Unintended Cultivator

Sen managed to impose one day of not being bothered with anything by anybody. It was a decision that would normally get a lot of resistance from all those people who were vying for attention and approval. In what seemed a spectacularly odd turn of events to him, Sua Xing Xing and Long Jia Wei put up a united front against everyone clamoring for just a few minutes of his time. It was surprisingly effective as discouragements went. Sen unofficially knew that Long Jia Wei had a reputation for dealing with annoyances that he considered beneath Lord Lu’s notice. A practice that usually involved cripplingly painful injuries and, if rumors were true, one or two suspicious disappearances. In short, everyone was afraid of the man. Sen couldn’t know about those things in an official capacity because then he would have to look into it and take corrective action. At least, that’s what Auntie Caihong had told him about how sects worked. It seemed that all patriarchs and matriarchs carried the unspoken duty to overlook such things.

Sua Xing Xing didn’t bring the same kind of intimidation to the table, but she had been positioning herself as… Sen didn’t know exactly what to call it. He thought the closest description was probably a trustworthy helper. He’d given her a few important tasks to deal with in spite of his early misgivings about the woman. She’d handled them all well. He’d reluctantly been forced to revise his opinion of her. She was a product of mortal lifetimes spent in a sect, where exchange was the name of the game. Juniors curried favor with seniors in the hope of preferential treatment that would help their advancement. It was a system that seemed far too well suited to the kinds of abuses that Sen knew happened in sects. As Master Feng had pointed out to him, though, most things in life worked that way.

The real question was about whether or not she was competent, and she was almost frighteningly competent. Either that or she was hideously motivated and made up for any failings with a lot of very hard work. The end results were generally the same. Pretending otherwise was a disservice to her, and willful, ignorant blindness on his part. She might be getting most of what she wanted from him, but he couldn’t afford to turn away reliable help. Sen might be a little uncomfortable with the situation but being anointed as one of his inner circle gave her a lot of pull with everyone who wasn’t so blessed. The combination of physical and social threats served to keep everyone else away.

Of course, that was also helped along by He Jietang deciding to conduct his classes outside and within sight of Sen’s home. When he’d recruited the man on Chan Dishi’s recommendation, Sen had more than a few reservations. He’d found a drunken He Jietang sitting outside a poorly maintained house in the capital. Lurking inside of the apparent husk of a person was a very skilled warrior. One who had seen a few too many battles and been forced to shed too much blood. Seeing that was something that jarred Sen’s sensibilities. It had been proof that not everyone was equipped for the quasi-immortality that cultivators enjoyed. Offering the man a job teaching instead of fighting had seemed to do the man good.

There was no way to know what He Jietang did in the privacy of his home, but he appeared healthy and in tight control of himself as he instructed those students. And if a few arrows went astray and landed between the feet of people clearly intent on bothering Sen, that was just a shame. Sua Xing Xing probably had a chat with him about this, thought Sen. It’s certainly an effective way to keep people at bay without simply posting guards to act as a deterrent. Everyone gets the message without anyone facing the public shame of being told to go away. Not that Sen would have hesitated to tell people to go away, shame or not. That one day was his reward, and he took full advantage of it.

He spent most of his time with Ai after prying her from the amused clutches of Auntie Caihong, Uncle Kho, and Master Feng. He listened to Ai talk about the minor adventures that she and Zhi had gone on under the watchful gazes of nascent soul cultivators and the terrifying sky monster known as Dancing Cloud. Zhi arrived later and retold most of the exact same stories to her “Uncle Sen” but from her own perspective. He smiled, nodded, asked a question here or there, and basked in the glow of their happiness. He even let himself be talked into going on an adventure.

That had mostly involved the girls taking him to a bakery that hadn’t existed when he’d left to retrieve Cao Kai-Ming’s villagers. It was clearly not their first visit to the bakery, either. Sen wasn’t sure exactly what gave it away. Maybe it was the kind smile the baker, a gray-haired woman with a no-nonsense attitude, bestowed them all. Maybe it was the way the girls immediately went to a specific rack of treats. Or, just maybe, it was the way the baker knew their names.

“Hello, Ai. Hello, Zhi.”

“Hello, Grandmother Zhan,” said the girls in unison.