Unintended Cultivator

Wrapped in a cloak of shadow, Sen stared at the distant wall of the Twisted Blade Sect. A traitorous part of him whispered that it wasn’t too late to turn back. He supposed that whisper was strictly correct. He could turn back and abandon the plan. It was possible to do so. It would just mean accepting the pitched battle that would come to the academy and town and all of the death that would follow. Sen knew that he could let that fight come. If it did, he also knew that Uncle Kho, Auntie Caihong, and Master Feng would likely kill every last member of the Twisted Blade Sect. It wouldn’t be the first time any of them did such a thing, but it would be different.

They hadn’t caused the problem. He had. That made this his responsibility. However tempting it might be to let them shed all of that blood, it wasn’t fair of him to ask that of them. Not before he did everything that he could to solve the problem himself. At that point, he could say that he genuinely needed their help. He wasn’t simply shirking an unpalatable responsibility. He wouldn’t just be shamelessly leaning on their strength. Sen had done what he could to avoid that in the past. He wasn’t sure how successful he’d been. It was difficult to judge how much direct or indirect pressure their names applied on his behalf. He was confident that at least some things had gone his way simply because people knew he was connected to them.

The only time he had directly, intentionally involved them was with the demonic cultivators. A choice that they had all assured him was the right course of action. He'd taken their word for it. Part of the reason was because he believed them. He’d seen just a little bit of what those cultivators could do. He could probably stand his ground with most of them now, but he couldn’t have back then. If they hadn’t been going all over the place and running those cultivators down, Sen was confident that he wouldn’t have survived.

The other part of the reason he just took their word for it was because it made him feel protected and safe. He hadn’t been so far removed from those terrible days of living on the street, days filled with panic and fear, to discard anything that made him feel safe. Looking back, he could see that had at least partially driven his stalling on the Luo Farm. Life there had been mostly simple and predictable. That simplicity and predictability had been close enough to a feeling of protection and safety that he hadn’t wanted to give it up. Yet, in the end, he had given it up because it was necessary. The same way it was necessary to move past depending on his teachers to make him feel safe and protected. Now, he was the one who needed to make his people feel that way.

Even recognizing that, he had no idea if he could pull off what he was planning. There were so many things that could go wrong. It only took chance turning against him once to convert his plan into a chaotic fight for survival. Even so, he also had some potent advantages. Shadow walking was so unbelievably rare that it was practically a myth. No one would see that coming. The technique wasn’t impossible to counter, but it was the next best thing to it. His biggest advantage was probably the audacity of it. While the Twisted Blade Sect leadership might have considered the possibility that Sen would lead an attack on their location, they likely thought of it in terms of him bringing a force of people to do battle with the sect as a whole.

He doubted they expected him to physically infiltrate their compound. That would prove a short walk to a swift death for anyone who didn’t possess his hiding ability. With the ability to hide from even nascent soul cultivators, though, he was at a distinct advantage. Again, there was a possibility that someone in the sect could see through it, but one that fell into the absurdly unlikely category. Beyond that, once he was inside the walls, picking him out from all of the other cultivators wandering around the place would prove difficult at best. He just needed to get inside the walls. Of course, the sect leadership wasn’t entirely incompetent. They’d cleared the land around the sect. That meant that there wasn’t much in the way of useful cover. No more second guessing, Sen told himself. You accounted for this already.

Sen made himself stop glaring at the sect walls. Instead, he turned his attention to picking out the best route to get him from where he was hidden in the trees to a shadowed area along the wall created by the flickering torches that the outer disciples assigned wall duty used for light. Fortunately, Sen had people along who were willing and even eager to provide him with some assistance. And it wasn’t long before Falling Leaf and Glimmer of Night once again proved their worth. He felt it in his feet first, the minor tremble that slowly built up to a more serious rumbling. It was hard to keep the grin off of his face when a small horde of spirit beasts crashed out of the forest on the far side of the compound. He watched as most of the guards on the walls disappeared to go defend the sect.

He resisted the urge to activate his qinggong technique. It would have been faster, but would also increase the odds of him being noticed. Even with the distraction of the spirit beasts, Sen couldn’t be certain the hiding ability he already had going would disguise the qinggong technique. He was almost sure that it would hide the technique, but it would likely expose him if even a small burst of qi slipped free. Instead, he dashed toward a small rise in the land that would provide some cover. He barely watched where he was going, choosing instead to keep his eyes on the guards. They were mostly looking toward the far side of the compound where the fighting was happening. Every once in a while, though, one of them would glance in his direction.

