Unintended Cultivator

“This can’t work for our needs. Not in the long term,” said Sen, gesturing at the walls of the room.

The walls in question were nothing but stone shelves. For the moment, most of the shelves were empty. There were, however, a few shelves filled with communication cores. Some of them gave off a faint glow that indicated they were active, while others remained dull and lifeless. Freed from the overbearing pressure that came with the prospect of advancement, Sen had been able to turn his mind to the many other problems that he faced. The most significant hurdle in front of him, if not necessarily the most pressing, was the issue of communication. Unless they could find a way for humanity to coordinate its efforts, no amount of struggle was going to prove sufficient. At best, they could achieve victory in individual battles that way. The war, though, the war would be lost under those conditions.

He wondered and not for the first time exactly how the spirit beasts were doing it. He knew that they must be communicating over long distances somehow. All of the information they had, scant though it might be, suggested that this was intended to be a continent-wide conflict. There was simply no way to manage something of that scale without some means of regulating the timing and size of attacks. That simply could not be done if getting messages back and forth took months on end. After all, it was the exact same problem he was trying to solve right now.

If he could figure out the how of that coordination, he assumed that there would be a way to disrupt it. Given how untested and fragile their own method was, it might not even be that difficult. Achieving that end might prove almost as important as making the communication cores more efficient. Sadly, the answer to that mystery remained firmly out of reach for the moment. He had a feeling that the only way he was going to get an answer to that particular question was to capture a spirit beast like Boulder’s Shadow. One that had awakened to true sapience. They had to be what were passing for generals in the spirit beast forces.

At the very least, they would be more likely to have the answers he wanted than the unawakened spirit beasts that had made up the tide that had come against the town. He had kept enough of a rein on his anger to at least look for a spirit beast that was in command or controlling the others through some means. He hadn’t found any acting in such a role. That suggested to him that the spirit beasts that had threatened them were sent in their direction from farther away, but it was anyone’s guess exactly how far away. The wilds weren’t quite incomprehensibly vast, but they were more than large enough to hide a truly terrifying number of spirit beasts and their movements.

Of course, actually carrying out such a task wasn’t something that he could just assign to anyone. Sen sincerely doubted that he could capture Boulder’s Shadow as their relative power stood at the moment. It would be a fight for the elder ghost panther, but it would be a fight that the spirit beast would win barring outside intervention. That meant setting a trap, which meant knowing where to set the trap, which meant having information that humanity did not possess. Like it or not, the spirit beasts had the advantage of moving more or less freely, while most mortals and cultivators were inevitably confined to strongholds they could defend. That was a losing proposition in the long run. Surviving the war required disrupting the spirit beasts’ movements, which meant taking the fight well beyond the walls of cities, towns, and sect compounds. I don’t look forward to those arguments, thought Sen even as he knew they’d be unavoidable. No one sane wanted to abandon even temporary safety for danger.

Sen also recognized that not every awakened spirit beast given a position of authority would possess the undiluted might of Boulder’s Shadow. The problem was that there was no way to know until they actually showed themselves in battle. While not every commander in the spirit beast hierarchy would possess such strength, any of them could. There was simply no way to plan around that level of uncertainty. It was another of the problems in front of Sen. It was a serious problem. It was also a problem that had been pushed to the back of his mind because there were no viable solutions to it at the moment.

Fixing the communication cores wasn’t necessarily an easier issue, but it was at least something he could approach directly as one of the people who had made the things in the first place. Glimmer of Night looked from Sen to the shelves and then to some place in the middle distance. The spiderkin’s expressions were always the next best thing to opaque and this time proved no exception. Sen knew that the spirit beast might well be deeply engrossed in the problem, or he might be thinking about what he was going to eat later. There was simply no way to tell until he gave voice to his thoughts.

That was assuming that the spider did give voice to his thoughts. There had been more than one time that Sen had posed a question just to have Glimmer of Night wander away without uttering a syllable. There had also been several occasions when the spiderkin walked up to him days or even weeks later and began answering the question with no preamble, leaving Sen to either keep up or be left behind. It would have been easy to get frustrated or even angry about those behaviors, save that there was no malice in them. Glimmer of Night simply lived a world of his own where the most pressing of human problems fell far behind whatever web-related abstraction had captured the spider’s attention most recently. This time, though, there was no such incident.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“No,” agreed the spider. “This was adequate as a test, but it requires too much maintenance and attention. There is also the tedious task of relaying messages when direct contact would work better.”

