ericdontigney

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 46 – Stabbing You Is Always on the Table

Sen watched as a number of conflicting emotions battled for supremacy on Lo Meifeng’s face. There was shock, which he’d expected. It wasn’t like he’d let her know he was coming. He’d made the general assumption that since none of his other teachers had come looking that they knew he was still alive. He’d also sort of assumed that Master Feng would have let Lo Meifeng know, either directly or indirectly, that Sen had survived his most recent brush with death. Still, he supposed it ...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 45 – Self-Mastery

Sen had thought that traveling alone again might feel different now that he was subject to someone else’s will. And he supposed there had been a heady sense of extra freedom for the first couple of hours. Yet, Fu Ruolan’s demands on him had thus far been extremely light. She hadn’t needed to put him under any pressure because the situation was taking care of that all by itself. He’d pushed himself hard, probably harder than had been safe or wise, but it also meant that he’d...

Rinn's Run TIG: Chapter 7 – Cargo and Crew, Part 1

When Kalan left the office of the Interstellar Court, he felt a great deal better about things. He’d loomed menacingly out of view of the camera while the magistrate “regretfully” tendered his immediate resignation. It wouldn’t permanently bar him from regaining a position with the interstellar court, but Kalan doubted that they would ever welcome him back. The resignation would let the man seek out some kind of position in a planetary court system. That was Kalan’s concess...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 44 – No Direct Pressure

“You’re welcome to come along, of course,” said Sen in the most offhanded and casual tone he could manage.

After discussing his plans with Fu Ruolan, he’d reflected on how he’d taken it almost for granted that Falling Leaf would come with him. He didn’t like that he’d done that at all. While he had valid if obnoxious reasons to venture back into those old familiar territories, she didn’t to his knowledge. She’d certainly never expressed a desire to do so, exce...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 43 – Travel Plans

It really worked, thought Sen and not for the first. I really am healed. He mentally backtracked from that last part. His body had been modified and improved. It was stable. Yet, he knew that was a temporary situation. It would start to deteriorate again if he didn’t continue with the Five-Fold Body Transformation. Of course, that was less worrisome than it had been. He finally had the manual or, rather, he had a copy of the manual. He actually three copies that h...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 42 – Prove It

Yan Zixin sat alone in a tea shop, watching the foot traffic of the capital city move by in great waves. A few people had tried to invite themselves to sit with him, young women mostly, but one particularly ardent young man as well. He had fended them off as kindly as he could. He might have welcomed company at another time. He enjoyed conversation and mortals were often surprisingly good at it. He supposed not spending months or even years at a time in near-total seclusion kept them in bette...

Rinn's Run TIG: Chapter 6 – Pesky Legalities

Kalan knew that he had a reputation as someone whose ship you wanted to be on if you could work the miracle to make it happen. So, he wasn’t worried about finding enough people to man the Zeren ship. The problem was that he was going to have to talk to all of those people and make decisions about them. Kalan hated that part. He hated it so much that he’d rather run a light crew than go through the misery of dealing with all of those people. Yet, no matter how he turned the proble...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 41 – Taking Stock

Sen’s first instinct was to return to the galehouse, make sure everyone was safe, and then sleep. He ruthlessly suppressed that instinct. Fu Ruolan and Falling Leaf were survivors. Fu Ruolan had survived what was possibly the least forgiving process of all, cultivation. Falling Leaf, well, she’d survived a genocide and then forged a place for herself on a decidedly hostile mountain. While both might appreciate his concern, it was highly improbable that either of them actually required it....

A cold knocked me out

So, I don’t generally get hit with whatever autumn sicknesses are going around. Unfortunately, it also means I don’t always catch the early warning signs. While I was writing the last chapter I posted, I felt cold. I thought I just hadn’t set the heat high enough. It wasn’t until I stood up from my desk that I realized I was feverish and having severe chills. So, I drank some water and went right to bed. And pretty much slept for 24 hours straight. I’m pretty sure I’m through the ...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chater 40 – Body Cultivation

Breakfast had sounded like a good idea to Sen, and a great way to procrastinate for a little while. He’d been waiting for the moment for so long that having it right at his fingertips felt unreal. Part of him was waiting for the moment when he discovered it wasn’t going to happen. The rest of his was thinking about how much he didn’t know about what that pill was going to do to him. He’d starting thinking over the list of ingredients and the bits and pieces of what he could recall abo...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 39 – Take the Pill

