Sen stared down at the last of the spikes on top of the castle wall. He was waiting to receive word. It had taken most of two hours with Lai Dongi getting increasingly nervous and trying very hard not to show it before he’d finally gotten the necessary insight to make his lightning-borrowing idea possible. Ironically, it hadn’t been thinking about lightning that had done it. It had been looking up at those looming black clouds and thinking about all the rain that must be waiting to crash down on them that put him on the right track.
He’d gotten to thinking about those miserable days and nights in his childhood when he’d sought any kind of shelter from heavy storms. He rembered hunching in doorways because at least that got his feet off the ground. He’d stand in those doors and watch the water rush by, carried along in one direction or another depending on which way the ground slanted. Yet, that water would also be constrained and channeled by the buildings. That had gotten him to thinking about how rivers carved paths through the earth and that had done it. He understood what he needed to do. The lightning or at least the potential for lightning was up in those clouds, but he didn’t want all of it. He just wanted enough of it. Exercising that control ant providing the lightning with a channel, a path to follow down to these spikes.
It had taken a little longer to decide how to provide that channel. In the end, he’d decided that go with slender lines of lightning qi. He’d gathered those kinds of forces before using such qi. It stood to reason that it would attract what he wanted. He hoped it would at any rate. Interactions between kinds of qi and their natural counterparts weren’t always simple or obvious. He’d started to think that what qi accomplished in a technique was creating a close approximation of the real thing, rather than the real thing itself. Of course, he wasn’t entirely confident that was true either. He really needed to talk to one of his teachers about that idea.
Once he’d decided on his course of action, he’d started carving tiny formations into the stone of the wall around each spike. He’d been close to half done when it struck him that this plan of his was likely to trigger an attack that the city wasn’t ready to repel. Worse, it wouldn’t even depend on his success. Gathering up that much qi would be a sure signal to the spirit beasts that the humans and cultivators in the city ant to do sothing big. The spirit beasts would almost be compelled to attack, regardless of the state of their own formation. To deal with that backlash from the spirit beasts, the city would need mortal soldiers and cultivators gathered at and on the wall.
So genius had co up with the idea of stationing cultivators every fifty feet or so on the wall so that they could imbue arrows and ballista bolts with different kinds of qi. It would vastly enhance the offensive force that the mortals could bring to bear on the spirit beasts at range. Sen had gifted so of his cracked cores to the ballista teams. It would take a cultivator to prep them, and soone would have to secure the cores swiftly or risk becoming their victim. Still, it promised to add even more chaos to what should prove a very bad day for the spirit beasts. Yet, all of that depended on the soldiers and cultivators being prepared to act. Sen had descended from the wall and marched into the castle to alert the cultivator and mortal leadership that it was just about ti.
Generals had sent mortal runners to the garrisons, while cultivators returned to their sects to rouse their own fighters. Sen had been montarily startled by the frenzy of activity but soon realized that most of the important work was actually happening elsewhere in the city. He imagined that mortal army captains were getting orders, then passing those orders onto juniors, who passed them on to the spearn and archers who would line the walls. Those soldiers would climb dozens of sets of stairs that lined the interior of the city wall to take their positions. As for what was happening in the sects, Sen had no idea. It might be sothing similar, but it might not. For all he knew, the cultivators were handing out cups of tea and enjoying a nice al while the slower mortals got into position. It didn’t seem likely, but the actions of sect cultivators often left him baffled.
With that taken care of, Sen had returned to the top of the palace wall and resud his work of carving tiny formations. It had taken longer than he would have liked because he wasn’t carving individual formations. If that was all he’d needed to do, he could probably have finished all of them in less than fifteen minutes. The tricky part was that he needed them to function simultaneously, which ant weaving interconnections between them. Given the deluge of forces that were likely to descend on the palace walls, flags had never been an option. They’d be blown away or incinerated, which would prove mildly catastrophic. If nothing else, it would likely an the destruction of part of the palace walls. At its worst, it could disrupt what Sen ant to do, which would be catastrophic on a citywide scale.