“The question is, can we fix those problems?” asked Sen.

He had a few thoughts on the matter, but he knew that he was the very junior participant in this particular endeavor. He’d made a few useful contributions to making the initial idea work, but Glimmer of Night had been the one doing most of the heavy lifting. The spider went quiet again for a little while before he shrugged.

“Maybe,” said the spider and, with a gesture, made a small version of one of his webs appear in the air between them. “Do you understand how webs work for regular spiders?”

“I think so. When something touches the web, the motion is transmitted along the individual threads somehow, right?”

The spider hesitated before he nodded and said, “Close enough. Close enough for our needs. The communication cores work on a similar principle. They transmit voices along a thread of qi that connects two of them.”

Sen nodded along. That was more or less the same principle that he’d used to make cores act like triggering devices for formations. It was what had given them the core notion to begin with, even if the communication cores were orders of magnitude more complicated and only worked by using threads that essentially passed through the shadow realm. For some reason, that in-between space allowed the voices to pass through seamlessly where trying the same thing in the regular world had failed both spectacularly and repeatedly.

“Yes, that’s how we set them up,” said Sen, unsure why the spider was repeating things that they both already knew.

“That’s fine if you just want the voice to find its way to one other specific core, but they’re limited because they’re basically connected by one thread,” said the spider.

To illustrate the point, Glimmer of Night pointed to a particular part of the qi-web that hovered between them. He traced a finger along a single thread of the web, starting at one intersection and ending at another.

“That isn’t how a web works. A spider here,” said the spiderkin as he pointed at the outside edge of the web, “knows that the prey is caught here,” he pointed at the exact opposite point on the web, “because the motion carries.”

Glimmer of Night traced a complicated path along the strands of the web. Then, he traced an equally complicated but different path. This action was repeated several more times. Sen frowned at the web.

“So, you’re saying that we need to replicate that carrying action somehow?”

“Yes and no. We want the voices to carry, but we want them to carry to the right places, not to every single other core. That would be madness.”

Sen could see the point immediately. It wasn’t enough that the cores could reach other cores. And they definitely didn’t want them sending messages to every other core every single time. That might be a useful function for Sen and a few select others, but it would create chaos every time two people were trying to send messages at the same time.

“That would be a mess,” said Sen.

He had no idea how they would get past that stumbling block, but it wasn’t the first one they had to get over. That was the carrying problem. If they couldn’t find a way to interconnect the cores, it wouldn’t matter if they could direct communication between specific cores.

“Okay, I think I see the problem,” continued Sen. “I’m just not sure how we fix it.”

Glimmer of Night pointed to a spot where strands of the web intersected.

“These are more than just structural features,” said the spiderkin in an almost lecturing tone.

Sen studied the intersection but didn’t see the connection.

“I don’t understand,” he admitted.

“Those connections support the structure of the web, but they allow the motion to carry to other parts of the web. That is what we need to replicate. We need some kind of—" the spiderkin paused as though searching for the right word. “Node, I suppose. Something that can connect the cores and transmit the voices. We’ll probably need a substantial number of them.”

Sen frowned and asked, “Is that even possible?”

“I have no idea,” said the spiderkin in an unconcerned voice. “I just know that’s what we need.”

For a few moments, Sen felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task. This wasn’t an adaptation of something that already existed. At least, it wasn’t to Sen’s knowledge. This would require them to make something unique and do it from scratch. The probability of failure was high, and this was an innovation that they could not do without. Sen hated the idea of victory or defeat hinging on a single thing. His study of history taught him that situation was a recipe for failure. Even so, it was a necessity for survival.

“If nothing else,” said Glimmer of Night in an excited voice, “it should be very interesting!”

That excitement jarred Sen loose from the grip of anticipated failure. What rose up in its place was the iron determination that had let him carry on as a cultivator. So, we need to do something new, thought Sen. It’s not like it’ll be the first time for me.

“Then, I guess we better get to work,” said Sen.