Unintended Cultivator

V13 Chapter 67 – Choice and Consequence

Sen lifted the lid from the pot and looked in, with Chou Dai Lu peering from the other side. What he saw was, well, a pill. A fairly unremarkable pill at first glance. It had an almost smoky appearance. That was when Sen realized that the smoke appeared to be moving inside the pill. Sen had seen more than a few odd results from alchemy, but he’d never seen anything quite like that before.

“Master Lu, is it supposed to look like that?” asked Chou Dai Lu as she frowned down at the pill.

Sen shrugged and said, “I assume so. There wasn’t a description of the pill in the manual, just the process for making it.”

Now that he thought about it, he’d never seen a description of a pill or elixir in any manual. That struck him as more than odd, since such a description would prove very valuable for anyone attempting to make a pill or elixir for the first time. Asking Auntie Caihong or Fu Ruolon if they knew why that description was always left out might provide an answer, if he remembered to ask. However, he suspected that this was the correct form of the pill. He could feel the bound strength of it, waiting to burst forth. Sen was less enthusiastic about how he expected it would feel when that strength was unleashed inside of his body. But there was no avoiding it. He’d do what he needed to do.

Reaching into the pot, he plucked out the pill and deposited it into a jade box. He didn’t usually bother with such things, but certain ingredients and pills would simply bleed their power away if not contained in some fashion. This pill struck him as one of those things. The jade box swiftly disappeared into a storage ring. It wouldn’t be there for long, but there was no benefit to taking chances. He gave Chou Dai Lu a calm look.

“Did you learn anything of value today?”

“I did,” she said after a thoughtful pause.

He was tempted to ask her what she learned, but an intuition told him that this was one time he shouldn’t indulge his curiosity. Instead, he nodded.

“Good. I’m glad that it was beneficial. Now, though, you should return to your cultivation. I have a pill to take.”

Chou Dai Lu’s eyes bulged.

“You mean to take it now? So soon after breaking through in your spirit cultivation?”

Her alarm was warranted. There was no possibility that his spirit cultivation had completely stabilized so soon after breaking through. Breaking through again, even if it was in body cultivation, came with the distinct risk of destabilizing both his body and spirit cultivation. If that happened, death wasn’t a guarantee, but it was generally considered the outcome to hope for. When a body cultivation advancement failed, it was usually catastrophic for the body involved. The term Sen heard tossed around most often was mutilation, which had seemed extreme until he really thought about it. While any one body cultivation advancement might only affect part of the body, all of those parts were connected.

If an advancement for his bones failed and those bones exploded, nothing they were connected to was likely to fare well. If an advancement that affected blood failed and turned his blood to acid, equally hideous things were likely to happen. Worse, body cultivators tended to have very durable, very resilient bodies. Damage that would instantly kill a mortal might leave a cultivator lingering in unspeakable agony for days or weeks. While Sen might be willing to endure agony for a gain, he had no interest in enduring agony when the only possible result was a lingering death.

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While having his spirit cultivation destabilize wouldn’t kill him, it would render him essentially powerless. With everything that was happening and the countess enemies he’d already made during his conquest, it would only be a matter of time before someone killed him. If he were lucky, it would be a quick death. Given everything he’d done, though, he expected that his death would be made intentionally slow. Someone would probably slip me a poison, he thought. Either that or torture me to death. Probably the poison, though. Less chance of being caught and punished by Master Feng that way.

However, despite the risks, Sen would do it anyway. He was increasingly certain that his army was marching toward some kind of trap. A trap that the spirit beasts had to believe would spell certain death not only for him, but for the entire army. That could only mean overwhelming numbers and the presence of as many powerful, sapient spirit beasts as they could gather in one place. With that prospect in mind, he could no longer afford to ignore relatively sane opportunities to build strength. Opportunities like advancing his body cultivation. He’d been actively avoiding it for the same reason he’d been actively avoiding advancing his spirit cultivation. He wanted to draw out his time before ascension as much as possible.

But those efforts would mean nothing if they got him killed in battle. He had to strike a balance between what he wanted and what was needed. Right now, strength was needed. That meant occasionally taking risks that he might have avoided in less perilous times. Not that he hadn’t considered halting the army in place and waiting until his spirit cultivation was stable again. It was tempting, so very tempting, to do exactly that, but Sen couldn’t convince himself. He might only need to wait a few days, or he might need to wait a few months.

If he could know that it would be a brief pause with certainty, he would have waited. But there was no reliable way to know, especially for nascent soul cultivators. The paths they took to reach that level of advancement were simply too divergent, with too many idiosyncrasies, for there to be anything like a normal time for stabilization. The prevailing wisdom among cultivators was that it took the amount of time it took. Adequate enough wisdom, thought Sen, for people who stayed hidden behind sect walls for centuries at a time. No help at all in making my choices in the middle of a war. It was the prospect of leaving the mortals and cultivators who remained in the south to battle the spirit beasts alone that he couldn’t accept.

Sen couldn’t help but think of the problem of risk and reward. There was a similar problem. Choice and consequence. Either choice he made had potentially bad consequences. It was just easier, in the end, for him to stomach the potentially bad consequences for himself. Not that he imagined Master Feng, Xu Xiao Dan, or the mortal generals would see things the same way. He was quite certain that if he informed them of his intentions, there would be immediate and vocal dissent. I guess it’s a good thing I’m emperor, thought Sen a little wryly. I get to make these kinds of decisions. Unless Master Feng physically restrains me, they’ll just have to live with it. He didn’t intend to explain all of that to his student, but he thought some explanation was warranted.

“There are times when the needs of the moment force us to make choices we otherwise would not,” he told her.

Her uncertain expression told him that she didn’t grasp his full meaning. He’d have to let time and experience teach her what that meant. When he didn’t continue, Chou Dai Lu took the hint. She gave him a worried look, bowed, and left the tent.

“I guess it’s time to see if the heavens really do favor me,” he muttered.