Sen moved through the form, his body turning and shifting around his dantian like it was the focal point of the universe. He twisted into throws or transformed imaginary blows into joint locks. Through it all, he never stepped beyond the confines of a chalk circle he’d drawn on the courtyard stones. All motions are circular and should return you to center, Master Feng had told him. The chalk was a reminder, a choice, and a way that Sen could impose discipline on himself. Although, after all this time, it was as much a habit as anything else. Like so much else, he’d long ago burned these techniques into the nerves and fibers of his body. So, while his body ran nearly independently of him, he remembered that conversation from two years ago. In fact, he’d thought about that conversation almost every day since then. It had marked the true turning point when he’d gone from martial student to cultivator.
Yet, those early failures on his part and Master Feng’s part were instructive as well. While discussing it, Master Feng had done something he normally refrained from doing. He gave a name to the experience. He called it the Law of Unintended Consequences. When Sen asked what that meant, his master gave him a lengthy explanation. Sen had boiled it down over time to something he’d taken on almost as a mantra. All actions generate consequences you cannot foresee. The certain knowledge that everything he did rippled out into the world in ways he could not anticipate, let alone control, had made him far more thoughtful about what he did and why. He knew it wasn’t a cure for failure, as there was no cure for that, but it was often a cure for thoughtless stupidity. Sen firmly believed a little less of that in the world was for the good.
Even while he mused on the old conversation and what it had meant to him, as he trained his body, Sen cultivated. He knew now that Uncle Kho had put a lot of work into the manor that wasn’t visible to the naked eye. He’d organized the manor, the materials, and even the positions of the furniture to facilitate a healthy flow of qi. There were formations built directly into the walls that gathered and concentrated good qi, while other formations kept almost all of the spirit beasts away. The lone exception was Falling Leaf, the ghost panther. Of course, that beast recognized no master beyond herself. What were formations to her when there were qi-infused treats that the humans would just give her? Sen felt quite confident that the big cat came around as much for the readily available qi in the courtyard as she did for food or company.
He couldn’t blame her for that. After all, he spent hours every day in that same courtyard drawing qi into his dantian and cycling it through his meridians. At first, Sen had tried to cultivate while sitting and quietly meditating. Master Feng had put a stop to that almost immediately.
“So, tell me,” Master Feng had said. “What do you plan to do while fleeing for your life from an angry sect for five straight days without sleep? Ask them to wait while you sit and cultivate?”
“Why five days, master?”
Feng shrugged. “That’s how long it took me to shake them loose. No, this sitting and cultivating nonsense is an indulgence that you can’t afford. When you go out into the world, you’ll be a wandering cultivator, Sen. You’ll be on the move all of the time. You must be able to cultivate while you do that. In fact, you need to be able to cultivate while you do everything else. You better start practicing here and now, while you’ve got access to a lot of qi and a minimum of distractions.”
“How do I do that master?”
“The mind is a powerful tool. You can train it to do just about anything if you put enough time and effort into it. You must train a small piece of your mind to constantly focus on cultivating.”
“That sounds impossible.”
“Challenging the heavens sounds impossible, too. Yet, people have done it. You’re a cultivator. We trade in the impossible.”
Sen had discovered that Master Feng was right. He could and did train a piece of himself to relentlessly cultivate. It wasn’t impossible. Much to Sen’s chagrin, though, it was very, very hard. Of course, so was most of what he’d done for the last two years. He’d gotten angry at Master Feng more than once during those years. His master was happy enough to explain what things were in relation to cultivation and even offered advice about how to do some things. First principles, the old cultivator had called them. Essential information that no student could live without. Sen had learned about his dantians. He’d learned about body cultivation, which was intimately connected to spirit cultivation but fundamentally separate as well. He’d even learned about the five elements of qi, although both Master Feng and Uncle Kho had rolled their eyes at that explanation.
“It’s not that the information is wrong,” explained Uncle Kho. “You can divide qi up that way. The problem is that the information is incomplete. No one really knows how many kinds of qi there are. I’ve personally seen twenty or thirty different kinds of qi. I expect Feng has seen more.”
“I have,” confirmed Master Feng. “If you must think of qi as a group of separate things, a practice I strongly advise you not to adopt, those five kinds of qi are the foundational types of qi. They’re the types that people can access most easily, which means that they’re the kinds you see most often. But you should treat that generalization with a lot of mistrust. Otherwise, you’ll get blindsided by the first person you meet who specializes in lightning qi or heat qi or death qi.”
