V13 Chapter 73 – Deceptive Calm

The next two weeks of marching passed in what someone unobservant might have described as calm. The calm was deceptive. As with most deception, it showed in the details. The wary looks that the soldiers directed at their surroundings as they came across more empty villages and no spirit beasts. The increasingly tense exchanges between the cultivators traveling with the army. For Sen, though, it was most obvious in the faces of the generals who had previously been happy simply to avoid skirmishes. The truth was settling on them. The trap was too obvious to ignore anymore. The spirit beasts were gathering. They were also killing anyone and everyone who might have supplied the army with support of any kind.

On the one hand, Sen was surprised that it had taken the spirit beast so long to decide on that course of action. It was a brutal but obvious method to slow down any normal army. After all, the soldiers couldn’t take from fields that weren’t tended or had never been planted in the first place. They could take livestock that had wandered off into the wilds or been eaten by the spirit beasts. If not for the many storage rings filled with excess food, it might well have ground his army to a halt. All of that death also brought the spirit beasts one step closer to the ultimate goals.

On the other hand, Sen had the sense that there were many spirit beasts who wanted to drag the conquest out. It seemed that it wasn’t enough for them to simply kill the humans. They wanted to take revenge for slights, maybe real and maybe imagined. Grudges were like that, and there was very little satisfaction to be found in a swift, efficient slaughter. The army’s successes so far had more than likely pushed the spirit beasts to take this more drastic step. It was a small thing, but any fracture in their leadership was a potential weakness that Sen might find a way to exploit. He was sure how he would accomplish that, but he tried to keep it in mind. Not that he had a lot of spare time at the moment.

He wasn’t quite looming over the talisman masters and their apprentices day and night, but it was a rare day he didn’t visit for a progress report. Reports that they gave with obvious dissatisfaction. It was no secret that, while he wasn’t demanding the impossible, it was close. When he wasn’t bothering them, he was developing his own plans for formations. He’d considered bringing in some of the formation experts among the cultivators for his project but ultimately decided against it. Instead, he’d ordered them to prepare a number of useful formations ahead of time. Some of them were defensive in nature, but most of them were offensive.

Of course, their main challenge was the same one he faced. Formations worked best when they were adapted for the exact place a cultivator meant to put them. That made anything prepared in advance far less efficient. Even so, it was generally better to have a less efficient formation that was ready to go in a handful of minutes than have no formations at all. As for him, Sen was confident that he could make the most crucial adjustments while creating his formations in place. He could even do it without flags if necessary. That’s why he was preparing a formation that would likely serve as their primary defense. One that wouldn’t depend too much on what they found wherever the spirit beast decided to launch their attack.

It would take a distressing amount of qi, but recovering qi wasn’t something one could do when they were dead. He could also offload some of that burden onto the environmental qi. He thought that he’d even worked out a way to siphon some qi from the spirit beasts if they were close enough. He’d never have figured that out if he hadn’t spent so much time working with Glimmer of Night on the communication cores. While the cores were all different in the kind of qi they used, their basic function was the same. That meant that he could take advantage of that sameness. It was one of the nasty surprises he’d been waiting for the right time to spring on humanity’s enemies. If they did end up facing the veritable horde he expected, this felt like the right time.

When he wasn’t preoccupied with all of that, Sen did his best to understand and adapt to the ways his most recent advancements had changed him. There was more power at his disposal. He could store more qi and access it faster than ever. Of course, that additional power and speed had come with a deterioration in control. To try to counteract that, he spent hours every day doing simple exercises that required more finesse than strength. He even fell back on Xu Xiao Dan’s hobby of creating objects out of qi that resembled things in his environment. Sen was no kind of artist, so his attempts were more laughable than impressive, but he didn’t care about that. What he cared about was that the practice forced him to work in a way that made brute force a liability. He found it so useful that he even instructed his disciple, Chou Dai Lu, to take it up on a more limited basis. He might be able to do it for hours at a time, but she didn’t enjoy his qi reserves.

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At night, when the soldiers were largely asleep, Sen worked with shadow qi. The changes to his body showed the most there. He found it markedly easier to pass into that in-between place. Almost as if he’d become more of a shadow himself. He suspected that it would be much less of a struggle to take someone else into that place. He recalled Fu Ruolan’s warnings that, for most people, staying there more than a few minutes would mean death. Sen had never tested it before. Now, though, he experimented with taking plants into that realm. They died almost immediately, which he found strange. I wonder, he thought, if a mortal would die that fast if they were brought there?

Since Sen wasn’t willing to test that hypothesis on an actual person, he decided that he’d have to go the other direction with it. He sorted through his storage rings and picked out one of the more potent spiritual herbs that he was, if a little reluctantly, willing to lose. Holding it in his hand, he stepped into the in-between space. The spiritual herb did not immediately disintegrate like the normal plants. However, it was clear that the space was bleeding the potency from the herb. He could actually feel it growing weaker as he stood there. Sen thought it might last a few minutes. Rather than waste the herb entirely, he stepped back out.

The experiment was interesting, but it didn’t necessarily answer his questions. It was clear that anything with more qi would last longer, but was that it? Sen didn’t think that a normal mortal had much more qi than that herb did. Yet, they would presumably last longer. Was the difference that people and spirit beasts had souls? Beyond that, though, it was possible that something lived in that in-between place. Perhaps something that would kill people who lingered too long there. That was something that he could potentially test, except he probably wouldn’t. No matter how often he went there, Sen couldn’t shake his loathing for that bizarre realm.

Just going there and hanging around held about as much interest for him as calling down lightning on his own head. Now that he was thinking about it, though, he wasn’t sure how much damage that would do if he did it at anything less than his full power. Another thing that he could potentially test and most certainly wouldn’t. There were bound to be spirit beasts with a lightning qi affinity in the coming battle. He’d let them try to hit him with lightning. If they actually pulled it off, that could be the experiment to test his current durability.

Despite all the effort Sen was putting into his practice and tests, he understood that their value was finite. Like most cultivators, he found his most useful insights and his limits in battle. It was always just a little unnerving entering that first battle after an advancement. Lacking a clear sense of his own reach made overreaching at a crucial moment a chilling possibility. Unfortunately, there was no way to overcome that problem ahead of time. He could only trust his instincts, battle with due caution, and hope that those around him could carry the load if he fell short a step. Something that Master Feng’s presence made more palatable. That terrible old man could carry a lot. Sen was about to return to his frustrating contemplation of the first Shadow Gate technique when a messenger came rushing back to where Sen stood on a qi platform.

Lowering himself to the ground, he looked at the messenger and said, “Yes? Have we arrived?”

“We have, Lord Lu, but General Hu says that you should see the city for yourself.”

Sen frowned at those words. He honestly expected the worst, given everything they’d already seen. For the general to say that he needed to see it could only mean that it was worse than they expected. Either that, or something unexpected had happened. Neither option seemed like a good thing to Sen, but he nodded.

“Very well. Inform the general that I’ll join him shortly.”

Sen could have reached the general far faster than the messenger could return. Whenever he did something like that, though, it seemed to throw everyone off balance. So, he waited around and idly cultivated for fifteen minutes before he, oh so very slowly, took his qi platform forward. With his enhanced vision, he saw what the general had wanted him to see long before he arrived. He sighed to himself.

“So, that’s the kind of trap they’ve set,” he muttered as he landed next to General Hu.