Unintended Cultivator

Sen had ground his teeth when Lo Meifeng first dispatched riders to visit a few, very carefully chosen sects. He ground his teeth every time he thought about it. Sects had been the source of so much unhappiness and pain in his life. The idea of doing business of any kind with them felt wrong. Unnatural. Almost a violation of something sacrosanct. Yet, after hearing just a little bit about how things were on the far side of the Mountains of Sorrow, he knew that they truly were the lesser of two evils. And like or not, his own choices had led him to a place where he had to consider things like what the lesser of two evils were. Given a choice between sects that enforced some level of restraint on their members and cultivator nobility who were perfectly happy to treat mortals like slaves, he would take the sects. It didn’t make employing them feel any better to him, though. That was why he had left that work almost entirely to Lo Meifeng.

If he’d left it to himself, it never would have gotten done, and it needed to get done. He’d required a fast way to secure those distant Xie properties and holdings in the short term, while he assembled at least semi-reliable mortal forces to go and hold them in truth. As Lo Meifeng had explained to him, repeatedly, and at length, using sects was the only realistic option. All of the other options meant marching forces across the kingdom. Forces he still didn’t have or at least not in sufficient numbers. They had recruited a fair number of ex-soldiers and a few mercenaries who had managed to get past Lo Meifeng and Grandmother Lu's rather incisive questioning. Of course, even if he had been able to find enough men with the right skills immediately, sending them out in large numbers was the kind of thing that always drew attention. Word would spread ahead of them. People would talk. There would be vicious fighting to reclaim every bit of territory.

All of which could be sidestepped by sending out a comparatively small force of cultivators. Only other sects would question it when cultivators moved, and they wouldn’t take an active interest unless those cultivators made a nuisance of themselves. Sen shook his head and tried to shove his unease to the back of his mind. He’d been having this same argument with himself every single day. In the end, it all came down to a simple question. Do I trust the judgment of the people around me? Sen did trust their judgment. In part because they had earned that trust, and in part because he knew that his poor relationship with sects was at least partially his own fault. He had decided early on that sects and everything to do with them was bad. That had bred a kind of arrogance in him. He was dismissive of sects, which he knew infuriated sect members. Knowing that, he acted dismissive of them anyway. Not that sect disciples needed much excuse to start trouble, but he had never helped the situation. And then, he’d used their negative reactions to his disdain for them as proof that sects were indeed evil. It was a tidy little circle of justification he’d made for himself.

Except, now, he wasn’t in a place where he could indulge that kind of juvenile thinking anymore without hampering his own plans. The world was more complicated than the simple either-or he’d been applying to sects. He’d met people from sects who weren’t terrible people. People who did have honor, and who did care about doing the right thing, even if he’d had to remind some of them of that fact. The truth was that sects were made up of people. Some of them were undoubtedly awful. Some of them were undoubtedly good. Most of them were probably in the middle somewhere. The same as all the mortals Sen had met over the years. It was just easy to see sect cultivators as evil because the power they held made them so much more deadly and destructive when they did turn out to be huge piles of garbage masquerading as a person. Sen stood up from the table where he’d been staring blankly at paperwork for at least twenty minutes.

“I have to stop doing this to myself. It’s done. Rehashing it won’t change anything,” Sen announced to the, for once, empty room.

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