Unintended Cultivator

It took a long, long time before the tears ran dry, and Sen came back to himself. He thought he’d felt empty before, but that had been nothing. He was utterly hollow now. It seemed that the faintest breeze would be enough to shatter the fragile shell of him. He let himself sit like that for a little while. He knew he couldn’t sit there much longer, but he needed at least a few moments of calm before he faced the rest of the world and all of its demands again. Almost of their own volition, his hands rose to his face and scrubbed away the drying remnants of wetness on his cheeks. He rubbed his eyes, but they still burned a little. Part of him knew that wouldn’t last. Soon, all physical evidence of his pain would be scoured away in the regenerative powers of his body cultivation. He just wished that was true for the wounds inside of him. He forced himself to stand. There were still things that needed to be done.

“It’s a lot different than in the stories,” said Uncle Kho.

Sen looked at the elder cultivator. He saw empathy and concern there. Uncle Kho had done things like this countless times if one believed the tales, which Sen mostly did. He tried to understand how the other cultivator could stand the weight of all those deaths. Then, he thought about the story that Uncle Kho had told about his sister. He remembered the rage that had rolled off the man like an endless tide. Sen had thought he hated all of the sects, but he saw now that he had fundamentally misunderstood hatred. His feelings about the sects might rise to the level of intense dislike. Uncle Kho genuinely hated them. That hatred shields him, thought Sen. It’s not a perfect shieldor he wouldn’t be concerned, but it blunts things for him.

Sen wasn’t sure what to do with that insight. A piece of him envied the distance that hate put between Uncle Kho and all those deaths. He also wondered if building that kind of emotional distance was necessary to survive as a cultivator in the long term. Given what he’d seen of the world, he worried that it might be. It was still hard not to think that, for whatever benefits it offered, that hate would also hold Uncle Kho back. Sen didn’t dream that ascension required a person to be perfect. If it did, no one would ever ascend. Advancement, though, depended at least partly on a person’s own thoughts and perceptions. If the elder cultivator could never find an accommodation with his grief and rage, would he get stuck at a bottleneck?

Sen almost dismissed the thought as something he didn’t need to worry about until he remembered that he was one advancement away from the nascent soul stage. He wasn’t some foundation formation cultivator anymore, even if he felt like one in his head most of the time. His cultivation had outpaced his self-image, but he couldn’t let that continue. He did need to worry about things like what might bottleneck a nascent soul cultivator. Fu Ruolan had warned him that self-knowledge and understanding were crucial to the initial advancement. It only followed that those things would become more important as he moved through the nascent soul stage, not less important.

The thought that he might one day advance past Uncle Kho had never really occurred to him before. The man had always seemed so impossibly powerful. He was a juggernaut in Sen’s mind. Just reaching that level of advancement had always seemed like some distant flickering possibility lost in a hazy time called someday. It was with a bit of shock and mild dread that the reality struck Sen that his hazy someday would become now all too soon. All of those jumbled thoughts pressed down on him. They amplified a deep weariness that he hadn’t even begun to recover from. Sen decided to ignore that tangled mess until a time when he was better able to consider them.

“It is very different than in the stories,” Sen agreed.

His voice sounded hoarse in his own ears. It was like he’d been screaming for hours.

“The Twisted Blade Sect’s patriarch is dead,” offered Uncle Kho.

“That guy?” asked Uncle Kho with a snort. “No. He was doomed from the moment this all started. I’ve been of half a mind to kill him since the first time we met. All of this just made the decision for me.”

“That’s a relief, I guess. I’m just about certain that I couldn’t have beaten him. There was an elder here. Aihan. She was this incredibly tall woman with white hair. I’m not even sure I could have beaten her if she’d been at her best.”

“Did you beat her?” asked Uncle Kho, his brow furrowed.

“In a sense.”

Uncle Kho frowned at him, so Sen continued.

“The poison caught up with her.”

Uncle Kho nodded his understanding of the distinction between the plan killing the woman and Sen personally defeating her.

“I wouldn’t say things like to many people. You’re going to get credit for all of it, and you want that credit.”

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“But—” Sen started to object, but Uncle Kho waved him off.

“No one will be impressed if they hear that I killed another sect patriarch. They expect me to do that kind of thing. Everyone will be very, very cautious about so much as annoying the core cultivator who killed a patriarch and wiped an entire sect off the map.”

Sen nodded. That was a part of why he had done all of this. He wanted to make himself so scary that no one wanted to invite a repeat of what had happened to the Twisted Blade Sect. If he had to take a little unearned credit, it was a pretty small sin compared to everything else he’d done. Thinking of sins, Sen turned his attention to what was left of the sect. There were still a few members hiding in those buildings that needed to be sorted through and sent on their way, either to their next life or out into the kingdom. He shuddered at the thought of more bloodshed. There was no way around it. Better to be done with it.

