Unintended Cultivator

Book 10: Chapter 19: Something You Can Live With

The next few days were a flurry of activity, at least for Sen and Auntie Caihong. Much like the question of whether he should help the cultivators in his sect advance, there was an equally problematic question that Sen had been willfully ignoring for some time. Should he help the mortals who were hovering on the cusp of becoming cultivators make that leap? From the perspective of coming and ongoing conflict with the spirit beasts, the answer was obviously yes. His conscience told him something else altogether. He wouldn’t be giving them some kind of miraculous opportunity to elevate themselves and their families. That would have been the case in different times when these mortals would have had time to grow into their new strength and advance at a sane pace. Now, they would be expected to fight.

Sen knew from his extensive reading that war was not kind to either foot soldiers or the lowest ranks of cultivators. It wasn’t that their commanders were careless, although that was sometimes true. It was simple numbers. These newly minted cultivators would be expected to fight against spirit beasts who would likely match or exceed them in strength and outnumber them. Learned skill and coordinated support could help smaller forces overcome numerically superior foes. Yet, it was always a fraught proposition with victory constantly balanced an a jian’s edge. A single misstep and the battle was lost. Even without mistakes to hamper them, such victories always came at a cost in blood. That was the opportunity that Sen would be offering them. The opportunity to die in a war that humanity might be doomed to lose anyway.

For all of that, he couldn’t quite bring himself to decide that he wouldn’t make the offer. There would be many who would curse him for not letting them make that choice for themselves. Others would curse him for not seizing every possible resource to achieve victory. He could live with the latter if it came down to it. He wasn’t sure he could live with the former. Cultivation was risk, it was true, but it was also about choices. The choice of what risks to take and when. The choice of pursuing ascension or accepting the lesser reward of a life that eclipsed a mortal one in a thousand ways great and small. The choice to wander or to seal oneself away inside a sect for decades or centuries at a time.

Sen knew that he could argue that it was his choice whether or not to kindle cultivation inside those mortals, but that was a liar’s logic. He felt empowered to make such a choice for himself but was not empowered to make that choice for everyone else. Cultivation did not belong to him and him alone. The right to fight was not his solitary and exclusive domain. He could warn them of the realities but that was as far as his choice could go. Every man and woman would have to make the final decision for themselves. As they should, he thought a little wearily. I can’t bear that choice for them.

So, he threw himself into alchemy. It wasn’t even difficult alchemy. Well, it wasn’t difficult for him and Auntie Caihong. After all of his mad experimentation on himself, the insights he had gained, and tutelage from not one but two nascent soul alchemists, the prospect of making pills and elixirs that could ignite the fire of cultivation in someone’s dantian was almost trivial. Unlike so many things in alchemy, this work didn’t require that he make something specifically for every person. In fact, it couldn’t be done that way because there was no way to know what kind of affinities a person would have before they took those first few halting steps into cultivation. The challenge was simply making pills that could fuel that ignition for most affinities.

Sen had a much broader view of affinities than many cultivators, so his version of the elixir was far more complex than something a sect alchemist might devise. They would make something that could fuel any of the common affinities of earth, fire, wood, water, and metal. Sen’s version included much less common affinities, such as lightning, shadow, and wind. In a perfect world, it would have included dozens of potential affinities, but he lacked the time and resources to produce such things in quantity. It rankled him a bit, but he contented himself with making something that was only vastly superior to something a sect alchemist might do instead of miraculously better. It never even occurred to him that he burned through several fortunes worth of alchemy resources to achieve results he found only barely acceptable.

“You shouldn’t look so dissatisfied with your work,” noted Auntie Caihong as she filled another stone vial and stoppered it.

“It isn’t—” he hesitated. “It isn’t what it could be.”

“So, you’re not satisfied with crafting something that would make half the alchemists on the continent weep blood? You won’t be happy until you make them all weep blood?”

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“That’s very thoughtful of you. Are you sure you want to do this, though?”

“No, but certainty has been in rather short supply lately. I’m not convinced that there is a right answer to this problem. There are just available answers, and what I can live with.”

“You’ll find that’s the case for a distressingly large number of things now.”

“Because of the war?” asked Sen.

