ericdontigney

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 33 – Trope Boot

Having only experienced his growth from inside, Terry found it fascinating to watch Kelima’s steady increase in power. If he’d had a computer, the proper software, and access to a gym, he expected it would make for some interesting graphs. It wasn’t following a linear curve or an exponential curve. It was more like punctuated increases, like she was installing better hardware into a computer. Not that the noble girl seemed aware of the changes. Nor had Terry bothered to mention it, beca...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 12: Chapter 5 – Be Convincing

Bey Peizhi managed to stand, staggered, and then clutched at his head. It had been a very, very long time since he’d last experienced anything like a headache, let alone the agony inside his skull now. That kind of pain was for mortals and qi-condensing cultivators. He wasn’t even sure where he was. The last thing he remembered, he’d been outside the palace, staring up at Judgment’s Gale. He froze as the words came back to him. Lie down. Then, everything had exploded i...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 32 – Unseasoned

The next few days passed with only mild irritations. Rather, they were mild irritations for Terry. He suspected the Kelima found the process of fighting monsters several times a day rather taxing. Although he did take great care not to let things devolve quite as much as he had in that first fight when she’d been injured so badly. Waiting around for another three or four days while she slept off another healing potion was not on his agenda. Beyond her displeasure at all the fightin...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 12: Chapter 4 – It’s Just Death

“So, we just wait?” asked Falling Leaf.

Sen looked up from the scroll he was reading. The Lunar Tiger Sect members were still sprawled on the ground. He turned his head toward Falling Leaf, who was sitting next to him in a comfortable chair he’d summoned for her from a storage ring.

“There isn’t much else we can do until they wake up.”

“We could go somewhere else. We could do something other than just waiting. This isn’t interesting.”

Sen gave ...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 12: Chapter 3 – Are You Truly So Small

“Judgment’s Gale!” thundered a voice that made the stone of the palace shiver.

Sen looked up from the small mountain of paperwork that had been shoved in front of him by the small army of functionaries that did the actual work of keeping the kingdom running.

“How long?” he asked.

“Lord Lu?” asked the young man who had been left with him for reasons he didn’t entirely understand.

Sen frowned at him, trying again to discern exactly who the young ma...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 31 – Six Months

Once again, Terry worked his way through the sequence of sword motions that other-Terry had painstakingly walked him through. It all seemed oddly basic to him. He knew he had already performed far more difficult things with a jian before. It also lacked the strain that he’d come to associate with the exercise. Since he’d apparently gotten the deluxe body upgrade package on arrival and then boosted it by absorbing monster cores, the swords just weren’t heavy enough to tired him out. It s...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 12: Chapter 2 – The Time for Patience Is Over

Every cultivator in the room went silent as Sen lifted a hand and began to rub at one of his temples with two fingers. Grandmother Lu had been able to make excuses about needing to return to Lu Manor and departed almost the moment they got through the city gate. Lai Dongmei had been able to follow a similar path by citing the need to check in on her sect. They had been polite about it, but they had both abandoned him. Even General Mo had said something about seeing to the new recruits and fle...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 12: Chapter 1 – Nobody Would Let It Go

Ah, the start of new volume. And...here....we....go!

***

“They belong to the army now,” Sen told General Mo.

He gestured to the huddled mortals and the more stoic cultivators. General Mo didn’t say anything or even look at the people that Sen had indicated. His eyes were locked on the shadow constructs that were, to their credit, passively standing off to one side and making no trouble. If anything, they almost seemed bored to Sen, but that m...

Rylan's Rise (initial chapters)

Okay, as promised in the update post, here's the thing that got in the way of me writing anything else. If you read it, let me know what you

Okay, as promised in the update post, here's the thing that got in the way of me writing anything else. If you read it, let me know what you think in the comments. Is it crap? Should it go in the definitely write more of this later folder? Inquiring minds (mostly mine) want to know. Enjoy! ~Eric

***

Pr...