It was, much to Sen’s deep disappointment, pain that woke him from the warm depths of dreamless sleep. It wasn’t just regular pain, though. He’d learned to cope with garden variety pain years before, ignoring it the way a horse would ignore a single ant on the ground before it. This was something else, something more profound. It was pain that throbbed, that stabbed, and twisted in the deepest parts of him. He felt it in the marrow of his bones, in the tissues of organs, he felt it in h...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 38 – Final Test

For Sen, the following week was nothing but a blur of alchemy. While the primer only provided the most tangential guidance in terms of method, it did force him to manage increasingly complex assortments of ingredients and reagents. He rarely struggled with the early recipes. As the reactions and interactions inside of the cauldron grew increasingly complicated, though, he found that even his intuitive abilities were hard-pressed to keep pace. When he very nearly failed to complete a pill, he ...

Unintended Cultivator: Chapter 37 – Work Quickly

Sen spent several weeks trying to weaken the pills he was making. While he found that he could consistently reduce their potency, he couldn’t reliably reduce the amount. Some of it was simply the unpredictability of how the ingredients interacted with each other. He could never fully replicate any method because the conditions inside the cauldron were simply too chaotic from one session to the next, even if he was making the exact same kind of pill. It went deeper than that, though. Sometim...

Rinn's Run TIG: Chapter 5 – Something Forgotten

Kalan got Cera settled in a room in one of the safer hotels on the station and a tidy bribe kept her name out of the system. He was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to happen and equally sure that it happened all the time on a station that had as much through traffic as Cobalt 7. There were just too many people who didn’t want to be located for hotels to offer no options for privacy. If they handled it off-the-books, that was even better in Kalan’s opinion. She eyed him like she thought...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 36 – Tone It Down

For all the stagnation that had marked the months he spent trying to make pill refining work as others did it, the time after he figured out the trick followed a path of meteoric mastery that even he wouldn’t have credited if he hadn’t experienced it personally. He flew through the primer. The early recipes seemed laughably easy to him when he let his natural instincts guide the process. There were days when he completed half a dozen new pills even when intentionally maintained a leisurel...

Forde Voss: Chapter 4 – Blonde Ambition

The minister of agriculture was droning on, again, the way he always droned on, and on, and on. After he finished droning, the minister of the military would get up and he would drone on, and on, and on. The man would, no doubt, complain that yet another expedition sent to deal with that stupid sea monster had been summarily eaten. When Voss had mentioned it to him more than a year ago, the man had seemed so casual about it, exuding absolute confidence that someone would kill the wretched thi...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 35 – Pills

Sen managed to escape Falling Leaf’s wrath mostly unscathed. Her fury had been pretty halfhearted after he waved the pill in front of her. She clipped his chin with a claw and drew a negligible amount of blood. He thought she’d done it mostly to prove a point. Don’t wake me up from a nap unless there’s danger imminent. On the whole, it was a sentiment with which Sen agreed. That ultra-mild chastisement did nothing to dampen his good mood. He had succeeded in making a...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 34 – Hope and Fear

Sen had planned to wait until the next day and take his plan to Fu Ruolan, but it nagged at him as he tried to focus on reading the primer. He found himself rereading the same passages over and over again as his attention slipped from the book to the possibility that he might finally crack the problem of pill refining. Of course, that came with equal parts excitement and trepidation. If it worked, it would be a fantastic triumph. If it failed, Sen cringed to imagine the blow that might delive...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 33 – Clarity

Sen was happy to discover that the tension that had hovered between him and Fu Ruolan largely dissipated after their conversation. However, he suspected the gift of the extremely rare ice lotus helped as well. That translated into unexpected but welcome changes in how they worked on his pill refining. The mystery of his persistent failures remained unsolved, but she paid much closer attention to his state of mind. When she thought that he was getting too frustrated or disheartened, she would ...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 32 – Freedom’s Call

Sen pushed open the door to galehouse and looked around. He did that every time he came into the place. He knew that he was looking changes, but it was a fruitless little bit of paranoia. The interior of the galehouse never changed. Still, it soothed some small part of his heart to find the place as he’d left it, even if he’d only left it for a few days. The tedious weeks of crafting failed variations on the healing pill had left Fu Ruolan stumped. Sen had pounced on that moment when the ...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 31 – Curiosity

