Sen turned his gaze back and forth from the corner to where Fu Ruolan now stood. His teachers had told him about things that were like what he’d just seen, but this was different. The techniques he’d been told about were just advanced movement skills. They seemed to make someone disappear and reappear, but it was just magnified speed. There was also something called teleportation, where someone literally disappeared and then reappeared somewhere else. That had something to do with having a space qi affinity and remained firmly beyond Sen’s understanding. Yet, that was supposed to be instantaneous, and with Sen’s spiritual sense, he would have been immediately aware of their new location if they were close enough to be a threat. Fu Ruolan had vanished from his senses and been gone for long enough that he’d had the time to stand up and examine the corner. In fact, it had been about as long as it might have taken someone to casually walk across the room.
Master Feng had also told him about shadow travel techniques, but the way they had been described it sounded more like a hiding technique than a true travel technique. The cultivators used shadow to obscure themselves, and some even managed to briefly take on the insubstantial nature of shadows. It made them harder to sense, find, and track, but that didn’t seem to be what Fu Ruolan had done either. She hadn’t been obscured. She had been gone. Like she stepped outside of reality altogether and then stepped back into reality somewhere else. Sen frowned. He wondered if that was exactly what she had done. The very idea would have seemed impossible to Sen back in his mortal days, but he’d been a cultivator long enough to only ever put things into categories like probable and improbable. Stepping out of reality sounded more like an improbable technique than a probable one, but he had to keep in mind that he was dealing with a nascent soul cultivator. Sen frowned.
“It looks like you aren’t happy with the potential explanations. Good. That means you’re likely on the right track,” said Fu Ruolan. “So, tell me. What do you think I just did?”
“I don’t know,” answered Sen. “You say it’s something to do with shadow affinity, but I don’t see the connection. To me, it felt like you stepped right out of tangible reality and stepped back in again, somehow.”
Fu Ruolan lifted an eyebrow at Sen. “Well, that was annoyingly accurate. I guess Feng Ming and his cohorts wouldn’t have put up with you if you weren’t quick.”
“I don’t know about that. Besides, it’s not like I know how you did it or where you went.”
“True enough,” conceded Fu Ruolan. “So, let’s start with the where since that’s probably the more interesting part. Where do you think I went?”
Sen thought hard about it. No matter what he came up with, though, it just sounded absurd. Eventually, he just gave up and went with the stupidest idea that passed through his head.
Laughing a little, he answered, “I think you stepped through that shadow into some separate realm where all the shadows dance and play.”
His amusement faded as Fu Ruolan glared at him. He swallowed hard to clear the sudden lump of concern in his throat.
“Did someone explain this technique to you?” asked Fu Ruolan.
“No,” said Sen before hurriedly adding, “I didn’t think that was the actual answer.”
“No? You just picked that out of the air and happened to be right?”
Sen reached up and rubbed at the back of his neck, where all the hairs had suddenly stood up on end.
“Yeah,” said Sen, his voice a little weak.
A part of him wanted to explain, except that there was nothing to explain. He’d guessed. No, he hadn’t even guessed. He’d picked the answer that he was certain was wrong. Yet, Fu Ruolan seemed convinced that he’d pulled some kind of trick on her, and Sen couldn’t figure out how to convince the woman that it had just been a stupid coincidence. Fu Ruolan eyed him suspiciously for an uncomfortably long time before she sniffed in a decidedly unimpressed way.
“Well, now that you sucked all of the fun out of the answer, that’s what the technique does. Well except for that part about the dancing and playing,” she said.
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“How does that even work?” asked Sen.
“I’m going to go ahead and assume that your working knowledge of space qi techniques is limited.”
Sen frowned at that. “I know a bit about how time acceleration chambers work. Same for storage treasures. Beyond that, though, not really.”
“Why in the world would you know about time acceleration chambers?”
“There was a copy of the Five-Fold Body Transformation manual stuck inside of one. I was trying to figure out how to get into the chamber to retrieve it.”
“You obviously didn’t succeed,” said Fu Ruolan.
“The chamber had been sealed from the inside,” said Sen.
“Oh, well, that would do it. And you thought you were just going to master space qi and get in there?”
