Once Sen got Lo Meifeng and Falling Leaf to calm down enough to let him get a word in edgewise, their ire swiftly transferred from him to the Clear Spring sect. As far as they were concerned, it had been the sect’s job, in general, and the patriarch’s job, specifically, to see to their safety. Letting a three-person team of hired killers get into the sect to injure or kill Sen was an epic failure on all fronts. While Lo Meifeng stormed off to find someone official to scream at for a while...
2023-08-16 06:47:23 +0000 UTC
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Because I know everyone has been waiting for this. Also, yes, there will be another chapter tonight. ~Eric
***
Lan Zi Rui was frustrated. He had been frustrated and growing ever more frustrated for the last two months. Ever since that wretched boy and that awful woman had left. Oh, he had been secretly relieved when they left. He still didn’t know how that boy had done what he’d done. He’d had no food for almost half a year. He’d...
2023-08-15 23:14:15 +0000 UTC
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Exiting from the odd enclosure that held the spring and the gardens, Sen was relieved that he didn’t find anyone waiting for him. At the same time, though, that lack of a friendly or hostile welcome from anyone left him even more concerned about just how long he’d spent communing with the spirit of spring. Days probably, but it could easily be longer than that. The patriarch would probably be happy about that, even though Sen wasn’t really sure he’d gotten anything he truly needed. He...
2023-08-15 01:18:40 +0000 UTC
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Sen had been through a lot in his time off the mountain. Enough that it was easy for him to forget that he’d seen very little of the world. For all the intensity of his experiences, though, they were limited in scope. As a veil was pulled back before him, Sen was given an acute reminder that he was very, very young. He didn’t see anything, at least nothing that he could recall later, but rather he felt something. It was a presence, something so vast that it reduced the unleashed presence ...
2023-08-14 07:50:22 +0000 UTC
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Sen considered everything that had just happened, nodded to the patriarch, and turned to walk away.
“Is that it?” asked the patriarch. “No questions? No demands?”
“You don’t have what I need, no way to give it to me, or no intention of giving it to me. Regardless of the reason, my business here is done,” said Sen. “I don’t have the interest or the time to waste on figuring out which reason it is.”
“You’re a core cultivator. You have nothing but
2023-08-13 23:16:21 +0000 UTC
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Sen tried to make sense of the patriarch’s words. How can they have it, but not have access to it, he wondered. His mind tried to come up with scenarios that might provide sense to the words, but he didn’t have much luck. The few things he did come up with were, even on casual inspection, absurd. Accepting that he wasn’t going to get anywhere without more information, he eyed the patriarch. The older cultivator was frowning out over the spring.
“I’m sorry, pa...
2023-08-13 07:55:34 +0000 UTC
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For the first minute or so, Sen tried to answer questions. Unfortunately, everyone was so busy yelling at him or each other that his attempts at answering went unheard. For the next minute or so, he just gave everyone an a generally annoyed look. That didn’t seem to dampen their enthusiasm at all. Sen’s frustration swelled as they continued their verbal assault and he cycled up air qi. When it became clear that no one planned to stop anytime soon, Sen wove air qi through the enti...
2023-08-12 21:18:52 +0000 UTC
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So, the migraine pill I took knocked me out cold, and I woke up in the middle of the night. So, you get a chapter at a ridiculous time. ~Eric
***
Their first day at the sect was both calmer and more tedious than Sen had expected. He’d planned for more than a little burning resentment from the water cultivators over his interference with their little war. In fact, he’d expected a lot of that. Either those people had been ordered to stay away from him o...
2023-08-12 08:44:38 +0000 UTC
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For a long moment, Sen wondered about his own reaction. Why was he nervous about this meeting? As far as he knew, Falling Leaf and Chan Yu Ming had never met, let alone had any bad blood between them. There was no reason why they should be at odds with each other. If anything, Falling Leaf would likely just decide that she didn’t care about Chan Yu Ming at all and not interact with the woman. As for Chan Yu Ming, he didn’t really know her well enough to guess at her thoughts, but...
2023-08-11 19:54:03 +0000 UTC
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As they drew ever closer to the Clear Spring sect, Shi Ping grew increasingly nervous. He never said anything directly to anyone. It seemed that the combination of getting stabbed in the leg and witnesses Sen’s impromptu declaration of war against an entire species had buried fear firmly in his soul. Instead, the man grew jumpier and jumpier, twitching at any unexpected sound, and eyeing the occasional passing traveler with open concern. Sen let that play out until he was certain they were ...
