The first thing he became aware of when James slowly rose to consciousness was pain. There was a savage ache that threatened to split his skull apart, which was second only to stabbing shriek of agony any time he so much as twitched his jaw. A fact that became increasingly apparent as his recently wakened body forced him to yawn.
“God dammit, that hurts!” he snarled.
He opened his eyes looking for something or someone to glare at and, then, like a ghost ship sailing out of the...
2024-10-07 20:37:11 +0000 UTC
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Hey everybody, I'm not dead. I didn't mean to worry anyone. Most of last week was pretty awful. The erratic weather and bouncing barometric pressure that came with it turned what should have been a perfectly normal beginning of the week into migraine-palooza. That ran me straight into leaving for the retreat my publisher put together that I think I mentioned a month or so ago.
The retreat was good but very busy. We talked about a lot of things that would be very interesting to other wr...
2024-10-07 20:28:44 +0000 UTC
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Chan Dishi once again contemplated the benefits and pitfalls of abandoning the capital and heading north. By all accounts, Judgment’s Gale was building himself a stronghold up there and taking in wayward cultivators. I could be wayward, thought Chan Dishi. It’s not like I’ve got some commitment to a sect. I haven’t sworn any oaths to the king. He could just collect what he was owed and leave. It might create some hard feelings, but the king had more pressing...
2024-10-01 04:33:37 +0000 UTC
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James opened his eyes to a ceiling he didn’t recognize. Is this a hospital? He shook off that thought. Hospital ceilings weren’t usually made of stone. At least, he didn’t think they were. An absurdly beautiful face appeared in his line of sight. She looked like something out of a fantasy novel or a movie. Oh, he thought, or maybe this is what angels look like and I’m dead. She bestowed a kind smile on him.
“Awake, I see. That’s good,” she said i...
2024-09-30 09:55:46 +0000 UTC
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So, as I intended them to, this weekend let me play around a little with an idea I've had. I've been on a bit of a manga, anime, isekai kick for a while, and thought it might be fun to try my hand at writing something like a light novel, or a few chapters of one at any rate. So, I wrote a couple chapters and it was, in fact, fun. I'm posting the results here for your entertainment. ~Eric
***
“Hey, James!” shouted a familiar woman’s voice
James turned to look a...
2024-09-30 09:52:35 +0000 UTC
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The assembled mortals from the town looked nervous but not afraid. They were all respectful toward him, but Sen’s relationship with these mortals still borrowed a bit from the more casual approach he’d taken with them in the early days. He was happy for that today. He didn’t want them to be frightened of him today. That would come soon enough. It was one thing for them know he was powerful. It would be something else entirely for them to feel the tremendous g...
2024-09-28 04:20:41 +0000 UTC
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Update: The question has been answered. Thanks!
***
I clearly remember that at some point in the series, Sen turned a mortal into a cultivator. Unfortunately, with a million words or so of text at this point, pinpointing specific events in the series gets tricky. I really need to go back and assemble some kind of reference document.
In the meantime, though, does anyone remember which volume that happened in? I want to reference back...
2024-09-28 02:34:34 +0000 UTC
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The next few days were a flurry of activity, at least for Sen and Auntie Caihong. Much like the question of whether he should help the cultivators in his sect advance, there was an equally problematic question that Sen had been willfully ignoring for some time. Should he help the mortals who were hovering on the cusp of becoming cultivators make that leap? From the perspective of coming and ongoing conflict with the spirit beasts, the answer was obviously yes. His conscience told him somethin...
2024-09-27 08:02:38 +0000 UTC
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Behold! I made cheater pizza with a Boboli crust
2024-09-27 03:01:17 +0000 UTC
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“You’re not going to participate?” asked Sen.
Auntie Caihong glanced at him before returning her eyes to the sky, where the figures of Uncle Kho and Master Feng were swiftly disappearing. He’d assumed that there would be extensive discussions about how to approach the mortal and sect leadership. There was not. Both of the elder cultivators had assured him that they knew what to do. While Sen had doubts, but he also lacked any experience to draw on that would qualify him to offer...
2024-09-27 00:32:00 +0000 UTC
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Sen was met with blank looks from Uncle Kho and Master Feng. He saw mild sympathy on Auntie Caihong’s face, as though she’d expected things to go a certain way, knew it would frustrate him, and that everyone had filled their roles precisely. This was another reminder of that almost impossibly vast distance between Sen’s experiences and those of his teachers. For him, this idea of theirs seemed like some wildly complicated problem that would require at least some delicate h...