“Because of your advancement. You’re so close to the nascent soul realm that you’re functionally operating as one of us. When cultivators are chasing that goal, the world is divided pretty cleanly. There are the things you can do, and the things you can’t do. Some of them are decided by how much power you have, and the rest are decided by those with more power. As a nascent soul cultivator, at least one as strong as you are, there’s very little you can’t do, and very few people with the strength to tell you that you can’t do something. Your range of available choices becomes very wide. So, what you do often boils down to what you can live with.

“In this case, you can take a group of mortals that probably wouldn’t ever fully step into cultivation and make them cultivators. In doing so, you are consigning them to all of the agonies that go with being a cultivator. You’re doing it with full knowledge of what that pain is like. It says something about you that this is something you can live with.”

Sen didn’t hear any judgment in her voice. Even so, he couldn’t help but feel a little judged. He was pretty sure that feeling was coming from inside himself, but he had to know.

“It says something about me,” he muttered. “Something bad?”

“Bad? No, not bad. Not good, either. It says something about how far you’ve come and the way your perspective has changed,” she said and smiled at him. “It also says something about how it hasn’t changed.”

“The Sen of ten years ago would never have considered this. You would have tallied up all of the pain you went through and were going through. Then, you would have decided that you couldn’t ever do that to someone else. It would have seemed very right and moral to you.”

Sen winced at that pronouncement, mostly because it was so accurate. He would have thought something just like that and felt proud of himself for being so moral. Except, that was a child’s way of thinking. To see the world through the lens of his own pain and assume his reactions were the correct ones. Life just wasn’t that simple. Not that he believed he’d escaped that trap entirely. It was almost inevitable that he was still doing things just like that, but he hadn’t grown enough to recognize it when it happened. ṜᴀΝọ𝐛Еŝ

“I can’t disagree with that,” he said.

“Of course, you’ve also had this idea for a long time that people should make their own choices. Now, you’re letting that take the lead. It’s not necessarily a better way of handling things, but it does show that you’re putting a higher priority on letting people choose their own courses through life. Like I pointed out. It says something about you.”

The feeling of being judged had fallen away. Sen wasn’t even sure why he’d imagined that Auntie Caihong was judging him. It wasn’t usually her way to fall into that kind of behavior, save for when she and Master Feng got serious about wounding each other. He was thankful that they usually kept things at the level of occasional caustic remarks and childish insults. His life would be much more difficult if those two really went at each other on a regular basis. Fortunately, they seemed to have found some reliable common ground in their overprotective love for Ai and a mutual belief that any threat to her should suffer unspeakably before finally being allowed to die. It was grim common ground, but Sen was more than willing to overlook that part and take the victory. Sen idly reached out and picked up one of the many vials set out on the work table.

“Such a small thing to bring about such a change in someone’s life,” he murmured.

“In my experience, life is an accumulation of small things all stacked up on top of each other,” said Auntie Caihong. “We’re usually just too distracted to notice it until all those little things add up to something profound.”

“Like what?”

“A family. A town. A sect,” said Auntie Caihong, sweeping her hand in an all-encompassing sort of way.

“A war?” asked Sen.

“Yes. Even a war.”

“Do you think we can win?”@@novelbin@@

“There’s always a chance at victory. I think the more important question is, can we win without losing?”

“What do you mean?”

“War is ugly. I know you’ve seen little glimpses of it. You know the toll that violence can take on people. War amplifies all of that. It’s all too easy to enter a war as one person and end it as someone you don’t know, even someone you hate. If we all become something we hate to achieve victory, I’m not sure what that will mean for humanity moving forward.”

Sen felt his hand tighten around the vial until the stone threatened to shatter. He hastily put it back down on the work table.

“I can’t be responsible for that,” he finally said. “I don’t even know if I can ensure humanity survives war. I can’t be responsible for safeguarding their souls as well. That’s too much to put on any one person.”

“It is, but someone has to be thinking about it.”

“Someone, perhaps,” said Sen. “But not me.”

“If not you, then who?”

Sen rubbed at his face with both hands before he finally found a suitable response.

“I say we saddle that sky monster that Ai rides with the task. It looks like it has a strong back or shell as the case may be.”

Auntie Caihong gave him an incredulous look before she laughed.

“Very well. The sky monster gets the job. So, when will you give the mortals the good news?”

“There’s no point in dragging out the decision. We’ve already made the elixirs, after all. I’ll do it in the morning.”