“Wait,” interrupted Uncle Kho. “Have you actually seen death qi, Ming?”
Master Feng squinted into the middle distance for a moment before he nodded. “Yes. At least, I think I did. It wasn’t my fight, so I only saw it from a distance. Still, if I had to name it anything, I’d have named it death qi.”
“Sometimes, I really do think that I made a mistake moving up onto this mountain when I did,” said Uncle Kho with a vaguely sad expression. “You see so many interesting things.”
“You’d have hated it, old friend. I was on the Southern coast.”
“Well, there’s literally no good reason to go to that hellish swamp. So, I assume that some woman turned your head and sweet-talked you into that terrible decision.”
“I was paying off an old debt.”
Uncle Kho smirked at Master Feng. “Were you now? To whom?”
“Fine, fine. Yes, it was a woman,” said Feng, throwing his hands into the air.
Then, he’d stalked away to do something. Uncle Kho did Feng the courtesy of waiting until he left earshot to start laughing. Once he finished up with that, though, he turned a serious eye to Sen.
“Ming is right, you know. Don’t get too attached to that idea of five kinds of qi. It’s a useful guideline, but that’s about it. Don’t let it limit your thinking.”
Sen took those words to heart, but that became its own kind of frustration. Both Master Feng and Uncle Kho had written down all the kinds of qi they’d seen when Sen asked them about it. Yet, when he’d asked about the techniques one could use with them, both the old men had refused to discuss it. Maser Feng had instead instructed Sen to try to manifest as many different types of qi as he could. When asked how to do that, Feng only grudgingly offered an explanation.
“At your stage of development, you’re mostly taking in whatever qi is around you. So, assuming Kho did his work well, which you should always assume, you’ve got a bit of just about every kind of qi that’s available here. You don’t necessarily have a lot of it, but you should have some. You can manifest specific kinds of qi in two ways. If you can identify it in your dantian, you can pull it out and do things with it. The other way is with cycling patterns. Moving qi through specific meridians in specific orders will help you refine out different kinds of qi.”
Master Feng had offered Sen a basic primer for the cycling patterns that would refine the five main kinds of qi. As for the rest, he told Sen to experiment with different patterns and see if he could figure out any of the others. It had been an exhausting few months of trial and error, but Sen had figured out the patterns for another six kinds of qi. Once he figured out that other kinds of qi usually bore a close relationship to a primary type of qi, he focused on variations of the patterns he knew worked. That had gotten him results. He could manifest the five foundational types of qi, water, wood, air, fire, and metal. He could also manifest light, heat, mist, earth, wind, and shadow qi. While he relished the accomplishment, Sen was much less satisfied with the intense variations in strength he showed across the different types of qi. While fire and shadow qi proved especially easy for him to access, he found air, wind, and water qi much more challenging. Everything else fell somewhere in the middle.
Questions about those variations seemed to be of little interest to either Master Feng or Uncle Kho. Both men had simply said something about natural affinities and left it at that. It was only after he manifested several types of qi that Master Feng would teach him techniques using them. When Sen got frustrated and demanded to know why, he was surprised when Feng answered him.
“Sen, we all develop preferences. When we’re good at something, we tend to default to it. There’s a logic to that. Specializing creates mastery. Cultivators have a lot of time on their hands, though. We don’t need to specialize like that. It’s holdover thinking from our mortal days. If you only have fifty good years to work with, specializing lets you wring the most value from a very finite amount of time. When you have five hundred years, or a thousand, or five thousand, you can take the time to master things like minor affinities. It will give you more flexibility in the long run.”
Then, as if to prove his point, Feng made Sen practice techniques with every kind of qi he manifested. Much of it was slow work, while shadow and fire techniques came almost without effort. Sen was honest enough to admit that, left to his own devices, he’d have stopped with shadow and fire qi. Yet, all of those other kinds of qi did give him the kinds of options that would likely prove useful in a somewhat hostile world. It had taken a lot of work and would mean more of the same in the future, but Sen didn’t really mind that.
With his form complete, Sen wiped away the chalk circle he’d made.
“You really like that defensive approach, don’t you?” Asked Feng as he walked over to Sen.
“You said it yourself. I’m on the weak end of the cultivation scale. If I get attacked by someone stronger than me, I expect a lot of strong defense will help me more than an aggressive attacking style.”
“Debatable,” mused Master Feng, “but probably accurate. On that topic, though, it’s time that we do something about your killing intent.”