BOOK 11: CHAPTER 64: SHADOW DOG REBORN (1)

Sen took his time getting ready in the morning. He made a lavish breakfast that required him to reshape the stone table. He’d worried that Ai might have started to outgrow her delight at such trivial tricks, but her eyes lit up as the stone flowed like water into a new shape. He’d also needed to make the table bigger to accommodate the extra people who were there. The guests for that particular meal included Falling Leaf, Grandmother Lu, Lai Dongmei, Auntie Caihong, little Zhi and her mother, Li Hua. He’d even invited Fu Ruolan, Sua Xing Xing and Long Jia Wei. The discomfort those last three felt at being included in this meal was obvious from their rigid postures. Then again, it might have simply been the presence of Lai Dongmei. She was a guest, but also a nascent soul cultivator. Her very existence was a threat. Sen decided he didn’t care which reason it was.

This was going to be his last meal with his daughter for a very long time. He wanted her to remember it as one with lots of people, talking, and laughter. What he didn’t want was for it to be some somber affair where both he and she dwelled on their mutual unhappiness at being separated again. Grandmother Lu did him the great service of engaging everyone in conversation, sometimes at his expense. She told a few embarrassing stories about him as a child, minus some of the harsher details that would have upset both Ai and Zhi. Those stories drew laughs from Lai Dongmei, Auntie Caihong, and Li Hua. The girls giggled. Long Jia Wei remained mostly stone faced, while Sua Xing Xing looked positively scandalized. Her reactions were entertaining enough that Sen felt it was worth the minor embarrassment.

The girls swiftly grew bored of sitting and began going from person to person, asking questions or just looking for attention. Sen was discussing some details about the trip back with Grandmother Lu when he felt a gentle tug on his sleeve. He turned to find both girls standing next to him with big pleading eyes.

“Uncle Sen,” said Zhi, “will you make shadow dog?”

“Please, Papa,” said Ai, almost vibrating with excitement.

“Shadow dog? What is a shadow dog?” asked Lai Dongmei with a perplexed expression.

“You want me to summon the mighty shadow dog?” asked Sen.

“Yes!” shouted the girls in unison as they jumped up and down.

“What will you give me?” he asked.

“Hugs!” the girls cried in unison again.

“Well, I can never turn down such a request when you’re offering me hugs.”

Sen made a theatrical, wholly unnecessary gesture that made the girls squeal in joy, and a black, dog-shaped figure emerged from a shadow in one of the corners. He’d taken pains to make it bigger than he used to since both of the girls had grown. They’ll be too old for this the next time I see them

, he thought as regret lanced through him so sharply it was an almost physical sensation. He kept that regret off his face as he got out of his chair, knelt down, and opened his arms wide.

“Now, where are my hugs?”

The girls crashed into him, squeezed him for most of a second, and then immediately forgot he existed as they raced over to the shadow construct. Lai Dongmei gasped when Zhi climbed onto the shadow dog, which made Sen grin at her. While he’d had to focus on making the shadow construct do things before, his advancement to the nascent soul stage had come with an increase in his mental capacity. At least, it had in terms of speed of thought, concentration, and splitting his focus. He didn’t think that he’d actually grown any smarter or wiser. It just looked that way from the outside because he could so much more thinking in the same amount of time. He sat back down at the table and used a small corner of his mind to make the dog wander around inside the galehouse.

“That is impressive,” said Lai Dongmei.

“It’d be more impressive if I’d ever figured out how to make the damn thing permanent and sapient,” muttered Sen.

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“Why would you want to?” she asked.

“Can you imagine a better guardian for those girls than something that the never sleeps, never gets tired, never gets distracted, and can’t be swayed?”

“How long have you been trying to work out that problem?”

“Years. I’m starting to think that it’s just not—”

His words faltered as a several disparate pieces of information struck him in a new way.

“Not what?” she asked.