“We’ll deal with it,” said Uncle Kho. “You’ve done enough today. Should I deal with those two core cultivators who are unconscious?”

“No,” said Sen, trying to hide the explosion of relief that he wouldn’t need to personally kill anyone else today. “They’re getting spared by heavenly decree. Well, one of them is. I guess the other one is getting spared by my decree.”

Uncle Kho gave him a skeptical look and asked, “Heavenly decree?”

“It’s—” Sen started and couldn’t muster the energy to explain. “It’s complicated. I’ll tell you about it later. Right now, I guess I need to have a chat with those two. Extract some oaths. I should probably take them out of the compound.”

“I expect that’s a good idea. Waking up surrounded by the bodies of everyone they knew isn’t going to put them in a friendly mood.”

Sen winced, but he couldn’t pretend the other man was wrong. Waking up to that would be the exact kind of thing to make people violent and angry. Even if the two he spared weren’t on great terms with all of those other core members, they’d surely had a few friends. Sen was surprised to discover that while he didn’t feel good about anything at the moment, he did feel less hollowed out. The conversation and company had helped to ground him. That was probably why he did it, thought Sen. It stood to reason that Uncle Kho had at least a sense of what Sen was going through, which gave the elder cultivator some insight into how to keep him from spiraling out of control. It wasn’t a perfect fix, but it was a bandage over the wound. It was enough for the moment.

“After we’re finished,” said Sen, remembering something, “you might want to take a look at the patriarch’s residence. There are some formations there that I know for a fact he didn’t put up. They’re very good.”

“How good?” asked Uncle Kho with interest glittering in his eyes.

“Good enough that I couldn’t figure out how to get past them. I’m not even sure what half of them do.”

“Really? I will have to look at those. Plus, there’s bound to be some things in the patriarch’s residence that you’ll want.”

“I think those things should probably go to you,” observed Sen.

“Maybe so. I might pick out one or two things, assuming you don’t want them. Really, it’s better to take them and invest them in your sect.”

“I’m still a little surprised that you’re not angry with me for starting one of those.”

Uncle Kho shrugged and said, “Caihong has started some. We had some very loud discussions about that a long time ago. I’ve come to terms with the idea that a good sect could exist. I’ve also seen the kind of rules and discipline you enforce. You’re at least trying to build a sect that isn’t rotten from the ground up. I’m interested to see what happens.”

“I guess that’s fair,” said Sen, reaching up to rub at his eyes.

His prediction had come true. They weren’t burning anymore. Uncle Kho walked over, put a hand on Sen’s shoulder, and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“You should go deal with your strays.”

With that, the elder cultivator vanished into the darkness in a burst of qi. Sen made his way back to where he’d left the pair asleep on the ground. He scooped them up onto a platform of qi before he stepped onto the platform himself. He carried them a fair distance away from the sect. Far enough that they weren’t likely to be seen or overheard by anyone. He put them down on a patch of soft grass. While he waited for them to regain consciousness, he idly noted the brightening sky to the east. He couldn’t believe that it had all happened in a single night. Thinking back, it felt like it took a month from when he stepped through the empty place where the gate had been to when he’d killed Elder Mu. It had only taken hours. He took that as a stern reminder of how fragile even cultivator lives were.

The sun had peeked over the horizon before the pair finally stirred. The woman was groggy, at least until she saw Sen. Then, she was pure panic. She scrambled back away from him, hands clawing at the ground. She was almost five feet away before Sen walked over to the unconscious man and nudged him with a foot.

“Nap time is over. Wake up!”

The man’s eyes shot open, and he jerked into a sitting position. That was followed immediately by a pained gasp as the man reached for the wound on his chest. I probably should have done something about that, thought Sen. Well, I guess I did have some other things on my mind. The woman finally seemed to recognize that Sen was making no effort to chase her. Relief, confusion, and terror contorted her face, but her gaze finally settled on the man.

“Yunhan!” she shouted.

It looked like she wanted to rush to the man, but it seemed her fear of Sen kept her locked in place.

“Liwen,” breathed the man.

That seemed to break her out of the paralysis that Sen’s presence had imposed on her. She scrambled back over to Yunhan and threw her arms around him. She let go a second later at his pained grunt. She lifted her hand, no doubt intended to produce some terrible healing pill from her storage ring, but Sen just handed the man a vial. Both Yunhan and Liwen started at the vial as they felt its strength. Yunhan started to speak, but Sen cut him off having heard it all before.

“Yes,” said Sen. “It’s very impressive. Just drink the damn elixir.”

Yunhan looked a little shocked but dutifully drank it.

“Thank you,” said the man who sounded very hesitant.

Sen couldn’t really blame him. Yunhan had fallen asleep expecting to wake up dead. Sen crouched down and gave Yunhan and Liwen a stern look.

“We have some things to talk about.”