Unintended Cultivator

Sen winced as he saw the aftermath of the fight with the beast tide in the full light of day. He’d put it off as long as he dared. It wasn’t until after Ai had woken up, shrieked in delight at seeing Falling Leaf awake, and eventually been passed off to Auntie Caihong that he’d ventured out to get a good look at things. At seeing it, he wished he’d found a way to wait even longer. There were dead spirit beasts everywhere outside the town. That was something he knew would need to be remedied and quickly, or entirely new problems would start to crop up. Rotting bodies, however qi-rich they might have been in life, were still rotting bodies. That could be a good thing for the soil in measured doses. Hundreds and hundreds of them posed a serious threat to the health of the people. Minimally, it would draw scavengers by the score, including abundant rodents. Rodents would make their way into town and become a source of diseases.

All of those rotting bodies could also contaminate the water supply. He was still a bit hazy about exactly what caused the contamination, but he didn’t need to understand it to know that it could happen. Of course, they could simply be destroyed en masse. The townspeople wouldn’t care, but the cultivators might riot. While the bodies themselves were a problem, many of them contained cores or other valuable parts that even Sen couldn’t readily ignore. Resources of all kinds were about to get very thin on the ground, which meant that they had to gather what they could. If they’d been quicker about it, some of those spirit beasts were even edible. They could have butchered them and preserved the meat for later use.

Sen knew that the slow response was partly his fault. He’d been so eager to get back and talk with Falling Leaf that he’d only given out a few half-baked orders and then disappeared. It stood to reason that someone else could have taken charge, but he doubted that any of them had been thinking about potential food shortages in the direct aftermath of the battle. It’s too late now, he thought. I’ll have to do better next time. The things he kept trying to avoid and that his eyes were inevitably drawn to were the huge tracts of the surrounding forests that no longer existed. The land was still there, but the trees and most of the vegetation were gone. He’d been so angry about the attack and the timing of the attack that he’d been rather indiscriminate with his use of fire.

There had been lots of spirit beasts in those areas, and most of them had fared no better than the trees. He expected that the ground there was all but littered with cores. I’ll have to make sure that those are collected and sorted, he thought. Glimmer of Night will need them if we’re going to make all of the communication cores I expect that we’ll need. Of course, that was only a partial solution to the communication problem. Sen had wanted to keep to a tight grip over the production and use of those specialized cores, but that approach came with its own problems. They had become the sole hub for receiving and sending messages. It made them indispensable, but it also meant that Glimmer of Night was more or less chained to that little building. The problem of managing the ever-growing web of cores was still interesting to the spider-kin, but it wasn’t a long-term fix.

They needed a better way of dealing with it, or at least a way that didn’t require Glimmer of Night to be present on a daily basis. As important as it was, it also kept him from doing anything else, and Sen suspected that they had not yet begun to tap the creative things that spider might dream up if given more free time. Sen wanted those innovations. More importantly, he feared they would need them just to survive. Falling Leaf made a small noise, and he glanced at her. She had joined him on top of the wall around the town to see what he’d done the night before. She wore a thoughtful expression.

“You were right. You did clear some land,” observed Falling Leaf.

“Yeah,” said Sen, feeling a little embarrassed all over again.

It truly had been overkill. Of course, the attack had also shaken Sen loose from a sort of complacency he’d been experiencing. For all that he’d known that war was coming and tried to prepare for it, it had also been abstract for him. A thing that was happening but happening elsewhere. Now that the violence had truly found its way to his doorstep, a sense of urgency had blossomed inside of him. He couldn’t keep dragging his feet anymore. Not with the war, and not with taking the next step in his advancement. That second part galled him a little. He’d been prepared to wait to push into the nascent soul stage for as long as possible for more than one reason.

The first was simply that he hated to be rushed into something like that by forces larger than himself. He’d been pushed into advancements way too early for far too long. He’d gotten lucky enough to avoid some of the worst problems, such as an unstable foundation, but he hadn’t avoided the problem of unfamiliarity with his own power. Now, if he did advance, he’d be starting over again, trying to understand what an initial nascent soul cultivator could really do. Of course, that wasn’t the real problem or, rather, that wasn’t the most pressing problem.