Chapter 30: Good Counsel
Even with all of the improvements to his body and mind, Sen found the days starting to blur together. There was simply so much to do. During the day, there were countless details that he had to sort through, decide about, or simply approve of. That was after delegating way more authority than he was comfortable with to people he didn’t know very well or trust. He found himself relying very heavily on Lo Meifeng and Long Jia Wei’s finally honed deceit detection skills to decide who could be trusted with what. Of course, once the mortal tasks were done for the day, meaning the mortals were stumbling to bed in a state of pure exhaustion, the cultivators simply changed tasks and kept going. Lo Meifeng had made the very good point that securing the far-flung holdings of the newly minted House of Lu was going to require far more manpower than Sen had available. Then, the woman spoke heresy to him.
“You should hire sects to do it for you,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Two questions,” said Sen through his stunned horror. “Are you insane? And, are you insane?!”
“No. I’m also not biased. You have it in your head that every sect is stacked with awful, murder-craving monsters who cannot be trusted under any circumstances.”
“You’re going somewhere with this. I can tell,” said Sen in a weary voice.
“You’re wrong.”
“You, of all people, are going to tell me that sects aren’t filled with people just like that?”
“I’m telling you that not every sect is filled with people like that, and even the sects that have people like that in them aren’t made up entirely of them. No organization could survive if every member was a blood-crazed maniac. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Sen desperately wished they’d been having this conversation before he’d started an academy. If they had been, he could have dug his heels and thrown a tantrum, blissfully ignorant of the truth in those words. But he did know what she was saying was true. Even his tiny little academy depended on having diligent, level-headed, and sometimes borderline-boring personalities working behind the scenes. Those were the people who made sure that there was food, ink, and paper ordered. Then, they paid attention and made sure said orders were delivered and distributed. Sen didn’t need anyone to tell him that being unhinged and murderous was likely to undermine anyone’s effectiveness in roles like that. Since sects seemed to persist for centuries if not thousands of years, it stood to reason that most of them had the same kind of diligent, level-headed, and sometimes boring personalities that he had managing things at his academy.