Sen had largely committed to not using fire in the fight. Of course, that decision had been based on the high probability that the odd spirit beast would likely be able to dodge or disrupt said fire. That would, in turn, endanger the sanctuary. An impression that still seemed reasonable, save for the fact that the creature was clearly disoriented. A fact that Sen was happy to take advantage of while it lasted. He swiftly plunged one of his jian into the ground and lifted his hand, palm facing toward the struggling spirit beast. He created a ball of fire no bigger than a plum and hot enough to vaporize metal. With a moment of concentration, he sent it hurtling toward his still-disoriented enemy.

The creature’s instincts were good enough to warn it that danger was approaching. It jerked to one side, which did prevent the fireball from boring a hole through its thick chest. Instead, the incoming attack slammed into the beast’s upper arm. There were whistling, popping, and cracking noises as the fire consumed flesh and bone alike. The spirit beast let out a roar so loud that Sen was forced to throw up a dome of dense air to contain the sound. He feared it would deafen anything and anyone below the nascent soul level in the immediate area. Even so, the dome trembled and threatened to shatter beneath the brute strength of that noise.

While the spirit beast’s body had absorbed most of the strength in the fireball, its arm separated from its body before the technique was entirely spent. Sen was forced to expend irreplaceable moments to put out the fire he had caused before it turned the sanctuary into an inferno. Although, for once, that lost time did not work against him. It seemed he had underestimated just how disorienting having an arm burned off could prove. The spirit beast was no longer howling in agony, but it also hadn’t made a move to retaliate either. Not that he expected that good luck to last for very long.

Unfortunately, Sen at least suspected that losing a limb wouldn’t be debilitating to the spirit beast the way it would to a core cultivator or any cultivator below the nascent soul stage. Having spent so much time studying what little there was to know about spirit beasts, alongside his much more direct inspections of Falling Leaf’s internal makeup, told him that the way spirit beasts channeled qi was different. They didn’t have major qi channels that they used to cycle qi. They had countless smaller channels. That fact, sadly, would make it possible for most spirit beasts to continue throwing around techniques at the same level of power right up until they died.

As for a spirit beast on the level of a nascent soul cultivator, Sen wasn’t sure that it even had qi channels anymore. He didn’t. Then again, he wasn’t sure that spirit beasts developed nascent souls the way that human cultivators did. Falling Leaf didn’t seem to think that they did, but she had admitted to receiving very little education in the matter. She’d just been too young to have needed the information when the rest of the spirit beasts all but destroyed her species. The important part was that he could only expect the loss of that arm to hinder the creature physically. Still, he was happy to take any advantage he could get.

Sen started forming more ice lances in the air. He could tell he wasn’t truly recovered from the injuries he’d sustained, though. That fireball had been made in the euphoric moments that came immediately after his chest no longer felt wrong. That euphoria had passed. Now, he could tell he was concentrating far harder than he should have needed to in order to form half a dozen ice lances. He’d done far more complex things under worse conditions before. That suggested that he’d taken some kind of deeper damage or was suffering some lingering aftereffect from having his auric imposition and killing intent broken.

He shook off the thoughts. He couldn’t worry about that right now. He redoubled his efforts to complete the ice technique. The spirit beast might be tough, but few things could survive having six fist-sized bars of ice that were harder than steel pass through their chest and head. He just needed to launch the attack before the creature recovered its wits from losing its arm. It all felt like it was taking far, far too long to Sen, even as he knew that it wasn’t really taking long at all. It just felt long because it wasn’t happening at the speed he was used to. The ice lances finally coalesced into glistening harbingers of death.

