ericdontigney

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 16 – Retrieve and Escape

Sen tried to work as quickly as he could to help the injured, but things only grew more chaotic as people poured out of the gates. Some came looking to find loved ones, while others simply wanted to see what had happened. There were wails of grief of the two men who had died, but Sen had to steel himself against them. There was nothing he could do for those people except offer empty words he was certain they wouldn’t want to hear. By the time he’d finished dispensing what immediate aid he...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 15 – Group Tactics

It took longer than Sen would have liked to get to the battle because he had to keep dodging around panicked townspeople. Granted, it only added a few seconds to his journey, but he knew as well as any warrior that seconds could cost lives. However, when he arrived at the scene of the fight by the simple expedient of jumping over the town wall, he couldn’t help but pause. He wondered, what in the hells are they doing? Some of the men from town were out… Sen thought the right phra...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 14 – A Beautiful Orchid

Sen had a lot to think about when he took Liu Ai back to the town to get her new clothes. He was so caught up in his own thoughts that Ai had to poke his cheek to get his attention. He blinked and looked at her. He had a dim recollection that she might have asked him something.

“I’m sorry,” said Sen. “What did you ask me?”

“Can I see Dai Bao?” asked Liu Ai.

Sen had to rack his memory. Dai Bao? Then, he remembered the grizzled man at the inn that the li...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 13 – I Am Not Weak

“You’re angry with me,” said Falling Leaf.

Sen glanced over at the ghost panther, noting the unusually intense look in her eyes. He’d known this conversation was coming. He just wished she’d picked a more convenient time for it. Waiting until he was three feet in the air and balancing on a shaft of hardened shadow no wider than a finger was not, in his opinion, the ideal moment. Not that balancing was particularly difficult or that the fall would mean anything to him. The chal...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 12 – Fox Deal

Laughing River frowned as he thought about the ghost panther kit. While his transformation skills weren’t the same as those used by other spirit beasts, he would have been willing to bet that he knew as much about the process as any spirit beast or cultivator alive. Yet, he hadn’t been able to crack the mystery of why she couldn’t change back into her original form. It was equal parts frustrating and intriguing. Every piece of knowledge he had gathered said she should be able to move ba...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 11 – Settling In

Liu Ai was ecstatic when she saw Sen in the morning, jumping up into the chair to hug him as hard as her little arms would let her. That held up for about five minutes. Then, she remembered she was angry with him.

“You weren’t here!” she accused, her eyes huge and brimming with unshed tears.

Sen did his best to keep a straight face. It wasn’t funny, exactly, but her unhappiness was so unfiltered and turned up so high that it almost became a parody of itself. The vague humo...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 10 – Wisdom

Mindful of Fu Ruolan’s words, Sen relieved Glimmer of Night from watching over Liu Ai. Granted, it mostly involved telling the spider he didn’t need to stand at the girl’s door, but Sen found it relieving that she hadn’t been left entirely alone. That thought sparked more than a little guilt. He was so used to being responsible only for himself, that he’d fallen into that mindset immediately when he went searching for Falling Leaf and damned nine-tailed fox. Unlike Falling Leaf, Liu...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 9 – Or I Will Do It for You

It only took about an hour of wandering through the town for Sen to yearn for a place like Grandmother Lu’s shop. A place where you could find a bit of everything, as long as it was meant for mortals to use. Instead, he had to ask where to find a tailor shop, only to be directed to the home of a very terse, very stern woman who told him in no uncertain terms that if she was going to make clothes for a child, she had to actually seethe child. At which point, he was summarily dismiss...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 8 – Breakfast and a Checkup

Sen opened his eyes and looked down. A mop of disheveled black hair met his gaze. Liu Ai was using his chest as her bed, having come looking for him after another bad dream. He had still been awake, idly trying to make shapes out of shadow qi. He was taking Fu Ruolan’s instruction to play with shadow qi quite literally. It wasn’t coming as easily as he might like, but it felt like old instincts were stirring inside of him. He had heard Ai calling out in half-formed words for parents that ...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 7 – Safe?

Sen stepped out of Fu Ruolan’s home with a mildly perplexed expression on his face. It turned out that what came next was not even remotely what he thought would come next. Sen had fully expected the woman to go into a full-blown explanation of the technique. Instead, she had instructed him to do something he thought was absurdly simple. It was something that he’d figured out how to do years before.

