Book 5: Chapter 6: The Forge of Practice
For all her talk of finding out what made other nascent soul cultivators find him so interesting, Fu Ruolan took very little notice of Sen during his first few months there. Her only instructions to him were to heal and cultivate. A very small part of him felt annoyed with the woman for a couple of reasons. Some of it was simple ego. He didn’t like that she was functionally ignoring him while she did…whatever it was that she did with her time. He was also annoyed with her because she’d told him flat out that she wouldn’t give him the manual until she was satisfied that he was at least mostly recovered. Sen felt like that was a basic betrayal of their agreement and had complained to Falling Leaf about it. She was less than sympathetic.
“It sounds to me like she saw your basic nature,” said Falling Leaf while they ate dinner together.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Sen.
He felt mildly offended but struggled to put his finger on exactly what he felt offended about. She had given him a look that suggested he was being intentionally obtuse about something very obvious.
“If she had given it to you, what would you have done?”
“I’d have read it,” he said.
“Of course, and then what?”
Sen couldn’t believe he’d walked right into it. The very first thing he would have done if Fu Ruolan had given him the manual would have been to try to take his body cultivation to the next step. Falling Leaf had clearly discerned that, and it seemed Fu Ruolan pegged him for that sort as well.
“I’d have tried to advance,” he said in a sulky voice.
“Naturally, and killed yourself doing it. If you survived the advancement, which you wouldn’t, the tribulation would kill you.”
“That’s not…completely certain,” Sen objected with zero conviction.
“You should be grateful that she didn’t let you kill yourself being foolish.”
“I liked it better when you didn’t like to talk.”
It took Sen a moment to realize that he’d actually said those words out loud instead of just thinking them. He’d tried to apologize immediately, but the damage had been done. Her furious expression had told him that. The full month of total silence on her part that followed that ill-conceived statement convinced Sen that he did not, in fact, like it better when she refused to speak to him. That silence took on a life of its own. It loomed like some kind of unwanted guest in the galehouse he’d constructed for them to live in during Sen’s semi-unwilling apprenticeship to Fu Ruolon. At least, that was how Sen felt about the silence. It became ever more oppressive as time went on. Sen discovered that he had a burning need to be outside practicing a lot during those deeply uncomfortable weeks.
He did discover that one upside of proximity to the nascent soul cultivator was that no spirit beasts dared to come within a mile of her. While he hadn’t tested it, Sen had a suspicion that the local spirit beast population would likely avoid him moving forward as well. It had been one thing when he was killing them off a few at a time. Killing off a few hundred in one fell blow, well, that sent a message on an entirely different level. Still, Sen appreciated that he could go outside and walk in relative safety during those first few weeks when his body was truly too weak to help him do anything and his qi reserves were still so low. Over time, though, he found that his body was gradually putting muscle back on. Even though the memory of his pain woke Sen up in cold sweats at times, his fear that it would return was proved mercifully unfounded.
So, he did as he’d been told. He cultivated. He slept. He returned to his roots. Once more, he took to unarmed combat training and running. Once more, it was like being tortured on a daily basis. Despite the increasing reserves of liquid qi and core qi available to him, though, he didn’t fall back on them. For all the temptation they provided, they wouldn’t provide growth. Sen found himself understanding what he’d been taught in new ways. When he’d been initially learning, everything had been about comprehending the moves and mastering the forms. Yet, he could see how shallow his understanding had been. Even when he’d moved beyond the stage of thinking his way through every attack and defense to responding on instinct and muscle memory, he hadn’t had the experience or the mental bandwidth to see anything deeper. Nor had he understood himself well enough to know why he’d liked some approaches better than others.
