Everything inside of Sen wanted him to… No, it was begging him to sleep. The kind of overpowering exhaustion that came from having your mind, body, and cultivation taxed to their limits wasn’t new to Sen, but it simply wasn’t something that a person could ever learn to shrug off. It went too deep, and nothing could cure it but sleep. Unfortunately, Sen also knew that a tribulation could be headed his way at that very second. He really didn’t want lightning burning a hole through his tent. It’d let the rain in, thought Sen. He knew that worrying about his tent when a possibly lethal tribulation might strike at any second was absurd on a level that bordered on the insane. Yet, the thought persisted and forced Sen to action. Fighting his body the entire way, Sen crawled out of his tent.

He was surprised in a disturbingly distant way that it was night. He wasn’t sure if it was the same night or a different night and couldn’t muster the energy to care. Sen tried to stand, got as far as his knees, and simply couldn’t rise any farther. His body either refused to stand or was incapable of it. Sen supposed that there wasn’t much practical difference between those options, but it felt like an important distinction. His eyes kept threatening to close without so much as a courtesy check-in with his mind even as he tried to scan the skies. For all that he’d just gained, and he knew that he had gained a lot, Sen felt horribly vulnerable. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to do anything more than simply take the hits and hope for the best if a tribulation descended at that moment. That cheery line of thought was interrupted by the near-hysterical voice of Laughing River.

“What in every single last hell was that?” demanded the elder fox.

Sen managed to look over the fox, half lifted a hand to either wave the fox off or possibly just to wave. Parsing his own intentions through the haze of exhaustion was next to impossible. His vision was getting blurry around the edges as sleep threatened to claim him regardless of his will in the matter. Misty Peak’s eyes were open as wide as they could go and remained locked on Sen. He did his best to sum up what had just happened in the fewest possible words that would allow the other two to make sense of it. When he realized that no version of that explanation existed that only took one syllable, he just grunted something wholly inarticulate at them. He turned his eyes skyward again, hoping against hope that this would be one of those times the heavens opted not to send a tribulation.

“Did he always look like that?” asked a perplexed Misty Peak.

“No, he most certainly did not always look like that. Sen, what-” Laughing River started to say.

It was the last thing Sen heard before the final flickering vestiges of willpower in him winked out. His eyes rolled up into his head, and he felt himself slump forward. He was unconscious before he reached the ground. When consciousness returned, it came back like a bolt of lightning. One second, there was blissful nothingness. The next second, he was wide awake and trying to stand. Except, nothing looked the same. That moment of confusion caused him to topple off the bed he was trying to stand on and drop onto the hard stone floor of the galehouse. The fall didn’t hurt him physically. It just made him glad there was no one else around to witness his supreme lack of grace. Grunting in annoyance, he stood up and, after a moment of thought, sat down on the bed. He needed to take a moment and get his bearings.

“Okay,” he muttered. “No tribulation, I guess.”

Sen's confidence that a tribulation would have killed him was nearing absolute certainty. He didn’t want to speculate too much about why he’d gotten to skip the tribulation this time, but it was hard not to wonder. Maybe the heavens were giving me a break since they were the ones who pushed it so far, he mused. He hesitated to give the heavens that much credit, but it seemed like the only real explanation. Sen certainly hadn’t been angling for a breakthrough. Quite the opposite. He’d had it pushed onto him. A not-so-subtle sign that his slow down approach wasn’t getting any kind of approval from the heavens or at least a few figures in the heavens. Part of him wanted to believe that massive outpourings of heavenly qi weren’t the kind of thing that the heavens could do all that often. He wanted to believe it, but he didn’t. While that had felt like an obscene amount of heavenly qi to him, it probably wasn’t anything to a god or the heavens in general.

