ericdontigney

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 8 – Minder

Kelima just stared at him with wide eyes and disbelief written all over her face. That silence went on for five very long seconds. Then, words exploded from the girl.

“What? Do you think I’ve been chasing after you this whole time because I want to be here? Are you out of your mind? I don’t care how pretty you are. No man alive is worth the kind of trouble you cause. And, on top of that, you have the personality of a crab-bear that’s fresh from molting! I’m here ...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 55 – The Wall

Jing stared out at the land that he used to think of as his. The hubris of that notion was made painfully evident to him as watched that ravening horde of spirit beasts draw closer and closer. Every foot they covered made it feel like it was their land and always had been. It also felt like a rope tightening around his neck. Not that those feelings were brand new. He’d felt the same things, if on a lesser scale, when Fate’s Razor had made his pronouncement about the new order of ...

Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 15 – Blades and Magic

“That went well,” observed Sig after a few awkward moments of silence.

James shot him a withering look that had zero impact on the other man. Chrosan stared in the direction that Seiran had stormed off before he turned a confused look on James.

“What did you say to her?” asked the young man.

James lifted his hands and said, “I didn’t say anything.”

“Then, why did she leave like that?”

 “I’ll explain it to you when you’re older,” sai...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 54 – A Kind Boy

Save for the occasional rise and fall of Lu Sen’s chest and the beads of sweat on his forehead, the man might have been dead. At least, that was what Lai Dongmei thought as she stared down at him. She knew that something was wrong but lacked the training to understand what. It was an unusual feeling of powerlessness that gripped the nascent soul cultivator in that moment. She felt compelled to do something. However, there was nothing that to do. Rarely did anyone wish for the presence of Ma...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 53 – Leadership

General Mo Kegong stood in the early morning light and scowled into the distance from the top of the city wall. He knew that the spirit beasts were out there. He’d expected them to launch an attack already, but it hadn’t come. Turning from the at least temporarily unthreatening countryside beyond the walls, he walked with a measured pace. He knew that he should be sitting in room in the palace. It’s what the other generals were doing, but he had no patience for that kind of thing. He’...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 52 – Young Monster

Sen ultimately told Shi Ping to head anywhere at the base of wall, look for someone in charge, and tell them he was a cultivator there to help.

“If they give you a hard time, tell them that I sent you there personally,” Sen had told the other cultivator. “I don’t think they’ll give you any trouble, though. I suspect that anyone who can and will fight is welcome right now.”

Shi Ping had nodded at that and, after hesitating for a moment, asked the question that Sen had b...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 7 – Orcs!

Terry woke up early the next morning. It wasn’t quite zero dark thirty, but it was close. He’d accomplished that particular feat by crawling into his tent almost immediately after finishing his bowl of soup and cleaning up afterward, thereby avoiding any meaningful conversation with the Kelima. He figured escaping the girl was worth at least one more shot. After all, anything worth doing was worth doing repeatedly. He swiftly dismantled his tent, tucked the still-napping Dus...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 51 – Stick of Judgment

Sen stared down at the last of the spikes on top of the castle wall. He was waiting to receive word. It had taken most of two hours with Lai Dongmei getting increasingly nervous and trying very hard not to show it before he’d finally gotten the necessary insight to make his lightning borrowing idea possible. Ironically, it hadn’t been thinking about lightning that had done it. It had been looking up at those looming black clouds and thinking about all the rain that must waiting to crash d...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 6 – You!

While Kelima went a short distance off into the woods for some privacy as she tried to clean herself up, Terry took the opportunity to dig the core out of the ape thing. He was running about fifty-fifty on which ones he could absorb and which ones he couldn’t. That turned out to be one of the cores he could absorb. Checking a twinge of annoyance, he posed a mental question to other-Terry.

Do you have any idea why I can absorb some of those cores and not others?<...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 50 – I Never Understood

“Is he here?”

Lo Meifeng just stared at the man standing in front of her for several seconds. She recognized him. At least, his features held some vague resemblance to the man she remembered as Shi Ping. That was where the similarity ended. The Shi Ping of her memory was a plump, lazy, and generally cowardly person. His cultivation had been sound but altogether unimpressive. He was someone that she had considered destined for mediocrity, only given a lengthy lease on life by Lu Sen�...

Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 14 – Mindset

There was a rapid-fire ting, ting, ting, as James blocked the flurry of dagger strikes from Seiran with his short swords. The problem was that he didn’t know, not for sure, how or why he was suddenly able to do that when he couldn’t the day before. Not that everything was coming up James, either. As had happened countless times the previous day, a small foot crashed into his chest.

Thud.

And James was abruptly looking up at the sky again for...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 49 – Borrowing

It seemed like a thousand important matters vied for every second of Sen’s attention, but there came a moment when he had to tell everyone to leave him alone. A few people reacted like he was being difficult or surly. At least, they did right up until he told them that he needed to go focus on a solution for the massive formation the spirit beasts were constructing. Some of the cultivators still doubted that spirit beasts could make formations, but he’d put the idea in their heads. He cou...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 48 – Cunning on Demand

Sen had to work hard to quell his nervousness as he sat at the large table and waited for the last few stragglers to arrive. Some of them were mortals and near the outer edges of the city, so he couldn’t expect cultivator speed from them. He’d called together the main leadership in the city for the ostensible purpose of informing him about the progress of the various defense projects they were overseeing. He did need that information, but he wouldn’t have bothered to summon them if that...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 47 – The Worst Possible Thing

Sen spent a little of the time that he didn’t have walking to where Misty Peak had apparently bought a very large house. It was distressingly close to Lu Manor. A fact that he was quite sure she had taken into account when she acquired the place. His first impulse had been to race over, but better sense took hold before he did that. He knew that he could be impatient. However, impatience would not serve him well when dealing with that woman. At the best of times, she could only be described...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 5 – Quit Complaining

Terry leaned against a tree and tried to catch his breath. A few feet away, Kelima Silventar was bent over at the waist with her hands on her knees and gasping for air. Terry wasn’t entirely sure if he should give the noble grudging credit or be supremely pissed. He’d sprinted down the road for the better part of an hour. Part of him had hoped in vain that the annoying girl would give up and go home. However, every time he glanced back, he saw her racing after him. Since looking at her wa...

Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 13 – Ill-Considered Words

Thud.

James found himself staring up at the blue sky, trying to catch his breath, and wishing that his chest would stop hurting. Unfortunately, being kicked in said chest repeatedly by Seiran was not helping that pain. Given that she probably wasn’t planning to stop anytime soon, he was just going to have to learn to live with the intermittent transition between a dull and sharp ache. Speaking of the blonde-haired she-devil, the woman leaned over enough to interrupt his line of sight ...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 46 – That Lunatic

While Lo Meifeng poured Grandmother Lu a cup of tea, Sen a found a comfortable-looking chair and promptly slumped into it. The price for all the masks he’d been wearing over the last day had caught up with him. He wasn’t just mentally tired. It bordered on exhaustion, which was frustrating because his body still felt just fine. It seemed to him that those costs ought to be shared equally across body, mind, and soul, but it seemed the universe didn’t work the way he thought it should. As...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 4 – Run Away

As Terry stuffed things into his pack, he did his best to ignore Jaban. It wasn’t easy given the amount of complaining, but Terry persevered. He was committed to the task. A fact that Jaban seemed to pick up on because he increased the volume of his complaints.

“Come on! I want to go!”

Terry looked around the nearly bare room that he’d claimed as his own and decided that there wasn’t anything left worth taking along. He straightened up and walked directly p...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 45 – Supremely Unimpressed

Dragging stone to the surface for the earth cultivators to use did take several hours of focused work on Sen’s part. It also did something that he hadn’t experienced in a while. It left him feeling drained of qi, even if he really wasn’t. There was plenty left in his core. His dantian, on the other hand, was perhaps a quarter full. He definitely felt sluggish mentally. It was nothing a nap couldn’t take care of, but it still worried him. The battle hadn’t even started yet, to say no...

Updates: Unintended Cultivator Volume 4 Publication Day

Yes, the blessed day has arrived! Volume Four is now available on Amazon in ebook, print, and hardcover editions! Woohoo! If you wanted to grab one of those, you can find it here.

