ericdontigney

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 62 – The Storm, Part 3

Even with time being a precious and limited commodity in a battle, Sen couldn’t help but notice that his strike had been more effective than he could have hoped. From just below the elbow, the devil’s left arm was simply gone. It also appeared that the lingering energy of Heavens’ Rebuke wasn’t done quite yet. The stump seemed to be corroding. The energy eating away more and more of the flesh and bone as it worked its way up the arm. Sen expected that was what the devilish en...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 61 – The Storm, Part 2

Despite the monumental amount of death Sen had just dished out, he knew they weren’t done yet. If he had been dealing with the same kinds of numbers they had to face when they’d approached the ruins, they’d have a largely clear path. With the horde concentrated in this spot, though, he’d just landed a serious but not critical blow. So, he stalked toward the enemy, fully intended to punch a hole right through their lines and then run for all he was worth toward the forest. At least, th...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 60 – The Storm, Part 1

One of the truths that Master Feng had imparted to Sen through their countless hours of sparring was very simple to state. Seize the momentum. Of course, Master Feng hadn’t ever said those words to Sen. He had shown Sen, over and over again. The person who seizes the momentum of the battle stands a better chance of victory. It wasn’t an absolute edict. Momentum could be lost. It could be stolen. It could even be overwhelmed by sufficiently superior strength. In the world of cultivation, n...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 59 – The Calm

It turned out that Glimmer of Night could not teach them how to do it. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, either. The spider had very patiently described his exact process for doing whatever it was he had done to the cores. It just hadn’t taken Sen very long to figure out that Glimmer of Night was operating from an entirely different understanding of qi that used webs and various kinds of interconnection as the baseline. Given enough time and context, it was probably a decipherable method. T...

Migraines, Chapters, and Girl Scout Cookies

Okay, so I'm sure some of you have noticed my output has been a little sporadic the last few days. I've been getting hammered by migraines this week. I'm sure it has something to do with the terrible weather, but migraines and writing don't mix. Even after the migraine is gone, you're not really done with it. Or, at least, I'm not done with it. Between the migraine itself and the medication I take for it, I get migraine hangovers. It's the best way I can think to describe it.

I'm basica...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 58 – What’s a Core for, Anyway?

Sen didn’t actually care about eating, he just wanted to give himself a little while to think things through. The formation had only ever been a fallback plan, but Sen was certain that the original plan of signaling Laughing River also wasn’t going to work either. There was a decent chance that the elder fox had waited for weeks and simply decided that they must all be dead. Sending up a signal also depended on people outside the barrier being able to see it. Sen wasn’t at all convinced...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 57 – Mystery Unsolved

Sen so very badly wanted to ask the monk a mountain of questions, but he realized that it was ultimately a distraction. As interested as he was, and as much as he might want to come back and visit once those long-lost inhabitants came back, talking about it with the monk now would simply delay their return. Given that he had no idea how long it had been since they entered the ruins, he realized there was a question that should have asked long since.

“Brother Khu, how long has it been ...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 56 – Spiders, Glares, and a Pertinent Question

Not even bothering to open his eyes, Sen disengaged his hands from the fox woman’s backside and stood up. He hadn’t particularly missed this kind of behavior during the long years he’d spent ascending that mountain that seemingly had no peak. He found himself oddly wistful for those quiet centuries of climbing. It had been frustrating at times, but peaceful nonetheless. Sen also got the impression that while he had gotten a lot out of the experience, he hadn’t gotten everything he mig...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 55 – Compassion

Sen sat at a table and sipped tea while Brother Khu muttered under his breath and searched through chest after chest that he pulled out of a closet that could never have held them. He considered offering to help the old monk, but Sen suspected that there were probably things in the chests or the closet that Brother Khu would prefer went unseen by an outsider. So, Sen did his best to wait patiently. That resolve was tested when the monk all but fell inside of a chest. It was a telling moment. ...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 54 – Webs

Glimmer of Night had followed along behind the Cluster Slayer, who he liked, and the other one, who he didn’t care about. He had been quite uncertain about the Cluster Slayer at first. He had only followed them into the ruins out of a sense of obligation that ran so deep in his kind that it might as well have been a command from the heavens. He had feared that once they were in the city, the Cluster… No, thought Glimmer of Night, he is called Sen. He had feared that Sen ...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 53 – Individual Paths

