I guess it’s for real now, thought Sen. All along, he’d thought of the academy as something of a safer middle ground and a half-baked idea that he could abandon at a moment’s notice if it seemed like too much trouble. Once he’d decided to accept students, though, the hypothetical nature of the academy became a fixed reality. Not that everything had gone smoothly. Word had slowly spread to nearby towns and villages that there was a place to learn how to fight, which had meant a steady trickle of young men toward the academy. While Sen was aware that fighting was largely considered a man’s job outside of the Jianghu, he also knew that it wasn’t just men who wanted to learn how to fight. He’d made visits to some of those villages with Li Hua and Falling Leaf for practical demonstrations. Li Hua had been decidedly nervous, while Falling Leaf had found the entire exercise to be hilarious. After the pair of them had embarrassed the local village men to the point of coughing up blood, Sen had made the announcement that his academy was open to any man or woman who wanted to learn. It hadn’t changed the numbers a lot, but some women had started to show up.
He'd also been vexed by the problem of money. Not that money was an actual problem. He could probably run the academy out of his own funds for decades. He just didn’t want to. The problem was figuring out what to charge. He was intentionally charging any cultivators who showed up what most people would consider extortionate fees. It served the dual purpose of scaring away people who weren’t serious, while also letting him pay Wu Meng Yao. He still needed to find someone else to handle teaching spear forms to the lower-level cultivators, who would also need to be compensated. The problem was that he was negotiating the extortion on a person-by-person basis. Painfully expensive to someone like Mo Kai-Ming was, he knew from experience, nothing to someone like Sua Xing Xing. Just as what would be nearly unpayable by a mortal wouldn’t have made Soon Zi Rui blink. Sen thought that he’d just have to settle on a number for lower-lever cultivators and leave negotiating to the core formation cultivators he’d have to train personally.
On the other hand, he wasn’t extorting the mortal students the way he was the cultivators. This academy had mostly been created as a way to help them defend their towns and villages. Even so, he had to charge enough to at least cover the cost of their food and hire people to prepare the food. He had considered just giving people raw ingredients a few times a week, but a few conversations with would-be students put a swift end to that plan. Auntie Caihong might have made sure that he knew how to cook, but it seemed that most of the young mortal men were helpless to make anything beyond tea. Plus, he had to give some consideration to the more talented townspeople he’d picked for more advanced training. They were tasked with teaching new students. The time they spent teaching was time they weren’t spending on their actual professions, which meant he needed to pay them enough to make up that difference. In the end, he didn’t care if the place made money, but he did want it to make enough to be self-sufficient.
At least Uncle Kho solved the heating problem, thought Sen. It had been instructional for Sen to watch as a problem that had vexed him for months took the elder cultivator less than an afternoon to solve. Sen saw it as the difference between talent and experience. He was good with formations and could intuitively improve them, which gave him a lot of advantages. But he didn’t have thousands of years of experience dealing with problems ranging from the purely mundane to the mind-bendingly difficult. Not only had Uncle Kho solved it, but he’d also solved a problem that Sen hadn’t been thinking about. High summer heat. While the stone he used to make buildings wouldn’t absorb heat quickly, it would build up over time. So, rather than try to adjust the heat based on the weather, Uncle Kho just devised a formation intended to keep the temperature inside the buildings at a fixed point.
Of course, that simple-sounding solution had been both hideously complex in the details and a pain to implement. Sen had needed to create the actual formations inside the walls of the buildings. More specifically, he’d needed to add layers and layers of interlocking formations into the walls and then seal them up. The sheer complexity of those formations had taxed the upper limits of his understanding, as well as his abilities. He read that as just one more sign that he was nowhere even close to done learning about formations. Sen and Uncle Kho had taken a trip deeper into the wilds to acquire more fire-attributed treasures and some ice-attributed treasures. The formation could draw on those when the weather turned especially cold or hot. Then, Sen had needed to create special chambers beneath the buildings to house the treasures and contain their extreme heat and cold, which had turned into a secondary formation project all on its own. The good news was that unless something managed to damage the walls of the building, the system should function without any need for maintenance until the natural treasures ran dry. Sen estimated that would take at least a hundred years unless something drastic changed with how the weather worked.
