Unintended Cultivator

Much as he had done at his own manor, Sen stepped onto a qi platform and rose high above the royal palace. It probably wasn’t necessary. He didn’t need to physically see structures like walls to manipulate them, but a little spectacle was probably in order. He’d drawn quite a crowd the first time around. Of course, he’d been up there for hours and hours. That it would only take him an hour or two hadn’t been a boast to impress Jing. Sen had a rough idea of how much wall he’d be working with, and with the manor as reference, he’d been able to make a rough estimate. Of course, you never know what you’re dealing with until you’re dealing with it, Sen reminded himself. He’d learned that lesson with alchemy. The same ingredients never acted quite the same way. Most alchemy recipes simply worked to compensate for those variances to produce approximately the same results each time. In the same way, these walls might have problems that he hadn’t considered, such as shoddier construction, or some kind of erosion, or something he just hadn’t considered. Oh well, I won’t know until start.

Cycling for earth qi, he reached down into the walls, looking to get a sense of what he could and couldn’t do with them. He paused then, frowning down at the structures. What he was sensing didn’t make any sense. Huge stretches of the walls were little more than empty shells of rock. They looked sturdy enough to make for a good bluff but that was it. It wouldn’t take much more than a couple of mortals with heavy hammers and a couple minutes of labor to punch a hole straight through them. A cultivator could have done it in moments. Sen couldn’t tell if they’d been made that way or intentionally weakened somehow as a prelude to some kind of attack. He supposed that it didn’t much matter, but he would have to tell Jing about it. He was also startled to find the remnants of formations embedded in the walls. Nothing as complex as what he’d done at the manor, but that they had ever been there was curious. He lowered the qi platform and flew it along the wall, studying what was left of the formations to get a sense of what they’d been for.

He snorted to himself. He wondered if one of those early kings had been hiding their status as a cultivator the same way as whoever had built that lair beneath his manor. There was a qi-gathering formation or what was left of one. The design was basic. It probably wouldn’t have even drawn the attention of the sects, just slightly lifted the ambient level of qi inside the palace. Sen of all people understood that even small improvements could yield substantial results over time. Boosting the ambient qi level would have shaved down the amount of time that someone had to actively cultivate. Maybe not that important at the qi-gathering stage, but as the cultivator’s needs grew, that reduced time would become increasingly important. If there was another qi-gathering formation somewhere inside the palace, around a specific room, with the right kind of obscuring formation around it, it could have condensed that slightly higher ambient qi into a tiny little cultivation paradise for someone. Sen might have to look around later and see if his guess was correct. Even if it was damaged, he could probably repair it. It could even serve as a kind of peace offering to Chan Yu Ming. Don’t get distracted, he chided himself.

The other formation took him a little longer to understand. It had suffered substantially more damage, so Sen was forced to do a lot more guessing and rely on more intuitive leaps to puzzle out its purpose. He felt like slapping his own forehead once he pieced it together. It was another low-level formation designed to help subtly reinforce the walls, probably by borrowing a bit of strength from that higher ambient qi level. Sen found himself nodding along. It was a smart design for anyone looking to incrementally improve their safety without being too obvious about it. The strategy also bypassed problems like everyone needing talismans to come and go. It was a passive approach instead of an active approach. Sen didn’t necessarily favor it, but it made sense in a place where hundreds of people needed to come and go on a daily basis. The question was, should he reinstate the formations?

On the one hand, he didn’t see any harm in it. The formations would provide an obvious benefit. If he improved them a bit, made them a little more obvious, it would be a signal to everyone with eyes to see that a cultivator had taken an active hand in preparing the palace defenses. On the other hand, he had no idea how long these formations had been dormant. Had they been left that way on purpose? The royal family could likely have hired a sect to repair them. They were simple enough that most sects probably would have jumped at the chance to let any outer disciples with some talent for formations get the practice. The big sects here presumably would have done it just to get a bit shaved off their taxes or to smooth over any recent disagreements. Was it possible the royal family just didn’t know? Wouldn’t Chan Yu Ming have noticed? Maybe she wouldn’t have, thought Sen. I didn’t notice until I went looking, and she doesn’t have an earth qi affinity or my experience with formations. Even if she did notice them, she might not have understood what they were.

