Sen sat with his legs crossed and eyes closed. The sun would rise soon, but it wasn’t up yet. It was a quiet time when the night creatures had retreated to their lairs and nests, yet before the day creatures had roused themselves to go about their sunlit activities. He let that gentle hush wash over him and through him. It was an indulgence in serenity that he rarely allowed himself, but given what was about to come, he felt he’d earned this indulgence. He was aware of the pill in his hand. Its actual weight was negligible, especially to someone like him, but it still felt like it might drag his hand to the earth. It had been a long time coming, that pill, the last one in the Five-Fold Body Transformation.
Of course, as Elder Bo had rather cheerfully told him, Sen was on uncharted ground. When he’d suffused his body with divine qi, he had stepped off the true path of the Five-Fold Body Transformation and onto a new path. He was walking the path of the Six-Fold Body Transformation. Like all new paths and uncharted ground, the dangers were unknown. With any form of body cultivation, there was always the chance of failure. That wasn’t the greatest danger, though. The greatest danger was some kind of unchecked or unbalanced transformation. Sen felt a certain kinship and empathy with those body cultivators of old, the ancient geniuses who had walked undaunted into those dangers, hewing a path through the jungles of ignorance.
He had done everything he could to minimize the dangers. He had gone over the recipe again and again, making modifications both large and small to better suit what he understood about his own body. Then, he had discussed those changes with both Auntie Caihong and Fu Ruolan, explaining his reasons and asking for their input. For all of his own intuitive talent, he was not about to ignore their combined centuries of experience and insight. Then, he had set it aside for a month so he could return to the problem with fresh eyes. He had been fortunate with the last pill. Everything went smoothly. He even managed to avoid a tribulation.
Of course, that was only ever a delay of the inevitable. A cultivator never truly escaped tribulations, only postponed them. Every advancement that went by without one simply increased the odds that the next would draw heavenly ire down on one’s head. With this pill, though, he’d be functionally transitioning into what would be considered the nascent soul realm of body cultivation. There would be no reprieve this time, which was why he had chosen to venture into the wilds. A tribulation would come. In all likelihood, it would be a terrible thing. He had no intention of drawing something like that down onto the heads of the townspeople or the people at his academy. Everyone else called it a sect. He knew that it was a sect, but he persisted in calling it an academy. It was almost spiteful on his part, denying everyone there the supposed dignity of calling a sect, but that was his prerogative.
Sen pushed away those distracting thoughts. Those were truly problems for later because there was a good chance that he would not survive the advancement. The heavens were not known for their lenience, and the closer one drew to ascension, the less forgiving they became. While failure was the most common bottleneck at the lower stages, that wasn’t the case for those entering the final stage before ascension. The most common bottleneck there was death. And I’ll have to face it twice as often as any other cultivator, thought Sen a little bitterly. He knew that being a body cultivator was a big part of the reason he was still alive. All of that extra durability, resilience, and raw strength had helped him bridge the gap with opponents who should have crushed him. Even so, it didn’t make him any more excited to face multiple, increasingly lethal tribulations.
He shook his head at his own balking. It wouldn’t change anything. The only way to avoid the extra tribulations would be to abandon his body cultivation, and it had been made painfully clear to him that doing that was more than merely courting death, it was embracing it. He supposed he could stop after this pill, but not before. A little part of Sen was amused. Wasn’t that such a perfect description of cultivation? Too dangerous to stop, and almost too dangerous to keep going. It was only by sprinting successfully on a jian’s edge that one could succeed. Smiling a little, Sen opened his eyes to take in the pre-dawn light and look at the trees around him. If he was to die this day, at least he would die somewhere that was pretty. Better by far than dying on some road in some useless duel for honor, or on a battlefield surrounded by the dead and dying. Although, finding himself in such a place might be unavoidable if Master Feng was right but, again, a problem for after.
Sen reached out a hand and brushed it across the grass. His hand came away a little wet from the morning dew. He rubbed that moisture between his fingers. It was a strange sensation. He remembered how water felt from before, when he’d still been living on the streets, and this was the same, but it wasn’t. It felt muted somehow. He supposed some of it was that he’d become all but immune to things like heat and cold, but it felt like more than that. It was as if he’d already started to leave his world behind in some fundamental way. Like he was already a half-step into whatever place that people went when they ascended. Maybe, I am, he thought.
He’d often said that cultivators were little more than guests in the mortal world, their true domain the Jianghu. Perhaps, as one approached and joined the ranks of nascent soul cultivators, they also became like guests to the Jianghu. Beings who were simply too powerful to truly participate, save in direct conflict with those of similar advancement. Sen wasn’t sure if he was quite there yet, but he thought he was getting close. Not that he thought himself so powerful that he couldn’t be brought down in the right circumstances. There were certainly nascent soul cultivators powerful enough to do it. Gather enough peak core formation cultivators, and they could probably do it if he didn’t have any time to prepare. But the threat of death from others had become a more distant concern to him of late. No, the most pressing threats came from his own advancement and the heavens.
