During the day, Sen was as diligent and driven as ever. If anything, he was even more diligent and driven. Most days, he was up before dawn making food. By the time Auntie Caihong or Uncle Kho drifted out for their first cup of tea, Sen had often been outside practicing for hours. Sen had found that he needed those extra hours just to get through everything. Between his unarmed combat forms and his jian styles, real practice could easily take up to five or six hours a day. Then, after he ate a quick meal for lunch, it was time for formation training. In its own way, formation training was as difficult as the medical and alchemical training that Auntie Caihong had put him through. In part, it was because many of the same concerns applied, if in different ways.

“A formation,” said Uncle Kho, “is almost a living thing. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in the world. It moves through time with you. It has a lifespan. Just as importantly, it interacts with your environment. Try as hard as you like, you’ll find that setting up a fire formation is all but impossible within a certain distance of any body of water. There’s just too much water qi in the area. Even if you do make it work through sheer talent or luck, it won’t last long. A good formation must take into account the flow of natural energies around it. It must work both with and within that existing balance.”

Yet, for all those complexities, Sen found formations a much easier subject. He briefly wondered if Uncle Kho was simply a better teacher, but quickly dismissed that idea. Auntie Caihong had been almost infinitely patient with him and always geared her lessons to a level that he could understand. No, it was simpler than that. Medicine had to interact with a human body. Human bodies were messy, unpredictable things. No two bodies functioned exactly the same way and their qi energies could change in strange ways. Formations interacted with the natural world. Sen was experienced enough to realize that nature was hugely complex, but it also moved slower. If you examined the energy in an area in the morning, there was a reasonably good chance that those energic flows would hold true in the evening. You didn’t have to adapt to everyone on the fly. You could make predictions and count on them.

Of course, that also made things harder to understand when things didn’t work properly. Sen had seen Uncle Kho sigh more than once when Falling Leaf simply appeared inside the courtyard. Uncle Kho liked the cat just fine, but he’d also told Sen that he’d specifically set up formations to keep spirit beasts out. The big cat shouldn’t have been able to come and go as she pleased. Yet, she did. Uncle Kho had checked the formations he built into the manor more than once. Every time, he said the same thing.

“There’s nothing wrong with these formations.”

Then, he’d usually turn a glare on the cat. Falling Leaf would yawn, or roll over, or simply go to sleep in the face of the cultivator’s annoyance. Sen reasoned that she might take Uncle Kho a bit more seriously if he didn’t give her so many treats. After a few weeks of formation training, when he understood the rules a little more, he asked the older cultivator a question he’d been hanging on to for a while.

“Uncle Kho, is Falling Leaf so powerful that she can just ignore the formation?”

“Hmmm. You know, I asked myself that exact same question when she first started showing up here. I thought maybe she was hiding her cultivation level. Maybe playing some kind of game with us.”

“And?” Sen prompted.

“No, it’s not a matter of power. Don’t get me wrong, she has plenty of power. If she were human, she’d probably be in middle foundation formation or even brushing up against late-stage foundation formation. Once Ming cleared out nearly anything with a core on the mountain, that makes her one of the bigger threats up here. But that’s not even close to powerful enough to just ignore one of my formations. No, something else is happening here. Something I don’t understand.”

“Do you have any ideas about what’s happening?”

Uncle Kho laughed. “Oh, I have lots of ideas, but no good ones. My best guess is that she, somehow, developed a unique qi technique that lets her slip through gaps in my formation that other things can’t.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I’m not. As far as I know, there are no gaps in my formation. There could still be a gap. One I don’t know how to see. One that she’s slipping through. Unfortunately, it’s not very likely.”

“Any other ideas?”

“She’s a cat.”

Sen frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Cats go where they want. I have a sneaking suspicion that there may be a loophole in the natural order that facilitates that.”

Sen frowned some more. “Sounds difficult to prove.”

Uncle Kho gave Sen a morose look. “I know.”

Sen found himself watching the big cat closer after that to see if he could spot her doing something special with her qi when she came and went. He didn’t have any more luck than Uncle Kho did. Falling Leaf seemed to know what he was doing and acted particularly smug when she noticed him failing to discover her secrets. Despite training with the spear, and his interest in formations, and the ongoing mystery of the ghost panther’s comings and goings, it was the cultivation manual that drove Sen’s relentless drive. He wanted to spend as much time with it as he could, which meant he needed to finish everything else during the day.

