Unintended Cultivator

Sen didn’t say much as he, Falling Leaf, and Glimmer of Night made their way through the wilds and toward the Twisted Blade Sect. The prospect of walking through such a place at all, let alone through the darkness of night, would once have been enough to leave Sen in a cold sweat. The wilds were dangerous in the full light of day. They became much more so when the sun fell below the horizon. Now, he barely gave it a thought. His night vision wasn’t quite a replacement for daylight, but it was close enough that it eliminated the advantages that nocturnal ambushers usually relied on. Not that they’d seen any of those. Glimmer of Night’s efforts to intimidate the local spirit beasts with superior terrifyingness had apparently gone well.

Uncle Kho had chosen to hang back. He said it was so he wouldn’t accidentally alert the sect with his presence until after things truly got started. It was a plausible reason that Sen could see the elder cultivator was using as an excuse. He wanted to give Sen a little time with his thoughts and with Falling Leaf. She was walking nearby. Unlike him, she looked alert but calm. He supposed that made sense. The wilds were her domain far more than his. Glimmer of Night was idly spinning little qi webs between his hands, although Sen had long ago learned not to take that as a sign that he wasn’t paying attention.

The spider’s capacity for simultaneously paying attention to multiple things was difficult not to envy. Sen could split his attention that way with qi cycling but not with everything else. He wasn’t sure if that failing was due to a lack of practice or a lack of aptitude. He suspected it was going to end up as one more thing he’d never find out for sure. When Sen had first become aware of just how long cultivators lived, that amount of time had seemed endless to him. He’d fantasized, a little, about mastering everything there was to master.

Life had been happy to teach him how hilariously unrealistic that idea had been. He doubted he’d have enough time to ever truly master the intricacies of his own cultivation. Mastering everything else? Sen estimated that there was exactly zero possibility of accomplishing that goal even if he lived for tens of thousands of years. Existence was simply too complex. He’d seen in himself that every time he understood something new, it just prompted more questions. He had to assume that every area of knowledge was like that. Maybe there was an endpoint where someone could know everything if they lived for long enough, but he couldn’t begin to imagine how long that would take.

However, in what he could only assume was some kind of perverse facet of human nature, that knowledge did nothing to reduce his desire to understand and replicate things he’d seen others do. Maybe, I’m just greedy, thought Sen. Can you be greedy for things like knowledge and understanding? He wasn’t sure. He usually thought of greed in terms of power, money, land, and even food. He’d certainly been greedy for food when he lived on the streets. Nobles seemed to have infinite greed for money and land. Almost everyone seemed greedy for power in whatever form it took for them. It was almost dangerous not to be greedy for power in a world where one’s might decided so many things.

Sen supposed it followed that those same impulses could apply to more abstract things. Maybe he just hadn’t lived long enough to meet people like that or hadn’t understood what he was seeing when he did. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. He was greedy for safety. Not safety for himself which he could ensure in most situations, but safety for the people around him. Safety for Falling Leaf. Safety for Grandmother Lu. Safety for the members of his own sect, however aggravating he found them. Most of all, though, safety to Ai. That’s what this attack on the Twisted Blade Sect was really all about when he stripped everything else away. If they marched on his sect, there was a chance, however vanishingly small it might be, that Ai could be hurt or killed.Nôv(el)B\\jnn

He'd made a joke once to Lo Meifeng that a daughter was someone you’d slaughter millions to protect. Looking back, he realized that it hadn’t been a joke. Not even a little bit. He wasn’t going to slaughter millions to protect his daughter, but he was going to slaughter this sect because they meant to put her in danger. All of his misgivings, all of his uncertainties, meant nothing in the face of that. They were a threat and not a vague one. The world was full of things that might put her in danger. I can’t kill every single one of those nebulous threats, thought Sen before he paused mentally. I probably can’t kill all of them. The Twisted Blade Sect wasn’t some hazy possibility of danger. They were an immediate danger. They had to be addressed.

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There were other reasons to do it. There was certainly sect politics to consider. Wars between sects of relatively equal strength were, not common, but not remarkable. They generally ended in a stalemate. One sect might lose some prestige or some territory, but both sects usually survived. Wars between unequal sects inevitably meant the destruction or absorption of the smaller sect. If he turned that expectation on its head, it would have a positively chilling effect on any other sect that meant to come to his door looking for trouble. If the story became that challenging him meant not just war, but utter annihilation, well, cultivators were selfish. They wanted to live. They weren’t going to be eager for a conflict where impersonal, sect-wide destruction wasn’t just possible but his obvious goal.

He acknowledged that possibility and the benefits it would bring, but he wasn’t going to lie to himself about his motives. Not when he was about to initiate his plan. He was doing this for personal reasons. The Twisted Blade Sect, or their very foolish leadership, had decided that they were going to put the people Sen loved into harm’s way. He was going to make sure that they learned, that everyone learned, it would not be tolerated. If he had to bathe in a river of blood and build a mountain of corpses to rival Master Feng’s and Uncle Kho’s to get it done, that was a price he’d willingly pay. If he had to cull the innocent along with the guilty, that was just the nature of the situation. He could hate it. He could wish it was otherwise, but it wasn’t otherwise.

“You don’t want to do this,” said Falling Leaf.

“No,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t it?” she asked, sounding a little uncertain about whether her words were actually true.

“No. I keep going over it in my head. I keep debating if there’s a better way, but there isn’t. Not everyone in that sect necessarily wants to be our enemy, but they are all enemies. As long as they wear those robes and follow their elders, they take away my ability to be lenient. I can’t view them as individuals. In the end, they are soldiers in an army. Why? Do you think I should change my mind?”

“No. They would destroy our den. They would harm the kit. We must kill them all.”

Sen almost missed a step. He’d been wrestling with this decision since the moment they set out, trying to weigh the morality of it, and looking for alternatives. It seemed that Falling Leaf had no such qualms. It had taken him forever to come to the conclusion that she had likely arrived at weeks ago. The wisdom of Falling Leaf was simple but profound. You live in peace until something threatens home and family. When that happens, everything dies. It made him feel, not better exactly, but slightly less conflicted about what he was about to do. The world might condemn him for it, fear him for it, but as far as Falling Leaf was concerned, he was just doing what needed to be done. It was a feather to balance a terrible weight, but it was a powerful feather.

Sen appreciated now why Uncle Kho had stayed back. He had certainly recognized the turmoil in Sen. He must have known that his presence would not be a comfort as Sen solidified his resolve. If anything, Sen suspected that having Uncle Kho right there would have clouded the issue. He might have felt a need to live up to what the elder cultivator had done in the past. That kind of influence could turn to poison in a person’s heart. He was grateful that Uncle Kho had given him the room to make the final decision on his own, or at least with Falling Leaf’s assistance. The choice might haunt him, but it had been his own choice.

By the time they reached the edge of the forest Sen had pushed away the last of his ambivalence. He stared at the walls of the Twisted Blade Sect in the distance. Then, he summoned a particular beast core from his storage ring. It was paired with another beast core that he’d left buried in a wall in an inconspicuous, dusty room. With a thought, he activated the formation inside the Twisted Blade Sect.

“We should get moving,” said Sen. “The chaos has already begun in there.”

Suiting actions to words, Sen activated his qinggong technique and shot toward the gates of the Twisted Blade Sect.