When he’d agreed to help Falling Leaf try to advance faster, Sen knew that they were both going to be taking risks. He’d be betting on his intuition and experience, and no little help from Auntie Caihong and Fu Ruolan, to help him overco a stark lack of information. She’d be betting her life based on, as far as he could tell, nothing more than almost blind faith in him. Those realities had stayed his hand for a long ti as he had people scouring the kingdom and spending money like water for any scrap of knowledge, any obscure resource, anything at all that might improve their chances. As he stared down at the stone vial in his hand, he had to pray that it had been enough. That he wasn’t sure what he was praying to was a rather pointed indicator of his conflicted relationship with the heavens. Perhaps, it was a prayer to unknown gods. Ones that might elect to treat him and Falling Leaf a bit more kindly.
He'd spent more than a little ti examining Falling Leaf with his spiritual sense and his qi. He’d delved into the minor miracle that was her transford form and found himself wanting. It wasn’t all beyond his understanding. Her new body shared traits with a human cultivator’s body. For example, she did have a core. Unlike a cultivator, though, she didn’t have a dantian or at least not one that he could recognize. She possessed qi channels, but they were wholly unlike the ones in a human. Human qi channels tended to be large, like the major veins and arteries, and often followed parallel paths. They allowed for small rivers of qi to move through the body. In Falling Leaf, there were hundreds of tiny qi channels that perated her flesh and bones. He understood that they moved qi but had no clear sense of how they did it. He’d even had her channel qi while he watched and still found himself baffled.
The composition of her body was almost like a human’s but not quite identical. The muscles and bones were denser than a core cultivator’s would be at a similar level of developnt, which helped to explain her strength and speed. However, the joints and connective tissues were structured a little differently. He suspected that those differences contributed to better flexibility, but that was just an educated guess. There were also oddities in the positioning of her organs, as well as a few structures that he didn’t recognize. He didn’t know if those were so kind of holdovers from when she had her big cat form or if those were from after her transformation. Those mostly minor differences left him with a kind of unease that seed to stem from the familiar and unfamiliar in such close proximity.
Of course, all those minor and major differences ant that he couldn’t take for granted that her body would react the sa way as a human body. He had what he felt was a strong theory that the multitude of minor qi channels were part of what allowed spirit beasts to consu cores and use them to strengthen themselves. The channels would distribute the power gained throughout their entire bodies, not just to their cores. In essence, they would do naturally what Sen had done rather unnaturally when he suffused his entire being with divine qi. If he could widen those channels as he had done for himself, it should facilitate faster progress by allowing more qi to flow into her flesh and bones. Unfortunately, that still left the primary chanism of the process hidden.
He had a much shakier idea that the difference lay in the core itself. While human cultivators ford a core inside of their dantian, the absence of a dantian in Falling Leaf suggested to him that her core was doing all of the work that was divided in humans. It made him wonder if spirit beasts were actually intended to cultivate as a part of their growth cycle while humans could only do it through a variety of inelegant, brute force thods. that was a question for another ti or maybe even another lifeti, as compelling as it. If he was right, and it was the only explanation he could co up with, that ant that he needed to dramatically strengthen her core at the sa ti that he was widening and reinforcing her qi channels.
That was a dangerous proposition since he couldn’t examine its interior workings. He could sense it, feel the qi inside of it, but he couldn’t look at what it was doing. He could only guess, and he hated that guesswork so much. He hated the way it would threaten Falling Leaf’s safety. Part of him wanted to rescind the offer and destroy the vial in his hands. The elixir it contained was a volatile concoction. He’d ventured deeper into the wilds than was probably safe even for him to find spirit beasts that were strong enough and had shadow affinities to harvest cores from. He’d ventured into deep caverns to retrieve plants and fungus that had never seen the light of the sun. A few of them would have killed a foundation formation cultivator to even touch. So of them didn’t even have nas to his, Auntie Caihong’s, or even Fu Ruolan’s knowledge.
He was trying to fundantally alter the way that Falling Leaf’s body wanted to progress, which ant undermining it while also reinforcing it. That was the trickiest of balances to strike. If he got the mixture even slightly wrong, it would kill the ghost panther faster than it could restore her. His closest friend, the person he trusted most in the world, would die in unspeakable pain, and it would be his fault. An almost overwhelming urge to destroy the elixir took him. I could just tell her I failed, he thought. She’s seen fail before. She never needs to know! Qi raced to his hand and manifested as a nearly physical mass of light around the vial. It would only take a thought. That qi would transform into an incandescent fla hot enough to vaporize the stone vial, to say nothing of the elixir inside of it. She doesn’t need to know, he told himself again.
