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Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 44 – Academy, Part 2

Sen focused his not inconsiderable will on suffusing his entire body with shadow qi under Fu Ruolan’s watchful gaze. Her focused attention didn’t bother him. In fact, he was grateful for it. When she’d first described the process for her version of shadow walking, Sen had thought it would be easy. He’d swiftly learned that there was a reason only a handful of people could perform it. It was a relentless battle against nature and his own body’s desires. Sen had remolded that body aga...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 43 – Academy

“Again,” said Sen.

The townspeople, under the guidance of Dai Bao, started the form over again as Sen and Uncle Kho watched. The elder cultivator had seemed both curious and dubious about Sen’s project to train the mortals to defend themselves against spirit beasts. As they worked through the form again, though, he could see Uncle Kho gaze turn considering as he evaluated the townspeople. He reserved judgment, though, electing to maintain his guise as a simple visitor for the mome...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 42 – Talking

The rest of that evening passed in a glow of food, carefully-curated conversations that steered away from anything too dark for the girls, and familial warmth. While Uncle Kho and Auntie Caihong were very nice to both girls, it was clear that they were more focused on Ai. Falling Leaf surprised Sen by taking up the slack and lavishing extra attention on Zhi, who eventually drifted off to sleep in the ghost panther’s lap. Even after the girls were put to bed, Ai possessively hugging a shadow...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 41 – Payment

It wasn’t long after Auntie Caihong dragged a weakly protesting Shen Mingxia into a corner to negotiate for the picture that Falling Leaf arrived. Sen couldn’t help but a chuckle a little at the startled look on her face. The scene she had walked into was a little bit more exciting than what she was used to seeing. Two little girls were sitting on a shadow dog, cheering wildly as Uncle Kho made a tiny figure made of lightning dash across the wall, leap over windows like they were great ch...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 40 – Panic, Chaos, Questions… And More Panic

Shen Mingxia just stared at Ma Caihong with her eyes so wide that Sen worried she might damage them. Then, the woman lurched to her feet, slammed her hands together and bowed so low she was basically looking at the floor.

“Lady Ma Caihong, this unworthy one is Shen Mingxia. I apologize for—” her words trailed off when it finally seemed to occur to her that she hadn’t actually done anything wrong. “It is the greatest honor of my life to meet the esteemed Alchemy’s Handmaiden!...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 39 – Arrival and Introductions

Fu Ruolan glared at Sen. “You invited them here?”

“No! No, no, no,” said Sen. “I just sent them a letter telling them what’s been happening to me in recent… Um, years. It’s the first time I’ve been stationary for a while.”

“You should have told me they were coming.”

“I didn’t know they were coming.”

The awkward conversation was mercifully cut short as Ma Caihong and Kho Jaw-Long descended from the sky supported by nothing...

Mostly Non-Unintended Cultivator Updates

Sort-of Unintended Cultivator-related news: I have opened up an additional ten slots in the Uncle Kho's Cultivation Corner tier. I'm not sure if anyone actually wants those slots, but the tier is also always full. So, now a few more people can upgrade to it if they want. It's main attraction is that it gets you signed paperback copies when they become available, assuming you're in the US. 

While Unintended Cultivator remains my primary focus, I do have other projects from time-to-t...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 38 – The Realities of Sect Building

“She’s not wrong,” said Fu Ruolan.

After they had all eaten and Fu Ruolan had spent some quality time listening to Ai regale her to tales of walking through town, “training” with Dai Bao, and drawing orchids in the snow, the core cultivator had withdrawn to talk with Sen. The two had reached an odd sort of unspoken agreement after Sen had moved himself, Ai, and Falling Leaf to the new galehouse. Things had been incredibly tense that first week. Fu Ruolan had been keeping herse...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 37 – I Am Begging You

“She’s really yours, isn’t she?” asked Shen Mingxia.