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The cover of night made it easier, but his body cultivation had enhanced his night vision substantially. He couldn’t risk that one of those guards was also a body cultivator with a better-than-average ability to see in the dark. Every time he saw one of those cultivators start to twitch their head in his direction, he’d freeze, relying on the shadows he’d pulled around him to obscure his presence. Given that he’d felt the gazes of those cultivators up on the wall pass over him, he assumed it was working. However, he made full use of the cover he could find, sometimes sprawling on the ground, sometimes crawling slowly. Sen was certain that his luck had run out when his flickering glances revealed one of the guards on the wall squinting at the spot where he was crouched. He had to press his lips together as the guard pulled out a bow and fired an arrow at him. Forcing himself to remain perfectly still, he didn’t make a noise or flinch when the arrow passed so close to his ear that it would have hit him if it’d been aimed a hair to the left.

Sen had no idea what the guard thought he was shooting at. His best guess was that they thought he was a spirit beast. It would even be a reasonable assumption if the beasts on the far side of the compound had decided to attack instead of being driven to it by Sen’s friends. It seemed the sound of the arrow burying itself in the ground paired with the utter lack of motion on Sen’s part convinced the cultivator that he was shooting at shadows. A falsehood Sen was perfectly content for the man to believe. Despite an intense desire to do so, he held fast in the same place even after the cultivator turned away. He expected the man to spin back to check that nothing was moving, which was exactly what happened.

It was a basic strategy but one that worked well enough when dealing with impatient people. It was something Sen would have done in the man’s position. Although, he probably would have reserved firing an arrow for when he was more confident that there truly was something out in the darkness. He also would have waited until he was absolutely certain he could hit whatever it was, rather than firing half-blind at a suspected target. Sen had to observe all of this through peripheral vision, though, not daring to look directly at the man. While he didn’t think his eyes would reflect any light, it wasn’t something he’d tested. An oversight he meant to correct at the very first opportunity. This is the problem with having an affinity that your primary teachers don’t share, thought Sen. There are a lot of gaps in your training.

While Fu Ruolan also shared the affinity for shadow qi, she wasn’t primarily a fighter. She could fight if she had to. He’d seen the weapon training that the nascent soul cultivator put Falling Leaf through. She knew her business with the three-section staff she preferred, but she wasn’t brilliant with it. She simply didn’t share the near-fanatical drive to improve her combat abilities that Master Feng and Uncle Kho possessed. Even Auntie Caihong was much more focused on her combat prowess than Fu Ruolan. Sen suspected that on those rare occasions that Fu Ruolan was pushed into a fight, the other people died from qi techniques or poisons or some combination of factors, rather than from pure physical injuries. Part of Sen thought he should encourage her to focus more on it with the war coming, but he pushed that thought aside for later examination.

The guards on the wall weren’t even feigning interest in looking his direction anymore. He was close enough now that he crept forward instead of dashing. Even though the fight on the other side of the compound was going to be over soon based on the diminished sounds, there was no benefit to getting caught. It’d just be a waste of effort. It felt like it took an hour to him, slowly lifting a foot and moving it forward. He suspected it was closer to ten minutes, but paranoia was getting the better of him. He was glad that he didn’t really need to breathe that often anymore. He could just hold his breath. One less thing to give him away. Step by step, the wall drew closer until he mercifully moved close enough that someone would need to lean over the wall to see him. Even then, he was crouched in a shadow with even more shadow darkening the area around him.

Sen had been expecting formations every step of the way, but even restricting his spiritual sense to an area of around two feet in every direction hadn’t revealed any. He pressed a hand to the wall and let a bit of his spiritual sense and a touch of qi bleed into it. He finally found the formations he was looking for, but they were rudimentary to his way of thinking. There was the qi-gathering formation he expected to find. There were also some basic shield and offensive formations, but they were so basic that he didn’t even need to do anything to bypass them. It was clear that no one with the appropriate skills had constructed formations to keep out someone who could shadow walk.

Repressing a sigh of both relief and annoyance, Sen let a little more of his spiritual sense extend through the wall and out the other side. It was a risk, but he didn’t want to bypass the wall through the shadow realm just to find a whole group of guards waiting for him. All he found on the far side of the wall were buildings and no people. He had to assume that those people were busy cleaning up the last of the distraction. With a tiny nod, Sen let himself slip out of reality as he normally understood it and into that in-between place.

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