Without a solution to the sapience problem or at least a partial solution, it wouldn’t matter how durable he made the shadow constructs. They’d just end up being dark statues that consumed qi very, very slowly. That idea actually amused Sen a little. He could think of a few people that he might enjoy scaring by having what they believed were statues abruptly move after several weeks of being stationary. It was just an idle thought, though. His main focus was on trying to pull up a memory of something that his intuition told him was relevant to this problem. Whatever that something was, it was back in the capital.

The problem with that was the sheer number of things that had happened to him or been done by him in that city. Trying to pinpoint anything in that mass of experiences was proving a challenge even to his improved cognition. Making things even more confusing was the way his mind kept turning to the idea of walls. He could not, for the life of him, understand what walls could possibly have to do with giving a shadow construct sapience. As Sen did his utmost to drag whatever had triggered the intuition into the light, everything that was happening around him started to fade into the background. He knew that he had to focus now or he might never discover the key to achieving this long-sought goal.

When the intuition finally crystallized into a thought, Sen wanted to hit himself in the head. It had been so obvious. The reason he kept thinking about walls was because of the way the defenses around Lu Manor behaved. They were too aggressive, almost like they were acting on their own volition. They weren’t quite sapient, but Sen had the lingering idea that they might be partly sentient. The question he kept asking himself was, Why? Why are they sentient? What makes those defenses different from all of the other formations I’ve made over the years?

He didn’t think it could be accounted for as a matter of power. Plenty of nascent soul cultivators had made formations with more power than he could muster, like Uncle Kho, and their formations didn’t behave that way. He also didn’t think that it could be anything as simple as using a strange combination of qi. He’d been doing that for years with no sign of his formations or techniques coming to life. Mostly. There had been a few times when that strange mixed qi around his dantian had invaded Heavens’ Rebuke and done frankly terrifying things. But those incidents always involved him facing off with something or someone truly corrupt. A situation that didn’t apply when he’d made the defenses around Lu Manor.

“What’s the difference?” he mumbled.

There was noise in the room around him that might have been someone speaking, but his focus was so absolute that it just sounded like an insect buzzing nearby. There had to be something about that specific moment that changed the process, he thought. It wasn’t the location. There was nothing special about where Lu Manor stood in the capital or anything in the surrounding area. If it’s not the location, and it’s not the environment, all that’s left is me, thought Sen. What was different about me while I was making those formations? He tried to put himself into the mindset he’d been in at the time.

I was angry, he realized. I wanted to send a message. I wanted protections around Grandmother Lu that would be so aggressively hostile that only a madman would risk them. Not that it stopped the attack that had truly roused his fury, but that was what had been in the back of his mind the entire time. He just couldn’t see the connection. Sen was certain the connection existed, but the nature of it eluded him. Formations and techniques were largely static things. They could be improved, but they didn’t have emotional connections. He leaned back when he realized that wasn’t actually true. Two words sprang to his mind. Heavens’ Shadow. He had, in point of fact, infused his feelings into that technique.

The results had been so awful that he’d pushed both the technique and the possibilities implied by what he’d done to the farthest corners of his mind. He tried to focus even more. It wasn’t just emotion, though. The defenses around Lu Manor didn’t lash out blindly at any living thing that got too close. There was something else, something more to it. Sen took a moment to clear his mind. He didn’t think this was a revelation he could brute force. He just let himself sit with the question for a time. What more is there?

“Intention,” said Sen, wholly unaware that he was speaking out loud. “The difference is intention.”

He had intended those defenses to be hostile and aggressive, but only toward things like humans, cultivators, and spirit beasts. That was why birds and cats and horses could seemingly come and go unmolested by the manor. Sen didn’t see them as threats, so he hadn’t imbued the defenses with the intention to keep them out. That was part of the answer, but only part. He knew it. He felt the tickle of an idea forming. It was related to beast cores, but he couldn’t see it clearly. Qi, beast cores, and intentions, he thought. How do those three things get me the rest of the way to making a sapient shadow construct?

Sen thought back to everything he had studied, theorized, and learned before and during his mad, if ultimately successful, attempt to push Falling Leaf’s cultivation forward. It soon became apparent that the answer wasn’t there, not specifically, but it also was there. He could feel it hiding behind the details somehow. Sen had been certain that he’d shattered Falling Leaf’s mind in that experiment, but she had come through it in the end. He shook his head. That was closer to the secret, but it wasn’t it. Cores and intention, he thought again. It’s something to do with cores and intention.

When the truth finally dawned on him, he didn’t feel like slapping himself in the head. It was obvious, but only in the way something feels inevitable after you figure it out. Spirit beasts, particularly the sapient ones, formed techniques and used their qi with the same kind of intention that human cultivators did. It had to shape their cores and the qi within it in some fundamental if obscure way. The driving intelligence would be gone after the spirit beast died, but Sen was absolutely convinced that some echo of those intentions would remain. And that was the key. He’d already be using a core to give the shadow construct power and a kind of half life. Getting the rest of the way there should just be a matter of joining his intentions with the echoes of the intentions already there in the cores.

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He didn’t think it would be enough to give the constructs true life or sapience. To do that, he’d have to step or, more rightly, overstep into a domain reserved for the heavens. He’d said it himself often enough. Cultivators were not gods. Giving life to a dead thing was strictly the dominion of divine beings. Even with that obvious limitation in place, though, Sen thought he could make a shadow dog for his daughter that would be alive enough to do what he wanted it to do. For one moment to the next, Sen’s consciousness went from being almost entirely isolated from everything to being entirely focused on the world around him.