That manual consumed his evenings. As soon as they finished eating and cleaning up after the evening meal, Sen vanished to read it. A part of him knew that his fixation on it was nothing more than it being the first technique he’d been allowed to see that he didn’t come up with on his own. While Sen liked being creative and planned to keep building on that foundation of technique creation, it could be crushing work. After all, it was nothing but failure after failure until he succeeded. Then, after a few moments of pure joy, there was more work. He had to practice the technique, perfect it, and then start all over again. All of that failure wore him down after a while, even if he had found some shortcuts along the way.

To have someone simply hand him a technique felt so good that Sen was sure that there must be something fundamentally wrong with doing that. Still, he reveled in the pure luxury of having someone just tell him how to do something with qi. Although, he quickly discovered the pitfalls of a technique manual. Just because someone explained what to do and why, it didn’t necessarily mean that Sen would understand it. He understood his own techniques because he knew literally everything about them. With the technique in the manual, he could follow what it wanted him to do with his qi. The cycling pattern was less complex than many he knew already. He felt less certain about the why. That uncertainty bothered him more than he expected it would. More to the point, he had a feeling that it was even dangerous for him to not understand the why of the technique.

It didn’t help that the actual explanation was written in a way that Sen found frustrating and difficult to follow. Uncle Kho had declared that Sen’s reading skills were more than good enough for any of his needs. Yet, he’d never had Sen read anything like the manual before. The person who wrote it seemed determined to make every statement as long and complicated as possible. Sen would spend entire minutes trying to figure out what just one sentence meant. So, rather than spending his time cultivating with his new technique, Sen found himself reading the manual over and over again. If he couldn’t rely on simple comprehension to do the trick, perhaps repetition would serve him better. Even as he adopted that approach, he put himself on a clock. He would try to understand the manual on his own, but not forever. He gave himself seven days. If he couldn’t figure it out after seven days, he would simply ask one of the older cultivators.

He knew that there was value in developing understanding on his own, but time had value as well. The time he spent trying to understand was time he didn’t spend mastering something else. Uncle Kho had been teaching him about balance, and Sen was determined to find it in his life. He’d certainly learned his lesson about not asking for help in the past. So, the days ebbed away as Sen studied the manual. Understanding did not occur in a blinding flash, the way it sometimes did for him. Yet, it did come. At first, it was in small fits and starts. Then, bigger pieces slid into place. It took him five days with the manual before the why of the technique finally locked together. It also became clear to him why Master Feng and Uncle Kho had chosen this technique.

Master Feng had explained that many cultivators built their foundations around a single qi type. He even acknowledged the basic advantage in strength it would provide. Sen had experienced enough to know that he wanted to keep his access to many kinds of qi. He could see way too many advantages to having it to ever willingly give it up. Feng had encouraged that attitude. So, the old cultivators had gone out and found a foundational building technique that would let him keep it. The whole technique was designed to let him condense liquid qi that used all of the attributed qi he could access. It was basically ideal for his needs. That understanding did nothing to temper his frustrations with whoever wrote the stupid manual.

“You couldn’t just say that’s what the technique was for?” He demanded of the unknown writer. “No, of course not, because why do something so rational? No, you had to talk about the many-branched tree of creation. You ass!”

It wasn’t until Auntie Caihong knocked on his door that Sen realized he’d been yelling at the manual for almost ten minutes in a glorious, rage-purging explosion of verbal violence. He’d opened the door with a rather sheepish expression.

“Is everything alright, Sen?” Auntie Caihong asked.

She peeked past him into the room, as if she wanted to make sure that some stranger hadn’t snuck in and bothered him.

“Yes, Auntie. I just figured out what the cultivation manual was trying to explain.”

“That made you angry?”

“No. That made me happy.”

“So?” She prompted.

“I also figured out that the person who wrote it was…” he trailed off, not wanting to actually say it out loud to her.

“Oh, you mean that he was a tiresome buffoon who loved a turn of phrase more than being helpful?”

Sen was nodding before she even finished. “I just called him an ass.”

She gave him a sympathetic smile. “It won’t be the last time you say that about someone who wrote a manual.”

Sen groaned.