Sen looked at her briefly before returning his attention to Liu Ai and Li Zhi. The girls were running around outside the galehouse he had erected adjacent to the practice hall. While he didn’t think any spirit beast would be stupid enough to try to snatch one of them with him looming nearby, he wasn’t about to take any chances with their lives. Not that he’d let them stay outside too long. He had the sense that the winte...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 36 – Meanwhile…

Ma Caihong had never bothered much with the little town at the bottom of the mountain. There had simply never been anything there to interest her. Plus, it was tedious to deal with mortals as a nascent soul cultivator. While she hadn’t been a great beauty in her youth, she had been fair enough to turn a few heads. The miracles of cultivation refined her modestly appealing appearance over the last several thousand years. Now, like most other nascent soul cultivators, she possessed an almost ...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 35 – Prime Your Mind

Sen stared down at his own hand. He shook his head violently in the negative. It can’t be that simple, he thought. He had to force himself to repeat the action. He waved his hand through the shadow the tree was casting. His eyes were locked on the snowy ground beneath. The sun overhead made the shadow of his hand crisp and clear as it simply disappeared into the tree’s shadow, and then reappeared on the other side. I refuse to believe that it’s that stupidly simple, he...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 34 – How Did We Do?

While Sen hadn’t been able to predict exactly when another spirit beast attack would come to the town, he had known with certainty that one would come. With that knowledge in hand, he hadn’t wasted his time. He’d made a habit of making at least some healing elixirs that mortals could use every week. With entire months behind him, he had a deep stockpile of the things just sitting around in one of his storage rings. That made it fairly easy for him to hand them out with the assi...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 33 – First Test, Part 2

It was all Sen could do to keep his breathing steady. If this had been his fight, he knew he would have been calm, collected, and focused. He might have even been a little excited. But this wasn’t his fight. Not really. He was mostly a spectator to the danger. His eyes traveled across the backs of the townspeople, and he couldn’t help but pick out the ones he knew and liked best. He could almost see the fear rolling off the people who had never been in any kind of a real fight before. Spa...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 32 – First Test, Part 1

Sen had barely begun to walk away from the inn when his spiritual sense alerted him that there were spirit beasts near to the town. They were much too near to the town to be doing anything but preparing to attack. I guess this day was always coming, he thought. Now, we find out if I’ve been wasting my time or not. Sen activated his qinggong technique and flashed over to where the town had set up a gong. It was usually tucked away and only brought out for festivals...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 31 – Quest-giving

Falling Leaf just stared at Sen with those green eyes of hers for a while, her hand gently stroking Ai’s hair as the little girl slept in her lap. That sleep was peaceful, for which Sen was deeply grateful. The awful nightmares of the first couple of months had slowly faded away, largely Sen suspected, in lockstep with Ai’s increasing feeling of safety and security. These days, the nightmares were the rare exception. To Sen’s immense relief, those nightmares often featured imaginary thr...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 30 – Don’t Worry About It

As Sen waited for answer, he watched the woman’s face. She seemed almost confused as she looked around at the building, and then over at Ai riding on the shadow dog. When she did finally look at him again, it was only for a few moments before her eyes shifted to look past him. He glanced over his shoulder to see Shen Mingxia curiously staring at the pit of shadow balls he kept there for the girls to play in. The woman looked from the pit, to Ai on the shadow dog, and then back to the pit. S...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 29 – Uncertain Reception

Wu Meng Yao did her best not to stare at Lu Sen. It had been a long, long road to find him. She’d been away from the Soaring Skies Sect for years now, dragging poor Shen Mingxia along in her wake. They’d been gone so long, in fact, that she suspected they were members in name only by now. Not that the traveling had been entirely a bad thing. Like most members of her sect, she had rarely traveled far beyond the city walls, and on those rare trips only to deal with a spirit beast that was b...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 28 – Teaching

“Again,” said Sen doing his very best to keep the boredom out of his voice.

Of all the things Sen had thought might happen when he agreed to teach the townspeople how to use spears all those months ago, he hadn’t really considered tedium as a possibility. Of course, he’d only ever come at the process from the side of the student. As a student, everything was about mastering something new or solidifying a technique you’d already learned. It was a race to keep pace. For the teac...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 27 – The Value of a Demonstration

Sen took a little time to review the basic thrusts he’d taught Wang Bo and Dai Bao with the newcomers, before turning most of the gathered townspeople over to grizzled man. Sen focused most of his time and attention on the newest or most hopeless people, which included Li Hua. Of course, her main impediment was that her gaze constantly wandered the entire place in search of her daughter. Sen had finally picked a corner, raised a small enclosure that was about a foot and half high, and all b...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 26 – The Right Start

Dai Bao trudged toward Sen like a man marching toward his own execution. It was obvious from his expression the man knew that Sen wasn’t happy, and that he blamed Dai Bao for some of that. Sen did him the courtesy of walking them away from the small collection of townspeople and erecting a wind barrier to keep their voices from carrying. Sen knew that he might have some unkind things to say to the man, but he didn’t particularly feel the need to shame Dai Bao publicly. It wasn’t as thou...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 25 – Then, Leave

The trip took a bit longer than usual since Sen had to keep his speed down a little to let Falling Leaf keep pace for the entire distance. It was late morning by the time they arrived at the wall. While the guards knew to let Sen pass, they eyed Falling Leaf as if they expected her to burst into violence at a moment’s notice. She just stared back at them with a bored, mildly impatient expression. The guards traded a look, seemed to realize that there was exactly nothing they could do to sto...