He lifted a hand and focused on his storage rings, searching for the right kind of beast cores. Spirit beasts with shadow qi affinities were comparatively rare, but he’d killed tens of thousands of spirit beasts. With so many dead, he had plenty of shadow-attributed cores to choose from. But for this first experiment, he wanted to give himself every advantage. That meant picking a core that came from a spirit beast that would have had the right kind of intentions during its life. Something with a strong focus on a pack. Something like a…

“That’s the one I need,” he said, standing up from his chair as a core appeared in his hand.

“You figured it out, didn’t you?” demanded Fu Ruolan from mere inches away.

“We’ll find out,” said Sen before looking to where he could still sense the shadow construct.

Zhi and Ai had switched places, with his daughter now gleefully riding the construct and Zhi cheering her on.

“Ai,” Sen called, drawing her attention. “I’ll need you to get down from shadow dog for a little while. I need to send him home for a little while.”

Ai gave him a pouty expression, but dutifully slid off the shadow construct.

“Ai. Zhi. Come here, please,” said Auntie Caihong, intuiting Sen’s needs before he could speak them.

“Thank you,” he murmured before stepping into the clear area the girls had just vacated.

While making one of the standard shadow constructs had become simplicity itself, Sen knew that this construct was going to need to be substantially more robust. He was very grateful that he didn’t need to cycle the way he once had. That might have made this process too complicated even for him to accomplish. Closing his eyes, he started to imagine what he needed. He started with shadow qi, as that was always the most substantial contribution. Then, he began weaving threads of metal qi so fine that no mortal eye would have been able to discern them in the shadow. That should provide it with the durability it would require.

Yet, as soon as he did that, the two types of qi started to react against each other. This was familiar, and he drew on his alchemy experience. The metal needed something to balance it out, so he tried water qi. That almost made the entire thing collapse, so he drew away the water and tried wood qi instead. That seemed to be sufficient to prevent the usual destabilization that happened when shadow and metal qi were forced together. However, he could feel that the entire construct was too rigid. He slowly started weaving in threads of fire and air qi. The tension that had marked the construct softened, but it once more started to feel like it might unravel. Frowning, he tried adding water qi again.

It took a while before he found the exact ratios of different kinds of qi it would take to make the construct both sturdy enough and limber enough to function. With a wave of his hand, he dismissed the construct and started over again. This time, he felt himself slipping into that state he achieved when doing alchemy. He started making adjustments on instinct, intuitively adding threads of different kinds of qi that hadn’t been in his original construct. A thread of lightning here, and a thread of wind there, he thought to himself. Bit by bit, the construct took shape and form until something that looked much more like a true wolf stood before him. There were semi-physical structures inside the construct. With a minor effort of will, Sen placed the core where those structures would support it.

What he didn’t do was let the core bleed qi into the construct, yet. This was the part where he’d have to make it up as he went. He’d never even had a conversation about how cores might carry the intentions of the spirit beasts they came from. So, there was no guidance about how to connect his intentions to those intentions. He poked and prodded at the core with his qi for most of a minute before he realized that it wouldn’t get him anywhere. He was going about it all wrong.

Taking a steadying breath, Sen allowed his feelings to pass into his qi. He focused on his desire to protect his family. He focused on his hope that Ai would have a protector. He focused on the fervent wish that his daughter would have a companion to give her comfort while he was away. Then, he let that emotion-laden qi touch the core. Where the core had been wholly inert before, this time he felt a sympathetic echo inside of it. He resisted the urge to rush his qi toward the echo. Instead, he moved his qi forward a little at a time, never releasing his focus on his intentions. So slowly that it felt like it took a lifetime, those echoes began to pulse in a rhythm not unlike a heartbeat. Then, his intentions made contact with the remnant intentions in the core.

They pressed against each other like oil and water for a moment before they mixed. There was a dizzying moment where Sen felt alien impulses trying to press themselves into his mind. He pressed those foreign ideas down. Not completely, as he didn’t want to suppress them, but enough that he could imprint his own intention over them. There was a moment of resistance, but only a moment. In the end, Sen was a living being, and his will was always going to overcome the echo of a spirit beast’s intentions. He slowly released his constraining power over the core, and there was a pulse of darkness that filled the construct.

Sen held his breath as the construct simply stood as motionless as any other construct. Then, it tilted its head to one side like a dog that had been confronted with something it didn’t recognize. Sen had to resist the urge to shout his triumph. There was no guarantee that it was a triumph, yet. He couldn’t sense any hostility from the shadow wolf he’d made, but he hadn’t given it any instructions either. Closing his eyes, Sen felt suspended between anticipation that he’d succeeded and dread that he’d failed. There was only one way to find out. He opened his eyes and looked at the construct.

“Do you understand your purpose?” he asked the shadow wolf.

There was an interminable pause before the thing looked past him, and then walked over to Ai. It lay down on the floor in front of her, its tail wagging. Ai stared at the construct with huge eyes before she looked at Sen.

“Is he for me?” she asked in a breathless little whisper.

“He is,” said Sen, stepping closer just in case he needed to intervene.

Ai reached out a little hand and stroked the shadow wolf’s head. Its tail started to wag faster. Then, something happened that Sen had not anticipated. He felt the shadow wolf draw in some of the environmental qi around them.

“What in the thousand hells,” said Sen.

He was still trying to understand what had just happened when he heard Lai Dongmei speak under her breath.

“Did I just witness a miracle?”

“Yes,” said Falling Leaf in a disinterested tone. “You should expect these things from him, even if he is still a silly human boy.”

“What?” asked Sen, still trying to make sense of everything.

“You should have made her a panther,” explained Falling Leaf with a glare, “not a big dog.”