While Sen had neither wanted nor expected this advancent, he had prepared for the inevitable arrival of an advancent. He’d known for years that there would always be one coming sooner or later, right up until the mont he ascended. Sen intended to take full advantage of that fact. Who knew? If he’d planned well enough, he might even be able to prevent it from forcing a breakthrough. Sen extended a hand. Hundreds and hundreds of expended beast cores dropped to the ground around him. Experience had taught him that those were ideal for storing divine qi, which he could then use for other things. He still wasn’t entirely clean on what, if any, limits there were to using divine qi for his own purposes. What was obvious was that it never hurt to have so available.
He’d also taken to heart what the talisman masters among the army’s cultivators had told him. Every talisman needed an infusion of qi to function, much the sa as formations. The cultivator making the talisman usually provided that qi, but they didn’t have to. They could create what they called inert talismans that could then be filled with another cultivator’s qi of choice. That could prove both helpful and detrintal. It could be helpful if the cultivator’s qi type worked well with the kind of talisman. Talismans designed to create explosions worked well with fire qi, just as talismans ant to encourage healing worked well with wood qi.
On the other hand, filling an explosion talisman with water qi had very limited usefulness. Unless you were up against a spirit beast or another cultivator that specialized in fire, it would mostly just result in leaving everyone wet and irritated. Filling a healing talisman with tal qi might help other tal cultivators, but it would be useless or even harmful to cultivators with other affinities. There was, however, one kind of talisman that worked equally well with any type of qi, and would work especially well with divine qi. Defensive talismans. With so many lower-stage cultivators in the army, Sen felt that there was no such thing as having too many defensive talismans on hand.
Not that he could make them himself. At least, not ones that would be useful against strong spirit beasts. For one, he simply didn’t have the ti. He also understood the severe limits of his talisman-crafting abilities. That was why he had tasked the talisman masters and their imdiate juniors with making as many extra inert defensive talismans as they reasonably could. It turned out that when they didn’t need to pour their own qi into every talisman, they could make those inert talismans in truly shocking numbers. Before he’d almost drained himself dry, Sen had made it a habit to infuse a stack of those talismans with helpful qi types every few days. He’d had the qi to spare, after all. Master Feng, whose qi recovery speed might actually exceed Sen’s own, would join in occasionally. As did most of the other nascent soul cultivators, if far less often due to their slower qi recovery.
They had, slowly but surely, been amassing a stockpile of them that should prove very useful in the event that the army ca up against an especially brutal fight. Or a trap, thought Sen. But he had also been storing a bunch of them away for the mont when the heavens decided to inundate him with enough divine qi to force his next advancent. With a wave of his hand, stack after stack after stack of inert talismans appeared on the ground around him. The heavens were going to dump divine qi on him like a waterfall. It had already happened on multiple occasions. This ti, though, he’d do everything he could to test the limits of that dubious generosity.
At least, he would once his own reserves were more replenished. While he normally had to maintain a careful balance between qi types, that didn’t seem to be an issue with divine qi. The reason for that was elusive. It was almost like the divine qi mimicked what was supposed to be there. It wasn’t quite the sa. Still, as long as it didn’t make him sick the way a qi imbalance did, he’d just accept it. He suspected that the reason could be found in the divine part of divine qi. That ant the answer to why it behaved as it did, like the answers to so many of his questions, would only be found after his ascension.
It took a surprisingly short ti for Sen to feel that his reserves were back to what they had been before. After that, he began directing as much of that divine qi into the talismans and expended beast cores as he could. It was a much more delicate process than he’d like. There were hard limits to how much qi each talisman or core could take before they’d just burn up or explode. He was relying on quantity over quality in this instance. As the qi flowed out of him and into those convenient vessels, he let out a grunt of laughter. What he was doing could rightly be considered theft from the heavens. An idea that would make most cultivators break out into a cold sweat. The heavens were many things, but wildly forgiving wasn’t one of them.
