Unintended Cultivator

While Sen knew that he could activate his qinggong technique or fly himself on a qi platform to get back to the mostly destroyed sect compound, he couldn’t seem to rouse the ambition. He’d been focused and even domineering with Yunhan and Liwen, but he’d done that out of pure, brutal, unadulterated necessity. Now, there was no necessity to drive him to do anything. The Twisted Blade Sect was no more. Whatever survivors that had been left in the compound were either dead or fleeing for the perceived safety of that golden land called anywhere else. There were still the libraries to sweep clean and alchemical components to claim. Whatever urgency he’d felt about those things before felt distant and held no power to compel him to increase his speed.

He just walked. It wasn’t even the miles-consuming pace of a cultivator. He walked as he had walked as a younger and much cleaner man on the streets of Orchard’s Reach. Whatever filth he'd carried then could be washed away with water. He feared washing himself clean of this would take things more profound and deeds more profoundly difficult than standing in the rain or jumping in a river. As his slow steps carried him to and through the gaping hole in the compound wall, that same sense of hollowness he’d felt in the aftermath of Elder Mu’s death threatened to overtake him. It was all-consuming and seemed to bleed the color and vibrancy out of everything. Every motion felt like it took twice the energy it should.

He stopped when he found Glimmer of Night. The spider had either taken everything he wanted already or hadn’t wanted anything at all. Instead of picking through the handful of standing buildings, he was making massive webs that covered huge portions of the sect’s grounds. Sen watched the work for a while, uncaring about how long he stood there. Glimmer of Night eventually came over and spoke to him. Sen didn’t really register the words, but he felt his mouth open and words fell out. They must have been coherent enough to satisfy the low bar of spider social interaction because Glimmer of Night returned to his web project. Sen made a huge mental effort and walked deeper into the sect. He found Falling Leaf sitting on a large rock that didn’t look like it had always been there. She was scowling at what looked like a cultivation manual. The sight was jarring enough that it brought Sen back to his senses.

“What are you glaring at that manual?” he asked.

She looked up at him, her face brightening for a moment before the scowl returned. She shook the manual in a way that made Sen want to cringe a little.

“Because this is foolishness,” she declared. “No wonder human cultivators are all mad.”

Sen frowned. Manuals could be obtuse at times. He’d seen that himself. Even so, he had to wonder if this was Falling Leaf applying ghost panther logic to human cultivation. He walked over and sat on the rock next to her. He held out his hand. Falling Leaf seemed almost eager for him to take it.

“Yes. Look! Look at the insanity!” she almost shouted.

He didn’t even have a chance to open the manual himself before she lost patience and did it for him. She pointed emphatically at the first page. Mentally shrugging, he read the first page. At least, he thought he did. The manual did contain words. He knew them all. They had just been arranged in a way that seemed designed to aggravate anyone who expected words arranged together to have coherent meanings. Maybe I didn’t read it closely enough, he thought. I’m not at my best right now. Shaking his head, he started over. After he finished his second read, and then his third through the first page, he started scowling at the manual.

Sen looked up in shock. He’d been so busy fuming about the idiocy in the manual that he hadn’t even noticed the elder cultivator arrive.

“Because this is foolishness,” Sen said, borrowing Falling Leaf’s completely accurate description.

Sen didn’t even need any prompting before he thrust the manual at Uncle Kho. The older man took the manual, glanced through most of the pages, frowned deeply, and shook his head. Then, with a crackle of lightning, he destroyed the manual. Sen stared at the other cultivator in pure shock. He knew the kind of care and reverence Uncle Kho had for books, manuals, and scrolls. To see him destroy one felt like…Sen didn’t know what it felt like. It seemed like a pillar of truth that supported his entire world had just collapsed. Uncle Kho saw the stupefied horror in Sen’s expression and laughed.

“Don’t look so appalled. That manual was garbage. It was proof that some people have no business being cultivators, let alone writing manuals. There was one vaguely useful insight in the whole thing, and not nearly useful enough to ever inflict that manual on another person. That was a service to cultivation as a whole.”

Sen glanced over at Falling Leaf who looked ecstatic that her declaration about the stupidity of the manual had been fully validated by Uncle Kho. I guess she earned that, thought Sen. It did make it clear that all about the manuals he was about to take out of the libraries would need to be reviewed. The thought made him feel even more tired for a moment, but the more he thought about it, the less unhappy he became. It would probably prove interesting. He would almost have to pick up some good ideas and maybe even techniques. More than that, though, the manuals should be reviewed. Just because this sect kept them around, it didn’t mean they were good. Uncle Kho’s destruction of one was proof enough of that. It was also evidence that he shouldn’t let the people in his sect have unrestricted access to them. There was no reason to make it easy for people to pick a bad path.

The rest of the day was spent extracting valuables from the sect. Sen resisted the urge to look at any of the manuals in either of the libraries. He’d end up standing around for days and not getting anything done. Instead, he simply walked up and down the rows of shelves, putting everything in a storage ring. He made himself keep a swift pace for that. He was more selective when he finally got around to looking at the sect’s alchemy resources. Many of the medicinal herbs and reagents they had on had were, in Sen’s informed opinion, lousy. He wouldn’t have even bothered to collect many of them. He did keep some of the best cauldrons he came across, though. He could let Fu Ruolan and Auntie Caihong pick out any that they wanted. He’d even keep a couple for himself. They weren’t his favorite things, but they were useful tools. Depriving himself of high-quality tools was foolish.

