Unintended Cultivator

Sen felt Fu Ruolan’s unhappy gaze trying to bore a hole into the back of his skull. Given that he was working on poisons that were, he was pretty sure, three times as dangerous as the ones he used to kill Tong Guanting, the scrutiny wasn’t appreciated. Still, he persevered until he had sealed the absurdly dangerous concoction into several vials. It was all he could do. Letting his focus lapse would have been an almost instant death sentence. He also couldn’t stop the work without risking some kind of runaway reaction that would make the cauldron explode. Again, that would likely mean instant death.

The cauldron was the one concession he’d made to Auntie Caihong. He’d argued that he knew and was comfortable with his battered pot. She’d argued that cauldrons controlled potentially lethal vapors better. She was right, as far as it went. It just didn’t mean much to him. He routinely controlled those vapors with air qi. He’d been doing it for so long now that it barely counted as active qi use. Still, it seemed to make her feel better. He had a suspicion, though. He was willing to be that, deep down, she was harboring some conservative idea that proper alchemy should be done in a cauldron. It wasn’t a fight worth having for long, so he’d simply conceded. With the current batch of liquid death now safely contained, he turned to look at a very displeased nascent soul cultivator.

“So, you’re going to follow in his footsteps?” demanded Fu Ruolan and then carried on before he could answer. “There’s nothing glorious about destroying a sect. It’s stupid and pointless.”

Sen sighed. He agreed with her in principle. It was stupid. It was pointless, or at least a pointless waste of life. It was also a grim necessity. If he didn’t want more sects showing up and issuing challenges all the time, he needed to send a message. The kind of message that would get through to everyone from the most aloof elders and patriarchs to the most battle-hungry qi-gathering cultivator. He’d learned long ago that it wasn’t enough to just have strength. It was equally important to project strength. Unless he planned to withdraw from the world entirely, he needed people to view crossing him as an act of last resort.

While Uncle Kho or Master Feng could get away with letting some people go, nobody doubted their strength. Those decisions were viewed as the acts of mercy they were or at least the whims of people too dangerous to question. If Sen let a bunch of people go the first time that he faced a challenge like this, it would be viewed as weakness. It wouldn’t solve any problems. It would create them. The sects would judge that he was too soft to do what needed to be done. He couldn’t have that. He had to look utterly ruthless and vengeful when people crossed the lines he set. After all, he hadn’t gone looking for challenges. They had come to him. Those Twisted Blade Sect idiots had entered the town of the mortals Sen chose to protect and abused them. While killing those cultivators was an excuse for the sect to posture and yell and start a sect war, it was actually a pretty light punishment. He’d only killed the people who participated. A smart sect would cut their losses there.

“I know it won’t be glorious,” said Sen. “It’ll be plain and simple butchery. I’m not doing this for honor or glory. I’m going to do it so that no one will ever be stupid enough to try something like that again. Besides, you’ve been in sects before. You know as well as I do that there is no high road to take here. If I don’t go and destroy them now, they’ll come here to try to destroy me. There is no avoiding this fight.”

Sen hated his own argument. It didn’t matter that it was true. He hated it because it meant he was letting them dictate the terms. It wasn’t the first time, either. Sen was painfully aware that he embodied the role of the young master far more often than made him comfortable. He didn’t know how many people he’d killed in a might makes right moment, but that was the world he lived in. Pretending it wasn’t that way was stupidly naïve at best and willfully ignorant at worst. Even if he wanted the world to be different, he wasn’t strong enough to impose his will on the whole world. He was just about powerful enough to impose his will on one tiny little piece of the world, and he had done that much. He forced the cultivators who visited the town or joined his sect to treat the mortals and other cultivators there with more respect. That was the pitiable scope of control that he could realistically impose.

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There was no true equality between the mortals and cultivators. There couldn’t be. The power differences were too great. The habits of lifetimes were too deeply ingrained. If he had a few thousand years… But he wasn’t going to get them. He knew that. No matter how things played out with this war with the spirit beasts, he suspected that he would only get enough time in this world to leave fleeting changes. The best he could hope for was to make things a little better for the people whose lives he touched most directly. If he was very lucky, he might help create some cultivators who were a little kinder to mortals and a little more likely to chastise other cultivators for being abominable people. Those felt like such small accomplishments and terribly uncertain ones, but they were what he thought he could do.

If that meant he had to play the young master sometimes, he'd do it. If destroying a sect was the price for protecting what was his and discouraging other sects from similar stupidity, that was a price he’d pay. Sen didn’t have to like it or want it, but he did have to accept it. Ideals didn’t make the world something other than it was. Kindness, mercy, and equality were things that sounded nice, but bestowing them was ultimately up to the discretion of the strong. In Sen’s experience, the strong weren’t terribly interested in those things, except on a person-by-person basis.

His own teachers were the best example. He would consider Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, and Uncle Kho kind people, but that was only because they had been kind to him. Even Fu Ruolan had a streak of kindness in her, but all of them bestowed it on individuals. Master Feng likely had the power to impose whatever kind of society he wanted on the entire continent. Yet, he seemed largely disinterested in any kind of social change. His reputation was another indicator that his kindness was deeply selective. He wouldn’t go out of his way to hurt anyone that didn’t offend him, and not much seemed to offend the man. Once someone did offend him, though, nothing could save them. He even seemed to have a soft spot for mortals, but, at the end of the day, he had chosen not to change the world.

The same applied to Auntie Caihong and Uncle Kho. They likely could change everything, but they had decided not to. Sen didn’t understand why and had never worked up the nerve to ask. He just knew it was true by the evidence of his own eyes. Perhaps it was just because they were people with their own interests and preoccupations. Master Feng had made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t interested in being in charge of things. Uncle Kho had largely abandoned the outside world in favor of the life of a scholar unless something truly roused his interest or anger. Auntie Caihong interacted with the world, but she did it very quietly. Her life was alchemy. Forcing change on the world would likewise force them to abandon those choices and interests to take on responsibilities they didn’t want. Being in charge of a minor sect had given Sen a very personal understanding of why they wouldn’t want that.

As for Fu Ruolan, who was still glaring at him, he was mostly relieved that she hadn’t ever tried a world-changing gambit. Part of him thought that the other nascent soul cultivators might have intervened, but maybe not. An erratic ruler could prove helpful to anyone looking to solidify support behind themselves, or so Jing had explained to Sen in one of his politics lessons.

“So, there’s no talking you out of this?” she asked.

Sen shook his head.

“If things were different, maybe, but things aren’t different. Besides, if they come here, they’ll make a mess and be loud. Maybe loud enough to bother you.”

Fu Ruolan opened her mouth, seemed to consider his words, and grimaced.

“You might be right. That would be very irritating. But so is having you run off before you’ve kept your promise to me,” she said before she got a thoughtful look on her face. “Maybe I should go deal with them so you’ll settle down and focus for a few months.”

Visions of a poisoned wasteland stretching out for a hundred miles in every direction filled Sen’s mind.

“No!” he shouted before getting ahold of himself. “No. That’s not necessary. This isn’t your problem. I’ll deal with it.”

She eyed him and asked, “Are you certain? I could probably—”

“I’m sure,” Sen hurried to say.

He didn’t want to give the woman a chance to decide she was going to go solve the problem anyway. It was one thing to bring Uncle Kho along as backup. It was something else entirely to unleash an annoyed and unsupervised Fu Ruolan on a group of unsuspecting victims. Who knew what she might do?