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Using the stone of the wall itself was safer. He’d reinforced it himself, which ant that it could stand up to lightning better than almost anything else. He also didn’t need it endure those forces for more than a few seconds. If it took him longer than that, it probably ant he’d managed to kill himself instead of disrupting the spirit beasts’ formation. Of course, being dead would make everything that happened afterward fundantally not his problem. That’s not much of an upside, thought Sen. But tis are hard. I’ll take what I can get. What he struggled to deal with was the wait.
He knew that directing so many people to the walls would be a slow process. However, that knowledge had been abstract. Gleaned from those historical scrolls he’d read. The reality of it was frustrating. He literally had nothing useful to contribute. All he could do was stand around and feel the seconds slip by until that process was completed. On top of that, all the people who weren’t fighting would also need to be gathered so the foxes could set up their illusions. That thought made him more than uneasy. He’d put on a good show for the mortals and the other cultivators, but he harbored deep reservations about the reliability of those foxes.
If it had been Misty Peak saying that she would do it, he would have put the matter out of his mind. He might question her motives sotis, even most of the ti, but he knew her enough to know that she could stay the course when it was important. With this, though, he was forced to rely on her belief that she could wrangle the rest of those foxes into doing sothing helpful and sticking with it. He couldn’t help but worry that she was overestimating her ability to direct the flighty nine-tail foxes. His mind threatened to keep chewing on that problem but was saved by the arrival of soone familiar. Sen heard the man’s feet touch down on the stone, and a smirk crossed his lips. The qi was similar, but more intense than it had been before. I guess he managed that breakthrough, thought Sen.
“Shi Ping the Lazy and Gluttonous. I didn’t expect to see you,” said Sen.
“Oh, by the thousand hells, you are still an ass.”
Whatever little bit of mirth Sen had cobbled together vanished. He turned to look at the other man. He was a little bit startled by the changes in the other man, but it had been a few years. He supposed even cultivators could undergo aningful transformations in that space of ti. He chose not to comnt on those changes and focused on Shi Ping’s words instead.
“You should be careful how hard you swing that stick of judgnt,” said Sen before his voice went hard. “The last I heard, you were a professional custor at a brothel. A job you took up with a pile of money that I gave you. As I also recall, when I was going off to what might well have been my death, you were too busy with those ladies to even co get the elixir I made for you. Shall I continue?”
Shi Ping grimaced and said, “No. You’ve made your point.”
Sen let the silence linger a little longer than necessary before he softened his tone and said, “Good. So, what can I do for you in these hectic tis?”
Instead of answering the question, Shi Ping just stared at Sen before shaking his head and saying, “You advanced again.”
“Since I last saw you? Yeah. Several tis.”
“I can’t decide if the heavens adore you or despise you.”
Sen shuddered at the mories of his advancents and said, “I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. It seems like you’ve made so progress of your own, though.”
“That elixir you made was… Hells, it was a lot. More than was safe for . It got into core formation and gave a pretty big jump on my next advancent. I would thank you, but the tribulation that ca after was so violent that it left on death’s door for most of a month.”
Sen winced.
“Yeah, I didn’t adjust that one to you as well as I should have. I am sorry about that. I wanted it to be good. It took a while to recognize that making an elixir better is not always for the best.”
Shi Ping made a noise that might have been a grunt or might have been a weak laugh. Sen decided to call it a laugh and not dig into it any deeper. The other man's expression went serious before he looked around and frowned.
“Just what are you doing up here?” asked Shi Ping.
“Oh, I’m setting up a series of small, synchronized formations that will call down lightning from the storm and—” Sen started.
“Stop,” said Shi Ping, raising his hands in an almost defensive gesture. “I have a feeling that if I let you finish that statent, I’m going to be looking for a way out of this city.”
“That seems—” Sen hesitated as he thought about it. “No, you’re probably right. Which brings us back around to my original question. What can I do for you?”
“I can see the soldiers headed up to the top of the city wall from here, and you’re engaged in so of your usual insanity. So, I’m assuming that the battle will start soon.”
Sen nodded.
“Pretty good chance. Probably in the next hour or two.”
“I need to know where I should go for the fight.”
Sen was shocked by the offer. He rembered Shi Ping as a coward. Maybe more has changed than just his appearance, thought Sen. When he considered what he should say, though, he ca to a startling realization.
“I honestly have no idea,” admitted Sen.
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