Sen smiled at the little house with the barn-like structure out back. It was exactly as he remembered the place, which he realized wasn’t that big of a surprise. It hadn’t actually been ten years since he last visited the formation flag maker and his wife, it just felt like it. He walked up to the door and, much as he had the last time, summoned an expensive bottle of wine. He knocked on the door and waited. A few moments later a gray-haired woman opened the door. Her expression went from annoyed to surprised and happy from one eye blink to the next. Sen offered her a very respectful bow.
“Ung Wen, this humble wandering cultivator greets you.”
Snorting a little, she returned his bow and said, “Ung Wen greets the Lord Lu. Heavens above, did you somehow get prettier since the last time I saw you?”
“I suppose it’s possible. I was so hideous before it hardly seems possible that I couldn’t improve a little,” said Sen as he proffered the bottle.
Taking the bottle, she waved him inside. Sen sat while the woman bustled around and made them tea. Before she could find a snack, Sen waved a hand over the table and a plate of small cakes appeared.
“I’ve been trying out that recipe you gave me for these. I thought I’d present my efforts to the master for her appraisal.”
“My appraisal, eh?” she said. “Well, it’d be rude of me to refuse now.”
She carefully lifted one of the cakes from the plate and bit into it. She chewed thoughtfully, her face betraying nothing of her thoughts. After she swallowed the bite, she lifted her tea and took a sip.
“Well, I suppose it’s not a complete failure,” she said with a merry twinkle in her eyes.
“I am relieved,” said Sen.
“I’m just teasing you, of course. These are excellent. Well done.”
Sen found himself smiling broadly at the praise. It was one thing to be praised for his cultivation skills. Much of those were things he didn’t fully understand, as much intuition as knowledge. Cooking, though, was truly his. He’d put in the effort. Learned what worked by watching and listening to people who knew what they were doing, and then practicing. The skills felt truly earned, as did Ung Wen’s praise.
“My daughter is rather fond of them,” said Sen. “So, I really should be thanking you.”
“You didn’t tell us you had a daughter,” said Ung Wen.
“I didn’t at the time. She didn’t have anyone, so I adopted her.”
“How old is she?”
“She five. At least, I think so. She didn’t properly remember when her birthday was, so there’s some guesswork involved.”
“Time is one of those things that's hard to keep track of at that age. Every day is an eternity, stuffed with new experiences. So, what’s she like?”
Sen considered that briefly and said, “She’s probably the most fearless thing I’ve ever seen. Unless she’s meeting new people.”
Ung Wen threw back her head and laughed. The two talked for another half an hour before Ung Wen sighed.
“I suppose I should take you out to see that husband of mine so you can get your formation flags. He’ll be relieved that you’ve come. They’re valuable. It made him nervous to have them here.”
“Ah, well then, let us go and unburden his mind.”
The pair went out to the barn and Ung Wen called in through the door.
“Tan Lin. You have a customer.”
“I’ll be right there,” the man called back before appearing a few moments later. “You’re here!”
“I am,” agreed Sen amiably.
Tan Lin seemed to remember himself and bowed.
“Forgive my rudeness, Lord Lu.”
“Just Sen will do fine,” he said with a wave of his hand. “I understand you might have a formation flag or two ready for me.”
“I do!” said Tan Lin with obvious relief. “Right this way.”
Sen wondered if Ung Wen had been downplaying how nervous her husband had been about those flags. He trailed after the craftsman into the work area proper. He glanced around, expecting to see his own flags piled up somewhere, but just saw what had become the standard, more inferior flags. He went to ask about it, only to see the man drag out a heavy chest that had been hidden from view. Sen’s eyebrows rose as the man undid a heavy physical lock, and then an assortment of qi locks. After that, he went through the same process with a smaller chest, before he finally plucked out a storage ring and offered it to Sen. After a moment of concentration, he was able to access the ring and its contents. He summoned a formation flag. He ran his hands over the material and smiled. It felt right, like the ones that Uncle Kho had given him all those years ago.
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“That was a lot of security on the flags,” observed Sen.
“A few people saw me working on them. They got a little pushy about me selling to them. Didn’t really want to hear the word no.”
“Couldn’t they just order some for themselves?”
“Sure. Except, they wanted to pay the same price.”
“Ah,” said Sen, finally understanding. “Well, I appreciate you hanging on to them for me.”
Sen swiftly transferred the flags into one of his own storage rings and tossed the one Tan Lin had originally handed him back to the man. The craftsman eyed the ring a little uncertainly.
“For the next time,” said Sen. “No reason you should have to buy a new storage treasure for every order I place.”
“Fair enough,” said Tan Lin, who looked around for a place to put the ring before Ung Wen plucked it from his hand.
“You’ll just lose it,” she said and gave her husband an affectionate kiss on the cheek.
Tan Lin smiled sheepishly and said, “She’s right. I will.”