Sen had hoped that Fu Ruolan had been satisfied that his failures meant the problem wasn’t with his technique. Instead, he spent nearly two full weeks running one failed attempt after another. On each attempt, Fu Ruolan would change one thing in refining process. The whole thing was tedious and frustrating, but Sen had done similar things in the early days of learning cultivation. It was the brute force method of learning something and, much as he hated to admit it, the method works with en...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 30 – Everything Right

While Sen had felt a little uncertainty about asking for help, Fu Ruolan’s reaction had caught him off guard. Her face had lit up like he’d just given her the best gift of her life. The woman had seemed almost giddy at the prospect of helping Sen figure out what he’d been doing wrong. She’d looked ready to get started immediately, but had ultimately told Sen to get some sleep.

“Better to start fresh,” she said.

Sen had almost objected with a reference to the t...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 29 – Failure

Sen stared down into the cauldron in disgust. The misshapen, burned lump of ingredients that sat at the bottom of the alchemist’s tool seemed to mock him. If this had been the first such failure, or the twentieth, or even the fiftieth, it wouldn’t have bothered him so much. Sen had lost count of how many times his attempts at making even the simplest healing pill had collapsed into abject defeat. He didn’t know what the problem was, precisely, but the entire thing felt unnatural to him....

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 28 – Inequity

As her feet carried her away from the stone house that Lu Sen had summoned from the earth with such casual disregard that she’d wanted to slap him for it, Fu Ruolan didn’t see anything around her. Even in a world where the heavens intervened directly, if only occasionally, it was rare to witness anything that one might call truly miraculous. But that was what she had just seen. For perhaps the third time in her very, very long life, Fu Ruolan had witnessed a miracle. That it was a miracle...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 27 – Cauldron

Time is a cultivator’s ally. Sen had heard Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Ma Caihong all say something similar at one time or another. However, as often as not, time seemed to work against Sen in one way or another. He always felt under pressure to accomplish an advancement, reach or a goal, or simply to be somewhere. He had felt the same way about the two-month deadline that Fu Ruolan had given him to make that pill. The addition of just one month had changed everything for him. Instead of fe...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 26 – Celestial Vista

The impulse to start reading what Sen recognized as a full-blow, if condensed, alchemy treatise was almost overwhelming. The pressure of that two-month deadline bore down on him as well, but a tinge of wisdom had crept into Sen’s thinking since his days on the mountain. Regardless of what his low-level panic told him, starting that day wasn’t going to help. He was mentally drained from the journey and everything he’d done on it. Fighting all of those spiders, to say nothing of the drago...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 25 – Welcome Back

The last few days on the way back to Fu Ruolan’s home wasn’t precisely peaceful, but it felt that way compared to fighting a beast tide that included a dragon. Even without his core or dantian topped off, Sen found that most of the challenges they faced were… He hesitated to frame it exactly as trivial, but he couldn’t think of a better term for it. The beasts who attacked them seemed trivial by comparison. Falling Leaf had the right of things about it taking time to gather a substant...

Where's Everyone From?

While I've made the assumption that many of the people on here are based in the US, I know that at least some of you aren't. So, sound off with some national pride in the comments and let me know where you're from.

Update: Well, it's certainly a cosmopolitan group we have here. I have to say that I'm a little bit in awe that so many people who aren't from the US, UK, or Australia have mastered the English language well enough to enjoy my books. It's either a testament to your education ...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 24 – Spirit Beasts and Mushrooms

While Sen’s healing elixirs had more or less gotten them back to being healthy, recovering enough qi to travel safely in the wilds was another matter entirely. Sen insisted that they leave the area where they had fought. He found the prospect that other spirit beasts would come sniffing around looking for easy resources or just an easy meal was too much of a risk. He only took them a few miles away, but far enough that he thought they would be able to set up for the night. Raising a galehou...

Unintended Cultivator V5: Chapter 23 – Trouble

Sen used his qinggong technique to kick off the ground at terrifying velocity, just to slam his knee into the underside of a dragon’s open maw. The knee struck with enough force to shatter stone and it forced the mouth closed…just in time for the dragon’s breath technique to erupt. With no way to escape into the outside world, the technique exploded inside the dragon. Sen was aware that it happened, but he didn’t actually see it. He was looking the other way and sending waves of light...