Glowering out at the empty city, Sen let his spiritual sense wash outwards. It was powerful enough that, while he knew he couldn’t cover the entire city, it should cover most of it. Sen froze in place. He had expected to get the usual flood of information about everything alive in the area. Instead, he sensed nothing. Nothing at all. It was as if he cast his spiritual sense into an utter void. The only thing he could sense was himself, the temple, and… Sen whirled. Standing at the top of ...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 52 – Mandala

Things were quiet when they set out the next… Sen pondered about the right word. It still looked like morning, but he suspected it was going to look like morning all of the time for the foreseeable future. Since there wasn’t much to be done about it, he set the concern aside. He’d just call whenever they got up and started moving again morning. The rest had done him good, despite dreaming about inscrutable patterns that seemed like they ought to mean something and might actually mean so...

Update: Chapters and Winter Weather Madness

Okay, so my little corner of the world is bracing for what will be a fairly extreme and extended cold period. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, but it's a bit of a confluence of events for me. I've been living in the same tiny apartment for several years now. Like most people, I accumulate stuff. I've been thinking for a while that I should get a bigger apartment. A big part of that stems from the fact that I like to cook but my kitchen is tiny. Not a great mix. Instead of being impulsive,...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 51 – The Ruins, Part 6

Misty Peak’s head tilted to one side like Sen had started leaning and she was trying to keep him in sight properly.

“What do you mean we’re stuck in a mandala?”

Sen considered a couple of approaches to explaining, but their effectiveness depended a lot on her knowing something about mandalas. She didn’t need to know a lot, because he didn’t know a lot, but she did need to know something. Instead of trying to talk her through it, Sen decided to simply show her what he m...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 50 – The Ruins, Part 5

“As pets go, it’s really creepy,” said Misty Peak.

Sen gave her a level look. “It’s not a pet.”

“It acts like a pet. It follows you around all the time.”

“By that logic, you’re my pet. Should I be scratching you behind the ears?”

The look of blind outrage on Misty Peak’s face was too much for Sen. He burst into laughter, which didn’t help things at all. She stalked toward him with bloody vengeance in her eyes. It was a challenge to du...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 49 – The Ruins, Part 4

Sen didn’t bother to stand as he pulled a healing elixir from a storage ring and downed it. He just lay there for most of a minute, basking in the magnificent absence of people talking at him. Knowing it couldn’t last, though, he pushed himself back up into a sitting position. Misty Peak and the spider were standing next to each other and staring at him. The fox woman looked stunned. The spider looked like, well, it mostly just looked like a spider that was staring at him. Sen wished agai...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 48 – The Ruins, Part 3

All throughout Sen’s training, Master Feng had instilled in him the need for control. He’d striven for it at first because he trusted Master Feng. Then, he’d gone out into the world and witnessed firsthand the destruction that uncontrolled techniques could unleash. He’d even been the cause of some of that destruction. A loss of control had the potential to end lives by the hundreds or, as a cultivator advanced, by the thousands. It could level homes. It could level nations. T...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 47 – The Ruins, Part 2

Sen’s pushed his qinggong technique hard. He wanted to cover the ground between him and the ruins as fast as possible. Ideally, he wanted to be moving fast enough to simply run around any beasts or spirits that might be a little slow to go after Laughing River’s illusionary army. Even so, he didn’t push the technique to the limit. He knew that Misty Peak was fast but not quite as fast as he was at top speed. He kept part of his spiritual sense trained backward. For all his tough talk to...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 46 – The Ruins, Part 1

Sen spent most of the evening and the night in something that wasn’t quite a cultivation trance, but came exceedingly close. He didn’t want to think because that risked him getting caught up in a spiral of what-if contemplations that would do him little good. The absence of good information about the horde and what they would find inside the ruins simply didn’t allow for those what-if scenarios to yield anything useful. All they could do is prime him with expectations that woul...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 45 – Final Straw

Sen spent the entire afternoon and early evening making ever finer adjustments to the formation. He reassured himself several times that he was simply being thorough and not avoiding the galehouse and its current occupants. No, he thought, definitely not avoiding them. Just want to make sure that this formation is going to perform the way I need it to. I’m just being responsible. He spent so much time working on the formations that night had fallen by the...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 44 – I Can’t See Your Legs

Sen stuck around just long enough for Misty Peak to return with Li Yi Nuo. The woman from the sect was bound at the wrists with something that looked like ordinary rope, but Sen assumed was something wholly different. Li Yi Nuo was no body cultivator like him, but she was a relatively advanced core cultivator. Basic rope shouldn’t be enough to hold her. He also lifted an eyebrow at the gag that was firmly fixed in the woman’s mouth. He thought about saying something but decided to just le...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 43 – I Believe in You

“Why is that monster just sitting around out there?” demanded Misty Peak.