2023-08-11 05:42:42 +0000 UTC
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Sorry that these are coming at such random times. I got a new desktop computer that I planned on switching over to on my days off. What should have been an afternoon of work has turned into a week long debacle of technical glitches. I'm hoping the last of the insanity will be done today and that I can get back to working on a more regular schedule. ~Eric
***
Everyone let Sen be for the rest of the day, which suited him just fine. He had plenty to think about. It w...
2023-08-10 18:29:00 +0000 UTC
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Falling Leaf was closing on them fast, which meant that Sen had a limited amount of time to decide what he wanted to do. Of course, those limits were quite as limiting as they had once been. Much as advancements in the formation foundation stage had refined his brain and improved the speed and clarity of his thinking, the transition into the core formation stage had done the same and benefited from a similar advancement in his body cultivation. That meant that decisions that would have once s...
2023-08-10 05:29:41 +0000 UTC
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Sen had thought he’d be happy to leave the valley of the fire cultivators behind, and he was…mostly. The only real downside was that one of the fire cultivators, Shi Ping, had come with them. Sen had gotten a heaven-chasing realm spear for taking on the task of bringing Shi Ping along and thought it was worth it. He had swiftly come to realize that it most certainly had not been worth it. Sen had known the man was lazy because Shi Ping had admitted it to him, openly, unashamedly,...
2023-08-09 17:39:33 +0000 UTC
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He did take a moment to study his dantian and the odd ribbon of new qi but left off almost immediately. There was no obvious damage to the dantian. Figuring out that new qi was important. He knew it. He also knew that it was something that he wasn’t going to understand with five minutes of casual study. Even so, it was an effort to turn his attention away from it. Any change in his dantian that he hadn’t initiated was a cause for concern. Changes could mean unexpected results, wh...
2023-08-09 05:46:49 +0000 UTC
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Zhang Jing sat in the chair by the window and contemplated patience. If it were possible to cultivate patience the way that people cultivated qi, he believed that he would be a nascent soul cultivator already. For, if ever a man had befriended patience, he was that man. Even now, he waited in patience for the words of The Diviner. Zhang Jing knew the ancient cultivator had a name, Li Qian, but he was only ever referred to as The Diviner. He wasn’t sure if the old cultivator himself even rem...
2023-08-06 16:28:56 +0000 UTC
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With the decision about where he was going at least tentatively made, barring new information, things relaxed a bit. They camped out at Sen’s little house for a few more days, while Sen slowly bled information about the capital from them. Auntie Caihong had been there most recently, so she gave him a rundown on the political situation as it stood while she was there. She also made sure he understood that in the world of capital politics, the five years since she was last there was a virtual...
2023-08-06 06:04:57 +0000 UTC
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Sen ended up making breakfast the next day since he was up first, or at least the first to wander out into the main room. It was always hard to gauge how long any given cultivator would sleep because there was no good way to gauge how long it had been since they last slept. He’d been getting regular sleep recently, so sleeping for a few hours had almost been an indulgence. It had been a chance for his mind to rest, though. He was still pondering the problem of Falling Leaf. The cas...
2023-08-05 18:55:37 +0000 UTC
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I’m housesitting right now. One of the best parts is that there’s a grill here. So, today, it’s steak, grilled zucchini with garlic pepper, and a pepper/mushroom/onion sauté.
2023-08-05 01:13:53 +0000 UTC
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Sen had suspected that the three nascent soul cultivators would keep him talking for days if he let them. So, he begged off with excuses about being tired after making the house. He was tired, just not physically. Recounting everything he’d done for a year, give or take, had been mentally taxing because so much of it couldn’t be talked about without dredging up old fears, old questions, and old uncertainties. Beyond that, it had been a very one-sided conversation. He underst...
2023-08-04 06:24:04 +0000 UTC
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“We all have stories to tell,” said Master Feng, “But I think we all want to hear yours first, Sen.”
At those words, Sen looked down mournfully at the heaping plate of food in front of him. He supposed it was a small enough sacrifice to tell his story first. He did pop a dumpling in his mouth before he answered, though. If he was going to tell that story, he was going to get at least one bite of hot food first. He assumed that everyone there knew about what had happened all the ...
