Unintended Cultivator V9: Chapter 62 – In the Wake of...

Sen reached down, plucked Ai from the ground, and swung her up into his arms. She was yelling and smiling and, in a few seconds, he would start to listen. Before that, though, he just let himself breathe. He let himself feel the impossibly soft strands of her hair brush his face in the gentle breeze. He reassured himself that she was, in truth, safe. He’d known that she was since Auntie Caihong and Fu Ruolan would have built a monument made of corpses as a warning to future fools brave or stupid enough to try anything. But that intellectual knowledge was not the same as the visceral truth of wrapping the single most precious thing in the world in the protection of his arms. He realized that Ai wasn’t speaking anymore and he looked down at her. She was staring up at him with deep concern in her dark eyes.

“Are you sad, Papa?” she asked.

“No, Orchid. I’m definitely not sad. I’m very, very happy to be home with you.”

Her face scrunched up like she was trying to solve a hard problem.

“Why are you crying?” she asked.

Sen reached up and felt the wetness on his own cheek. Well, damn, he thought. He gave her a bright smile.

“Sometimes, when people are completely full of happiness, they cry.”

Ai gave him a look of such deep suspicion that he burst into laughter. He kissed her forehead and then carried her over to where Auntie Caihong was watching them with a little smile on her face. He pulled Auntie Caihong into a one-armed hug and whispered to her.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she murmured before pulling back and looking around. “Now, I assume you have a husband to return to me.”

“He should be along shortly. He saw… I don’t really know. He saw something he wanted to go look at.”

Auntie Caihong rolled her eyes, but Sen knew her well enough to recognize it as fond exasperation.

“That’s the problem with geniuses. Always distracted.”

Sen lifted an eyebrow at her and said, “You’re not always distracted.”

“Fine, they’re almost always distracted.”

Sen glanced down at Ai, who had rested her head against his chest. She wasn’t asleep, but she looked like it wouldn’t take much for her to get there. He stroked the back of her head, and her eyes popped open.

“Did you keep all the yucky bugs away while I was gone?” he asked.

She straightened up and her eyes glittered with excitement.

“I did! There was one super yucky bug.”

 “A super yucky bug?! What did you do about it?”

“I got my big bird to eat it.”

Sen’s eyes narrowed a little at the talk of a big bird. There hadn’t been a big bird when he left. He looked over at Auntie Caihong who wore a very un-Auntie Caihong look of sheepishness.

“We should probably talk about that,” she said while not quite meeting his eyes.

***

Chan Dishi strolled into the throne room. He tried to hide his smile, but it was hard. Still, there was that decorum stuff and other things that had names he couldn’t remember most of the time. Etiquette, he thought. There’s etiquette. He waited patiently for his mind to draw on his long memory and produce more words, but it didn’t. Oh well, he thought. It’s not like most of that applies to me anyway. He leaned against a wall and waited patiently for the king to finish up his kingly responsibilities. Chan Dishi felt the young man glance his way more than once, clearly impatient to hear what he’d discovered on his little trip. If he’d been in the king’s place, he’d have just told everyone to get out. What was the point of being king if you couldn’t abuse all of that authority every once in a while?

Still, he didn’t mind being patient. It hadn’t always come easily, but he’d had centuries and centuries to practice. You picked that skill up or you swiftly ran into a bottleneck. Although, most cultivators did seem to have very selective patience. They could sit like a stone until moss grew on them if they thought there was the slightest chance it would advance their cultivation. Yet, meet another cultivator out on the road, and they had no patience of any kind. One wrong word and suddenly it was blood feuds until the sun went cold. He’d had to instruct a few overeager cultivators in the fine art of patience during his trip, but that was the price of experience.

Plus, like most core formation cultivators, he had time to burn. He could afford to sit some young idiots down and impart his hard-won wisdom. Well, he could beat them senseless, take all their stuff, and then explain to them why patience was important. That was basically the same, right? He thought about that for a few minutes before he nodded to himself. Yeah, he thought, that was definitely the same. That patience was also why he could lean on a wall and wait a couple of hours while Jing did his royal duty of listening to morons say moronic things about trivialities.