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Sen decided that he would just fix them with some minor tweaks to improve their performance. After he made the walls into something that he considered adequate. Sen rose back into the air, and much as he had done before, he reached deep into the earth below, searching for stone he could use without causing problems. He drew it up slowly and filled in all of those hollow spaces in the wall. After all, he couldn’t build better walls on a hollow foundation. He allowed the functionally liquefied rock to harden in place. With that pesky problem out of the way, he got down to the real work. He also told himself that he was just smiling. It was definitely not a smirk. The work itself was almost trivial. There was no real discovery to it, which meant that he soon grew bored with just making the walls higher, thicker, and all but impervious to anything mortals might throw at it. Then, he remembered a piece of shiny black rock that Uncle Kho had shown him once. It was called obsidian. It had been both oddly fragile and absurdly sharp, but his earth qi affinity would let him do almost anything he wanted to it.

He had to reach far deeper into the earth to find what he wanted. It was the first time in a long time that he’d felt that much strain when working with earth qi. He was working right at the boundary of his limits just to touch what he wanted, but he could touch it. That was enough. It took a while, but the outside of the walls went from the dull gray of normal stone to the shining black of obsidian. Then, because Sen couldn’t resist the urge, he covered the interior side of the walls with it. Oh yes, he thought, that does look positively foreboding. With the physical structure of the walls complete, he turned his attention to the formations.

He’d carefully preserved what was already there so he’d have something to build on. He swiftly realized how futile that had been. The qi-gathering formation was simply too primitive for his tastes and the strengthening formation was too damaged. He’d just use them as inspiration instead.

He soon lost himself in the process of making the formations the way he did when he was making elixirs. He forgot all about making the qi-gathering formation into something basic and found himself looking for a way to make it more efficient. To let it concentrate the qi better without simply soaking up all of the qi in the city. To let it draw from sources that were farther away. After all, there was earth qi to spare deep in the earth. For that matter, there was a surprising amount of untouched water and fire qi down there too. Reach high enough up in the air, and there were currents of air qi that wouldn’t even notice the tiny draw from this formation. Wood qi was trickier but not impossible. There were parks all over the city. It was as if all Sen needed to do was reach out his hand and tiny channels spread out through the city, the earth below, and into the sky itself. Since he was looking for it, he felt it when the qi started to flow toward the palace.

Satisfied that the qi-gathering formation was working properly, he went to work on the strengthening formation. Once he really focused on the problem, it took him about two minutes to design the formation in his head. It was in place minutes later. It wasn’t a subtle design because it wasn’t a subtle problem. The formation needed to do exactly one thing and do it well. However, Sen did think that he saw the obsidian take on a bit of extra luster as the formation activated. Then again, it might have just been a change in the position of the sun. He looked around at the masses of metal that had been floating around him for a while. It had been necessary to extract them to maintain the integrity of the stone. He’d almost negligently divided them into the different kinds of metal. He turned his eyes to the biggest floating mass. Iron had been the most common ore. Then, definitely without ever once smirking, he retrieved a particular beast core.

It still had some remnant divine qi in it. He’d mostly hung onto it because it was divine qi, not because he had any particular use for it. But now he did. He siphoned the qi out of the core and imbued it into that largest mass of metal, which took on a telltale sparkle. He refined and shaped the metal into more elegant-looking spikes, ones “befitting” of the royal palace, and spaced them out at the top of the wall, slowly sinking them into the stone. Between the sunlight and the divine qi, the things positively glowed in the late afternoon light. Sen looked around and found that he was generally satisfied with the work. He lowered the qi platform down to where Jing stood, his expression stupefied.

Grinning like a madman, Sen said, “Now, that is a Fortress of Doom.”