“I did not seduce a heavenly being,” said Sen through gritted teeth as he glared murder at the turtle.

“If you say so,” muttered the turtle, clearly not believing a word of it.

“Can we please get back to the whole diverged from the method problem?”

“I didn’t say it was a problem. I just said that it’s a thing that happened.”

“So, it’s not a problem?”

“I didn’t say that,” replied Elder Bo with dignified equanimity.

A murderous rage swelled inside of Sen. He’d already seized the hilt of his jian before he clawed back a trembling, fragile thread of control. Sen had already been furious with the turtle and this unwillingness to keep speaking plainly was stoking that fire. He forced himself to release the hilt of the jian but he was shaking. There’s no point in continuing with this, he told himself. You’ll just do something stupid. Sen stared at the divine turtle for several long seconds before he turned on his heel and started walking away down the beach. As the distance grew, Sen started to believe that the turtle might let him leave. That hope was dashed when he felt a burst of qi behind him. Before Sen could even turn around to look, the turtle was looming in front of him.

“You don’t respect…” started Elder Bo.

That was as far as he got before Sen’s fist crashed into the bottom of his jaw. Much to Sen’s surprise, it seemed to stagger the turtle. Sen couldn’t decide if it was the blow itself or simply surprise that he had dared to strike the divine spirit beast in the first place. Either way, Sen wasn’t about to let that momentary advantage pass him by. A second punch caught the turtle on the side of the head with a noise that boomed out across the water of the cove and sent an explosion of sand in every direction. Sen ruthlessly battered the turtle’s head and legs, unwilling to relinquish even a shred of the momentum, desperately seeking to keep the beast off balance. Once he’d thrown that first punch, Sen knew he was committed. He’d initiated this fight and there was only one way out the other side. He had to kill this turtle before it regained even a shred of equilibrium.

If he let the turtle gather its thoughts or qi, Sen knew that he was done. Sen also knew that it was theoretically possible for someone like him to kill a spirit beast like Elder Bo, much like it was possible for someone like him to kill a nascent soul cultivator. Of course, it was also theoretically possible that a mouse could kill a cat through a combination of luck and circumstance. It just almost never happened because the power disparity was so vast. Yet, through rash action, Sen had created one of those unlikely circumstances where he might, might, be able to pull it off. He’d caught the beast off guard and stunned it. If he wanted to win, though, there was only one way to do it. Relentless aggression until he could muster a lethal strike. That last part was the real stumbling block.

While Sen had been thoroughly versed in unarmed combat, he’d treated it as a foundation for learning weapons. He hadn’t treated it as something to fully integrate as part of his fusion of cultivation and combat. He’d mostly limited that integration to leveraging his superior strength and speed to augment the existing blows. He’d never or at least very rarely tried to use his body as the direct channel for things like wind blades, lightning, or Heavens’ Rebuke. His few experiments with that last technique had been so horrendously destructive that he simply hadn’t dared try to do more with it as his power grew. Instead, he had focused on channeling those techniques through his weapons.

The glaring flaw in that approach became obvious to him as he had to keep hitting the turtle as fast and hard as he possibly could to prevent a counterattack. He literally couldn’t spare the time to draw his jian or even summon a weapon from a storage ring. Even that tiny break in concentration or aggression would likely give Elder Bo the breathing room he needed to bring the fight to an immediate and lethal end. Sen thought wildly about what he could do, searching for some insight, some method that would let him deliver that lethal blow instead of desperately buying himself more life one second and dozens of blows at a time. If he was going to use his body as a channel for something, it needed to be something he knew well. It also needed to inflict maximum damage on the turtle. There was only one real choice. Sen cycled for lightning. He almost reflexively tried to push the qi into a weapon that he didn’t have in his hands. If his face wasn’t already fixed in a snarl of aggression, it would have been a snarl of frustration at his own oversight.The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Flexibility, he reminded himself. He’d interpreted that as meaning flexibility with the types of qi and qi techniques he used and never considered it beyond that. He’d grown dependent on a handful of techniques, only innovating when life-or-death stakes forced him to do it. Granted, he fell back on those techniques because they were so effective, but it was also a failure of imagination on his part. Not that he blamed himself entirely. He’d fallen into that trap in part because his teachers had fallen into that trap. Of course, they could afford to do that. Sen wasn’t even sure that anyone existed who could dislodge a jian from Master Feng’s hands. Good luck to the mad fool who tried to take a spear away from Uncle Kho. Their power allowed them to fall back on the familiar because so few people could stand up to it. Sen might reach those heights someday, but he wasn’t there yet. That meant that he couldn’t afford those kinds of gaps in his conception of what combat meant.