“I’ll need you to practice isolating the shadow qi in your core,” she said. �...

Birthday Time

So, as usual, my birthday sort of snuck up on me. Today, I'm turning mumble-mumble years old. More importantly, I survived another full orbit of the earth around the sun. Yay me! 

So, a few things are happening behind the scenes in Eric-land that you might be interested in. First of all, I just got the audiobook files to review for the third book in my ongoing urban fantasy series. I expect some of you just blinked and thought, 'Eric has an ongoing urban fantasy series? Since when?...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 6 – Inaccurate Analogy

Sen turned his gaze back and forth from the corner to where Fu Ruolan now stood. His teachers had told him about things that were like what he’d just seen, but this was different. The techniques he’d been told about were just advanced movement skills. They seemed to make someone disappear and reappear, but it was just magnified speed. There was also something called teleportation, where someone literally disappeared and then reappeared somewhere else. That had something to do wit...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 5 – Sleep and Shadow

Despite his misgivings about what he might find when he got back, Sen was surprised to discover relative tranquility. Fu Ruolan had decided that the best thing for a young child was to have something to chase. So, she had conjured qi constructs for Liu Ai to run around with under the unblinking gaze of Glimmer of Night. By the time he got back, he found the little girl peacefully sleeping on bed that had been incongruously summoned in a small grove of trees. That had apparently been a sign to...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 4 – A Vivid Imagination

Falling Leaf stared at Misty Peak like she thought the fox woman was particularly slow. She gave Sen a look that, for once, was not that hard to translate. Why do you put up with this one? The ghost panther adopted an expression of patience that bordered on patronizing.

Falling Leaf spoke very slowly as she repeated her words. “Sen has taken in a lost human kit.”

Based on the way his features seemed to go tight, Sen guessed that it took an act of supreme self-control ...

Unexpected Absence

Okay, I obviously haven't been on here or on Royal Road the last couple days. Nothing catastrophic happened. I just went to bed on Saturday and, when Sunday rolled around, my body just noped the fuck out. I basically spent the last two days doing nothing but sleeping and occasionally dragging my sorry ass out of bed long enough to eat something. My best guess is that I was maybe coming down with something and didn't realize it, and my body decided that we were just going to sleep it off. I re...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 3 – Surprises

Sen didn’t quite know what to make of the scene that greeted his eyes. The foxes, who he had just assumed were going to be the problem, were still sitting at the table where he’d left them. Of course, that didn’t mean they hadn’t caused the problem. In fact, he found it odd that they hadn’t gone somewhere else. Sen didn’t imagine that Laughing River really wanted to discuss the secrets of transformation in front of mortals. Although, after he thought about if for a second, Sen rea...

UC Volume One Signed Copies Update

Okay. So, I looked into a variety of options for selling signed copies. None of them are especially easy or particularly cost-efficient methods. It also turns out that Patreon's shop is strictly for digital content/items only. That's something I might have to explore in the future, but I'm not sure exactly what I'd sell there. Any suggestions other than ebook copies, since those go exclusively to Amazon? In light of these limitations, I've decided to go another way with this. 

Afte...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 2– The Problems of Others

Sen was a little relieved that the tree cutters lived near the edge of the town in a truly modest but well-tended home. He wasn’t looking forward to making a show of carrying the injured man through the town on a qi platform. He would have, but it would been inconvenient. Cultivators made mortals rightly nervous, and overt displays of cultivator power made them very nervous. Fortunately, the young man was much more concerned with his father’s well-being than with anything that Sen was doi...

Unintended Cultivator V7: Chapter 1 - Help

“There you are,” squealed Misty Peak in, what Sen assumed, was feigned joy. She dashed across the room, wrapped herself around him in a mann

“There you are,” squealed Misty Peak in, what Sen assumed, was feigned joy.

She dashed across the room, wrapped herself around him in a manner that Sen thought was probably inappropriate for any situation outside of a bedroom, and kissed him. Sen felt the hateful looks from at least three other men in the common room of the inn where ...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Bloopers (Official)

Sen had seen a lot of strange spirit beasts in depths of the wilds, from the damnable bear-cats to birds made entirely of fire. He’d even once been attacked by something that looked like the bastard child of a pangolin and a massive ivy plant. However, all of his experience with spirit beasts had happened on land. Most of his incredibly limited experience with water life extended only to fish. He’d heard about other kinds sea animals and spirit beasts from Captain Chen but that had been p...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Bloopers (Patreon Exclusive)

Okay, so I had a moment of realization. While I couldn't use any of the suggested blooper ideas for the final text I submit to my publisher...I absolutely could use them to give you all a Patreon-exclusive bloopers chapter. That's right, this one stays on here for your enjoyment. There will be a different bloopers chapter to go along with the final version of the text. Enjoy! ~Eric

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“I am a fox. Illusions are what we do. How do you think I g...

Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 1 – Grade-A

Okay. Yeah, it seems I'm completely incapable of not writing. But these days off do give me the chance to purge ideas like this one that tend to clutter up my brain. Enjoy! ~Eric

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Terry leaned back in the perpetually uncomfortable desk chair and rubbed at his eyes. A quick glance around the other cubicles revealed that there were only two other people left. There was Mark, who everyone but their project manager hated. It wasn’t that the guy was bad at his job. He was...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 68 – Temporary Solution

Sen stood on the opposite side of the road from Glimmer of Night. The two were tossing a spent beast core back and forth. Well, thought Sen, I guess it’s tossing for us. In reality, the core was zipping back and forth between the two so fast that it looked like a vibrating blue rope connected their hands. Still, it was more interesting than just standing around and waiting. Sen had a suspicion about what was going to happen and about fifteen minutes later, he was proven ri...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 67 – Uncle Lu

The two men guarding the gate never even had a chance to be startled. One moment they were half-watching the forest. The next moment, their heads were rolling away as their bodies slumped to the ground. The heavy wood of the gate was no more of an impediment to Sen than lace fabric. Wind blades reduced it to so many wood shavings in a matter of seconds. Sen was striding through that hail of wood chips before anyone inside really understood that death now walked among them. However, Sen had be...

UC Volume One Audiobook Update

Okay, the day has finally arrived! The audiobook version of Unintended Cultivator: Volume One is live on Audible! I'm a little less familiar with how Audible works internationally. So, I'm just going to provide some links to major markets. Hopefully, Audible is smart enough to redirect you from one of them to the appropriate regional version of their website if your country isn't on the list.

US: here  2024-01-26 12:19:34 +0000 UTC View Post

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 66 – A Call from the Darkness

Misty Peak had given him an annoyed look when Sen put his foot down. She’d been trying to convince him to just take her along when he returned to Fu Ruolan. He had, for his part, reiterated the point that the reception would not be good and that he wasn’t going to be responsible for her pointless death. When the group had finally reached the town where Falling Leaf occasionally went to buy things, Sen had called a halt.

“This is as far as you two go,” Sen told the foxes.

L...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 65 – The Road Home

Li Yi Nuo had spent the last few weeks trying to speak and be noticed as little as humanly possible. The fox woman seemed to have dismissed her from mind entirely, which was a relief after the humiliation of being captured by the woman. Yet, it was other two that made her shiver in fear. The elder fox radiated a kind of power that made it hard for her to breathe whenever he focused on her for more than a moment or two. She didn’t even think it was intentional. If anything, she thought he wa...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 64 – Pragmatic Advice

Deciding that since he was already awake, he might as well get up, Sen pushed himself into a sitting position and opened his eyes. And froze. The interior of the galehouse was in utter ruins. The only things left standing were the outer walls, and even those had deep cracks running through them.

Sen’s mind worked furiously. Had the devilish beasts regrouped and attacked? No, he thought. That would only explain the cracks in the outer walls. As his speculations grew i...

Updates

Okay, so the first thing I wanted to talk about is that Unintended Cultivator: Volume One has hit something of a milestone over on Amazon. It's now in the top 500 ebooks on the site overall! Granted, those overall site ranks bounce up and down all the time, but top 500 even for a little while is amazing for a first book in a series from a guy that basically nobody has ever heard of before. Everyone on here was a big part of making that possible, so everyone gets a virtual pat on the ...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 63 – Endure

When Laughing River woke him up, Sen didn’t speak. He just forced himself to stand with gritted teeth holding back the pain. He stumbled to the fireplace, dropped down in front of it, and went to work. He wouldn’t call what he did anything remotely like alchemy. That would have implied a lot more conscious thought that he had available to give to the process. He relied almost entirely on his instincts and his understanding of what was wrong with him to guide what he made. Even as he worke...