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However, the big picture details had slowly been dealt with or handed off, and training had begun. Of course, that had become a whole new pile of details to worry about. While the townspeople might only train a couple of hours a day, Sen didn’t want the other mortal students left with lots of free time to wander around town and make trouble. They needed to have things to do, all day. Preferably things that would tire them out enough that only the most ambitious would inevitably get caught up in some romantic entanglements. The last thing Sen wanted was a string of angry parents showing up to scream at him because their daughters or sons had gotten a little too friendly with a student who was going to leave in six months or a year. So, he had them do what he had done while training. He made them run. When they weren’t running, they were training. When they weren’t training, they were reading. Getting enough of the same scrolls for that had taken a trip to the capital and an obscene amount of gold to hire people to rush the copying. Sen had just paid for that and considered it an investment in future sanity. The students who didn’t know how to write were put in classes to learn. Then, they ran some more. The schedule was brutal enough that Sen actually worried it might prove too much for some of the older people who turned up looking to learn or to improve their skills.
Of course, he’d had to recruit more people to oversee all of those things. He’d been able to find a few in the town. There was an old man who couldn’t handle physical labor anymore, was bored out of his mind, and had no sense of humor. He did, however, possess the ability to write. So, Sen hired him to teach people to write. It had gone on and on, and he’d thought it would never end. He found himself grateful that he didn’t need to actually sleep every single day. Between dealing with academy problems, his own training, and being around enough that Ai didn’t simply forget about him entirely, sleep was a high luxury. But, like all enormous tasks, the work did eventually come to an end. That was how he found himself standing near a building in the large complex of buildings that now comprised the academy just watching the mortal students grow increasingly winded as they ran.
“Is the grand and mighty patriarch deciding which of the children to cast out?” asked Shen Mingxia as she came over to stand next to him.
Sen rolled his eyes.
“I don’t actually have anything to do at the moment,” he told her.
“That sounds unlikely.”
“I know. I didn’t believe it myself at first but here we are.”
“Don’t you have a little girl to take care of?”
“Uncle Kho and Auntie Caihong are watching her. By watching, I naturally mean planning how they’ll keep her.”
Shen Mingxi gave him a sharp look and asked, “Really?”
“No,” he laughed. “Well, probably not.”
“So, instead of sleeping, or cultivating, or doing anything even remotely productive, you’re watching people run?”
“They’re only running because I said they had to. It only seems fair that I watch them do it from time to time to make sure I don’t accidentally kill one of them.”
“You’re not pushing them that hard,” said Shen Mingxia.
“Not if they were cultivators, but those are mortals. Things that a qi-gathering cultivator would shrug off in few days could cripple one of them for life.”
“Couldn’t you just give them one of your healing elixirs?”
“Yes, but the goal is to train them. Crippling injuries run counter to that goal. Admittedly, there will be some injuries when they’re learning the spear or jian. It’s unavoidable. If they’re collapsing from exhaustion during a run, or damaging their muscles and joints, that’s not training.”
Shen Mingxia frowned. “I guess I do take fast recuperation a little for granted.”
“It’s not just you. I expect most cultivators do that. I know I’ve let myself take injuries to achieve victory because I knew I’d recover.”
“Wu Meng Yao did say something once about finding you battered, bleeding, and unconscious in a crater.”
“I was napping,” said Sen.
“In a crater?”
“It was a very comfortable crater.”
“Was it?” asked Shen Mingxia with a skeptical expression.
“Not at all. I was in a lot of pain.”
“Well, since you’ve got the time to chat about crater naps, don’t you think it’s time we talk about that flower you’ve been keeping in your storage ring?”
Sen looked at her blankly for a few seconds before it came back to him. “Oh yeah! We should definitely do that.”