Sadly, fixing those gaps meant surviving the fight in front of him. His mind churned frantically as he continued his barrage against the divine spirit beast. He’d never tried to do anything like what he meant to do before, wreathing his own hands in lightning. Where would he start? He didn’t want to infuse his hands with the lightning. He had a very vivid image of charred claws at the ends of his arms. Fixable, maybe, but not something he wanted to test. If this was alchemy, I’d know what to do, he thought bitterly. Then, it felt like a membrane inside his mind was yanked away and a great many things that he’d felt his way through in alchemy rushed into his head. He did know what to do, on some level at any rate. Moving offensive qi where he wanted it to go wasn’t really any different than moving qi inside a cauldron. The scale was different, but the process wasn’t any different.

Sen stopped trying to decide what to do and let himself slip at least part of the way into that hazy state of mind he usually fell into when he was doing his best alchemy work. Blinding light erupted around his hands as the lightning qi manifested where he wanted it. His strikes started to leave scorch marks on the turtle. Now, all I need to do is, Sen started to think. Pressure slammed into him from above and drove him to the ground. It felt like every bit of qi in his body was frozen in place, unable or unwilling to follow his commands. He tried to rise, to lash out with his killing intent, to do anything. It all ended in abject failure, casually brushed aside by a will and a power that dwarfed his own. None of that stopped Sen from trying to wrest back control of his qi or rise to his feet again. It wasn’t until a massive foot settled on his chest that Sen accepted the inevitable. Nothing he did was going to prevent his death.

A moment later, the reptilian face of Elder Bo peered down at him from above. The scorch marks from Sen’s enhanced blows were gone as if they’d never existed in the first place. He’d had a brief window of opportunity to save his own life and squandered it with his lack of understanding. By the time he’d figured out a little piece of what he’d missed, it was too late. He stared back at the Elder Bo, still railing internally against the incomprehensible power the turtle had used to so effortlessly suppress him. As much as he hated to be beaten, getting killed by a divine spirit beast that towered so very high above him wasn’t the worst possible way to go. It might even add to my ridiculous legend, thought Sen. Still, he wasn’t interested in hearing the beast gloat.

“Well, get on with it,” said Sen. “I haven’t got all day.”

Elder Bo’s unreadable eyes looked into Sen’s before the beast cocked his head a bit to one side, as if in confusion. “Get on with what?”

Sen’s eyes narrowed. “Killing me. Or do you plan to drag it out?”

“Why would I kill you?”

“That’s usually how fights end between cultivators and spirit beasts,” answered Sen.

“Fight?”

Elder Bo’s mouth opened and huge booming noises erupted from it. The sound was so loud that Sen felt like his brain was being slammed against his skull over and over again. He decided later that was the reason it took so long for him to figure out that the turtle was laughing like Sen had said the funniest thing in all of history.

“A fight,” said Elder Bo. “You’re ten thousand years too early for us to have a fight. I was just waiting until you’d worked out some of your anger. Seems like you had a little breakthrough there as well, which is always nice.”

Sen gaped up at the turtle, not sure whether he felt offended or relieved. He had to admit that the turtle didn’t look to have suffered at all from what, apparently, the spirit beast had thought of as some kind of mild temper tantrum from Sen. Shaking his head, Sen looked at the massive foot that was, on balance, resting pretty gently on his chest.

“Well, if you’re not going to kill me, why are you pinning me to the ground.”

“I just didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

“Thanks,” said Sen in the driest tone he could manage as he decided that offended was, in fact, the right reaction.