Volumes 1 and 2 Update and Bookfunnel

Okay, so we're swiftly rolling up on the official release date of Unintended Cultivator: Volume Two. Hurray! 

At the moment, the Volume One ebook is still the number one seller in the Asian Myth & Legend subcategory and has been for quite a while. That is amazing! Books don't usually hang out in a number one slot for very long, and Volume One has been, with the exception of a few days here or there, firmly glued into that slot for weeks and weeks. It's racked up over 2000 ratin...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 24 – Relationship Management

A cocoon of shadow surrounded Sen. He had made and sustained it all night while he sat cross-legged on the roof of the galehouse. The hope had been that immersing himself in shadow that way would help provide some insight into the shadow walking technique. That hadn’t happened at all. It had mostly just served as a way to sharpen the other skills that let him evaluate the environment around him without recourse to sight. It wasn’t a wasted effort since Sen couldn’t know when an enemy mi...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 23 – That Was Sect Thinking

Committed to his promise not to simply disappear because he got distracted, Sen limited his instruction of Dai Bao and Wang Bo to two hours. He drew a few conclusions from those two hours, though. The most important conclusion was that starting with someone who knew nothing about using a spear was infinitely better than starting with someone who had learned bad habits so long ago that they were practically instincts. He had to spend much longer working with Dai Bao simply to start co...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 22 – It Hurts My Soul

Sen stared at the eager face of the young man. While only a handful of years separated them, Sen couldn’t help the question that sprang to his mind. Was I ever that young? Whatever a calendar might say, Sen was quite certain that a massive canyon filled with experience stood between them. It was only the fact that he was acquainted with the Wang Bo that had kept him from simply ordering the young man to go away and leave him alone. Sen had barely set foot in town before people star...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 21 – Writing Lesson

Sen got the distinct impression over the next week or two that Fu Ruolan was actively avoiding him. Not that he necessarily minded that. It let him keep playing around with shadow qi and locking in his new understanding of the intrinsic matrix. He confirmed that all of the qi types he could access relied on the structure. He also learned that his approach to combining qi types was horrifyingly crude. Layering the different qi types provided an incredibly stable fusion. It also made doing thin...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 20 – That Isn’t How Learning Works

The order seemed odd to Sen. There was certainly a place for discussing things, but he’d generally found it more effective to simply demonstrate his understanding than fumble through verbal explanations that only partially captured the true meaning of something. For him, cultivation was at least equal parts clear understanding and intuition. Much of what he did he accomplished because it felt right, not because he possessed some deep theoretical understanding of the topic. Adding to the odd...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 19 – Sage Advice

“Finally got tired of lurking?” asked Sen.

Fu Ruolan’s eyes went wide with outrage. “I was not lurking!”

“Really? Because it looked a lot like lurking. Hovering just out of sight all of the time while watching me,” said Sen as he made a stupendous effort to keep a straight face.

The nascent soul cultivator pointed at him and started to say something before her eyes narrowed. She slowly lowered her pointing finger and fixed him with a glare that promise...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 18 – Focused Consideration

It was both fortunate and unfortunate that Glimmer of Night loved making webs, at least in Sen’s opinion. The spider had made dozens of them at Sen’s request without a single complaint. If anything, he had seemed quite pleased with Sen’s focused attention on the process. That meant that there were ample opportunities to see how the webs were constructed. It also meant that there were ample opportunities for Sen to experience the true and magnificent depths of his failure to und...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 17 – Web Lesson

“How in the world do you maintain this?” asked Sen.

He was staring at the qi web that stretched for hundreds of feet between widely spaced trees. Sen wasn’t sure exactly why the spider had constructed such a thing, but that question took a distant second position to the how of it. Sen was no stranger to large-scale techniques. The difference was that he often relied on the internal momentum of the techniques to keep them active. After all, once a storm got moving, it didn’t usua...