ericdontigney

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 42 – Pity

The investigation turned out to be a surprisingly brief matter. Misty Peak and her foxes spent less than a day on it before returning with their evidence. That didn’t make the entire thing a pleasant affair. Many of the detained nobles complained relentlessly, even the one who hadn’t suffered an accusation of disloyalty. That was when they weren’t trying to bribe their guards to either release them or carry messages. It got bad enough that Sen threatened to make trying to bribe a...

Migraine

I’ve got a pretty bad migraine today. I’ve taken something for it, but I’ll just have to wait and see if it helps. Worst case scenario, you’ll get two Unintended Cultivator chapters tomorrow.

Terry’s map

In case any of you were wondering what Terry’s map looks like. This is a nearly photographic reproduction of what it would actually look like.

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 41 – None Of You Will Like This

Kang made the only choice he could. The only choice available to a man who cared in the slightest about what happened to his family. He talked. A fact that was not received with universal joy in the throne room. As Kang named the people he’d been conspiring with, space opened up around certain individuals in the room. It was if the other nobles wanted to physically distance themselves from someone who had come down with a lethal and highly contagious disease. Those who were named glared mur...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 25 – Motives

“What?” Kelima shouted as she spun around, hastily drawing her sword.

Terry continued leaning against the tree and petting Dusk as he watched the girl desperately parry the clawed slashes of some kind of big cat. It wasn’t something that Terry recognized immediately, mostly because it didn’t have stripes or spots. Plus, he didn’t have any idea how many species of big cats Chinese Period Drama Hell contained. He was pretty sure that there were only five or six species back on E...

Update: Behind the Scenes Stuff

Okay, I've been talking about this for a while now, and I'm finally pulling the trigger on a decision that I probably should have made about 6 months to a year ago. I'm hiring an assistant. Or, rather, a virtual assistant. In practical terms, it shouldn't mean huge changes for how this page operates, but it does mean you'll occasionally see things from a new person. Her name is Kat. She's a friend of mine and has been for a very long time. Please, please, be nice to her, especially i...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 40 – The Trial of Kang, Part 2

Sen didn’t let it go on for very long. At least, he knew that was objectively true. He didn’t think a full five minutes had passed. Of course, Chan Dishi was a core cultivator. He could get a lot done in five minutes, and he had apparently been feeling motivated. He’d broken bones, shattered joints, and removed fingers and ears, but he hadn’t done anything that would kill immediately. Without the aid of something like Sen’s own healing elixirs, though, the sheer volume of injuries w...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 39 – The Trial of Kang, Part 1

“Lord Lu,” stammered Kang, having finally seemed to realize just how bad this situation could become for him.

“Do not speak again,” commanded Sen. “Your words will not be required to settle this matter.”

“Lord Lu! I must protest!” shouted Kang. “I am guaranteed the right to—”

Sen crushed the man to the floor with the barest application of his auric imposition.

“Guaranteed?” asked Sen to no one and everyone. “The r...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 38 – Political Theater

It was clear in the way that people hesitated ever so slightly at the door, the way that their eyes widened slightly, that no one had expected Sen to be openly sitting on the throne. After all, he’d made a point of not sitting on it since he’d arrived. It had been an indulgence he’d allowed himself. A way of sidestepping the new facts of his world. By avoiding that cumbersome piece of furniture, he’d been able to pretend for just a little longer that he wasn’t laying claim to an ent...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 24 – It’s For Your Benefit

It was the sound of running water that made Terry come up short. His eyes narrowed as he stared in the direction of that sound. A moment later, Kelima stopped next to him. She looked at him, looked in the direction he was glowering, and then back at him. When he just kept glowering and didn’t bother to explain, she finally asked him the question.

“What are you glaring at?”

“The future,” he said with a shake of his head.

“What does that mean?”

“It means ...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 37 – A Debt Like That

The throne sat there blithely ignoring Sen’s baleful glare. He tried glaring a little harder, but it seemed that scaring lifeless objects was still beyond his power. He knew that, all things considered, that was a good thing. In this one situation, though, he wished could intimidate that one particular piece of vexing furniture.

