Unintended Cultivator

There was nothing around him for miles in any direction save for the wilds. He’d sensed a few spirit beasts as he approached the semi-barren spot, but they had fled the moment he let a little of his killing intent slip free. He was relatively sure that they were low-level spirit beasts, rather than the sapient ones that were leading the charge against humanity. He’d entertained the idea of killing them, but they weren’t the ones who had roused his ire, and he couldn’t work up the motivation to chase them all down. Two weeks. It had been two weeks since word of his attack against the spirit beasts had jolted the waning fighting spirit of humanity across the kingdom. What a disappointment those two weeks turned out to be, thought Sen as he landed.

He stood trembling with barely suppressed fury as he thought about what the humans had been doing in that time. He didn’t understand. It’s so obvious, he thought. How can they not see it? How can they not see that they have to stand together? While there had been that surge in hope he’d been aiming for, it hadn’t ended with humanity banding together. Instead, he was hearing reports of sects setting up their own little kingdoms, often at the end of a blade. The mortal cities were doing practically nothing to coordinate with each other, despite his best efforts.

“At this rate,” muttered Sen, “we’ll never survive. It’s like they want to die.”

His open palm slammed into a boulder the size of an ox. The stone shattered, leaving only gravel that was spread out over a hundred-foot area. He grabbed another, larger boulder, heaved it up over his head, and hurled it into the distance with a wordless shout. He didn’t normally indulge in such recklessness, but there was nothing out there but more of the wilds. Anything that particular boulder landed on was likely to be something he either didn’t care about or wanted dead anyway. It wasn’t enough, though. He spun toward another boulder and lashed out at it with his foot. It exploded under the force and sent deadly projectiles hurtling in every direction. Not enough, he fumed. He needed to give some of this pent-up frustration somewhere to go, some way out of him.

His fists and feet flew at speeds that would have made them invisible to mortal eyes. He’d smashed a dozen more boulders before he realized that it simply wasn’t helping. He was just brutalizing innocent stone when he wanted to be beating sense into the rest of the idiotic human race. He leaned back against one of the few boulders that had escaped his wrath and slid down until he was sitting on the ground. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d expected someone to step forward, to take charge, to unify humanity against this threat. That was what happened in all of those stories he’d half-heard as a child. Wasn’t it? Maybe not. Maybe he’d misunderstood or just heard what he wanted to hear.

Instead, whatever semblance of order and civilization that there had been was ripping apart at the seams like a poorly made shirt. I never understood how fragile our society really was, thought Sen. I never imagined it would take so little to bring us to our knees. The rules had all seemed to be set in stone in those days. There were peasants. There were nobles. There was the king and armies. And, of course, there were the cultivators. Those otherworldly masters of terrifying magic and unspeakable strength. Finally, there were the people nobody wanted. People like him. Looking up toward the peak from the bottom of the mountain, from the place where there were more dead than living, the nobles, the king, and the cultivators had seemed immovable. Unconquerable. Invincible. He had thought them impossibly wise beyond anything he could know. It turned out, they were all fools too.

“I wondered how long it would take,” said Master Feng as he landed on top of the boulder that Sen was leaning against.

“You wondered how long what would take?” asked Sen, his voice weary.

“I wondered how long it would take for you to realize that they were never going to do it on their own.”