At least, that’s how it usually went. Sometimes, that Lu Jia came to court. Chan Dishi loved that woman. She never talked about trivial things, and she occasionally imparted some wisdom to some upstart noble who had more bravery than sense. That was always entertaining. He’d never forget the look on that one idiot’s face when he challenged her to a duel, and she immediately pulled out a pair of legitimate war fans. He’d never seen anyone back down and apologize so fast. That she’d done that hadn’t surprised him much. She was Lu Sen’s grandmother or something like that. He was a bit hazy on their actual relationship. Whatever it was, it seemed perfectly reasonable to him that an audacious man like that would have an equally audacious grandmother.

As pragmatic man, Chan Dishi always made a point to be very polite to Lu Jia. There was no good reason to annoy his friend’s grandmother. Plus, watching him be deferential to her made all those nobles look positively sick with fear. He supposed that might get old eventually, but it hadn’t happened yet. He glanced up when he heard Jing dismiss everyone. Once the room was clear, he walked over to the throne.

“Well?” asked the king.

“It’s all true,” said Chan Dishi with a huge grin. “That mad bastard actually did it.”

The king contemplated those words for a few moments.

“And the Twisted Blade Sect?”

“What Twisted Blade Sect? There’s nothing left. I mean, there’s literally nothing. Their compound is gone. If you look hard, you can see some places where there used to be buildings, but it’s just some scorched stone now. Even those are mostly obscured. That’s after a few months. Give it a year, and you won’t be able to tell there was ever anything there unless you know exactly where to look.”

“And the sect members?”

“I asked around. There are a few former sect members running around, but all outer disciples and not many of them. No core members. No elders. If anyone from their leadership survived, I expect they found a hole to hide in and plan to stay there forever.”

“I can’t believe it.  He destroyed an entire sect by himself?”

“Not by himself,” corrected Chan Dishi.

The king looked relieved at that revelation.

“So, it was exaggerated.”

“No. The report is that he brought two friends with him. A green-eyed beauty who slit the throats of pretty much everyone she didn’t like, and another one that no one seemed able to describe. They just kept saying he was dark. I couldn’t really make sense of it. The people who saw anything said that it was Judgment’s Gale doing the really scary stuff.”

Jing stared into the distance and asked, “What do you think?”

“I think this is spectacular.”

“Beyond your entertainment, what do you think?”

“I think that every sect that was even thinking about making his life hard is probably panicking right now. I expect they’re trying to figure out how to make sure he doesn’t decide that they’re continued existence is more trouble than it’s worth. I expect the gifts and cultivation resources to flow toward him like a river.”

“What about retribution? Sect wars are always highly destructive.”

Chan Dishi shook his head.

“It won’t happen. Probably not ever, and certainly no time soon. Who would risk it? One day, there was a Twisted Blade Sect. Then, Judgment’s Gale came calling one night. The next day, a sect was gone from the face of the world. No patriarch or matriarch is going to take the chance that something like that was just a fluke. I’ve got to give that boy credit. He just guaranteed that his sect is going to operate with no interference from other sects for at least the next century or three.”

***

Sen considered the door for a while before he walked up to it. He’d debated with himself about making this trip. He’d only been home for a handful of months and loathed the idea of leaving Ai again, but he’d felt like he couldn’t let this rest. It would have eaten at him. Maybe, if he hadn’t known what was coming, it would have been different. Knowledge was a terrible thing that way. Knowing something obligated you to act on it if you had a conscience. Sen’s conscience was a lot more battered than it had been, but it still functioned. He lifted a hand and knocked on the door. He’d asked around and spent a bit of silver on things he didn’t need, so he knew it was the right place. The door opened and the person on the other side looked at him with pure animal panic.

“Cao Kai-Ming,” said Sen.

“Judgment’s Gale,” said Cao Kai-Ming in a shaky voice. “Why are you here? I did as you asked.”

“I know you did. I’m here to discuss the—” he mentally searched for the right word. “The disposition of the people here.”

Cao Kai-Ming narrowed her eyes at him, clearly unsure of his meaning.

“I’m not sure I understand,” she said warily.