Update: Things Going Awry

Okay, so nothing this week went the way I planned. I was sick for three or four days. (Summer cold, I think.) That delightful experience was followed up by two days of migraines (from not drinking nearly enough water for the three of four days where all I did was sleep and not feel good, I expect). And then, I got an idea lodged in my brain that wouldn't go away and also wouldn't get out of the way long enough for me to get work done on anything else. This doesn't happen to me too often, but ...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 71 – There It Is

Sen spent some of those two hours gathering the scattered beast cores. He separated out the shadow cores from the destroyed constructs. After giving it some serious thought, he remade the constructs. However, they got made one at a time to limit the strain on that part of him that still ached. He was surprised to find that the lingering intentions in those particular cores were no longer as resistant to his intention for them to fight spirit beasts. That was helpful, but it gave him pause. Th...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 70 – Evaluations

“I’m not entirely certain you want these people as your vanguard,” said Grandmother Lu.

“Agreed,” said Lai Dongmei. “This is not an impressive showing, particularly for the cultivators.”

Sen looked at Falling Leaf.

“They’re bad at this,” said Falling Leaf in her usual blunt manner.

“They really are,” said Sen.

He shook his head as they looked down on the “battle” happening below. The mortals were screaming and cowering as the shadow co...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 69 – Valuable Things

A dull ache waited inside of Sen for when he woke up the next morning. An ache that refused to go away, which told him that he’d pushed too hard the previous afternoon. The worst part was that he knew that it wasn’t physical. As swiftly as he healed, any physical ailment would have repaired itself while he slept. He’d kept making the shadow constructs long after he knew he should stop. Some of it had been simple fascination with the process, as flawed as the final products might be in h...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 68 – Shifting Responsibility

Ten shadow constructs stood in a mostly neat row. Sen considered them with mixed feelings. He’d made them with the express purpose of fighting in the war. Something had proven both easier and harder than he’d expected. It was easier than he expected because the intention echoes inside the cores had already been primed to some extent for violence. Most spirit beasts who grew in power long enough to develop strong cores were forced to fight in the wilds, either for territory or survival. Th...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 67 – The Limit of My Mercy

Despite it feeling as though making the shadow wolves had taken a lot of time, Sen was surprised to find that it was still morning when they had all gone outside. Not that he felt the same weight of time pressing down on him the same way anymore. As they’d be taking mortals back with them, he’d expected the journey back to the capital to take weeks, or maybe even a month. The shadow constructs changed everything. If they could meet his expectations, which he thought they could, that journ...

Update: Recommendations and Randomness

I've been a little slow to start today. Migraine season is truly upon us. I somehow manage to forget that this time of year always, always sucks harder than the rest of year for migraines. It's just the weather. So, anyway, I had a migraine last night which really screwed up my sleep. That, in turn, has left me kind of groggy today. There is an Unintended Cultivator chapter coming. It's about half written. I just needed to give my brain a few minutes to percolate on the rest of ...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 66 – A Questionable Weapon

A pronounced silence filled the air after Falling Leaf’s mostly hollow criticism. The quiet was almost immediately replaced by a wave of noise as three nascent soul cultivators started peppering him questions. The volume rose as they all tried to get their own questions answered first. Sen took a step back as three women drew closer. It felt far too much like a pack of hungry wolves moving in on a wounded animal for Sen’s liking. The only saving grace was that they spent more time casting...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 65 – Shadow Dog Reborn, Part 2

Without a solution to the sapience problem or at least partial solution, it wouldn’t matter how durable he made the shadow constructs. They’d just end up being dark statues that consumed qi very, very slowly. That idea actually amused Sen a little. He could think of a few people that he might enjoy scaring by having what they believed were statues abruptly move after several weeks of being stationary. It was just an idle thought, though. His main focus was on trying to pull up a memory of...

Poll Results and a Brief Update

Okay, so the poll results are in and the overwhelming majority of voters (84%) prefer that the notifications resume. So, the notifications will resume starting immediately.

So, for anyone not caught in the current weather event that's happening in some parts of America, there is a weather event happening. In my corner of the US, we're under a flood watch because water is falling from the skies pretty relentlessly and will probably continue to do so until Monday. So, basically, anything ...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 30 – Sage Wisdom

Despite other-Terry’s possibly-good-natured-but-probably-mocking comments, Terry had been surprisingly content with his frost. It covered more ground than he’d intended, but it had been contained to a circle that was about six feet across. The point was that it hadn’t covered everything within a few hundred feet in a thick layer of life-stealing ice. Not that Terry was opposed to life-stealing ice. He just wanted it on-demand, under control, and murdering monsters. Not spreading out fro...