“Well,” said Sen, “you’ve held up your end of the bargain. I guess it’s time that I make good. Let’s head back inside. I’ll need to use your kitchen.”
Once they got back inside, Sen examined both of them with his qi and his spiritual sense. He even went so far as to have them cycle their qi to get as clear a picture as possible of what he was working with. That was followed by a lot of questions about what they wanted from their cultivation moving forward. It was one thing to know that Tan Lin had a wood affinity and that Ung Wen had a water affinity, but the way they wanted to use their cultivation could have a lot of impact on what he made for them. Sen had been careful with the construction of his core. It played to his affinities, certainly, but also to his needs. He knew that he was going to be doing a lot of fighting, so speed and explosive power were part of what he’d aimed for in crafting his core. For Tan Lin, who focused almost entirely on crafting, speed and explosive power would be largely useless. He needed a core that augmented stable qi flows and endurance of use. Ung Wen, on the other hand, was somewhere in the middle.
All of those factors played into Sen’s thinking as he delved into the components he had stored in his rings. He resisted the urge to smirk at the uncertain looks that the married couple shared when he dropped his trusty, battered old pot onto the stove. He had to forcefully suppress a laugh at their astonished looks when he started to pull out ingredients and reagents that nearly bled qi. Soon, though, he was lost in the process as he dropped in a water-qi affinity lotus that he’d found in a tiny lake deep in the wilds. He balanced that with lesser, or what he considered lesser, earth, fire, air, and metal-affinity ingredients and reagents.
As the elixir bubbled and boiled, he could sense that it wasn’t quite what it should be, what it needed to become. He dipped back into his supplies and summoned a feather from a thunder-crow. He wasn’t entirely sure what it contained that the elixir needed. However, the moment it landed in the pot, he could sense some minor disharmony, some dissonance that existed somewhere deep in the structure of the elixir correct itself. Even as all of that occurred, he made the countless adjustments that barely registered in his mind. He didn’t understand why other alchemists couldn’t feel these things or make these corrections, but he wasn’t going to hamper himself by not doing them. He’d been down the road of self-inflected near-madness once before, he never intended to do it again.
The first elixir had barely cooled enough to be poured off before he was at work on the second elixir. That elixir relied on an acorn from a thousand-year oak. The tree had been almost impossibly large, towering over the rest of the forest around it, positively blazing with qi, and possibly sapient if Sen didn’t miss his guess. He wouldn’t have dared to try to take anything directly off the tree itself, but his theft of a handful of acorns had not brought any wrath down on his head. If he’d been planning on feeding the elixir to a mortal, he knew he would have had to do things to the acorn. Otherwise, he would have risked making them ill. Fortunately, cultivator constitutions were a bit hardier, so he was able to drop the nut into the pot whole, shell and all.
The work for that elixir was trickier. Wood qi was more sedate and stable than water qi, which accepted change as its natural state. He had to nudge the elixir along slowly. Other ingredients went into the pot in much smaller amounts. It forced him to adjust from his usual approach, to adapt, and he loved every second of it. He reveled in the challenge and the state of purpose it provided. He basked in the warm glow of creation. Then, inevitably, and with a touch of the bittersweet, it was over. He poured the elixir through the cheesecloth and then sealed it. Smiling at the two vials he picked them up and turned to hand them over. He stopped short at the looks of awe on the faces of Tan Lin and Ung Wen. A little self-consciously, he held out the vials toward their respective owners. Both of them shied back like they didn’t dare get near the elixirs.
“This is what I promised you,” said Sen, pushing the vials a little closer.
“We can’t,” said Tan Lin in a hoarse whisper. “Those are too valuable. We could never repay.”
“Nonsense. They’re literally only valuable to you. I made them specifically to suit your needs. I mean, maybe someone else could use them, but they’d never get as much out of it. So, you might as well take them.”
Ung Wen jerked, almost like she was waking up, and immediately shushed Tan Lin. She reached out, took the vials, and dropped one into Tan Lin’s hand. She stared down at the elixir in her own trembling hand like it was some kind of a miracle. She looked up at him, and he thought she was about to burst into tears.
“Thank you,” she said. “This will really work?”
“I’ve done everything I can to make sure it will, which is quite a lot. Just make sure you take them well away from anything or anyone. There’s almost always a tribulation when you move between the major cultivation stages.”
“A tribulation,” said Tan Lin. “I haven’t faced one of those in… Honestly, I don’t even remember how long it’s been.”
Sen grimaced and said, “Yeah, well, I promise that they’re exactly as terrible as you remember. Which reminds me.”
Sen summoned two healing elixirs and handed them to Ung Wen.
“For after the tribulation,” he said in answer to the unspoken question in their eyes. “Just a little something to smooth the way.”
“How can we thank you?” asked Tan Lin.
“There’s no need. I’m just keeping the promise I made you.”