2024-09-25 06:01:38 +0000 UTC
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Sen had returned with Master Feng from the wilds to find a subdued Ai waiting with Auntie Caihong. They went through their usual routine of Sen asking Ai about her day, and her regaling him with tales of birds subjugated to her imperial will and yucky bugs slaughtered at her command. She brightened up while telling him about her adventures, but there was something underneath it all. A kind of melancholy that seemed odd and out of character for his daughter. When it was finally time to put her...
2024-09-23 19:39:45 +0000 UTC
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While it would have taken a very skilled observer to notice it, dissatisfaction marred Long Jia Wei’s face. He had, with the tacit approval of Lord Lu, set himself up as something of a protector not only of the sect but of Lord Lu’s vision for the sect. The first goal often proved far easier to accomplish than the second. Tangible threats to the safety and security of the sect could simply be encouraged to leave or disposed of in the abundant forests in the surrounding area. He found the ...
2024-09-21 04:43:22 +0000 UTC
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There was nothing around him for miles in any direction save for the wilds. He’d sensed a few spirit beasts as he approached the semi-barren spot, but they had fled the moment he let a little of his killing intent slip free. He was relatively sure that they were low-level spirit beasts, rather than the sapient ones that were leading the charge against humanity. He’d entertained the idea of killing them, but they weren’t the ones who had roused his ire, and he couldn’t work up the moti...
2024-09-19 04:47:13 +0000 UTC
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Sen had expected his frankly disproportionate attack on the duplicitous spirit beasts to have some kind of an effect when word spread. After all, that was half of the reason why he’d made it so disproportionate. Even his wildest predictions were nothing in the face of the reality. His people made a point of spreading the news, and everyone they told seemed to tell everyone alive. The story of spirit beast defeat, however lopsided the fight had actually been, seemed to galvanize the human fo...
2024-09-17 21:59:57 +0000 UTC
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Sen stood in the wreckage of what had been pristine forest for a long time before he walked back to where he’d unleashed that odd variant of Heavens’ Rebuke. He just stared at the massive crater. It had been unbelievable when seen from the air, but the scale of the destruction was simply staggering when viewed from the ground. It made Sen wonder, not for the first time, just what it would look like if Master Feng every truly unleashed the totality of his strength. If I c...
2024-09-16 23:12:55 +0000 UTC
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Just some questionably connected thoughts I wanted to get out of my brain. ~Eric
***
Like pretty much everyone else with even the vaguest interest in science fiction, fantasy, or film, I learned about the death of James Earl Jones over the weekend. I won’t pretend that I was overly shocked by the news. The man was in his 90s. Frankly, it’s a testament to his constitution and medical care that he lasted so long and remained as active ...
2024-09-16 10:39:24 +0000 UTC
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Sen flew over the forest at a speed that would have seemed reckless if he’d brought anyone else with him. He hadn’t. He very specifically and intentionally hadn’t. He’d left Falling Leaf to “guard” the last four survivors with a glowering Master Feng as backup. Sen had briefly explained the situation, as well as the assassination attempt on Falling Leaf, to his increasingly stone-faced master.
“I wouldn’t want these four to get any ideas if at all possible,” Sen had to...
2024-09-14 01:17:46 +0000 UTC
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“So, I didn’t kill them,” said Sen as he eyed the spirit beasts.
He’d drawn Falling Leaf away from the small group of potential enemies and put up a wind barrier to make sure their voices didn’t carry. Unfortunately, that did nothing to stop the spirit beasts from staring at them. Well, most of them were staring. The wolves didn’t dare look at him for longer than it took to take a flickering glance. The others, though, wore expressions of apprehension and fear. He didn...
2024-09-13 04:34:47 +0000 UTC
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Sen’s first reaction was to go find someone older and wiser to make this decision. Barring that, he just needed to find someone other than him. I’m not qualified to make this choice for the entire town, he thought. I should ask… Then, it hit him. There wasn’t anyone else to ask. In this place, there was no other authority to shamelessly dump this unwanted decision onto while he fled to do something else. He could certainly ask Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, or Uncle Kh...