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“Time to face that threat,” he said softly.
He lifted his hand to his mouth and let the pill slide between his teeth. He held the pill there for a moment, his tongue pressing it against the roof of his mouth, before he swallowed it. It’s done, he thought. No turning back now. Sen took slow, deep breaths as he waited for the pill to reach his stomach. He’d thought he’d feel some trepidation at this moment, but he was oddly calm. Not that the danger was lost on him, but he simply realized that there was no longer any point in being afraid. Whatever was about to happen would happen with or without his fears. Under those conditions, he might as well face it calmly.
When it started, there was no slow buildup of power. It happened in a rush. Sen felt an almost palpable sense of relief when the pain hit. Not that he enjoyed pain, but it was expected, familiar, nearly an old friend to him. Even as the pill dug its claws into his flesh and bones, he thought back to that first pill that Master Feng had given him. He always thought of that moment as the worst pain he’d ever felt, but he recognized that for the lie it was. It had been deeply unpleasant. It was unquestionably the worst thing he’d ever been through up until then in his short life, but it was nothing compared to the dizzying cliffs of agony he’d scaled in the years since. Relative to what he was enduring now, it would probably only rank as uncomfortable.
Even as he remained in his cross-legged position, he wanted to scream. It felt like lightning was alive and coursing through every fiber of his body. It was possible that was exactly what was happening. The pill had been so complex, had so many components, that it could be doing almost anything to him. The feeling that his bones were now molten metal might be accurate. The sensation that shadow was infiltrating his blood might be true. There was a sense that he was becoming even more connected with the fundamental building blocks of creation itself, yet simultaneously becoming anathema to creation as well. He was a cultivator. This paradox was his lot. He defied the heavens, seized power, and by doing so became something else, something other than human, something unnatural.
The world around him heaved and groaned as his body was remade, forged into something closer to that of an immortal. Winds howled around him. Stone shot into the air in great pillars and then shattered, pelting him with razor-edged fragments that meant less than nothing to him now. Water condensed into two streams that wrapped around each other in an all too familiar double helix that swirled around him. Fire erupted from his very skin, turning the robes he wore into ash in a heartbeat. Metal rose from the depths of the earth until he sat on a liquid pool of it. He was aware of these things, peripherally, but he was focused inward, trying to understand the changes that were happening to him, the way the pill was interacting with the existing changes to his body.
The thing that he worried about from the start, the thing he couldn’t account for, was the divine qi that had suffused him not once but twice. Cultivators knew what it was and, to some very limited extent, what it did. But that knowledge was mostly based on the effects it seemed to have on a cultivator. Sen didn’t know that he was entirely unique in having divine qi driven into every part of him, but he hadn’t been able to find even a story of another cultivator who had done it. That meant that there was no framework, no body of knowledge that he could draw from to predict what would happen here. If divine qi worked the way that people guessed it worked, it should only help this process along by acting as a catalyst for the things the pill was trying to do. If and should were words to make an alchemist shudder.
As the pill worked its literal and figurative magic on him, the pain grew and grew. Sen had thought it would. This was the final step in a body cultivation process so dangerous that, if he survived it, he might well be the first person in a thousand years or more to pull it off. He didn’t even know what the final result was supposed to be. The manual had been infuriatingly vague about that, which had made him wonder if this body cultivation method had ever been successfully completed, or if it was just the wild musings of some mad alchemist from a very different time. As his suffering grew ever more intense, the very earth seemed to shriek in fury. He was pummeled by earth, fire, water, air, and metal. He hunched over, the screams he’d been holding back finally escaping. His world condensed to a single point of concentration. I have to survive for the people I love, he thought. I can’t fail them. I will not abandon them.
The pain rose one last time to a peak that seemed determined to crush his will to survive. Then, it was over. Sen crumpled to one side, barely able to string one thought after the next. He was heaving for air that he was half-convinced he didn’t even need anymore. I lived, he thought. He pushed himself up onto his knees and forced his eyes open. The ground beneath him was a blasted, scorched mess. He looked around and froze. He had been sitting on the ground in the middle of a forest. Now, he was crouched at the peak of a small mountain that hadn’t existed before. He turned his head in the direction he knew the town and the academy were. If he tried just a little, his enhanced eyes could pick out the individual buildings from where he was. He laughed a little at the shock and confusion that must be happening in the town at that very moment.
“I lived,” he said.
Then, everything around him went dark, and he heard the thunder overhead. He shot a baleful look up at the gathering clouds.
“Yeah. Yeah,” he muttered. “You can wait your turn.”