

If push came to shove, though, there were things that Sen could do to at least partially replicate the process that produced his first core layer. He still had spirit beast cores that he’d poured heavenly qi into that he could draw on. The time he and Falling Leaf had spent out in the wild had yielded a few shadow-attributed cores. He’d claimed those specifically because he thought he might need them and because Falling Leaf had shown zero interest in them. While he couldn’t be sure that he’d get the exact same results under different conditions and a vastly altered mindset, he thought he could probably get close enough that the layers would bond without issue. Of course, that was a patch, not a solution. It might work, would probably work, once, but that could leave him with an unstable or fragile core.

The necessity of a stable core had been drilled into him by Master Feng, as well as the consequences of a fragile core. If it cracked before he reached the initial nascent core stage, he’d never get there. Of course, even if he got a fragile core all the way to the tribulation that everyone faced when transitioning to the nascent soul stage, the core wouldn’t protect the nascent soul. In short, Sen was very, very motivated to avoid patches and quick fixes when it came to adding layers to his core. What he needed was the right insight. Yet, all of his poking and prodding at his core hadn’t provided one. It was what it had always been to him. A mystery that he didn’t have the information to unravel. Yet, he persevered because it was either that or go with other options that he felt certain would prove disastrous in the long run.

For a time, Sen simply sat and considered the core in that pool of liquid qi. He observed that odd double helix that kept adding to the pool of liquid qi. That had been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it was pushing him toward another advancement years faster than he would otherwise have been able to get there. It had automated a process to which most people had to devote substantial time, energy, and conscious thought. Granted, he had suffered in ways that he expected most other people avoided along the way to get that shortcut, but it was still a shortcut. Of course, that shortcut had also deprived him of the years that let most other people come to a clear understanding of their core and its capacities. It felt to him, as his cultivation journey so often did, like running through a forest in total darkness, always praying that lightning would strike and illuminate his surroundings enough to keep him from racing off of a cliff. The lightning did seem to keep coming but how long could that last? It was luck again, and he didn’t dare rely on it.

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Sen had spent weeks beating his intellect against this problem and gotten nowhere. To him, it seemed like the entire thing had been specifically designed to thwart any attempt to reason his way through it. Yet, for all that the heavens might challenge cultivators, there was always a path to success. The path was often as narrow as a jian’s edge, but it always existed. If reason couldn’t show him the way, a painful revelation given all that he’d done and risked to quell his anger, that only left him with feelings and intuition. While marginally more reliable than luck, Sen struggled to trust them. It was all too easy to mistake what you wanted for an intuition, and feelings could lie. His had for a long time. With the necessity of adding another layer to his core looming, though, he’d have to set aside those concerns, those fears, and trust that he could tell the difference between wishful thinking and truth.

Then, as he had done once before, he let himself slip down inside of himself. He projected himself into his dantian as something less than a body, but more than a shadow. Once more, the liquid qi suffused this alternate form, strengthening something in him he couldn’t name, only sense. He basked in the warmth of that strength and the support of the liquid qi before he pushed forward to see his core up close. The liquid qi parted before him, pulling back from his core, and he saw once more what he had seen before. The sphere of his core still looked like it was made of dark gray liquid. Yet, to his ephemeral touch, it felt as solid as stone or steel or perhaps his own will. Stop trying to think your way through it, he admonished himself. You know that it won’t work. If it was going to, you’d have gotten a hint of it by now. With a sigh, Sen pushed back the part of him that wanted to think through every decision, every choice, and let that instinctual part of him that had given him the idea to widen his channels and expand his dantian move forward.

Sen extended his senses, letting them explore the core, not as a thing that must be analyzed, but as a cultivation mystery that needed to be understood. He let himself drift in that place, waiting to be shown what he needed, rather than trying to interrogate the insight out of his own body. He tried to grasp how the core felt and what it wanted. It was there, hiding at the edge of consciousness, almost in that place where vast and terrible powers adjusted existence to preserve balance and order. Sen resisted the urge to reach out for the answer, understanding that it wouldn’t work. He couldn’t take this answer, only experience it. Bit by bit, the comprehension dripped into him. Not something that could be formulated into words, not yet. It was too fundamental, too foundational, for that. If there were words for it, they could only be spoken in the language of stone and the crash of the wave.

Still, the knowledge passed into him. It was a visceral understanding of what his core was, and what it wanted. There were things that needed to happen, actions that had to be taken, and those things couldn’t always happen in open conflict. Some things happened in the shadows, literally and figurately, and he had been pushed along a path to let him do those things. For one terrible moment, he thought he was being primed as an assassin, but he felt the quiet revolt in his soul, his body, and his core at the idea. He wasn’t sure what that ultimately meant for him, but his relief was nonetheless palpable. He also came to understand that the nature of his core and his capacity to hide were connected. However, the nature of that connection proved elusive. He felt it swimming deep in the depths of his soul, but that knowledge wouldn’t rise into view for a time yet. He would have to be patient.

While his conscious understanding of his core and the idea of heavenly shadow remained woefully incomplete, the presence of that knowledge on a visceral level seemed to unlock something. He felt the shift in his dantian, felt the surge in the draw on environmental qi. He was also aware that he was doing something in the real world that was pushing this process along. He pulled back from his dantian out of a concern that he might somehow cause the process of adding a new layer to his core to fail. The last thing Sen saw inside his own spiritual space was a mass influx of heavenly and shadow qi. This time, though, he saw all of the other elements twisting together and fusing with those two elements to make something more complex. Then, he rose out of himself and took stock of his surroundings.

Without even realizing it, he had withdrawn cores filled with shadow and heavenly qi from his storage ring. They orbited around him in mid-air as qi rushed out of them and into him. Yet, that was probably the least interesting thing that was happening. It seemed he’d intuited that he might face some kind of opposition and erected a cage of lightning, fire, shadow, earth, and metal that spun around him like a vortex. Beyond the bounds of that vortex, he could feel other cultivators trying to force their way inside, to reach him before he added another layer to his core. They shouldn’t have wasted their time. It was too late the moment he’d erected those protections. Even as they struggled against his power, he lashed out at them with killing intent and whips made of the multiple types of qi in the vortex. While his conscious mind dealt with that problem, the rest of him bent itself on squeezing together all of that qi inside of his dantian. Keeping himself safe and forming another layer to his core taxed the limits of his mental resources, but he didn’t relent.

He didn’t try to keep track of how long he held those other cultivators at bay. It didn’t matter. He’d keep going until the work was done, or he failed. When he could sense that the new layer of his core was ready to solidify, he started making modifications to the qi vortex around him. It wasn’t anything immediately apparent to the outside observer, but they’d know about it soon enough. As the second layer of his core locked into place around his first core, doubling the protection around the nascent soul growing inside, Sen was able to redirect all his attention to the people who had violated that most sacred of cultivation traditions. They had tried to interrupt his advancement. Sen had no sympathy for anyone who would do that. He activated the modifications. One moment, there was a vortex of death around him. The next, all of the qi and force that vortex had contained was compressed down into four beams of destruction no bigger around than Sen’s pinky. Four bodies dropped with holes through their brains. Sen cautiously eyed the sky, waiting for a tribulation, but none arrived. Then, he waited to lose consciousness, because that happened to him all too often after an advancement. After a minute, Sen realized that he was just a man sitting on a rock with an expectant look on his face…and four dead bodies around him.