It would be like him pouring qi down onto a qi-gathering cultivator. Amounts of qi that he took for granted would seem overwhelming to someone at that level of advancement, and he expected the gulf between him and ascended beings was a lot bigger than the one between him and qi-gathering cultivators. In short, if the heavens wanted to do something like that to him every day, they probably could. He suspected the only reason they didn’t was that the constant strain on his body, mind, and cultivation would likely kill him instead of make him advance faster. Now that’s a cold comfort, thought Sen. I only get these long breaks between massive, terrifying infusions of heavenly qi because it’s not a self-serving behavior for whoever does this. He chased those thoughts around in a circle for a while before shaking it off. He only had suspicions at present. Annoying, logical suspicions, perhaps, but no actual proof. He couldn’t ignore them, but he realized that letting those suspicions rule his life would likely lead to madness.The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Instead, Sen turned his mind toward something else that had happened during that bizarre, unwanted advancement. Something he might actually be able to understand. When he’d been sure that qi was going to kill him, something had changed. A door, or gate, or some kind of channel he’d never felt before had opened and let the qi drain away. It had gone somewhere but somewhere that was still connected to him. He was sure of that much. Sen looked inside himself, trying to find the exact place where that gate was located. He searched his memory and tried to match that with what he could feel and see. He found the spot, but it just looked like more of him. There was nothing special there. He pressed his mind against that spot and tried to press open whatever had opened there before. He ramped up the pressure until he was certain he was going to give himself a nosebleed. He bore down on that spot with his spiritual sense and tried to glean any kind of insight.

There was something there, but it was out of his reach. It felt like it was trapped behind a barrier that was gossamer thin but entirely opaque and harder than steel. When his head was pounding at the strain of it, he released the pressure he was applying. No wonder it took all of that qi to open that channel, thought Sen. I can barely sense it. He toyed with a few possibilities but concluded that there was really only one place where all that qi could have gone. Somewhere connected to him but almost inaccessible? His soul was the only real option. He supposed it also made sense that the soul was protected from meddling even by the soul’s owner. Not that it was wholly inviolable. Sen knew that much from personal experience. After all, he had a technique that could seemingly affect the soul. Although, he wasn’t sure that technique would work the same way if he didn’t use divine qi. It would probably still do something, and something terrible, but maybe not something that persisted for so long and resisted all attempts to change it.

Of course, Sen wasn’t sure what a sudden influx of heavenly qi would do to a soul. He had to assume that it would be helpful but helpfulness was often a matter of degrees. The right amount of medicine would help, while the wrong amount could kill. How much divine qi could a soul absorb without harm? The dumb turtle had said his soul was already under strain. Would that fresh qi heal that strain or add to it? He didn’t know. Worse, he didn’t think he knew anyone who would know. Cultivators dealt in bodies and cores, not the ineffable, transcendent presence that was the immortal soul. While he hadn’t discussed it in depth with Master Feng, the elder cultivator had expressed his own belief that the nascent soul was something different than the immortal soul. Something layered over the immortal soul, rather than a replacement. Master Feng had also admitted that it was only his own belief and that no cultivator he’d ever met was sure about the relationship.

It left a disturbing amount of ground for uncertainty in Sen’s opinion, as well as reinforcing his own belief that cultivators didn’t simply ascend into godhood. If nothing else, he thought that gods should understand souls as a basic requirement for that role in the universe. He supposed that there was the possibility that ascension unlocked that kind of knowledge, but he doubted it. He’d had to learn everything he knew about cultivation. Even the things he did on instinct only happened after he started learning about something. No, it seemed far more likely that the path to true godhood was a lot longer than most cultivators wanted to believe. Sighing, Sen realized that he was thinking about increasingly tangential things simply to avoid looking at something he didn’t want to think about.

Glaring a little, he lifted a hand and turned it back and forth. I guess I wasn’t imagining that part, he thought. While he imagined that mortal eyes would just see a faint glow about him, Sen’s eyes could see what was really happening. There were thousands of tiny points of concentrated divine qi covering his skin. That was problematic for several reasons, but the biggest reason was that Sen didn’t know what it meant for him. If he was just going to glow a little bit, that would be wildly inconvenient but manageable. His luck never seemed to run that way, though. It seemed far more likely that those points of concentrated qi were meant to do something. And if I had the nonexistent manual for the Six-Fold Body Transformation, Sen thought with more than a little annoyance, it would probably be in there. Deciding that glowing was too much to bear, he tried to consciously suppress the glow. Much to Sen’s surprise, it worked. Those points of condensed divine qi seemed to sink deeper into his skin.

“Well, at least one thing went right today,” he said.

As soon as the words passed his lips, those points reappeared on his skin.

“Oh, come on!”