Book 9: Chapter 56: A Cleansing Fire
Sen only got a few steps away from the inert pair before he stopped. He looked back at them. He’d mostly excluded the woman from his killing intent, only maintaining enough pressure on her to ensure she remained immobile. She’d been unconscious to begin with, so he didn’t expect that it would take much to keep her that way. He had been surprised to discover that he actually had enough control to do that, though. It was something he’d been working on where he could, but it generally wasn’t safe to practice with it at the levels he’d been employing in the Twisted Blade Sect. The kind of pressure he was exerting would have killed almost everyone at his own sect.
Even recognizing that was enough to make him shake his head. The strength of his killing intent might be something that a particularly talented cultivator at his level of advancement could plausibly achieve. Maybe. It was, however, something that no one his age should have available to them. He certainly didn’t trust himself with it. He didn’t imagine he would trust any other cultivator with it, either. So, maybe it was just as well that he was the one who had it and not them. He frowned as he looked at the pair he had decided to spare, mostly at the behest of the heavens. He considered the people he could still feel nearby. He turned his gaze skyward.
“Is there anyone else you want spared?” he asked.
He waited for some indication that the heavens had heard him. They weren’t usually subtle, so he was looking for colossal storm clouds and listening for earth-rattling thunder. No sign of heavenly intervention made itself known to him. He cocked an eyebrow.
“I’m serious. If you want me to not kill anyone else here, now is the time to let me know.”
Sen was putting on annoyed air, but there was a part of him that truly feared divine retribution if he executed someone that the heavens meant to live. The problem was that the heavens didn’t always bother to let him know about their intention beforehand. A fact that had brought much unwitting hardship down on him. When the heavens remained silent on the matter, he took it as at least tacit permission to finish what he had started. He didn’t make a spectacle of it. He didn’t rouse anyone from unconsciousness just so they could witness their incoming death. It was brutal work but that didn’t mean it had to be sloppy or more vindictive than necessary. Sen made his way from one insensate enemy to the next and sent them back into the cycle of reincarnation as swiftly as he could. He was a little relieved that most of the work was done. He knew that some people were sheltering in the handful of buildings he hadn’t loaded with poison. They would have to be dealt with, but that wasn’t his primary concern at the moment.
He turned to face toward the innermost part of the sect, where the elders had lived. It was nearly as lifeless as the rest of the sect had become, but it wasn’t devoid of life the way he had hoped it would be. I guess it would have been too easy if all of the elders had died, he thought. Those three remnant sparks of life were part of the reason he’d sent Glimmer of Night away. He’d genuinely expected them to move him when he started cutting down the last of the inner sect disciples and core members. It’s what elders who were worth a damn would have done, he fumed. I guess that’s part of why I’m here, though, isn’t it?
The kind of mindset that let this sect prey on other sects for invented reasons or no reason at all had to have been supported by the leadership. The people who would enable and enforce that mindset were not people who cared all that much about what happened to their juniors. They might have been angry enough to stay. They presumably did so with a mind to killing him in revenge, but it wouldn’t be in revenge for their juniors. It would be in revenge for destroying their power base. Revenge for costing them status. Since they hadn’t attacked him immediately, though, it made him wonder if they hadn’t escaped his trap unscathed.
Sen had been very liberal with the poisons and toxins he’d placed to destroy the elders. Even brief or indirect exposure would have been enough to give them problems. Of course, those same poisons and toxins would be equally, if not more, effective against him if he came into contact with them in an unmanaged space like the sect. While he had used safeguards that went well beyond paranoid when making them, he couldn’t exert anything remotely like that level of control here. That was why Sen had a long talk with Uncle Kho about the design of the sect-spanning formation he meant to use.