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But she would know. She would sense the lie in him. It took an unreasonably long ti to reign in that qi. It was responding to what he wanted to do, rather than what he knew he had to do. In the end, reason won out over want and the light winked out as the last of the qi was drawn back inside of Sen. He bowed his head, muttered one last prayer to unknown gods that he hadn’t gotten this horribly wrong, and turned to the only door in the small building he’d erected solely for this purpose. He walked over to the door, steeled his nerves, and opened it. Falling Leaf was standing nearby, her expression so calm it bordered on serene. She gave him a questioning look.
“It’s ti,” he said.
Nodding, she walked over to him and glanced down at the hand that was wrapped tightly around the vial. She stepped into the small building and Sen closed the door behind them. Then, he transford the stone door into a smooth stone wall. There were no windows in the place. He’d limited himself to a few strategic slits to accommodate air flow. The only light in the place ca from small fireballs he’d fixed in place near the ceiling. Falling Leaf frowned at the spot where the door had been.
“This will be extrely painful,” he explained. “I expect that you’re going to scream. That will dampen the sound of it. Plus, I don’t want Ai running in here looking for us.”
“Wise,” said Falling Leaf.
She extended her hand toward him. He stared at that hand for much, much longer than was either necessary or reasonable.@@@@
“You don’t have to do this,” said Sen, hoping against all hope that she might change her mind.
“I do,” she answered with an unnerving calm.
“If I got this wrong—” he started before the words caught in his throat and refused to co out.
“I might die,” she finished for him. “I don’t believe I will die.”
She took a few steps closer. With wordless but obvious reluctance, Sen reached out and put the elixir into her hand.
“You’ll probably want to sit down,” he told her weakly.
She followed his advice and settled on the floor. Falling Leaf eyed the vial for a mont. Then, she removed the cork and swallowed the elixir with no hesitation. Sen did not think he could have taken sothing like that with such confidence. She set the vial to one side. For a few precious seconds, she seed fine. Then, her head snapped back so hard it looked painful. She slumped to the floor and started to convulse. Sen had to make himself stay where he was. There was nothing he could do for her until the elixir had run its course. Any intervention on his part might well spell disaster for her. He had to wait. That was when the screaming started. 𝐫ÂꞐȰ𝐛ƐṤ
They were the screams of pure animal pain. They went on and on for far longer than Sen thought possible before Falling Leaf would drag in a breath and then scream again. Sotis, she would thrash. Sotis, he heard her bones crack. There were monts where her skin turned a red so deep that he expected blood to burst from her skin. The occasional mont where she seed to find relief would be broken by more convulsions or more screaming. Sen made himself watch every second of what he’d helped make happen. He didn’t know how long he stood there. Ti had long since beco a aningless concept. The only vague indications of ti were the crimson pools spreading around his feet. He’d been clenching his fists so hard that he managed to cut his palms with his nails. A feat he hadn’t thought possible anymore.
There was one mont when Sen was sure he’d killed Falling Leaf. She’d let out a scream so loud and piercing that it probably would have shattered glass and permanently deafened any mortal within a hundred feet. Her body had arched up into a bow. Then, it had all stopped. She’d slumped to the ground, motionless and not breathing. For a few terrible seconds that felt like an eternity, he was certain she was dead. When she took a ragged breath, he nearly collapsed. Not that it was over. The cycle of screaming started all over again. It went on and on until Sen felt numb and hollowed out. I don’t think I can do this again, he thought. I can never inflict this kind of tornt on her again.
However, as much as it seed to Sen that it would never end, Falling Leaf’s screams did eventually subside. Her convulsions ceased. Her breathing fell into the steady rhythm of sleep. Sen knew that there were a thousand things he should be doing to ensure that she was still healthy, but he couldn’t make himself do any of them. Instead, he opened a hole in the wall of the building and stumbled outside into the light of day. There was soone nearby who called out a question, but he didn’t hear it. After a few more staggering steps, he dropped to his knees, bent over, and spilled what ager contents remained in his stomach onto the ground.
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