2023-08-03 16:57:21 +0000 UTC
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When reasoning kicked back, Sen realized that they all clearly had a lot to talk about. More importantly, there were big parts of it that he, at least, didn’t want people listening in on. Falling Leaf’s actual identity as a transformed, evolved, metamorphosed – Sen wasn’t sure about the terminology – spirit beast was very high on his list of things to keep contained to the five people standing in that little group. He wasn’t sure what big sects would do to capture and study a spir...
2023-08-03 07:01:15 +0000 UTC
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It took more than a week, and Sen was very nearly to point of simply leaving the fire cultivator’s valley, before something finally changed. Sen was hiding in his assigned room and pretending not to be there. He’d made the mistake the day before of answering the door and telling someone to go away. That had opened a floodgate of people knocking on his door who just happened to be walking by his room. He eventually went out the window to escape them. He hadn’t repeated the previ...
2023-08-03 00:07:42 +0000 UTC
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Kalan was vaguely amused to note that the Zeren ship was sufficiently larger than the Ankala Rising that he could drag his feet in going somewhere he didn’t especially want to go. It wasn’t any particular reluctance to do what he knew he had to do when he got there. He’d committed to that before left his own ship. It was what came after that he hadn’t decided on, and he didn’t like going into a situation without having at least a general plan of action. Yet, even on the bigger ship,...
2023-08-02 08:43:30 +0000 UTC
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With Duan Yuxuan’s certainty that Master Feng wouldshow up there at some point, Sen found himself stuck in one place with no clear picture of when he might leave. It was a strange feeling for someone who, aside from his time trapped at the cult, had rarely stopped anywhere for more than a night or two. Worse still, he had nothing that he needed to be doing. There were plenty of things he could be doing. After that afternoon with the jian students, he’d been inundated wit...
2023-08-02 06:17:08 +0000 UTC
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For all that the pair of them could have probably flown wherever they wanted in the compound, Duan Yuxuan led them through the place on foot. Everywhere they went, there was more kowtowing. The only exceptions were a few, peak core cultivators that Sen assumed were highly positioned in the order. They merely offered incredibly deep bows as the pair of them passed. It was deeply uncomfortable for Sen to watch, even if he wasn’t the object of all that bowing and scraping. The matriarch took i...
2023-08-01 21:51:29 +0000 UTC
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Sen was in a bad mood when he left that garden. Nothing had happened that he hadn’t expected, not really, but the whole thing was just a massive frustration for him. He’d thought that he and Lo Meifeng had made progress. His knee-jerk reaction was to say that they hadn’t made any progress at all because that would let him just write her off completely. But he couldn’t quite sell himself on that idea. They had built something like a friendship. It seemed that he’d just overe...
2023-08-01 06:01:18 +0000 UTC
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It wasn’t much of a conversation at first, as Sen laid out the reasons why he was angry with Lo Meifeng. She tried to justify a few things at first, but Sen just asked her to wait, assuring her that questions were coming. She reluctantly fell silent after that and simply endured his words. Words that he delivered with an almost mechanical precision and blank tone voice. Once he finished with that, he was silent for a time as he weighed which questions really mattered and which ones would ju...
2023-07-31 21:37:23 +0000 UTC
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Taking control of the ship had been an important step in the plan, but it was only the first step. There was an order to all things, and Kalan needed to take the next steps to impose order on this foreign vessel. It started with gathering up the few survivors who remained. It didn’t take long, although the last remaining survivor from engineering had to be dragged, kicking and screaming and swearing that the vengeance of the Zeren Authority would destroy them all. Kalan supposed it was easy...
2023-07-31 08:49:33 +0000 UTC
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Wu Meng Yao had never considered herself a coward. She had fought spirit beasts and rogue cultivators without hesitation. She had endured the pains of advancement and tribulations. She had held firm on the path of cultivation where so many others hesitated, broke, or failed. Yet, every day, the idea that she was a coward weighed her down a little more. Not a coward of the body, but something far worse, far more reprehensible. She feared that she was a coward of the soul. And all it h...
2023-07-31 02:50:23 +0000 UTC
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The next week was a true test of Sen’s patience. While a few of the most severely injured water and fire cultivators needed a bit of additional attention, Sen spent most of his time trying to avoid people. He often went out on long trips into the valley that lasted for most of a day. They weren’t wasted trips. He put out a handful of fires and fully extinguished some smoldering coals that might have burst back into fire. He was also able to replace some of the ingredients and reagents he...
2023-07-30 19:55:26 +0000 UTC
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