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As he’d moved around from building to building, Sen had sensed something he wasn’t enthusiastic about. It seemed he’d underestimated just how durable storage treasures and even a handful of regular cultivation treasures could be. There a lot of them scattered through the remains of the sect. He even felt some of them trapped in the slagged rock that used to be buildings. He gave a lot of thought to just leaving them where they were. Except, he knew that other cultivators would come here, looking to pick over the carcass of the Twisted Blade Sect on the off-chance that there were treasures waiting to be found. If Sen didn’t retrieve them, this place would become a battleground all over again. He didn’t want that. This place had seen enough battle and death in his opinion. The idea of going through all of those storage rings, however, ground him to another halt.

That was how Falling Leaf found him. Standing still and staring down at a piece of stone that had a storage treasure trapped inside of it. He knew she was there. He could feel her watching him. He didn’t want to tell her what was going on, but he didn’t want to keep that secret to himself either. Those two conflicting impulses vied for supremacy in his head, but it was Falling Leaf. He wouldn’t lie to her, and he knew she wanted to know. He didn’t look her way. He just opened his mouth and explained. She came over to look at the rock while she thought about it.

“Why must you sort through the contents?” she asked in confusion.

Sen blinked a few times and looked at her.

“What?” he asked.

“You have a sect. There are many people there. Make it a task for one of them if you don’t wish to do it.”

Sen felt like he’d been struck by lightning. It was so obvious, and it had just never occurred to him. There were reasons for him to sort through some of them. If he handed over a core formation cultivator’s ring to a qi-condensing or foundation formation cultivator, there would be a lot more temptation involved than he thought would be fair. There was honesty, and there was advancement. Asking early-stage cultivators to just hand over treasures or resources that could help propel them forward was probably expecting too much. All the storage treasures from the outer disciples’ area, though. He could hand those off without hesitation. If some low-grade resources ended up in someone’s pocket, Sen honestly didn’t care.

With that now settled as his plan, he was able to get started with the gathering. He was a bit surprised that Falling Leaf accompanied him for all of it. It was boring work, even if he was cheating left and right to speed the process along. He suspected that she’d sensed more of his state of mind than he’d meant to let slip. She always had tended to stick closer to him when she was worried that he was hurting more than he let on. Granted, that had usually meant being physically injured, but she wasn’t stupid. Her understanding of humans was incomplete, and her feelings often seemed alien to him, but that didn’t prevent her from understanding that something was wrong with him. Even if she couldn’t explain it to someone else, she could keep an eye on him. He might have felt exasperated by the action some other time, but he found her presence a soothing comfort.

When he’d gathered everything that he meant to gather, Sen finally made his way to the patriarch’s manor. Uncle Kho had been spending most of his time there studying the formations. Sen would have liked to have done the same. Those formations had been complicated and interesting. After sorting through the wreckage, though, he just yearned to be done with this compound. He wanted to go home. He wanted to hug his daughter for about a hundred years and listen to her tell him about every single bug her birds had eaten since he left. Uncle Kho took one look at him and saw it all. He nodded at Sen and started dismantling those protections like they meant nothing.

“It’s open now,” said Uncle Kho.

Sen looked at the former patriarch’s home and… He just couldn’t make himself go in there and take everything. He knew he should. The best resources and treasures would be in there. His sect could use them, but that idea caused a flash of anger to surge inside of him. I think I’ve done enough things I didn’t want to do for my sect’s benefit, he snarled in his head. He wrestled with that anger and managed to push it down. He decided that one more thing wouldn’t actually make a difference. He made himself start to walk toward the building, but Uncle Kho put a restraining hand on his shoulder to stop him. Sen looked at the other man. He could feel the blankness on his own face. He could sense the deadness in his own eyes.

“I’ll do it,” said Uncle Kho in a gentle voice.

Sen looked down. The relief was so powerful that it took all of his self-control not to cry again.

“Thank you,” he choked out.

An hour later, Sen stood outside the compound wall staring in. Uncle Kho, Falling Leaf, and Glimmer of Night had walked a little farther away. They were waiting for him to do whatever he thought was best. Sen roused his qi. Pillars of fire burst into life inside the remaining buildings. He waited until they were as thoroughly destroyed as the rest, and then doused the fire. He bled away the lingering heat. He didn’t want to start a fire that swept through the grass and forests for hundreds of miles. At least, he didn’t want to do that yet. There might come a day when he’d use that tactic against the spirit beasts, but it would be on purpose. He cycled earth qi and shattered the walls. The stone was swiftly swallowed by the earth. Sen looked around one last time.

Anyone passing by might realize that something had stood in this place once, but nature would reclaim the land. Flowers would grow. Trees would take root. A place of death would become a place of life again, soon enough. It wasn’t the balance that Sen had searched for so imperfectly and so fruitlessly before his life had overtaken even that ambition, but it was still balance. He turned away from the place that had been the source of so much fresh pain and walked over to the others. He silently made a qi platform and Falling Leaf jumped onto it. Uncle Kho and Glimmer of Night made their own. Sen didn’t plan on setting a grueling place on the way back. As much as he wanted to rush the entire way, he knew he needed a little time. He had to ground himself, find a more familiar version of himself, before he saw Ai again. Three qi platforms rose into the air and flew north.

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