Unintended Cultivator

Bin Enle stood on the walls and tried to suppress a yawn. It wasn’t tiredness, just boredom. Aside from the strange beast tide a week or so back, nothing interesting ever happened on the wall. It had given him an excuse to fire an arrow into the darkness. It hadn’t been entirely unjustified. He had thought that something was moving out there. Spirit beasts were attacking the walls. He’d been wrong, but it was still exciting for a few seconds there. Then, things had mostly gotten back to normal. In other words, things had gotten boring again. He didn’t even know why they guarded the walls this way. There literally hadn’t been an attack on the sect proper in more than a century. It struck him as a waste of energy, but no one listened to lowly Bin Enle.

Although, he had to admit that hearing about those two fools murdering each other had been a little amusing. The rumors were still flying around the sect about that. Discussing the event had been a way to pass the time for the first day or two, although he’d lost interest pretty quickly. He hadn’t known either of them personally. The sect was simply too large for everyone to know everyone else, especially if you didn’t share an interest or profession with them. He thought he might have met one of them a decade or two back, but he wasn’t sure and there was no way to check now. So, for him, life had resumed its usual dullness. He was a martial specialist but not one of those geniuses who garnered the personal attention of an elder. He was going to have to advance the hard way, by actually working hard. That meant wall duty, as pointless as it was.

The Twisted Blade Sect was too well-known and powerful, at least in the region, for anyone to do anything so monumentally stupid as attacking them. It would invite the kind of reprisals that left nothing but charred stone and funeral pyres in their wake. He knew he wouldn’t want to be a part of any force that meant to attack the sect. Bin Enle had been staring blankly out into the darkness and thinking. Advancement would make darkness no impediment to him, but that was likely decades away. In the meantime, it was very easy to let that darkness lull him into introspection. That was why it took a few moments for the sounds to register. He snapped back into focus and listened. What was that sound? Was that screaming?

He spun around and peered into the sect. He saw people moving around. There were too many of them, and they were moving wrong. Cultivators were, as a rule, graceful. The figures he could see were… They were falling, thrashing, and screaming. Bin Enle was torn. Should he go help? Should he stay on the wall? He had a duty to remain where he was, but he also had a duty to help his fellow sect members. Before Bin Enle could decide what to do, a killing intent like nothing he’d ever felt before crashed down on him. No, not just him, over the entire sect. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t breathe. This was no ordinary killing intent. This was the killing intent of a monster. Even as a world of shadow, fire, and impossibly sharp blades overwhelmed his mind, he saw three figures materialize out of the darkness. The monsters had come.

***

Zhan Shaoruo jerked out of his cultivation. As the patriarch of the Twisted Blade Sect, he was more deeply connected with the sect than anyone would likely credit. He’d found that out that hard way when he’d usurped… That is to say, when he’d inherited the role from the previous patriarch. However, it meant he knew the moment that a foreign formation was activated inside the sect. It wasn’t one of the trifling formations that some idiot outer sect disciple had put together on their own time. It was powerful. Powerful enough to slap aside the suppressions that should have kept such a thing from happening. It was also massive. Zhan Shaoruo tried to understand how such a thing could have been installed inside of his sect without anyone knowing.

A cold moment of clarity struck him. The lurker. There had been that talk among the elders that someone who didn’t belong in the sect was there. He hadn’t been able to find them, though, which was troubling. Very little escaped the spiritual sense of nascent soul cultivators. He’d even set up that trap with Elder Mu. The awful old shrew had extorted him for several natural treasures, and it hadn’t even worked. After that failure, he’d convinced himself that it was just people's imaginations running away with them. Escaping his notice and her frankly unnerving ability was the next best thing to impossible. They’d just been jumping at shadows and reading too much into a lover’s quarrel gone wrong.

But if someone had set up a formation that large and powerful, he struggled to imagine who could have done it. Formations were tricky business, which was why he’d moved his sect away from such unreliable things. Oh, they still had a formation master or two in the sect, but he made sure they never forgot their place. Cultivators should be warriors, not a bunch of scholars hunched over scrolls and alchemy cauldrons. Setting up a formation that large, without anyone noticing, and without getting caught. The list of people that Zhan Shaoruo thought might be able to do it could be counted on three fingers, and he doubted they could have gone wholly unnoticed.

Whoever had done it and why they had done it was immaterial. It almost certainly meant as an attack. He needed to get back. He was just thankful that he hadn’t gone too far from the sect. The cave he’d been in had been an amazing find. Granted, it probably would have benefited the core cultivators in his sect more than it was benefitting him, but he was the patriarch. That meant he got first pick of everything. He raced to the entrance of the cave at speeds that would have rendered himself invisible to most eyes. The moment he exited the cave, he launched himself into the air only to jerk to a stop as someone unveiled their killing intent.