Book 3: Chapter 23: Fighting the Inevitable

Book 3: Chapter 23: Fighting the Inevitable

Sen briefly wondered, Is the universe trying to get me killed? Then, he had other things to worry about. That amount of any kind of qi, let alone heavenly qi, was enough to obliterate the obscuring formation if Sen didn’t contain it. Unfortunately, there was really only way to contain it in a hurry. Bracing himself, Sen started drawing the heavenly qi into himself. He let it fill what little space there was left in his dantian. When the pressure there built to first uncomfortable and then painful levels, he started directing it out into his channels. Those were soon bursting with heavenly qi as well. He let the qi saturate his muscles, tendons, organs, bones, and even let it slip into his bone marrow. It suffused his blood. Sen was a little surprised by how greedily his body soaked up that heavenly qi, but it was a brief blessing that took some of the pressure off of his dantian and channels.

Even so, he couldn’t help but be a little bit uncertain about giving his body all of that qi. He could feel things changing, shifting, not in any monumental way, but still changing in ways he was struggling to understand or even keep track of. Some of it was obvious enough. Heavenly qi was, by its very nature, a beneficent force. So, it helped reinforce his body. He felt his muscles grow so dense that resembled bone more than flesh, and his tendons and ligaments felt like they were transformed into steel cords. His bones, so recently improved by the advancement in the Five-Fold Body Transformation were not changed, so much as perfected into something that might rival diamonds for strength. His organs underwent similar transformations, becoming models of efficiency. He felt like he drawing more benefit from every breath. Every heartbeat drove his blood through his veins and arteries like a raging river after torrential rain. And his blood, he wasn’t even certain if he could rightly call it blood anymore. It was still liquid. He knew that much, but he strongly suspected that the next time he suffered an injury, what came out would no longer look like human blood. He just didn’t know what it would look like. He could also tell that his blood was providing his body with more of something.

Yet, for all that his body was changing, it was a secondary concern that he’d pushed mostly to the back of his head. Sen needed to deal with the problem in front of him. That problem was the waves of heavenly qi still crashing down on him. For a moment, he was startled that it was still happening. Then, he realized, it had only actually been a couple of seconds. It seemed his brain had benefitted from some of the recent changes, as well. Not that it helped him manage all of the extra qi that was swiftly building up in his dantian and channels again. He could feel the heavenly qi compressing all of that liquid qi as it tried to make room for itself. Sen desperately tried to force the heavenly qi to the outer edges of his dantian, but he might as well have tried to hold back the ocean. He needed somewhere else to put some of this qi. His mind raced. Did he have any kind of storage that might hold heavenly qi?

A moment of inspiration struck, and he shook the mostly expended beast cores from his storage ring. As soon as they were exposed, he started shoving the heavenly qi at them. A few of them simply cracked or shattered, sending the qi right back at him like tiny lances made of heavenly will. It hurt when that qi fell on him again. Yet, the plan was working. The cores soaked up the heavenly qi, but they were soon bursting with energy. What else could he do with that qi? He supposed he could just drive into the ground. It’d probably make this spot a semi-sacred clearing for the foreseeable future, but that might not be so bad. Of course, he wasn’t sure he could control it well enough to keep the formations intact. There had to be another option. He knew he was missing something, something obvious, some perfectly natural place that the qi could go.

Then, Lifen stumbled out of the tent, looking around wildly, barely even conscious. Lo Meifeng shot out of her tent a moment later, looking much more awake if no less frantic. Sen heart soared as the obvious became apparent to him. There was somewhere else that qi could go. Two perfectly suitable recipients were right there. Sen stood and raced over to them. They both flinched back as he stopped in front of them. He didn’t have time to explain everything. He didn’t really have time to explain anything. If he didn’t offload some of that qi immediately, his core was going to start forming. He took one precious second to look them each in the eyes.

He wondered if he was simply fighting a losing battle against forces much bigger than him. After all, the heavens could just keep raining qi down on him until he started core formation. He’d recognized that sometimes you had no choice but to bend before forces greater than yourself, however bad he’d been at actually doing it. Sen just wished that he knew if this was one of those times. He revisited the idea of simply pushing the excess qi into the ground, but part of him rebelled against that kind of waste. It was one thing to store the qi for some later use, or even to share it with Lifen and Lo Meifeng. It was something else to just throw it away like that. That might actually trigger an angry response from the heavens.

No, he was going to have to do something with that qi. If he couldn’t offload it, and he didn’t want to let it trigger core formation, what else could he do? A mad idea came to him. He could compress environmental qi. Could he do the same with heavenly qi? He decided that there was no harm in trying. If he failed, he’d be no worse off than he was. Sen dropped back into a sitting position and focused inward. He reached into his dantian with a precision that no physical hand could ever have managed, he seized a big portion of that heavenly qi and squeezed. It fought him, but so had the environmental qi. He ignored the pushback from the qi and squeezed harder. He bent every ounce of willpower, focused every bit of his discipline, every iota of sheer stubborn determination in him, and he squeezed.

A second passed, and then two, with Sen and the qi locked in a stalemate. Then, the qi gave a little, then a little more. Sen dug deep and found a few extra shreds of willpower hiding somewhere and squeezed again. The qi snapped into a different shape. It didn’t become liquid like the environmental qi. Instead, it snapped into a familiar ribbon shape. The instant that Sen released his grip on it. The new ribbon shot to the outer edges of his dantian. The ribbon of strange qi and the ribbon of heavenly qi seemed to regard each other warily for a moment before they spun around one another forming a kind of double helix that floated in a circle around the edge of his dantian. Sen wasn’t quite certain what to make of that, and he didn’t have time to study it. The excess heavenly qi in his body was suddenly drawn into the empty space between the ribbons, and that seemed to do what Sen could not. It condensed that heavenly qi into a liquid. Sen heaved a sigh of relief as the ever-mounting pressure ticked slowly down. That relief was, however, short-lived as the divine liquid qi started dripping down onto the environmental liquid qi that Sen had so painstakingly gathered.

A deep, terrible shudder ran through Sen as the liquid heavenly qi kickstarted the very process Sen had been trying so hard to avoid. Accepting that his advancement was happening no matter what, Sen took what remedial actions he could to minimize the damage. He withdrew some extra formation flags from his storage ring and put together a containment formation. It would only blunt the evidence of his advancement, but it was the best he could do on short notice. If he’d had a day to plan it out, he might have contained all the evidence, but Sen worked with what he had. Next, he withdrew the stone vial that Auntie Caihong had given him. Sen regarded that vial for a moment before he removed the top and upended the vial. A pill the color of night dropped into his hand. He could feel the different qi types in it, but shadow most of all. He wondered if she would have made the same pill for him now, but that was a useless, distracting thought. Bracing himself, Sen put the pill in his mouth and swallowed it.

Sen had tried everything he could to prevent himself from going into core formation short of literally throwing away all of that heavenly qi. It wasn’t always true, but sometimes, when faced with the inevitable, all one could do was bend. As the pill reached his stomach, Sen took a deep breath. Nothing left but the work, he thought. Then, a whole new explosion of qi raced through his body and crashed down into his dantian.