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Granted, they’d never punished him before, but he’d never been quite so flagrant about his theft before. In the other cases, he’d mostly been trying to avoid burning up or exploding the way those talismans and cores might if overfilled. There would be no question this ti that he had made a plan to take that qi and put it to his own uses. That preditation on his part might trigger punishnt. Then again, that he had gotten away with it before without punishnt was itself a kind of tacit permission. That’s what he’d told himself when devising this plan.
It went beyond that, though. He’d been judicious with how he used that qi in the past. Sen wasn’t in the habit of wasting invaluable resources on trivial things. There was no evidence to support the idea, but he had the intuition that things might have gone differently if he had wasted it. Perhaps the most obvious sign that he hadn’t crossed a line was the fact that he was even able to do what he was doing. It suggested that soone or sothing in the heavens was at least choosing to briefly turn a blind eye. He didn't doubt that if the heavens wanted to stop him, they could. They had sealed his ability to release qi into the world before.
And they did it again. At very nearly the mont he finished filling the cores and empowering the talismans, he found himself unable to direct any qi to anywhere outside his body. He didn’t panic this ti. Panic hadn’t helped the last ti it happened. He supposed that there was a ssage in this as well. We let you do what you wanted to do, but now we’re going to do what we want to do. Instead of waiting until the pain built so much that he collapsed, Sen sat down on the ground. He knew that pain was coming. It arrived in the form of a wave of environntal qi that mixed with the divine qi. He supposed that there might be so limit to divine qi’s mimicry abilities. Maybe he needed a certain amount of the real thing to maintain balance.
Not that he cared all that much at the mont. As all of the mixed qi built up inside of him, the pressure grew and grew until it reached utter agony for him. It was only years of accumulated discipline, and no small amount of experience with unspeakable levels of pain, that allowed him to keep his screams confined to his mind. Even that tiny victory threatened to be short-lived as the pressure continued to intensify inside of him. When that wave of environntal qi was fully absorbed, he felt the mont when he was forcefully yanked across the threshold from one minor stage of nascent soul to the next.
He almost heaved a sigh of relief before he realized that the divine qi was still pouring into him. The pressure did not relent in the slightest. Panic threatened to well up, but he forced it down. This too was familiar, even if he didn’t fully understand it. All he could do was grit his teeth and endure as it felt like every fiber of his being was about to be shredded beneath that pressure. When it reached a peak that even Sen thought was unendurable, he felt a crack inside of him that he’d felt once before. It was so kind of gate that he believed led to his soul. A gate that was locked and always inaccessible to him. A gate that he was fairly certain he wasn’t even supposed to know about.
Again, he didn’t particularly care about any of that at the mont. All he cared about was that the hellish pressure receded as all of that excess divine qi flowed through that gate to sowhere else. As that seemingly endless flow of divine qi abruptly cut off, Sen leaned forward and braced himself with a hand on the ground. He tried to catch his breath. It had been a while since he actually felt out of breath. It was a novel and simultaneously unnerving experience. He couldn’t help but wonder just how hard that advancent had pushed his body’s limits. When he finally felt a little closer to normal, he gave the sky a wary look. He almost always got a tribulation when he advanced. It was almost an instinct for him to brace for one.
As seconds passed into minutes with no sign of gathering clouds or power, Sen allowed himself a relieved sigh. He forced himself to stand on legs that felt weak. He made himself step over to the talismans and the cores and store them again. Anyone likely to co check on him would likely be a trusted ally. Still, if one of the cultivators he wasn’t close with arrived, there was such a thing as too much temptation. Piles of beast cores and talismans overflowing with divine qi would absolutely qualify as too much temptation. He walked over to a nearby tree. He definitely didn’t stagger. There had been zero staggering. Especially since nobody was there to see it. He leaned against the tree.
“I think I’ll rest here,” he said to the air in a weak voice. “Just for a few minutes.”
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