Also, unlike previous volumes, the audiobook is having a legitimate simultaneous release. You can find that on Audible 2024-11-12 17:48:12 +0000 UTC View Post

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 44 – Kindness in Unkind Times

While Sen worried constantly that the spirit beasts were going to attack at any minute, he recognized that for overactive paranoia. Yes, there were a lot of them out there. However, he’d also seen their work on the formation. It was well on its way, but it wasn’t done yet. His own work on a large-scale formation told him that it was slow work. The capital might not have a week. He was pretty sure they had a couple of days. That was time they’d need if they were going to have an...

Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 12 – Job Interview

For a few, fleeting, glorious moments, James imagined himself standing in a… It wasn’t a river, but it was a healthy stream of gold coins. His balled fists were raised to the sky as he laughed maniacally. That picture didn’t last long. He’d barely had time to enjoy the thought before another image supplanted it. As if conjured by the isekai reality he found himself in, James saw a chibi image of himself uselessly hitting a dragon’s leg with a stick. Chibi James, in what could only h...

Update: It’s not all sadness

I know most of my non-fiction posts lately have been like a grab-bag of sad pulled directly from a bucket of suck. But, it’s not all awfulness and the tears of children. Here’s a few things that did not suck recently.

I got myself a Destiny-themed Nerf gun. I made a vegetable stock that wasn’t terrible. I’m also making pasta sauce from scratch today. There’s al...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 43 – City Defense Planning

It took a while for Sen to flatly deny the most obviously self-serving suggestions. He understood it, a little. Most of the cultivators had only ever thought about defense in terms of their own compounds, so that’s where their minds tended to go. He was also keenly aware that the cultivators largely didn’t care about the mortal population save as a source for food, some goods, and occasional cheap labor. Protecting them genuinely wasn’t a priority for the sects. Sen hadn’t tried it re...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 42 – Questionably Productive Meeting

Sen could hear the shouting from inside the meeting room long before he and Lai Dongmei arrived outside the door. The prospect of wrangling all of that pride did not appeal to him. He’d been forced to do similar things with the teachers back at his sect and had not enjoyed it. He suspected that this would be much worse. Then again, he’d been aiming for a certain level of harmony and tranquility in those days. He didn’t care if the people here felt particularly harmonious or tranquil. 2024-11-08 12:02:58 +0000 UTC View Post

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 41 – Imperial Conscience

The walk back into the palace was just as silent as the walk out had been, but the feeling was entirely different. Before, the nobles and even the cultivators had an air of uncertainty about them. Now, there was a palpable sense of dread around all of them. The nobles seemed keenly aware that it was Lai Dongmei’s presence alone that had prevented a mass execution and only just. More to the point, there was no guarantee that she would prove so magnanimous in the future. Sen knew that she had...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 40 – Conviction

There was an almost deathly silence around Sen as he marched toward the front gates of the palace. No one spoke. Even the breeze had fallen away, as if it too feared to interrupt was what about to occur. It was only the sound feet on stone that broke that oppressive silence. There was a heavily sweating servant leading the way and casting near-constant glances back at Sen, Jing, and an assortment of cultivators and nobles. The man who had set this all in motion stumbled along in a hunched ove...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 39 – Gratitude

Sen’s command to gather up members and soldiers of that house, something he’d considered relatively straightforward, turned in another round of bickering. He wasn’t sure if it was the tenth or twentieth or five hundredth glance his way that made him realize that his presence wasn’t helping. The realization did come, though, and he simply walked out of the room. There was probably some nice, quiet, soothing place he could have retreated to in the palace. There almost had ...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 38 – A Sufficient Example

Sen had smoothly bypassed what he expected to be a fraught moment in the throne room by just not going there. Given everything, people would likely expect him to sit on the throne. He knew that it was unavoidable, even necessary, but he didn’t want to take that step before talking with Jing. Sen harbored the haunting fear that it would prove something that he could never take back once he sat on that ornate piece of furniture. Of course, he knew that portentous feeling was not...

No New Chapters Today

Okay. It doesn't happen very often, but, every once in a while, even I have a day where I just can't get my head in the right space to write. I can often get around it by switching to a non-Unintended Cultivator project and working on that for an hour or two. Today, though, everything I tried to write was just lifeless, uninspired crap. I couldn't bring the funny with Terry. I couldn't bring the serious with Sen. I couldn't find the middle ground with James. So, there will be no fresh chapte...