Unintended Cultivator

Falling Leaf stretched. It was partly out of habit, partly out of curiosity, and partly out of that warm, pleasant sensation of being full of good food. She was aware that Sen had rushed the cooking, and it hadn’t been his best effort, but she didn’t care. Eating hot food in this strange stone den that he’d made for them was always a comfort. It let her feel something that she hadn’t even managed back on that mountain. She was home. She stretched again to confirm that she hadn’t been imagining it the first time. Yes, she definitely felt different. Stronger and…Something else that she couldn’t quite put her paw on. She glared at the very not pawlike thing at the end of her arm and sighed. She decided that she could call it a paw. It was hers. She could call it what she wanted to call it.

She briefly entertained the idea of following Sen. That woman had said something about a beast tide, and Falling Leaf usually didn’t like being left out of fights. But this was different. She didn’t know herself or her strength the way she used to, which meant that fighting was a precarious thing. She’d do it if she had to, but she’d seen the look on her human boy’s face when he left. Problems tended to just go away forever when he got that particular expression of barely suppressed anger. Plus, she felt the earth trembling and could hear the distant screams of agony from countless spirit beasts. No, she decided, Sen seems to have it under control. Plus, she was still very tired.

Both Sen and the Caihong had tried to warn her about what it would be like. She had listened to them. She’d even thought she understood. Between their words and listening all those times when Sen took pills and screamed for days, she felt prepared. Once it began, though, she finally, truly understood why her human boy had tried to warn her off. She had nearly faltered. In all her many cycles in this world, she had never experienced agony like that before. It had eclipsed everything. Worse, it had been unrelenting. Most pain would wax and wane like the moon above, but not that searing torture. It had continued until she thought her mind would break and her spirit shatter.

It hurt her heart to know that Sen had done that to himself over and over again in his pursuit of cultivation. She struggled to understand how or why any living thing could put themselves through such suffering after knowing what it was. She had been ignorant and could be forgiven her foolishness. He knew and did it anyway. It made her question his sanity a little, but she also felt her respect for him swell a little. It was one thing to endure it once, as she had, it was a testament to his unyielding will that he could and would continue down that path of punishment and tribulation.

Another shudder in the earth made her instinctively look in the direction of the fighting. She again considered going and, again, rejected it. If her help was needed, someone would be sent to get her. Instead, she went over and peeked into the kit’s room. The little one was sleeping soundly, one of those shadow balls that Sen made hugged against her chest. It struck Falling Leaf as an odd object to offer comfort, but humans often did things that made no sense to her. Even understanding all of the benefits that this stone den offered, and the similar benefits of the wooden ones some humans seemed to prefer, they always felt vaguely wrong to her. She wondered sometimes if it was just that she was a creature of the trees and shadows, while they were not. She pondered that again for a moment as she stood in the door to Ai’s room before shrugging and putting the thought away. She might ask Sen or the Caihong about it if she remembered.

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Falling Leaf smiled as she listened to the gentle breaths emanating from the bed. She didn’t recall much from what had happened after the pain finally ended and darkness seized her. She did remember Ai’s voice telling her stories about those mad birds that followed her around and the many bugs they consumed in their tiny war. Falling Leaf didn’t know if hearing that voice had helped her. She would normally ask Sen about such things, knowing as she did that her mind didn’t move in those ways. Still, her heart told her that it had helped, and she felt immense gratitude to the kit. Love, Falling Leaf corrected herself. The word you mean is love.

It was a word that she hadn’t used since the destruction of her people. She’d never allowed herself to so much as think it. The prospect had been too frightening. The idea of facing that kind of loss a second time had loomed so large in her mind that she was certain it would rend her in two if it ever came to pass. So, that word had been cleaved from her soul. She could see now the lies she’d been telling herself. She called it affection or gratitude or any word but love. However, she couldn’t fault herself for it. That fear had been so real, so palpable that she had hidden from it. It was only after passing through this most recent storm of pain and coming out intact that she once more felt capable of weathering a storm of loss. She would not welcome it with open arms, but she could face it now. She could survive it. It was that knowledge that allowed a piece of her to awaken that she had kept asleep for a long time.

That and the knowledge that she was stronger now. She knew that with certainty. It was in every step, the sharpness of her senses, and the thrum of energy that coursed through her. More importantly, she could feel the room for growth that had been absent. Her spirit beast nature would have allowed her to grow stronger eventually. It would have been so very slow, though. She might have needed to live as long as the Feng to reach what the humans called the nascent soul stage, whatever a nascent soul was. Her people didn’t have such a thing and the Caihong’s explanations hadn’t made much sense. A soul was a soul. How could there be another soul? No, she thought, that’s more human strangeness that I didn’t need to worry about. There was only one thing that she cared about. Her human boy had kept his promise.

She also knew that he had paid a terrible price for keeping that promise. One look at him was all she had needed to know that. There was a haunted look in his eye that hadn’t been there before. The overwhelming force of his relief when she’d first spoken had been a physical pressure in the room. He had done this thing for her once, but he didn’t need to tell her that he couldn’t do it again. Not that she would ask him to. She didn’t want to fall behind. That much was true. It would hurt her beyond words if he ascended without her, but she never wanted to go through a trial of the body and soul like that again. Some things were not worth the price, at least not to her.

She noticed when the sounds of fighting diminished and then vanished. A few minutes later, the door opened and Sen came in. The clothes he had been wearing were little more than tatters that had been clawed, scorched, and burned by acid from the smell of it. Other things had probably happened that weren’t obvious to a visual inspection or from smell alone. He had a vaguely annoyed look on his face, but the exposed skin she could see was beneath the tattered ruins of his clothes was unmarred.

“Did you win?” she asked.

He got an odd, sheepish look on his face when he said, “Oh, um, yeah. I won. I might have also opened up some fresh land for farming in the process.”

Falling Leaf almost asked what he meant, and then she remembered how the earth had shaken earlier. He’d most likely done something large and terrifying.

“You’ll have to show me that tomorrow,” she said.