2024-09-12 02:43:38 +0000 UTC
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Sen knew from personal experience with his hiding technique that people could mask themselves from a spiritual sense. In a place like the capital, that represented a huge stumbling block in dealing with or flushing out enemies. Widespread attacks were simply too dangerous and carried far too much risk of injuring mortal or the uninvolved. In a place where Sen held the high ground, there were enemies in numbers, and there was only person’s life he was concerned with preserving,...
2024-09-11 03:44:06 +0000 UTC
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I left the poll up an active for close to 24 hours, and the results are now in. Of the people who voted, an overwhelming majority voted to keep the notifications on. I will, therefore, leave the notifications in place for the time being.
I may revisit this again in six months or year. I don't want to assume that tastes will remain unchanged. The demographics of the subscribers may shift over time, for example.
2024-09-10 21:19:21 +0000 UTC
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Sen walked along the wall that separated the town from the rest of the rest of the world. Once the word had spread that the spirit beasts had begun their war, all pretenses had been abandoned. The cultivators in Sen’s sect had been explicitly put to work expanding and reinforcing both the physical wall and the formations it contained. Similar work was being carried out around the sect compound itself. It had been a tiny bit amusing to watch the mortal townspeople stare in awe as the once st...
2024-09-10 01:59:53 +0000 UTC
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In which you decide if the notifications will continue or will go away.
I have no dog in this fight. Honestly, I provide the notifications of lower tier chapter access to be nice. If they go away, my life would actually become a tiny bit easier because there would be one less task in it.
I'll let this run until tomorrow afternoon or there is a clear majority.
2024-09-09 23:06:30 +0000 UTC
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Something weird is going on with Patreon where chapters that should be appearing in collections are apparently going missing. They aren't missing. They aren't even inaccessible. When I post a chapter, there's a box I check to put the chapters into a specific volume in the collections tab. For some reason, it seems like when I change the tier access for a chapter, Patreon is "helpfully" unchecking that specific box on those chapters.
Even if a chapter isn't in the collection anymore, I ...
2024-09-09 23:02:33 +0000 UTC
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Sua Xing Xing had not been trained to panic. Like all cultivators, she understood well the supreme necessity of control. All was chaos and swift death without the steadying hand of control. Yet, as she had stood in that strange room with the spider-kin, a room filled with beast cores modified in ways she did not understand, she had felt her control slipping away from her grasp like a fistful of water. She had listened with mounting shock and dread to the reports that had come in, the tallies ...
2024-09-08 05:19:03 +0000 UTC
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Before I had to move and went off to Dragon Con and came back feeling like hell, I said I was going to think about what my schedule was going to look like moving forward. While things were chaotic, I did give it some serious thought.
My conclusion is pretty much what I said way back when. In terms of Unintended Cultivator, I'm going to move to a five days per week (M-F) schedule. My tentative plan is to get back to doing two chapters per day. Obviously, this week has been...
2024-09-07 05:32:01 +0000 UTC
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After dropping Zhi and some pastries off with the girl’s mother, Sen dawdled a little in taking Ai back. He knew any of the nascent soul demigods wandering around his sect would gleefully take her, but he resented the necessity of it. He didn’t want to go and deal with matters that threatened to shake nations and reshape history. He wanted to eat dinner with his little girl and listen to her talk about her birds. If not for the silent Big Sister Lei and her worried glances, he might well ...
2024-09-07 04:50:32 +0000 UTC
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There was a moment when something that felt very much like the heart demon that had once afflicted him rose up inside of Sen’s chest. He wanted to fly south. He wanted to find whatever damned fool spirit beasts had dared to choose this day, his day, his one day with his daughter and his niece to start their stupid, pointless war. He wanted to find them and make their deaths so utterly terrible, so unspeakable, that no spirit beast would dare show itself in human lands again fo...
2024-09-06 03:45:58 +0000 UTC
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Okay. My migraine did finally, mercifully go away today. I spent my afternoon dealing with a small mountain of dull but necessary administrivia. I won’t bore you with too many details. If you think things like changing addresses on student loan websites and trying to remember which box I put what folders of documents in, you’ll have a good picture.
Suffice it to say that I’m nominally caught up. So, that means that after I get some food in my very empty belly (I don’t ...
2024-09-05 22:46:49 +0000 UTC
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