“Glare all you like,” said Jing, “but you’re still going to have to sit in it.”

“I do not. I don’t have do anything of the s...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 36 – Competence

Sen had thought that it would feel like a long time when he initially set the goal to march the army in a month. As one thing had piled up on the next, he realized what a naïve thought that had been. He was training the emissaries, monitoring the army, and sidestepping nobles with all their delusions about the things they thought they were owed. The sects were better than the nobles, cowed as they had been by Master Feng and Uncle Kho. Of course, better was not the same as good...

Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 18 – No, It Definitely Works

“He’ll need a mana ring. One that can hold at least twenty or thirty mana if you have it,” said Sig.

“He’ll need light armor,” said Seiran. “He’s as fast as me, so we don’t want to slow him down too much.”

“Yeah, but he’s as strong as me,” objected Chrosan. “That means he’ll probably be doing a lot of front-line fighting. Light armor isn’t worth a lot there.”

“Speed isn’t worth a lot if you’re carrying around a hundred pounds of metal ...

Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 17 – Discerning Eye

“Well, that was awful,” griped James as soon as they were out of the guild.

Sig gave him a sympathetic look and said, “I’d like to say it could have gone better, but I’m struggling to imagine how that might have happened. At least, short of you being someone else entirely.”

“Is the boring stuff over?” asked Seiran, appearing out of nowhere right next to James.

He would maintain for the rest of his life that while he might have jumped a little at that moment, ...

Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 16 – Registration

It's been a while since I posted chapters of this, but I was a busy boy this weekend. So, you get multiple chapters of this today. Enjoy! ~Eric

***

“Wait,” said James as Sig led him away from the practice area. “Aren’t we going to practice those spells?”

Sig snorted and said, “Not anywhere where you might injure someone or, worse, infuriate someone a lot stronger than you. There’s a place outside the city where we can do that ...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 35 – Hero of the Land

“Well, that’s obviously a trap,” said Jing.

Sen managed to repress his urge to sigh and said, “Yes. I know it’s a trap. The problem is that I don’t understand the trap. I can’t plan around things I don’t understand. I don’t see any way that Kang can benefit from this.”

“Ah,” said Jing, leaning back in the throne that Sen had all but commanded him to sit in.

“I sincerely hope you have something more substantial to offer about all of thi...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 23 – Mansplaining

“Isn’t there a better way than this?” asked Kelima.

The pair had been walking ever deeper into the heavily forested area to the east of the city for most of the afternoon. They were following a more or less straight line to the mountain range where Wyvern Peak was located. Terry hadn’t thought much about the ground they were covering. He’d done a much harder walk through a much more hostile forest when he’d been significantly weaker. To him, this still mostly felt like a ple...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 34 – To the Land of Judgment

A cauldron of mixed emotions boiled inside of Hsiao Jiayi as she stared down at the body. Her father, the king of Kanshun, was dead. There was joy at the sight. How could there not be? She had prayed for his death ten thousand times and more. Most of her brothers had been killed on battlefields of his making, and her sisters had been sold off to one noble house or another at his word. Not that marriage had provided any protection for most of those sisters. Half had died at their husbands’ h...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 33 – It’s A Trap

It proved much more annoyingly difficult to find a private place to have that conversation than Sen initially believed it would. People kept running up to them with messages for him or for the general. A situation the general seemed to take for granted, but one that Sen hadn’t completely come to terms with yet. That half hour of undisturbed time up on the wall started looking increasingly miraculous to him. Sen finally lost patience, lifted himself and the general on a qi platform, and flew...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 22 – It’s Not That Bad Here, Version 2.0

Okay, in deference to the fact that the argument that appeared in this chapter before made for bad reading as it was written, and that it would have taken a deeply unfunny and lengthy philosophical chapter to fix it, I scrapped that part of the chapter and started over. So, here is version 2.0 with what I hope is a less irritating-to-read argument between Terry and Kelima.

