Unintended Cultivator

Sen felt Fu Ruolan’s unhappy gaze trying to bore a hole into the back of his skull. Given that he was working on poisons that were, he was pretty sure, three times as dangerous as the ones he used to kill Tong Guanting, the scrutiny wasn’t appreciated. Still, he persevered until he had sealed the absurdly dangerous concoction into several vials. It was all he could do. Letting his focus lapse would have been an almost instant death sentence. He also couldn’t stop the work without risking some kind of runaway reaction that would make the cauldron explode. Again, that would likely mean instant death.

The cauldron was the one concession he’d made to Auntie Caihong. He’d argued that he knew and was comfortable with his battered pot. She’d argued that cauldrons controlled potentially lethal vapors better. She was right, as far as it went. It just didn’t mean much to him. He routinely controlled those vapors with air qi. He’d been doing it for so long now that it barely counted as active qi use. Still, it seemed to make her feel better. He had a suspicion, though. He was willing to be that, deep down, she was harboring some conservative idea that proper alchemy should be done in a cauldron. It wasn’t a fight worth having for long, so he’d simply conceded. With the current batch of liquid death now safely contained, he turned to look at a very displeased nascent soul cultivator.

“So, you’re going to follow in his footsteps?” demanded Fu Ruolan and then carried on before he could answer. “There’s nothing glorious about destroying a sect. It’s stupid and pointless.”

Sen sighed. He agreed with her in principle. It was stupid. It was pointless, or at least a pointless waste of life. It was also a grim necessity. If he didn’t want more sects showing up and issuing challenges all the time, he needed to send a message. The kind of message that would get through to everyone from the most aloof elders and patriarchs to the most battle-hungry qi-gathering cultivator. He’d learned long ago that it wasn’t enough to just have strength. It was equally important to project strength. Unless he planned to withdraw from the world entirely, he needed people to view crossing him as an act of last resort.

While Uncle Kho or Master Feng could get away with letting some people go, nobody doubted their strength. Those decisions were viewed as the acts of mercy they were or at least the whims of people too dangerous to question. If Sen let a bunch of people go the first time that he faced a challenge like this, it would be viewed as weakness. It wouldn’t solve any problems. It would create them. The sects would judge that he was too soft to do what needed to be done. He couldn’t have that. He had to look utterly ruthless and vengeful when people crossed the lines he set. After all, he hadn’t gone looking for challenges. They had come to him. Those Twisted Blade Sect idiots had entered the town of the mortals Sen chose to protect and abused them. While killing those cultivators was an excuse for the sect to posture and yell and start a sect war, it was actually a pretty light punishment. He’d only killed the people who participated. A smart sect would cut their losses there.

“I know it won’t be glorious,” said Sen. “It’ll be plain and simple butchery. I’m not doing this for honor or glory. I’m going to do it so that no one will ever be stupid enough to try something like that again. Besides, you’ve been in sects before. You know as well as I do that there is no high road to take here. If I don’t go and destroy them now, they’ll come here to try to destroy me. There is no avoiding this fight.”

Sen hated his own argument. It didn’t matter that it was true. He hated it because it meant he was letting them dictate the terms. It wasn’t the first time, either. Sen was painfully aware that he embodied the role of the young master far more often than made him comfortable. He didn’t know how many people he’d killed in a might makes right moment, but that was the world he lived in. Pretending it wasn’t that way was stupidly naïve at best and willfully ignorant at worst. Even if he wanted the world to be different, he wasn’t strong enough to impose his will on the whole world. He was just about powerful enough to impose his will on one tiny little piece of the world, and he had done that much. He forced the cultivators who visited the town or joined his sect to treat the mortals and other cultivators there with more respect. That was the pitiable scope of control that he could realistically impose.

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There was no true equality between the mortals and cultivators. There couldn’t be. The power differences were too great. The habits of lifetimes were too deeply ingrained. If he had a few thousand years… But he wasn’t going to get them. He knew that. No matter how things played out with this war with the spirit beasts, he suspected that he would only get enough time in this world to leave fleeting changes. The best he could hope for was to make things a little better for the people whose lives he touched most directly. If he was very lucky, he might help create some cultivators who were a little kinder to mortals and a little more likely to chastise other cultivators for being abominable people. Those felt like such small accomplishments and terribly uncertain ones, but they were what he thought he could do.