Sen discovered that he’d underestimated the spirit beast. It seemed they’d both been taking the time to build techniques. It was a testament to the creature or Sen’s injuries that he hadn’t noticed the qi building. At the same time that he sent the ice lances racing toward the spirit beast, it swept an arm toward him. Sen activated his qinggong technique and leapt back, but he was a heartbeat slower than was ideal. Dozens of those same impossibly thin threads of metal tried to cut him apart. Most of them missed, but a few connected. His left leg was nearly severed. A deep cut across his abdomen threatened to disembowel him at any wrong move. There were cuts that burned like fire across his chest and even one across his neck.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Sen collapsed to the ground in a spray of blood. There was almost nothing that made sense in that explosion of pain. He only barely managed to choke off the scream of agony that wanted to burst out of his mouth. Something told him that there wouldn’t be anyone to block the noise of his amplified voice. Most of him just wanted to stay exactly where he was and let the elixir still coursing through his body start to heal the damage, but the fight wasn’t over. In the months leading up to meeting Fu Ruolan, he had been dying. His body had been failing him more and more. It had been excruciating, but it had also taught him a few things. It had taught him how to ignore crippling levels of pain. It also taught him that he could heal when the task was done.

He was also, he was discouraged to discover, out of practice. So, it took him longer than he would have liked to push that pain to the edges of his consciousness and wall it off. He also knew that there was no benefit in rushing. If that pain came crashing back in, it would be more time lost. If the spirit beast recovered first, there was nothing to be done about it. When he was confident that he wouldn’t succumb to the pain, he forced himself up onto his elbows and looked to where the spirit beast was sprawled out on the ground.

Despite three of the ice lances buried in its torso, the thing was still alive. Sen could still see it burning brightly in his spiritual sense. However, he was deeply relieved to see that spiritual presence growing weaker. He briefly, futilely hoped that he could just wait it out and that the thing would die on its own. Then, he watched in stunned disbelief as the thing reached up, wrapped a massive paw around one of the ice lances, and snapped it off. He could feel the remains of the elixir working on his injuries, but it had been mostly expended on repairing his original set of injuries. He summoned another elixir and drank it, but he didn’t dare wait until he was healed enough to safely move.

He focused all of the mental energy he had left on forming a final technique. It was the one he’d originally been considering before the fight took a turn. It was harder to do with it being so cold out, but he managed to find and create enough water to form the ball. He didn’t want to take any chances, so he made the initial ball close to ten feet in diameter. That was the easy part. The hard part was forming the thousands of individual, hardened water strands that gave the ball an almost shaggy appearance. He started rotating the ball until the strands were almost invisible, and the entire thing made an eerie, almost unholy noise.

It was only after he sent the spinning ball of water at the spirit beast that he realized he wore a maniacal grin. He was certain that his teeth were bloody and that he probably looked like a corpse that had died in a fit of madness. There had been nothing subtle about that technique, so he wasn’t surprised when he felt a surge of qi from the spirit beast. Sen redoubled his effort to keep the technique intact as he felt things passing through the ball, trying to disrupt the technique. There was one final howl of rage and pain from the spirit beast that was abruptly cut off. Sen felt a minuscule burst of joy at his victory before being pelted in the face by tiny bits of the spirit beast.

He let himself fall back to the ground when the creature winked out of his spiritual sense. That had been too close. Then again, he had limited himself or been forced to discard the majority of his usual and most effective tools. Had he been willing to unleash unlimited amounts of fire or Heavens’ Rebuke, the fight likely would have been over in a matter of moments. Still, he thought that there was an important lesson to be gleaned from this fight. He’d become overly reliant on those tools. He'd also learned to assume he’d always have access to them. Yet, he could easily imagine times when using them would prove impossible.

Even if he could blanket miles of ground in fire hot enough to melt stone, that would be useless if there were mortals or even cultivators of lower advancement than him nearby. They’d never survive the heat. To say nothing of how much air the fire would consume. He didn’t know precisely what it was in air that mortals needed to survive, but fire consumed it as well. He could accidentally kill his entire mortal army using something like that carelessly. A misplaced Heavens’ Rebuke would not distinguish between ally and enemy. He wasn’t sure if he’d gotten lazy, but he needed to return to being inventive with his qi techniques. Overwhelming force was just overwhelming stupidity if you killed your own people with it.

“Like I didn’t have enough challenges,” complained Sen to the uncaring sky above.