Book 8: Chapter 59: The Alchemy of Pain
As someone who wielded lightning and even storms, Sen was accustomed to loud noises. It just went with the territory. That was without even considering things like the sounds that were produced when he hit something very hard. So, the sheer, overwhelming noise of the explosion was a bit of a shock to him. The great gaping hole in the ground and the pulpy remains of trees for twenty feet in every direction came a very close second in the surprise department. He'd sacrificed what little sleep he was getting to have some free time to work on alchemy and poured every second into playing with the explosive mixture that had caused so much harm in the courtyard. He’d had a few insights, adjusted the formula a little, and then let his intuition guide him. After all that work, he had been expecting good results, but these results might be too good.
The kind of force that a tiny packet of the explosive was creating now could destroy buildings and bring down city walls. Maybe not by itself, but if he threw a couple of them into a building or at a wall, he’d made himself a nice crater or hole to walk through. The only reason Sen didn’t abandon the project entirely was the simple fact that, as far as he knew, he was the only person who could do what he’d done. Yet, he had the disturbing intuition that, unlike some of his alchemical creations, this wasn’t one of those things that other people would find impossible to replicate. He simply wasn’t well-versed enough in this kind of alchemy to have stepped beyond the capabilities of others. His intuitions had simply taken him farther down a road that others could follow. He’d gotten a shortcut and nothing more.
Just as importantly, this was something that mortals and sects alike would want. A powerful explosion from what could be fit into an elixir vial. A sect could fill storage rings with it. cultivators who were running out of qi could simply start hurling the things at each other and setting them off with little more than a flicker of fire qi. The potential devastation could be horrifying. Not that Sen was especially worried about cultivators using these explosives on each other’s sects. He was worried about sects using them against mortals as a way to save on qi. It could make them less restrained, and he felt they lacked restraint as it was. Setting them free to spread explosions wherever they went struck Sen as a bad idea. However, for all his reservations about this advancement, he could not pretend he was unhappy with the results. He’d set out to make something devastating and accomplished his goal. He just wished the accomplishment didn’t come bundled up with a lot of problems and questions he lacked good answers to.
On the upside, he had managed to scare away all the spirit beasts in the area of the wilds he’d chosen to test his creation. He expected it would be a while before the nearest village had to deal with them. Granted, that village was probably two days away for a mortal traveling on foot, but a motivated spirit beast could likely make the trip in a matter of hours. Some of them were absurdly fast, and their very nature as spirit beasts tended to give them appalling stamina. Humanity truly would be in trouble if the spirit beasts ever managed to get organized. The advantages that humans possessed, cultivation and technology, would be hard-pressed to withstand spirit beasts working in concert and with well-developed strategies.
Their fractious nature was humanity’s best defense. As long as they remained splintered, human beings were relatively free to build smaller settlements. Yes, some villages were overrun from time to time, but most of them survived. Those settlements grew a substantial amount of food, much of which found its way into the handful of large cities in the kingdom. If the spirit attacked, those villages and their food would vanish, even as people tried to find refuge in the cities. It wasn’t even a far-fetched idea. It had happened during human wars in the past. That exact strategy of destroying farming villages before mounting sieges on cities had toppled more than one mortal kingdom in the past.
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