“Nothing so grand. I wasn’t really trying to figure out the chamber, just the seal. But it was hard to understand one without the other. I learned enough to know that I didn’t have the time to learn what I needed to know.”
“Well, that might make for interesting discussion at some point, but it also means you don’t really have the background to understand how the shadow realm works,” said Fu Ruolan. “So, I’m going to give you a very inaccurate analogy that gets the basic idea across. You know how a manual is just a bunch of pages stacked together?”
“Sure.”
“Well, you can imagine that reality is like a bunch of realms stacked up together the same way. The everyday world or realm that we deal with is on one page. The shadow realm is the next page over. Or, if you like, it’s the space between this page and the next. If you know what you’re doing, you can move between this page and the next page. Does that make sense?”
Given that she’d said it was a very inaccurate description, Sen was certain that it was a lot more complicated than that. On the other hand, he supposed that it wasn’t crucial for him to fully understand the nuances. After all, he didn’t really know what lightning was but that didn’t stop him from using it. He decided that this was the same thing. Until it became an issue, he’d take it at face value.
“Yes, that makes sense.”
“The shadows in our realm can act as access points between those pages. So, I stepped through the shadow in that corner to get to that other realm. Then, I used this shadow,” she gestured at the shadow she was standing in, “to get back here.”
“So, you can just walk around in that other realm like you would here?” asked Sen.
Fu Ruolan waggled a hand in the air. “Not exactly, but that’s close enough for right now. With a technique like this, you can pass by enemies to escape or even attack them directly out of their shadow. That’s to say nothing of walking through walls right into their very homes and strongholds.”
“I can certainly see the advantages to something like that,” said Sen.
“I expected you would. Now, can you think of any potential disadvantages to a technique like that?”
Sen thought about how he might deal with someone who could do that.
“Well, with enough light, you could simply erase every nearby shadow. It wouldn’t be easy to do, but it could be done. It seems like that would be potentially catastrophic if you were halfway through to that other realm. I have to imagine that there are formations that prevent people from using the technique to pass through walls.”
Fu Ruolan nodded. “Both are legitimate concerns. Anything else?”
“You didn’t stay in that other realm for very long. Is there a limit on how long you can stay there?”
“For practical purposes, let’s say yes. It varies from person to person based on a lot of things we won’t get into right now, but there is a hard limit for everyone. Stay in that other realm for too long, and you don’t come back.”
“Because you die?”
“No one knows. People have their theories, but theories are all they are. Well, I suppose someone might now, but they aren’t spreading the information. The only solid fact we have is that, beyond some threshold, you don’t return. Maybe you die. Maybe you get transformed into something. As you might imagine, it’s not a subject that anyone is eager is study firsthand.”
“You can add me to the list of people who don’t want to discover the truth for themselves,” said Sen.
Fu Ruolan snorted. “So, there is a tiny shred of caution buried deep inside of you. I was starting to wonder.”
Sen considered everything he’d just learned and noticed a bit of a logical disconnect.
“Are you saying that anyone with a shadow qi affinity can do this? If they could, it seems like something that Master Feng would have warned me about.”
“A shadow qi affinity isn’t that common,” admitted Fu Ruolan. “In fact, it’s one of the rarer affinities out there. As to your question, no, not every cultivator with a shadow qi affinity can do it. You need a strong affinity to use this particular technique.”
Sen’s eyes narrowed. “How strong?”
“Quite strong,” said Fu Ruolan without quite meeting his eyes.
A suspicion formed in Sen’s mind.
“How many people have a strong enough affinity? Ten percent of cultivators? Five percent?”
“Four,” said Fu Ruolan.
“Four percent?”
“Four people that I’m aware of, including you.”
The value of the technique that he was going to learn went way, way up in Sen’s mind. If it was that rare, it meant that it was something that most cultivators wouldn’t be protecting against. Hells, he thought, most sects probably wouldn’t bother with it either. Why would they? It was one thing for sects to protect themselves against threats that were likely. But only the most paranoid of sects or one with a reason to think someone with that skill would target them would bother defending against it. If nothing else, it meant that most sects would have a hard time holding him if he got even a brief window of opportunity to act. Sen smiled.
“In that case, what’s next?”