Sen resisted the urge to start yelling at the heavens, but only because he had a number of more pressing concerns. Unlike the advancement in Orchard’s reach, safety was not a short run away. It was happening on the beach, whether Sen liked it or not. He needed to protect himself from unwanted observation. Unfortunately, he also wasn’t alone. Lifen was standing a few feet away from him, having recovered from her initial shock, but still unclear about what was happening. He supposed he could send her back to the Silver Crane, but he didn’t know how safe it actually was for her to travel alone. Of course, the other option was that he kept her with him, on the beach, for however long it took him to consolidate this gain. Why is this always so damned inconvenient, thought Sen. Prioritizing his concerns, Sen turned to Lifen.

“This is the situation. I’ve experienced a moment of enlightenment and all of that qi you just felt is rolling through me right now. It’s going to mean a small advancement in my cultivation once I convert it into liquid qi. We don’t have time to get me somewhere less public, so I’m going to have to do it here.”

“Here? On the beach?”

“Unfortunately. I can hold it off on it for a short time, but I’m going to be using that time to set up formations to keep me hidden.”

“You know how to use formations too?” demanded Lifen, sounding almost offended.

“Yes. It was part of my training. That’s not the point. I can’t escort you back to the Silver Crane. I can’t wait that long to do something with all of this qi. So, you have to decide what you want to do. You can head back on your own, if you think it’s safe enough, or you can stay here with me,” said Sen. “You don’t need to decide this very second, but you will need to decide before I activate the formations.”

A line formed between Lifen’s eyes, but she nodded. “I will consider this matter.”

Sen suspected that the young woman received less time than she expected to get as he all but flew through the process of setting up both a qi gathering formation and an obscuring formation. It took him a little longer than it might have out in the forest. The qi combination was dramatically different on the beach, much heavier in water and air, but dozens of repetitions at setting up those formations had made Sen a deft hand at evaluating those forces on the fly. He also needed to add in a more potent desire to steer clear of the area. Animals tended to react to even subtle pressures to avoid a place, while human beings tended to ignore that subtler warning.

While he didn’t know the young woman especially well, Sen had a suspicion about what Lifen was going to decide, so he made the formations a bit bigger than he might have done otherwise. As he worked, Lifen had watched him with intense eyes, like she could soak up his knowledge just by watching him. When he turned to her, he could see that she’d already decided what she was going to do. Still, he did her the courtesy of asking.

“So, will you stay or return to the Silver Crane?”

“I will stay,” she said.

Sen activated the formations, then only begrudging the lost time a little, set up his tent, and prepared a small fire. He didn’t light it but instead beckoned Lifen over to him. He handed her the fire qi device that he’d taken from that dead cultivator what felt like several lifetimes before and showed her how it worked. He’d left enough dried wood to last the entire night. He gave her blankets, travel rations, and a couple of gourds of water he had stored. He racked his brain for anything else she might need but came up empty. Sen realized that it was only long practice and the benefits of body cultivation that let him finish it all fast enough. Without both of those, he’d probably have had to leave her far less prepared to deal with whatever happened over the rest of the day and night.

“Don’t step outside of the flags,” he warned her. “If you do, it will likely break the formation.”

“I won’t,” Lifen hurriedly agreed, seemingly sensing Sen’s impatience.

“Oh,” said Sen, “the inner formation is a qi gathering formation. So, you should think about doing some cultivating while I consolidate this advancement.”

“I will,” she said, seeming to take it as more of a command than a suggestion.

Sen didn’t have any time left to think about Lifen, though. His dantian and his channels were overstuffed with qi. Stepping a short distance away from the girl, Sen sank down into the lotus position and focused inward. For Sen, this advancement was strange. Up until then, his body and spirit cultivation had advanced in perfect lockstep. Sen didn’t know if that was because of some clever design by Master Feng, or just a quirk of his personal cultivation experience. Yet, this advancement was purely a spiritual advancement. Oh, his body cultivation would enjoy a few secondary benefits from the addition of new, potent liquid qi, but it wouldn’t advance in itself. Sen found that it was actually a bit of relief.

Simultaneously managing the strains on his spirit and body had been, in hindsight, one of the bigger challenges of any cultivation advancement. Of course, he hadn’t really understood that the two could be separated until after he’d broken into foundation formation and been given a much more thorough explanation about cultivation stages and advancement. Able to focus entirely on his dantian and channels made converting all that fresh environmental and heavenly qi into liquid qi a much smoother process. It didn’t make the actual conversion any easier. Conversion remained a battle to maintain constant or increasing pressure on the qi. What it did mean was that Sen could spare a little attention for watching his channels and managing the flow of qi so that he didn’t strain those channels.

Part of what had made previous advancements so painful was that he always came out of them in need of healing. He simply didn’t have the mental resources to watch everything. So, he’d strain channels, or overtax body parts, or both. This time, he remained in full control of the process. As the droplets of liquid qi slowly formed and accumulated in his dantian, he could feel the extra qi around him, courtesy of the formation, and drew that in as fast as his limited attention would allow. He couldn’t extend the process indefinitely, but he could extend it for a time. Sen doubted that cultivation advancement would ever become the all-consuming, singular focus of his existence that way it seemed to be for most cultivators. Still, he wasn’t stupid enough to let an opportunity to push his cultivation forward slip by without at least a minor effort to wring the most value from it.

On the periphery of his senses, he could feel Lifen cultivating at times. He’d notice a slight dip in the available qi, although it was largely trivial, given that the formation was gathering more than either of them could reasonably use up. Yet, it also made him aware of time in a way that he wasn’t used to during an advancement. His particular cultivation let him go without sleep or even food, if necessary, for days at a time. Lifen’s cultivation wasn’t advanced enough to let her do the same. Sen’s concentration wavered for a moment as he wondered if he’d left her enough food and water, but he distinctly remembered handing her enough of both to last for at least two or three days. Firewood was a different matter, but she did have shelter available. Satisfied that he hadn’t left the girl in dire straits, he sank fully back into his cultivation. When he did finally rise out of his cultivation trance, he found Lifen sitting nearby, looking a little bored. When she noticed him looking at her, she leapt to her feet.

“I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up,” she declared. “For the heavens’ sake, does it always take that long?”

Sen shrugged. “Probably.”

As he always did after an advancement, he let a little of the liquid qi cycle through his channels, spreading the latent power out into his muscles and organs. He froze when felt just how potent that latent power was. He’d been thinking of liquid qi as something with a stable level of power, but it seemed he’d been very wrong about that. It was cumulative. The more he had, the more powerful it became. He didn’t know if it was a matter of density, but he’d need to be very careful about using that liquid qi to do anything. Once he examined his dantian, though, he was satisfied that he had broken through to late-stage foundation formation. Between the qi from his insight, the qi the formation had let him tap into, and the more incremental advancements he’d made on his own, his dantian was nearly three-quarters full with liquid qi.

“How long has it been anyway?”

“Two days,” said an annoyed Lifen. “My mother is going to have things to say about this.”

Sen hadn’t considered that before, so all he could think to say was, “Oh.”