“Possible,” he answered in a distracted tone.

Fu Ruolan shot up from her seat, her eyes alight with interest. She leaned over the table, nearly putting her hand into a bowl of noodles.

“Did you just see the path forward,” demanded Fu Ruolan, speaking for the first time since the meal began

Sen held up a hand and murmured, “Maybe. Maybe so. I just need to think for a moment.”

The possibility of making the shadow construct something more than a lifeless thing that needed his direct control had haunted him for years. Yet, his sporadic efforts had resulted failure after failure. The fact that he’d only been able to consider the problem in spare moments and stolen hours deep into the night hadn’t helped. Resolving most complicated tasks required sustained focus in his experience. At least, they did in alchemy. The first step was always to identify the most pressing issues.

The most immediate challenge had always been giving the construct sufficient power to remain a cohesive thing. The one Zhi was riding at that very moment existed only because Sen continued to feed it qi. He could give it enough qi to remain together for about a day but then it would dissipate. Some of that was due to the non-shadow qi he used to give the construct enough substance that the girls could interact with it. There wasn’t much point in creating the thing if they couldn’t actually touch it. The construct also couldn’t serve his long-term goal of protecting the girls if it couldn’t touch things in the rest of the world. Yet, brute force fusing those other kinds of qi into the shadow qi made the constructs less stable.

He’d always thought that the solution to those problems was to use one of shadow attributed beast cores he’d collected over the years. It wouldn’t be a permanent solution because the construct would slowly bleed off the qi contained in the core. However, it would be enough to keep one going for far, far longer than he could readily do. Maybe even for years if the construct didn’t need to do anything too strenuous or fend off direct assaults. He had a theory that a steady influx of shadow qi would stabilize the thing.

Yet, he’d never been able to connect the cores to the constructs in a way that distributed the qi. Dozens of attempts had led to dozens of exploding constructs. They were mostly shadow qi, so the explosions weren’t dangerous, or not dangerous to him, but they had been frustrating. He’d even gone so far as to try to fashion rudimentary qi channels for the cores. That had worked but only for about ten seconds. Then, the qi in the core would race out in one big rush and the construct would explode. He’d considered trying to make some manner of dantian substitute, but he didn’t really understand dantians well enough to replicate them.

Sen knew what they did very well, but he suffered from terrible ignorance about how they did it. That ignorance was not from a lack of trying to discover how they worked. He’d spent hours examining his own dantian. He’d gathered what documents he could find that discussed it. Those had been depressingly been few and far between, as well as monumentally unhelpful. He’d asked Auntie Caihong and Fu Ruolan about it, but even they had to admit that it was something no one seemed to have a good answer for. Even for old monsters, dantians just were. An immutable and ineffable fact of their existences.

While Sen could appreciate the heavens or the universe trying to keep some of its secrets, he’d rather wished that dantians hadn’t been among those closely guarded secrets. That had forced him into the unenviable position of having to hypothesize. A task that he had soon abandoned because it was pointless without some information to start from. Dantians exist was not enough information to start from. His best guess was that dantians helped to control that flow of qi, somehow, but he was stuck without more to go on. Of course, he’d done most of that work before he’d become a nascent soul cultivator.

He was living proof that a body didn’t need a core to contain qi. He still had a body, but he also was qi in a very real way. It suffused every part of him now, which was why he could manifest techniques without the trial of cycling and building techniques the way he used to. He didn’t need the core to supply qi to the construct in a trickle. He could see now that he’d been borrowing too heavily from his understanding of formations with that notion. The qi needed to flow at a particular rate to avoid overloading formations, but the shadow construct wasn’t a formation. It just needed access to the qi. The challenge wasn’t to provide a qi flow from a core, but to construct a body that could contain the qi that would rush out of the core.

And I can do that, thought Sen. It won’t be easy, but I’m certain I can do it.

“But that doesn’t solve sapience,” he said to no one in particular.