Now, with far more experience than he’d ever desired under his belt and a clearer sense of who he was, Sen could see those approaches to fighting in a broader context. He could recognize those hard forms not just as a channel for aggression, but as a kind of philosophy about the world. They saw the world as an inherently dangerous and violent place that must be met with aggression in return. It wasn’t a cheerful philosophy of life, but it did conform with Sen’s experiences. The systems that adopted that philosophy were fundamentally focused outward. The softer forms, the ones that Sen had always found more appealing in the early days, were fundamentally focused inward. It wasn’t so much that they saw the world differently, but that they saw an individual’s relationship to that world differently. The softer forms looked for ways to keep the individual in balance not only with the world but with themselves.
Sen supposed that he had, even then, recognized his failure to find balance. It had been a problem then, and it remained a problem. His attempts to fix it had been universal failures. Some of that rested on his own shoulders, if for no other reason than he couldn’t see a clear path to fix it. Yet, it wasn’t entirely a problem of his own making nor was it entirely a personal failure to resolve it. Every time he tried to fix it, the world seemed to throw him into some new conflict that ended in a massacre and set him back again. He acknowledged that avoiding those situations could, in theory, give him the space to find a more permanent solution. Of course, avoiding those situations almost always meant compromising things he was apparently incapable of compromising. As long as that was the case, Sen feared that a lack of balance would remain a fact of his existence.
Yet, for all that such thoughts troubled him, the practice itself reminded him of his time on the mountain. It had been a hard place in many ways, but it had also been a place of relative safety for him as well. He’d been pulled away from a life that was likely to be violent and all too short. Granted, his new life had been violent as well, but the violence was different. Everyone who became a cultivator understood to one degree or another that they were accepting that violence, maybe even embracing it. More importantly, to Sen’s way of thinking, it was something that they accepted as part of the price for striving for something more than mere survival. Cultivators might have to fight each other, but they also got to travel as they wished with virtually no interference from local governments. Cultivators were largely freed from any concerns about class or rank. As a mere core cultivator, Sen had reshaped the political landscape in the capital. The fact that he’d grown up poor and without so much as a family name simply did not matter. All that mattered was that he was a comparatively strong cultivator.
The kind of freedom was a prize in itself. Yet, the true prize was the possibility of ascension to immortality or godhood. At least, Sen thought that it was. He still hadn’t made up his mind that ascension, immortality, and godhood were actually good things for cultivators. His own failings made him doubt that anyone would benefit from him ascending to such a lofty station. As much as he respected Master Feng, Sen struggled to imagine what kind of god he would be or make. Would he become a god of the blade? One of overwhelming force? While Sen saw the possibility of his ascension as something that might happen at some point, Master Feng was much closer to that possibility. That proximity made the question of what he would become a much more pressing matter in Sen’s mind, although he didn’t think his input actually mattered all that much. Master Feng would become what he would become, and Sen just had to hope it would be a good thing.
While Sen believed that all the reflecting he was doing would ultimately benefit him, the moment he relished the most was when he felt ready to once again resume his jian practice. While he found himself using the spear more often, he’d spent more time with the sword than anything else. He had trained with it relentlessly on the mountain and diligently since he’d left. During the months of searching, though, he’d abandoned practicing anything. He cultivated because it was necessary and unavoidable. Yet, the pain he’d been in had precluded anything as demanding as daily jian practice. That loss had, he realized in hindsight, unbalanced him even more than usual by depriving him of an important outlet and routine. While too many routines weren’t necessarily a good thing, Sen took comfort in the ones he allowed into his life. They gave him time in every day to consider his situation and evaluate options. Removing even one of those opportunities to evaluate his choices in any given day inevitably made him more reactive. It also made him unpredictable even to himself because he made more decisions based on instincts in the moment.
So, it was with a deep sigh of relief that he drew a jian and began to rebuild the fluid grace and muscle memory he had once taken for granted. His form was rough, but that was something he knew he could repair in the forge of practice. What mattered in that moment was the simple act of having the sword in his hand and repeating motions that he had carried out thousands of times before. It soothed something that had been unsettled in him for a long time and let him focus his emotions. While it wasn’t a cure-all for everything that ailed him, it was a step in the right direction.
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