Sen watched as a number of conflicting emotions battled for supremacy on Lo Meifeng’s face. There was shock, which he’d expected. It wasn’t like he’d let her know he was coming. He’d made the general assumption that since none of his other teachers had come looking that they knew he was...
2023-11-13 03:48:45 +0000 UTC View PostSen had thought that traveling alone again might feel different now that he was subject to someone else’s will. And he supposed there had been a heady sense of extra freedom for the first couple of hours. Yet, Fu Ruolan’s demands on him had thus far been extremely light. She hadn’t needed t...
2023-11-09 12:12:13 +0000 UTC View PostWhen Kalan left the office of the Interstellar Court, he felt a great deal better about things. He’d loomed menacingly out of view of the camera while the magistrate “regretfully” tendered his immediate resignation. It wouldn’t permanently bar him from regaining a position with t...
2023-11-09 07:35:51 +0000 UTC View Post“You’re welcome to come along, of course,” said Sen in the most offhanded and casual tone he could manage.
After discussing his plans with Fu Ruolan, he’d reflected on how he’d taken it almost for granted that Falling Leaf would come with him. He didn’t like that he’d done tha...
2023-11-08 10:12:12 +0000 UTC View PostIt really worked, thought Sen and not for the first. I really am healed. He mentally backtracked from that last part. His body had been modified and improved. It was stable. Yet, he knew that was a temporary situation. It would start to deteriorate again if he didn’t continue ...
2023-11-07 08:01:06 +0000 UTC View PostYan Zixin sat alone in a tea shop, watching the foot traffic of the capital city move by in great waves. A few people had tried to invite themselves to sit with him, young women mostly, but one particularly ardent young man as well. He had fended them off as kindly as he could. He might have welc...
2023-11-06 07:20:56 +0000 UTC View PostKalan knew that he had a reputation as someone whose ship you wanted to be on if you could work the miracle to make it happen. So, he wasn’t worried about finding enough people to man the Zeren ship. The problem was that he was going to have to talk to all of those people and make deci...
2023-11-05 08:17:11 +0000 UTC View PostSen’s first instinct was to return to the galehouse, make sure everyone was safe, and then sleep. He ruthlessly suppressed that instinct. Fu Ruolan and Falling Leaf were survivors. Fu Ruolan had survived what was possibly the least forgiving process of all, cultivation. Falling Leaf, well, she...
2023-11-04 22:11:38 +0000 UTC View PostSo, I don’t generally get hit with whatever autumn sicknesses are going around. Unfortunately, it also means I don’t always catch the early warning signs. While I was writing the last chapter I posted, I felt cold. I thought I just hadn’t set the heat high enough. It wasn’t until I stood ...
2023-11-03 18:57:52 +0000 UTC View PostBreakfast had sounded like a good idea to Sen, and a great way to procrastinate for a little while. He’d been waiting for the moment for so long that having it right at his fingertips felt unreal. Part of him was waiting for the moment when he discovered it wasn’t going to happen. The rest of...
2023-11-02 07:04:39 +0000 UTC View PostIt was, much to Sen’s deep disappointment, pain that woke him from the warm depths of dreamless sleep. It wasn’t just regular pain, though. He’d learned to cope with garden variety pain years before, ignoring it the way a horse would ignore a single ant on the ground before it. This was som...
2023-11-01 05:29:26 +0000 UTC View PostFor Sen, the following week was nothing but a blur of alchemy. While the primer only provided the most tangential guidance in terms of method, it did force him to manage increasingly complex assortments of ingredients and reagents. He rarely struggled with the early recipes. As the reactions and ...
2023-10-31 06:32:38 +0000 UTC View PostSen spent several weeks trying to weaken the pills he was making. While he found that he could consistently reduce their potency, he couldn’t reliably reduce the amount. Some of it was simply the unpredictability of how the ingredients interacted with each other. He could never fully replicate ...
2023-10-31 03:54:59 +0000 UTC View PostKalan got Cera settled in a room in one of the safer hotels on the station and a tidy bribe kept her name out of the system. He was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to happen and equally sure that it happened all the time on a station that had as much through traffic as Cobalt 7. There were jus...
2023-10-30 06:36:29 +0000 UTC View PostFor all the stagnation that had marked the months he spent trying to make pill refining work as others did it, the time after he figured out the trick followed a path of meteoric mastery that even he wouldn’t have credited if he hadn’t experienced it personally. He flew through the primer. Th...
