Unintended Cultivator

Book 3: Chapter 5: Tribulation

Sen’s first thought after the elixir went to work on him was, “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

No matter how powerful he’d thought those extra ingredients were, it had been a pale, pale shadow of the truth. His previous body advancement had refined the tissues, the organs, even the bones. This refinement went so much further. He felt like it was ripping apart every cell in his body and rebuilding it from the ground up to be something better, more powerful, more efficient. While Sen was all for greater strength, power, and efficiency, he was less impressed with the pure physical torment of the process. The pain he had suffered before was a gentle breeze compared with this fresh hurricane of affliction. It felt like his eyes exploded and his fingernails ripped free from his fingers. His teeth actually shattered, although he couldn’t tell if that was from him clenching his jaw or was a byproduct of the elixir. For those first few instances, Sen thought he was going to die.

Yet, slowly, he managed to claw his way back to some semblance of sanity. He started by focusing on just one bone in his arm, forced himself to watch what was happening, and made himself understand. It didn’t just feel like the elixir was rebuilding his cells from the ground up, it really was rebuilding them from the ground up. Even as he observed, barely clinging to some tiny shred of rational thought, the bone transformed. It had been a serviceable bone before. If it was one vastly stronger than a mortal bone, it had been one made of essentially the same material. Now, it was becoming something else altogether. He didn’t even have a name for the new material.

It reminded him of stone or some kind of crystal construction. It drew heavily from the earth qi of the root the divine turtle provided, but also from the water qi of the ocean flower. What might have become something strong, but brittle, instead became something just as strong but flexible. Sen struggled to imagine the kind of force necessary to break that bone now. He let his awareness widen a little. He saw tiny threads of that strange new qi in his dantian flickering from cell to cell, igniting them to life. He didn’t see it, but he could sense some kind of similar transformation taking place in his marrow. Then, a new peak of agony washed over him, and he was lost in the pain again. Unable to focus on anything but a single thought, a single word.

“Survive.”

It was, in so many ways, the word that had defined his existence. Even when he’d been powerless, scavenging for food, it had all been in the service of survival. His almost obsessive practice on the mountain had, in the back of his mind, been about making sure that he wasn’t cast out to die on the mountain. He had known that Master Feng wouldn’t really do that, that Uncle Kho and Auntie Caihong would have forbidden it, but he’d been abandoned before. That fear had still lived inside of him long after his mind knew it wasn’t going to happen. So, he had worked, ceaselessly, relentlessly, all to survive. Even his reticence about engaging in lethal combat was at least partially driven by that basic need to survive. After all, he was much less likely to die if he didn’t fight other people and spirit beasts than if he did. It hadn’t worked out for him the way he hoped, but he understood where it came from. So, in the face of an agony that threatened to consume his sanity whole, he dug into that basic need, the primal urge, and made it his all-consuming goal. Survive.

Even by the standards of his own hellish experiences with body cultivation, the process seemed long to Sen. Maybe it was because the elixir was rebuilding so much of what he was. Maybe it was the pain distorting any understanding of the passage of time. He discarded worrying about the why because it wouldn’t help. He needed to keep his mind focused on the immediate need to keep going for another second, another minute, another hour, however long it took to survive. After a week or year or ten thousand years, Sen slowly became aware that the pain was receding. Not nearly fast enough, oh it could never be fast enough, but it was slowly ebbing to a level where he could put three or four words together in a row and have them make sense.

He focused on breathing at first. He forced himself to breathe in steady rhythm, drawing the air deep inside his lungs, and then releasing it just as slowly. When he could maintain that steady breathing without having to give it his entire attention, he let a little piece of his mind start the process of cultivating. No matter how powerful or balanced that elixir had been, the body always drew on its own resources to drive advancement. He felt the environmental qi start to fill the empty space in dantian, only for it to be immediately sucked away by everything. Every part of his body was desperate for qi, for all five kinds of qi. As fast as he drew it in, his body ate it up. Sen found that disconcerting given that his body had never behaved that way before. Plus, he’d set up a qi gathering formation, which meant his body was soaking in qi at an accelerated rate. Just as Sen started to worry that he’d need to provide his body with a constant supply of qi at that level, the demand started to fall off. Then, he was just filling his dantian. Somewhere in the midst of all of that, the last lingering vestiges of pain had slipped away.

Sen opened his eyes to find the turtle still sitting where he’d last seen it. The turtle was looking at him.

