Book 9: Chapter 8: Local Preparations
“That’s good to know,” said Sen. “I’ll be sure to clue you in if and when the time comes.”
“Future plans aside, what about your preparations here? I know what I see, but that’s rarely the whole story. How are they progressing?”
Sen frowned. His focus for the academy and the sect hadn’t changed, not entirely, after Master Feng had told him about what the spirit beasts were planning. Of course, that was in large part because he was already teaching mortals about how to kill spirit beasts. As for the cultivators, he wanted them prepared to defend Ai and the House of Lu. Preparing them for that and preparing them for a fight against hordes of spirit beasts were, much to his shock, not that far apart. Of course, close wasn’t the same thing as identical. He’d initially intended for the cultivator’s martial training to focus on individual combat with only periodic forays into group tactics. He’d seen that as the optimal choice because most cultivators fought each other one-on-one or fought an individual spirit beast.
Those plans had changed. Now, individual and group tactics got an even split, which he recognized was to the detriment of both. True mastery required focus. He was essentially training people to be competent in both areas. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was the best solution he could come up with when facing the certainty of the coming war. Not that he’d shared that information with most of the mortals or the cultivators, yet. It wasn’t that Sen wanted to keep the information hidden. If anything, he wanted everyone to know. He was just worried about causing a panic.
When he’d gone to talk with Lai Dongmei about the situation, she had advised him to keep the information to a close circle for the time being. She had been the one who suggested that spreading the information around prematurely could cause more harm than good.
“How so?” he’d asked.
“The prospect of a war is rightly terrifying to people. But, when you know the enemy and where they’ll come from, it can be a rallying point. Right now, all we know is that the enemy will come from the wilds, which is the same thing as saying the enemy could come from anywhere. The longer that goes on, the more rumors will spread, and panic will follow the rumors. When people don’t have information, they’ll invent it. Let’s say that people get it into their heads that the spirit beasts will come from the north, panicked farmers and villagers will flee south. The towns and cities there will be overwhelmed. That kind of chaos can only serve the spirit beasts’ ends.”
Sen had wanted to have a bit more faith in people, but he had been assured by Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, Uncle Kho, Jing, and leaders of every sect he’d spoken with that Lai Dongmei had the right of it. In most cases, that certainty had stemmed from actually having seen it happen in the past, not once, but repeatedly. So, his own misgivings aside, he had kept the information largely to himself. Even so, he didn’t want things at the academy or in town falling to pieces the first time that spirit beasts showed up looking for a bit of easy slaughter. He had quietly but firmly instituted several plans designed to strengthen the defenses around and inside the town and academy.
Much of that work had been masked as projects for some of the foundation formation and core cultivators. He’d worked with Uncle Kho to develop a variety of defensive formations, then broken them down into pieces that the students could erect. He’d cast working on the town walls as a kind of low-grade punishment. Those walls had been raised and reinforced over and over again. He’d personally started adding layers of formations to them. The work was progressing, probably faster than he had any right to expect, but it wasn’t fast. Solid formation work took time and knowledge. Reinforcing walls took time and energy. And all of it had to be assigned in plausible ways. While Sen could acknowledge the probable need for secrecy, it also put a hard limit on how much could be done at any given time.