V13 Chapter 70 – I Feel Awful

For the first few seconds of a crushing torment that he wasn’t braced for, Sen simply struggled to stay sane. He’d been expecting pain, but this…this was something beyond even his expectations. It wasn’t so much about the scope. It was the pain’s depth. It reached into the deepest parts of him. Parts of his body that even he rarely gave much thought or attention to because, frankly, a lot of what was happening there was beyond his knowledge. For example, he knew that things happened inside his blood and in the marrow of his bones. But that knowledge was limited. He had inferred those truths, not witnessed them, much as one might infer that food had been cooked from smells in the air.

The worst of the pain came from those places, but it wasn’t all of it. Every part of him was screaming as the pill’s unleashed power tried to remake him. Unfortunately, because he’d been distracted by the god’s visit, he hadn’t been able to direct the process. Without that guiding hand, every change was trying to happen at the same time. The result was chaos. With that chaos came the suffering. It felt like his bones were shattering while his muscles tried to peel away from them. From what he could sense, his organs resembled a soup that was trapped inside his skin. Even that skin seemed like to split open at any moment and spill his insides into the air. Letting this continue would be a death sentence.

Yet, he couldn’t stop the process either. He had no way of reverting the changes. Something that, in hindsight, looked like a vast oversight on his part. Having made the pill, he probably could have created something to undo its effects. There might have been a price to pay. Even so, better to be set back than to die. He could regain ground. Regaining life was still far beyond him. All he could do now was see things through to the end and, with luck, exert some control. The question was, where to start? When everything from his bones to his organs and even his blood seemed to be at war with each other, there was no obvious best place to begin. Sen allowed himself a moment to reclaim some composure. Acting out of panic could prove disastrous.

Sen fell back on lessons learned in his other advancements and during those hellish months when his last body cultivation method was killing him. He pushed the panic, the fear, and the pain to the edges of his mind. He didn’t try to push them out of his thoughts completely. Those things existed for a reason. The pain was, in its own terrible way, instructive. If he made some error in judgment, the increase in pain would be his first, best, and maybe even only warning that death was coming. Even the panic and fear had a purpose. When maintained at a healthy remove, they kept him focused on the moment and sharper than he might otherwise be. Still, he’d done what he needed to do. He’d carved out a place of calm in the maelstrom where he could think and, more importantly, feel his intuition.

He knew that there was no way to reason his way out of this situation. At the end of the day, this was just alchemy by another name. His body might be both the cauldron and the elixir, but it was ground that he knew. And this was ground where his intuition could guide him. The first place it directed him was toward his bones. He supposed that made a kind of sense. It was the bones that gave the body support and structure. If he fixed them first, it would give him a solid foundation to work from. That decision made, he fell into the alchemy trance. He forced the competing processes in his organs and tissues to slow to a crawl.

That took an almost obscene amount of mental effort with so many things trying to happen. Once the changes were slowed, though, it went a long way to relieving some of his pain. That didn’t apply to his bones, though. Without other things actively and aggressively hampering the process, it felt like his bones all tried to crumble to dust, while also being liquefied and possibly melted. What took root in the reforming bones was the water diamond, which gave them additional flexibility while also making them profoundly stronger. Maybe even strong enough to take blows from spirit cultivators far more advanced than him.

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Once the bones settled back into their original shapes, if not their original composition, his intuition guided him to his blood. There he felt a combination of the condensed power of the fire eagle heart and the thousand-year ginseng take root in that life-giving liquid. He couldn’t hold back the scream as that scorching power coursed through him. Yet, even as the torturous sensations threatened to overwhelm him, he understood why his intuition had focused there. New vitality roared inside of him. Assuming he survived this, Sen knew that his life had just been extended by hundreds, if not thousands of years.

It went beyond that, though. That fountain of new, stronger vitality invaded what remained of his organs and muscles. It burned away everything and anything that even might have been weak in his flesh, only to grow it back stronger than it had ever been. The small part of his mind that remained aware of the world around him registered something. He had brought his fists down onto the ground in an almost instinctive gesture of release. The resulting craters made him wonder if he’d moved far enough away from the camp for everyone’s safety. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the attention to spare for any kind of analysis.

While his body was in a better state than it had been, the process wasn’t over yet. The pill had included smaller amounts of many rare ingredients. He had to bite back more screaming as the fragments of sacred iron in the pill drew on metal qi in the surrounding environment to seemingly grow more of itself. The metal wound through his body, threading itself into muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Then, it even invaded his skin. All of this would make him stronger and more difficult to kill, but only by paying the cost in agony now. Lightning qi chased after those metal threads, infusing him with faster reflexes. Wind qi would grant him more speed.

One thing, then another, all of them improving him in some way, but even Sen had never imagined it would hurt so much. If not for everything that had come before this moment, he knew he wouldn’t have survived this. It made him wonder about the people who had tried this body cultivation method all those centuries before. Had any of them survived it? He wouldn’t have been surprised to discover the answer to that question was no. But if anyone had, they must have been extraordinary. Or terrible beyond words. Sen did his best to shake off those thoughts. He knew that the pain was eroding his focus, and he couldn’t afford that. It wasn’t over yet. There was one thing left.

The shadow lotus had only been one of many ingredients, but shadow also made up a sizeable portion of the qi he normally held inside himself. He honestly didn’t know how the lotus would react with that qi. As with so many things, it wasn’t what he thought it would be. He’d expected it to push his body into more extreme suffering. What he got was a feeling that his body was becoming, not precisely less, but that it was less firmly tethered to the world he understood. Almost as if he’d taken a permanent half-step into that in-between place. That wasn’t a feeling that he found especially pleasant, but there was no turning back now. Without warning, the advancement was done.

He couldn’t even find the strength to stand for the tribulation he was certain was coming. How could it not be? He’d advanced twice within a matter of months. The heavens couldn’t tolerate that without testing him. Yet, the tribulation never came. He even forced his head up to look toward the sky. It was clear. I don’t understand, he thought. The voice of the god he’d met so recently appeared in his mind.

You’re welcome. Now, prove that I’m not wrong about you.

Sen didn’t have a good answer for that. Instead, he let his head drop. Even with all that new vitality churning inside of him, the blinding exhaustion from what he’d endured remained to sap his strength.

“I feel terrible,” he muttered.