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.

The most pressing problem was something that Fu Ruolan had told him outright, and his other teachers had alluded to more than once. Advancing to the nascent soul stage wasn’t just a matter of accumulating enough qi in his core. If that was all it took, he’d have probably already advanced. Advancing to the nascent soul stage required a special kind of insight, an understanding of oneself, and he was not at all sure that he possessed that insight. If he tried to advance and didn’t have what he needed, he risked shattering his own core and killing the nascent soul within it. That wasn’t the only possibility. He might only crack the core, but even that was a problem with few solutions.

However, he couldn’t keep putting it off. The heavens had made it abundantly clear that they’d only put up with him procrastinating for so long. Beyond that, if he was going to become the tyrant that Master Feng seemed to think the kingdom needed, he needed to be a nascent soul cultivator. All of those patriarchs and matriarchs might pay lip service to the demands that Uncle Kho and Master Feng would be handing out, but Sen was certain that they’d balk when faced with the reality of taking orders from a core cultivator. It would wound their pride too much. It might gall them to take orders from a less advanced nascent soul cultivator, but he thought they might be able to stomach it. And that was all he really needed from them. Compliance. It didn’t have to be happy compliance or even particularly eager compliance, as long as they did what he asked them to do.

“I’ll have to try to advance,” said Sen. “Very soon.”

The thoughtful look on Falling Leaf’s face morphed into one of concern and even fear.

“Are you ready for that?” she asked.

That was the question wasn’t it. Am I ready?

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “What do you think?”

“The thing I learned from taking that pill is that some things are not worth the price you pay for them,” she said. “Now that I know what kind of misery you go through, I would tell you that it’s not worth the price. What will you get from it that you don’t have now?”

Sen frowned and said, “Legitimacy.”

“Legitimacy?” asked Falling Leaf. “I don’t know that word.”

“It means—” Sen paused.

He’d never really thought of the word in terms of a definition. He’d gleaned the meaning from reading it in history scrolls. Something that he knew that Falling Leaf had done, but not as extensively as he had. He tried to think of a way to put it in context for her.

“You might think of it claiming the right to lead in a way that others will recognize.”

“You’ve already done that. Look around.”

She wasn’t wrong. He was in charge in this little domain, but that wouldn’t mean much in the kingdom at large.

“I’ll need people like Uncle Kho and Auntie Caihong to bend to my will,” said Sen. “I don’t think they’ll do that for me as I am now.”

Falling Leaf was quiet for a time before she finally answered.

“If they will not follow you as you are now, why would you put yourself at risk? More power will not let you lead them better. You will not be smarter or wiser. If they will not bend, they should stand aside. The Feng has already decided that you will lead. Let them challenge his might if they are determined to be fools. It seems that you get nothing of value from pushing forward now.”

Sen blinked a few times as he processed those words. She had a point. He was basing this decision entirely on what other people would think of him. It might not be quite as simple as Falling Leaf thought it was, though. There was value in getting all those patriarchs and matriarchs on board. Taken as a whole, they were a force to be reckoned with. He also thought that they would need that strength before it was all over. Still, trying to break into the nascent soul realm just to get them to fall in line was a terrible reason to do it. He also hadn’t gotten any ominous feelings that the heavens were about to force the issue. That didn’t mean that it wasn’t about to happen any day now. He also didn’t like the idea of it happening at a time and place not of his choosing. But he believed that he would get some kind of warning beforehand.

He'd been making plans around pursuing that advancement, but he had been making some assumptions. He supposed it was possible that he was underestimating the sect leaders. They might prove less intractable than he was imagining. He didn’t think that was particularly plausible, but it was possible. It was more likely that he was underestimating just how much fear Fate’s Razor and the Living Spear were inspiring in all of those sects. If he were making the choice just for him, would he be doing it now? The answer was no. He didn’t feel ready. If it were five years earlier, he might have questioned himself over that hesitance. However, he’d long since moved beyond the place where he questioned his worthiness to advance. If he didn’t feel ready, it almost certainly meant that he wasn’t ready.

When it felt like a terrible constriction in his chest vanished, Sen realized just how much that choice had been weighing on him. He also realized that he’d made the decision. He would proceed as he was, and everyone else could either line up behind him or be cast aside. He’d take that next step when he was ready to advance or, he admitted to himself, when the heavens took the choice out of his hands.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?” asked Falling Leaf.

“For talking sense to me.”

“I always talk sense to you. You just don’t listen very well.”

Sen started to object and then snorted in amusement.

“Yeah, that’s probably true.”