Unintended Cultivator

Cao Kai-Ming found herself sitting by the fire and not sleeping, again. It wasn’t so much that she needed sleep, but she liked to sleep. It made her feel sharp and that was important. Even a little mental lag could mean the difference between life and death, and life and death had been on her mind a lot. There was every indication that the sect meant to go to war. Oh, there hadn’t been any official word, yet, but she knew the signs. She’d seen them before. The sect was calling people back. Gathering their strength. She was just grateful that they hadn’t canceled this expedition into the wilds. She hated sect wars and would be perfectly happy to drag out this expedition for as long as possible to avoid as much of the fighting as she could. She knew that fighting other cultivators was inextricably tied to the Jianghu, but it wasn’t why she’d become a cultivator.

She’d become a cultivator to help her village. She knew that it was little more than a collection of huts that teetered along by farming on barely arable land, but it was where she had come from. Her parents were long dead, but she’d never forgotten the place or the people there. It had taken time, decades, but she’d found a way to earn enough gold to help the village now and then. She’d become the most valuable thing to alchemists. She’d become a gatherer. One of those rare cultivators who could and would venture into the wilds to gather those invaluable resources that helped make advancement possible. Without her, all of those precious pills and elixirs that everyone relied on wouldn’t exist.

Not that she didn’t have mixed feelings about that. Having met the people in her sect, she would have gladly let most of them languish as qi-gathering cultivators. They were awful to mortals. They were awful to each other. They were just… They were just awful. But supporting them, however loathsome she found most of them, allowed her to ensure that her little village survived. She still had relatives there even if they didn’t know it. She knew it. She made sure that precious food was delivered to them when the harvests were bad. She sent medicines when the periodic plagues that ravaged the country swept through. She was no Judgment’s Gale who saved villages by the score, cast down kings, and had by all accounts started a city in the far north, but she had saved one village. That was enough. It let her sleep. Usually.

These rumors of a sect war, though. It meant fighting other cultivators, most of whom probably had nothing to do with whatever offense had occurred. That was assuming an offense had occurred at all. It wasn’t as though the Twisted Blade Sect really needed a reason to declare a sect war. They never had. She’d often wished that she’d chosen another sect but, by the time she’d understood what kind of place she sworn allegiance to, it would have been nightmarishly difficult to leave. She might have even been killed if she tried. The sect didn’t like to let go of useful resources, and she had proven herself a very useful resource. Yes, the best thing to do was to drag her feet on this expedition.

It would be easy enough. Most of the people sent along on this expedition were morons who couldn’t tell the difference between a fire lily and a water orchid. If she said she hadn’t found what they needed, they’d believe her. More importantly, the sect elders would believe her. In a sect that prized fighting prowess over trivial intellectual pursuits like alchemy and formation building, it was simple enough to trick her seniors. She would need to be wary of Elder Sio, though. Granted, he was practically an elder in name only having advanced with limited combat experience. If he accused her of lying, though, there was no way to be sure what would happen. They might believe him, or they might call him a stupid old man. Either way, she wasn’t eager to find out.

She could still stretch things out even if not as much as she might want to. Most sect wars didn’t last that long. A month, she thought. If I drag it out for a month, by the time we get back, the sect war might well be over. Even if it wasn’t over by then, they’d be at the sect rather than wherever the fighting was happening. Dispatching them would take time. That could at least minimize the combat she’d have to engage in. It wasn’t a perfect fix, but it was a solution that was less terrible than rushing back for the fighting. Feeling more settled, she stood up to go to her tent but a stark feeling of dread washed over the entire camp. It felt like the eye of some dark god had fixed itself on her. Then, the screaming started.

It wasn’t the shouting or yelling that she expected in a battle. It was the screaming of naked terror and pain. Cao Kai-Ming felt rooted in place even as the events unfolded around her. Things seemed to happen too slowly and too fast. She watched as people stumbled out of tents, drawing weapons and racing toward some as yet unrevealed enemy. She thought it must be some powerful spirit beast that had wandered away from the deep wilds. She had eluded such beasts before. Every gatherer who survived as long as she had developed a better-than-average ability to steal away into the darkness and hide. What she saw instead was a man or, at least, she thought it was a man. He seemed to explode out of the shadows to reap a life and then disappear back into them just as fast, leaving nothing but a faint impression of the color blue.

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Part of her felt like she should help, throw herself into battle, and help stop this slaughter. Another part of her watched on in grim satisfaction as Kong Hao, who took pleasure in beating outer disciples to the point of death, had both his arms broken beneath the raw force of a single blow from an impossibly heavy jian. A moment later, she heard the man’s neck snap as the attacker backhanded the man. There was an explosion of motion, a flurry of terrible violence, and five more martial specialists had their lives snuffed out. Mou Wei launched a twisted blade strike, the metal qi technique that the sect was famous for, only to have the attacker physically catch it, rip it out of the air, and crush it. Blood exploded from Mou Wei’s eyes, nose, mouth, and ears from the backlash. Lightning ignited around the stranger’s jian and a bolt of it punched a hole in Mou Wei’s chest.