***

“Why are you in such a hurry?” asked Kelima. “And why didn’t y...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 32 – Something That Sits Right In Your Soul

Sen had listened with the kind of focused attention most commonly seen in predators watching prey while Glimmer of Night told him about what Ai had been doing recently. Part of him knew that the conversation would have been boring, even painfully tedious for anyone else who might have been listening. She was a little girl and, barring her association with the sky monster and her ever-present flock of willing bird minions, her life wasn’t the sort of thing that would be interesting to an adu...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 31 – Along Came a Spider

Sen wasn’t sure how to react after learning that Glimmer of Night was physically there in the manor. Coming all that way just to tell him about the communication cores seemed…It seemed excessive. Particularly given that Sen had a communication core. He could have been told about any improvements through that core core. He even would have used it as a wholly transparent excuse to return home and see Ai. Although, he’d been considering doing that anyway with ever-increasing frequency, reg...

Update: Another Rotation Around the Sun

So, it is that time of year again. The day is upon us when I celebrate successfully surviving another rotation around the eye-searing fusion demon in the sky...Sun. I meant sun.

I'm am turning *mumble, mumble* years old. I might have announced this sooner, except I pretty much forgot about my birthday until my friend asked me about it a couple days ago. That's the thing about birthdays. After 21, it's mostly just a habit to celebrate. After 30, you've already hit all the major ...

Signed Copies Available

Okay, it's taken me longer to get back to this than I would have liked, but I have done it. I got the signed copies of Volume 4 signed and shipped out to the people subscribed to that tier. Then, I went through and counted up all the copies of all my books that I have sitting around in boxes, on shelves, in storage rings...you get the idea. These are available for subscribers in the US only to get as signed copies.

I know some of my non-US-based subscribers would like to g...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 30 – Evaluation

Sen started the analysis with the first group because he had more to say about what they did.

“So, who knows what went wrong with your approach?”

There was some hesitation before one of the women in the group spoke up.

“We spread out. That made us easier targets whenever you closed the distance.”

“True,” said Sen. “Anything else.”

There were a few more thoughts of varying value but no stunning insights. The big guy offered that they had all undere...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 22 – It’s Not That Bad Here

“Why are you in such a hurry?” asked Kelima. “And why didn’t you want me to talk to the guild master? Do you know what a wasted opportunity that was?”

“I’m in a hurry because I’m smart. As for that guild master, I don’t know who he actually is, but I do know that we want to avoid annoying him.”

“Since when do you care about annoying people.”

“Since I’m pretty sure that man could kill me.”

Terry took a few more steps before he realized that...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 29 – Fighting Styles

There was a single second of tense silence, and then it began. The gross unfairness of the match became painfully obvious to Sen as the man in front of him charged in. A heartbeat or two later, Sen heard the person directly behind him rush forward. He parried a thrust the man in front of him. Then, carefully judging from the sounds, his foot lashed down and back to send a chunk of hardened snow into the face of the person coming up from behind. He heard a startled cry from that direction and ...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 28 – This Is The Challenge

By the next morning, Sen still hadn’t come up with something nice he could do for the dozen people he’d been borderline torturing. Regardless of that personal failure, he had been leaving them largely to their own devices in terms of training. They thought he had at least. He’d been checking up on them far more frequently than they would have credited. With his basic physical senses undergoing further enhancement when he broke through to the nascent soul realm, all he needed to do was f...

Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 27 – The Right Kind of Minds

“Do you mean for them to stay here permanently?” asked Grandmother Lu.

Sen turned away from the window where he’d been watching the twelve people he’d commandeered from the army’s ranked. They were in an inner courtyard and no doubt cursing his name. It was bitterly cold out and snowing. He’d discovered that even the army generally relented on days like this and let the soldiers retreat to the questionable warmth of their small fires and tents. Sen was a less forgiving teach...

Isekai Terry AHS: Chapter 21 – Guild Master

Tarell Collonin, master of the guild hall, watched the two adventurers vanish down a street as they bickered like a married couple. Oh, to be young and foolish again, he thought a little wistfully. Not that Tarell had wasted his opportunities in those regards. If anything, he had overindulged in them. He couldn’t even count the number of times he’d found himself trying to fight his way out of life-or-death situations against impossible odds, or climbing out of some prett...