2023-10-30 03:16:18 +0000 UTC View PostThe minister of agriculture was droning on, again, the way he always droned on, and on, and on. After he finished droning, the minister of the military would get up and he would drone on, and on, and on. The man would, no doubt, complain that yet another expedition sent to deal with that stupid s...
2023-10-29 07:18:55 +0000 UTC View PostSen managed to escape Falling Leaf’s wrath mostly unscathed. Her fury had been pretty halfhearted after he waved the pill in front of her. She clipped his chin with a claw and drew a negligible amount of blood. He thought she’d done it mostly to prove a point. Don’t wake me up ...
2023-10-29 02:29:22 +0000 UTC View PostSen had planned to wait until the next day and take his plan to Fu Ruolan, but it nagged at him as he tried to focus on reading the primer. He found himself rereading the same passages over and over again as his attention slipped from the book to the possibility that he might finally crack the pr...
2023-10-28 00:16:16 +0000 UTC View PostSen was happy to discover that the tension that had hovered between him and Fu Ruolan largely dissipated after their conversation. However, he suspected the gift of the extremely rare ice lotus helped as well. That translated into unexpected but welcome changes in how they worked on his pill refi...
2023-10-27 05:35:49 +0000 UTC View PostSen pushed open the door to galehouse and looked around. He did that every time he came into the place. He knew that he was looking changes, but it was a fruitless little bit of paranoia. The interior of the galehouse never changed. Still, it soothed some small part of his heart to find the place...
2023-10-26 03:41:33 +0000 UTC View PostSen had hoped that Fu Ruolan had been satisfied that his failures meant the problem wasn’t with his technique. Instead, he spent nearly two full weeks running one failed attempt after another. On each attempt, Fu Ruolan would change one thing in refining process. The whole thing was tedious and...
2023-10-25 04:53:21 +0000 UTC View PostWhile Sen had felt a little uncertainty about asking for help, Fu Ruolan’s reaction had caught him off guard. Her face had lit up like he’d just given her the best gift of her life. The woman had seemed almost giddy at the prospect of helping Sen figure out what he’d been doing wro...
2023-10-23 19:02:45 +0000 UTC View PostSen stared down into the cauldron in disgust. The misshapen, burned lump of ingredients that sat at the bottom of the alchemist’s tool seemed to mock him. If this had been the first such failure, or the twentieth, or even the fiftieth, it wouldn’t have bothered him so much. Sen had lost count...
2023-10-23 03:13:02 +0000 UTC View PostAs her feet carried her away from the stone house that Lu Sen had summoned from the earth with such casual disregard that she’d wanted to slap him for it, Fu Ruolan didn’t see anything around her. Even in a world where the heavens intervened directly, if only occasionally, it was rare to witn...
2023-10-22 03:13:16 +0000 UTC View PostTime is a cultivator’s ally. Sen had heard Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Ma Caihong all say something similar at one time or another. However, as often as not, time seemed to work against Sen in one way or another. He always felt under pressure to accomplish an advancement, reach or a goal, or si...
2023-10-20 23:04:54 +0000 UTC View PostThe impulse to start reading what Sen recognized as a full-blow, if condensed, alchemy treatise was almost overwhelming. The pressure of that two-month deadline bore down on him as well, but a tinge of wisdom had crept into Sen’s thinking since his days on the mountain. Regardless of what his l...
2023-10-19 16:03:47 +0000 UTC View PostThe last few days on the way back to Fu Ruolan’s home wasn’t precisely peaceful, but it felt that way compared to fighting a beast tide that included a dragon. Even without his core or dantian topped off, Sen found that most of the challenges they faced were… He hesitated to frame it exactl...
2023-10-18 15:38:50 +0000 UTC View PostWhile I've made the assumption that many of the people on here are based in the US, I know that at least some of you aren't. So, sound off with some national pride in the comments and let me know where you're from.
Update: Well, it's certainly a cosmopolitan group we have here. I have to sa...
2023-10-18 13:39:29 +0000 UTC View PostWhile Sen’s healing elixirs had more or less gotten them back to being healthy, recovering enough qi to travel safely in the wilds was another matter entirely. Sen insisted that they leave the area where they had fought. He found the prospect that other spirit beasts would come sniffing around ...
2023-10-17 20:45:18 +0000 UTC View PostSen used his qinggong technique to kick off the ground at terrifying velocity, just to slam his knee into the underside of a dragon’s open maw. The knee struck with enough force to shatter stone and it forced the mouth closed…just in time for the dragon’s breath technique to erupt. With no ...
2023-10-17 03:10:11 +0000 UTC View Post