Chapter 47: Foundation Building

Chapter 47: Foundation Building

During the day, Sen was as diligent and driven as ever. If anything, he was even more diligent and driven. Most days, he was up before dawn making food. By the time Auntie Caihong or Uncle Kho drifted out for their first cup of tea, Sen had often been outside practicing for hours. Sen had found that he needed those extra hours just to get through everything. Between his unarmed combat forms and his jian styles, real practice could easily take up to five or six hours a day. Then, after he ate a quick meal for lunch, it was time for formation training. In its own way, formation training was as difficult as the medical and alchemical training that Auntie Caihong had put him through. In part, it was because many of the same concerns applied, if in different ways.This essence is securely nested within the heart of Nøv€lß¡n★

“A formation,” said Uncle Kho, “is almost a living thing. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in the world. It moves through time with you. It has a lifespan. Just as importantly, it interacts with your environment. Try as hard as you like, you’ll find that setting up a fire formation is all but impossible within a certain distance of any body of water. There’s just too much water qi in the area. Even if you do make it work through sheer talent or luck, it won’t last long. A good formation must take into account the flow of natural energies around it. It must work both with and within that existing balance.”

Yet, for all those complexities, Sen found formations a much easier subject. He briefly wondered if Uncle Kho was simply a better teacher, but quickly dismissed that idea. Auntie Caihong had been almost infinitely patient with him and always geared her lessons to a level that he could understand. No, it was simpler than that. Medicine had to interact with a human body. Human bodies were messy, unpredictable things. No two bodies functioned exactly the same way and their qi energies could change in strange ways. Formations interacted with the natural world. Sen was experienced enough to realize that nature was hugely complex, but it also moved slower. If you examined the energy in an area in the morning, there was a reasonably good chance that those energic flows would hold true in the evening. You didn’t have to adapt to everyone on the fly. You could make predictions and count on them.

Of course, that also made things harder to understand when things didn’t work properly. Sen had seen Uncle Kho sigh more than once when Falling Leaf simply appeared inside the courtyard. Uncle Kho liked the cat just fine, but he’d also told Sen that he’d specifically set up formations to keep spirit beasts out. The big cat shouldn’t have been able to come and go as she pleased. Yet, she did. Uncle Kho had checked the formations he built into the manor more than once. Every time, he said the same thing.

“There’s nothing wrong with these formations.”

Then, he’d usually turn a glare on the cat. Falling Leaf would yawn, or roll over, or simply go to sleep in the face of the cultivator’s annoyance. Sen reasoned that she might take Uncle Kho a bit more seriously if he didn’t give her so many treats. After a few weeks of formation training, when he understood the rules a little more, he asked the older cultivator a question he’d been hanging on to for a while.

“Uncle Kho, is Falling Leaf so powerful that she can just ignore the formation?”

“Hmmm. You know, I asked myself that exact same question when she first started showing up here. I thought maybe she was hiding her cultivation level. Maybe playing some kind of game with us.”

“And?” Sen prompted.

“No, it’s not a matter of power. Don’t get me wrong, she has plenty of power. If she were human, she’d probably be in middle foundation formation or even brushing up against late-stage foundation formation. Once Ming cleared out nearly anything with a core on the mountain, that makes her one of the bigger threats up here. But that’s not even close to powerful enough to just ignore one of my formations. No, something else is happening here. Something I don’t understand.”

“Do you have any ideas about what’s happening?”

Uncle Kho laughed. “Oh, I have lots of ideas, but no good ones. My best guess is that she, somehow, developed a unique qi technique that lets her slip through gaps in my formation that other things can’t.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“You couldn’t just say that’s what the technique was for?” He demanded of the unknown writer. “No, of course not, because why do something so rational? No, you had to talk about the many-branched tree of creation. You ass!”

It wasn’t until Auntie Caihong knocked on his door that Sen realized he’d been yelling at the manual for almost ten minutes in a glorious, rage-purging explosion of verbal violence. He’d opened the door with a rather sheepish expression.

“Is everything alright, Sen?” Auntie Caihong asked.

She peeked past him into the room, as if she wanted to make sure that some stranger hadn’t snuck in and bothered him.

“Yes, Auntie. I just figured out what the cultivation manual was trying to explain.”

“That made you angry?”

“No. That made me happy.”

“So?” She prompted.

“I also figured out that the person who wrote it was...” he trailed off, not wanting to actually say it out loud to her.

“Oh, you mean that he was a tiresome buffoon who loved a turn of phrase more than being helpful?”

Sen was nodding before she even finished. “I just called him an ass.”

She gave him a sympathetic smile. “It won’t be the last time you say that about someone who wrote a manual.”

Sen groaned.