Notifications Poll

I was going to do this tomorrow, but I figure everyone has had enough time not getting notifications to develop an informed opinion about whether they want them. Also, I accidentally let a notification go out today, so there's that. Anyway, this is your opportunity to participate in a democratic process. You can either vote to turn the notifications back on, or you can vote to keep them off. I'll let this vote run until tomorrow afternoon (or when it's become obvious that there will be no mor...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 64 – Shadow Dog Reborn, Part 1

Sen took his time getting ready in the morning. He made a lavish breakfast that required him to reshape the stone table. He’d worried that Ai might have started to outgrow her delight at such trivial tricks, but her eyes lit up as the stone flowed like water into a new shape. He’d also needed to make the table bigger to accommodate the extra people who were there. The guests for that particular meal included Falling Leaf, Grandmother Lu, Lai Dongmei, Auntie Caihong, little Zhi and her mot...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 63 – Marching Orders

Sen hardened his expression as he landed outside of the makeshift camp that contained the cultivators and mortals he planned to take with him. He found it more difficult to harden his heart when he saw what a miserable state the mortals were in, particularly the children. He had ordered that they all be provided with necessities, so there were ample fires, tents, blankets, and food, but there was nothing else. Nor were they were allowed to wander far from the confines of the camp. A few of bo...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 62 – More Damning Than Hate

Despite his intentions to leave after the third day, Sen couldn’t bring himself to do it. The prospect of leaving after the scant few hours he’d managed to carve out with Ai was simply more than he could bear. He also knew that his original plans were no longer viable. Before, he could have simply left. Now, he had to at least make arrangements to get the cultivators and mortals he planned to forcibly conscript back to the capital. Unlike Sua Xing Xing, he made a point to communicate thos...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 61 – Flight

There was a part of Sen that exulted at seeing the blinding happiness on his daughter’s face as the sky monster swooped through air. The rest and much bigger part of Sen found himself horrified at the speed of the Fenghuang. That was to say nothing of their distance from the ground. He reminded himself over and over again that this was nothing new. Ai had ridden the spirit beast countless times and never fallen to her death. Something he had no choice but to attribute to the Fenghuang’s c...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 60 – Uncomfortable Pairing

As Sen left his office and the building that contained it behind, he was shocked by how utterly tired he felt. It wasn’t physical fatigue. He was pretty sure he hadn’t felt that in any meaningful measure since the last time he almost died. That thought brought him up short. He couldn’t help but wonder when he’d become the sort of person who almost died often enough that it just became a handy reference point instead a life-altering event. It didn’t seem like something that should be...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 59 – Secrets and Assumptions

The silence drew out as Sua Xing Xing seemed to weigh what she would tell him. Or, he thought, maybe she’s just trying to decide how to phrase what she’ll tell me. He doubted that she was going to come up with any kind of verbal magic that would succeed in making him less angry about everything. Even if he had, eventually, concluded that the matter was sufficiently in hand, he still should have had a say in how it was handled. Setting aside that he was the sect ...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 58 – Introductions

Sen was happy and a little relieved he could put off what he expected to be an uncomfortable meeting with Sua Xing Xing, at least for a little longer. He’d decided to get some actual sleep for once and been woken by an ecstatic Ai jumping on him in the morning. That had led to breakfast and, then, to his excuse to procrastinate for a few minutes longer. Grandmother Lu had come to the galehouse to meet Ai. Sen had somewhat expected his daughter to be shy around the new person, but it seemed ...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 29 – Training Montage

Alright, alright, alright. Let’s get this training party started, said other-Terry in an accent.

Terry could not, for the life of him, figure out what that accent was supposed to be. It was only when he remembered hearing that alright, alright, alright phrase back on Earth that he put two and two together and asked the question.

Was that your Matthew McConaughey impression?

Prett...