Sen felt his patience slip a little and said, “I’m not here to kill you. If I were, it would be done already.”

“I see.”

He wasn’t sure if his words actually did anything to soothe the apprehension he saw in her. He took a few steps back and looked around.

“Let’s take a walk,” he said.

It looked like she needed to talk herself into it, but she did eventually step outside and close the door to the little house behind her. Sen took the lead, directing them back into the little village. He could see clear evidence of the improvements that had been made, but he also knew how pointless those improvements were going to be within a year. Little villages like this wouldn’t survive the coming storm.

“There’s a war coming,” he said.

He heard Cao Kai-Ming stop walking, followed by hurried footsteps that brought her alongside him.

“What war? With who?” she asked.

“Between spirit beasts and us. Humanity. Mortals and cultivators alike. It’s coming soon. It’ll probably start within a year.”

“Within a year?”

“I’m honestly stunned it hasn’t started yet.”

“What does that have to do with my village?”

“It will be destroyed. It’s too remote. It doesn’t have enough defenses.”

“I’ll defend it!”

“And you will be destroyed,” said Sen. “Have you ever seen a beast tide?”

“No,” she admitted after a long pause.

“I have. I have seen them, and I have fought them. You’re strong. You’re brave. You might hold off one if it’s small. But two? Ten? Fifty? Spirit beasts are going to pour out of the wilds like an endless tide of death.”

Cao Kai-Ming looked around at the village and the people, who were giving them both a lot of room. Sen could see the realization on her face and justifiable fear in her eyes.

“I can’t defend them from that,” she said.

“No,” Sen agreed. “You can’t defend them from that. Not here.”

She turned to look at him.

“You say that like there’s somewhere else. Where can I take a bunch of village farmers? The capital? They’d be taken advantage of, or abused, or worse.”

“Probably.”

“Then where?”

“Bring them to my sect. There’s a town there. I suppose it’s my town in every way that matters. I’ve been preparing for this. There’s land there. Good land. Better land than this. More importantly, there are walls there, and people to defend them. It’s a chance at survival.”

Cao Kai-Ming didn’t say anything at first. She kept studying his face. He studied the people.

“There are a lot of villages in the kingdom. A lot of them are a lot closer to your sect than this one.”

Sen gave her a bemused look.

“You’re trying to figure out what prompted this spontaneous and out-of-character act of benevolence on my part.”

“Something like that,” she admitted.

Sen sighed and said, “I took a lot of lives at the Twisted Blade Sect.”

“I heard.”

“I think everyone has by now. I know cultivators aren’t supposed to care about killing, but I get the feeling that most of them have never taken life on that scale before. It’s one thing to kill someone in a duel, or to fight another sect as part of a small army. That’s the Jianghu. It’s something else to personally end the lives of hundreds and hundreds of people in a few moments. To kill people who are sleeping, cultivating, eating, or anything but expecting death.”

She frowned at him and asked, “So, you’re doing this out of guilt?”

“Not exactly. I hate what I did there, but it had to happen. That fight was unavoidable. Feeling guilty over something I couldn’t avoid is pointless. It took me a long time to accept that, assuming I’m not lying to myself, but I still ended those lives. Helping these people won’t balance that, but it might prevent some senseless deaths. If I can do that, I’d like to.”

“And that’s it? You just decided that these people, of all the people in the world, are worth helping?”

“Not at all. You decided that. When you were facing down death, you decided that helping them was more important that trying to save your own life. You asked me to look after them. I said I would. So, I’ve come to keep that promise.”

Cao Kai-Ming’s mouth worked a few times before she managed a weak, “Oh.”

“Startling, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“Realizing that choices you made actually mattered. That they changed things,” said Sen.

“It feels like a lot of responsibility. More than I expected.”

“I imagine it does.”

“But what am I supposed to do in this town of yours?”

“What did you do here?”

“I… I helped,” said Cao Kai-Ming. “I looked out for them.”

“That sounds like a good place to start to me.”

***

And here we come to the end of Volume 9, save for the bloopers chapter. Since it's a true landmark chapter, I'll go ahead and leave comments on for it. ~Eric