“That really hurt,” complained Sen, his mind veering away from even trying to remember the details.

“I expect it did. The Five-Fold Body Transformation isn’t for the weak. It is where your body transformation was headed, though. I just helped ensure that you made the last few steps. Although, speaking of pain, you should brace yourself,” warned Elder Bo.

“Brace myself? For what?” Sen asked, sitting up in alarm.

“Tribulation,” said the divine turtle.

Sen remembered Master Feng talking about tribulations. What had he said they usually were?

“Oh no,” said Sen, looking up at thick, dark clouds overhead. “Not lightning.”

As though his very words had triggered the event, Sen felt heavenly qi coalescing around him. He idly noted that his passive cultivation technique was greedily drawing that divine qi into his dantian as fast as it could. Sen couldn’t decide if that was a good thing, or a bad thing. Tribulations were supposed to be some kind of punishment. Would stealing some of that divine qi make it worse? Was it really stealing if they were just throwing it around in the environment? Sen wanted to think that it wasn’t, but he wasn’t a god or an immortal. He expected they made their own decisions about things like that. Even so, he started cycling earth qi. He reached down into the earth, beneath the sand and the soil, down to the rock below. He dragged it up and around himself, then slumped to his knees, exhausted by the effort.

He felt as much as heard the first lightning strike on his tiny makeshift fortress. All of the hair on his body tried to stand up straight, and he could smell the ozone. Then, there was a terrible crash as the lightning obliterated part of the stone. A second strike, and then third carved pieces away from his protection. The stone wasn’t going to last much longer, so Sen cycled up his own lightning and called out the spear he’d gotten from the Soaring Skies sect. He knew he couldn’t defeat heavenly lightning in a direct confrontation, but he might be able to redirect it using his own. When another strike ripped a giant hole in the stone around him, Sen didn’t wait around for another. He dove through the hole and rolled away, thanking Uncle Kho for all those lessons about how to handle a spear when in motion. He felt and heard another strike on the rock before there was a slight pause.

“Here it comes,” he whispered to himself.

Sen pushed lightning qi in the spearhead and held that spear so that the tip was a little over his head. Then, he got creative. He let the lightning in the spearhead seek the ground around him. It was more than a little unsettling for Sen to see a veritable curtain of lightning form a kind of curtain around him. Then, he was done being interested in his own technique as the first bolt of heavenly lightning crashed down onto his curtain. The idea worked, partially. The lightning from above did tend to follow his own lightning down to the ground. Yet, it was so powerful that parts of it still arced into him, searing skin and scorching flesh. He didn’t have a better idea though, so he pushed harder and tried to reinforce the lightning curtain as much as he could, shamelessly burning liquid qi to keep it going. For the next minute or two, lightning bolts fell on Sen like rain. By the end, he wasn’t standing anymore. He was on his knees, clutching the haft of the spear in a death grip meant as much to support himself as to keep it aimed upward. Eventually, he realized that there was no more lightning trying to end his life and let go of his own technique.

Sen collapsed sideways. He could smell the burned cloth, and his own charred body. Yet, as much as it hurt, he could feel his newly advanced body knitting itself back together. Not wanting to overtax it, he fumbled one of Auntie Caihong’s healing pills from his storage ring and choked it down. He was surprised to discover that his qi gathering formation had survived the tribulation, so he crawled inside of it, and just cultivated while his body put itself back together. Sen was really, really tired of pain. He decided that he could wait a while to advance his cultivation again, demonic cultivators be damned. When Sen made himself sit back up, the turtle was looking out at the cove, where Sen could see a small boat approaching fast.

“That woman needs another hobby,” muttered Sen.

The turtle snorted and turned back to Sen. “You survived your tribulation. Well done.”

“They say the first one is the hardest.”

Elder Bo gave Sen a sharp look, or what Sen felt must be a sharp look when coming from a leathery, black-eyed face.

“First,” said Elder Bo. “That was your first tribulation?”

Sen gave a tired nod. “It was.”

“What a very peculiar young cultivator. You’ll have to come back and visit me once you’ve reached core formation, so I can see how it went.”

“How will I find you?”

“Just come back here. I’ll know it’s you.”

With that, the turtle turned and walked into the ocean, not even leaving a ripple in his wake. Sen lay back in the sand, closed his eyes, and pretended he couldn’t hear Lo Meifeng shouting obscenities at him from the water.