Sen steadfastly refused to engage in anything like conversation or banter with either her or Laughing River until he’d had at least one cup of tea. The fight with the fire eagle had been brief but not without consequence. Healing taxed even cultivator bodies, and Sen had taken a lot more damage than he thought bringing that bird down. No single injury had been particularly dangerous, but he’d accumulated a...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 42 – Glimmer of Night

Confusion. He felt confusion. Even as he sat outside the strange stone cave and kept vigil, he didn’t know what to think or how to feel. The day had been too strange, too uncertain, and he had carried that uncertainty in his heart. The matriarch had tasked him to watch the Cluster Slayer, the god of wrath who had killed and killed and killed their distant cousins. He was greatly honored to be singled out by the mother and given a task directly. Doubly honored, truly, to have been given a na...

Unintended Cultivator Audiobook Update

Okay, so I got answers about this faster than I expected. The audiobook for Volume 1 starts recording tomorrow! Still no firm date about when it's going to come out, but with recording getting started, the answer is probably sooner than later. The narrator is Adam Verner (barring some catastrophe in the immediate future, knock on wood), which I'm pretty excited about. You may recognize him from series such as Painting the Mists, System Universe, Daniel Faust, Forgotten Starship, The ...

Random Updates

So, every once in a while, I like to update you guys on things that are not strictly writing-related. So, that's what this will be.

Since some of the people on the livestream asked about it, I talked with my publisher about how Volume 1 is doing in terms of sales. The general consensus is that it's doing well. For reference, when I had that conversation with them a week ago, they generally consider any ebook that breaks into the top 5000 overall on Amazon to be performing fairly well, a...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 41 – Quiet Afternoon

Sen was deeply relieved when Misty Peak, after throwing a few more verbal jabs at him, departed to go try to convince her grandfather to let her join Sen in the ruins. For his part, Sen thought it was a fool’s errand but a very useful fool’s errand. It served double-duty by getting the fox woman out of his hair for a while and firmly placing the decision into Laughing River’s hand. Sen thought there was about no chance in the world that the elder fox would let Misty Peak go along. If Se...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 40 – Fox Matters

“This is boring,” complained Misty Peak for the fifth time.

Sen ignored her while he finished adjusting the formation flag’s position. The work would have gone much faster if he hadn’t had her tagging along and doing her level best to get him to do anything except finish the formation. Content that the flag was in the best place he could manage with someone constantly breaking his concentration, he stood and gave the fox woman a hard look.

“If I didn’...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 39 – Something New

Sen opened his eyes and turned to look at the thing that Misty Peak was pointing at a little more urgently. He’d sensed it a while back and, perhaps foolishly, assumed that it would get out of his way. After all, he’d left thousands of that thing’s kin dead on the slopes of Mt. Solace. Standing in their way was an enormous spider. It was probably the largest spider Sen had ever seen with great hairy legs that were longer than his entire body. He regarded the spider with a neutral expres...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 38 – I Don’t Glower

After he finished coughing and wheezing, Sen threw the fox a death glare.

“Why would you even ask me that?”

The fox arched an eyebrow at Sen. “My amusement.”

Sen opened his mouth to say something with acid in it, paused, and then nodded. “Yeah, I guess that was a stupid question. Still, what if I had seduced her?”

The fox shrugged. “You probably would have choked a bit more? I’d say congratulations? I’m not really sure what you’re getting a...

Unintended Cultivator V6: Chapter 37 – Not that Special

After feeling disgruntled for a minute or two, Sen realized that suppressing the glow wasn’t really any different than his passive cultivation. It was just one more thing he needed to do and then push into the background of his thoughts. With yet another core advancement and, maybe not an advancement, but a change to his body cultivation, he discovered wasn’t that really an effort. Every advancement seemed to make his mind more efficient even as it made his core more powerful. With that r...