Unintended Cultivator

Book 10: Chapter 44: Kindness in Unkind Times

While Sen worried constantly that the spirit beasts were going to attack at any minute, he recognized that for overactive paranoia. Yes, there were a lot of them out there. However, he’d also seen their work on the formation. It was well on its way, but it wasn’t done yet. His own work on a large-scale formation told him that it was slow work. The capital might not have a week. He was pretty sure they had a couple of days. That was time they’d need if they were going to have any hope at all of being ready. If there is such a thing as ready for what’s about to happen here, thought Sen.

Once the stupidity at the meeting had finally settled down, they’d actually managed to come up with some workable ideas. Most of those ideas were things that Sen didn’t need to take a direct hand in or where his presence would be little more than a hindrance. At the moment, the last remaining people in the towns and villages outside the city walls were being brought inside. The outer edges of the city were also being evacuated. Those ideas had come from the mortal contingent. Sen wouldn’t have thought of them, but they made sense. If some of the spirit beasts got over the walls, there was no reason to provide them with easy targets. Not that the people were happy about it.

“I don’t see why I have to leave my house!” shouted a skinny man with white hair.

A man in a city guard uniform showed far more patience than Sen would have been able to in the same circumstance. He listened as the old man ranted and raved and basically acted like a toddler. Sen had only come to watch the process. He’d just been curious how people were handling it. He’d hoped that most people were being cooperative, but this was the fourth time he’d seen a scene like this play out. At first, he thought people were just being stubborn, but an alternate explanation occurred to him. They don’t understand the threat, he realized. For Sen and most other cultivators, spirit beasts were a hard fact about the world. Cultivators saw them, fought them, and were even killed by them sometimes.

For most mortals, spirit beasts were little more than scary legends. Mortals who traveled a lot, such as merchants, caravaneers, and caravan guards, likely knew better. They were a relatively small group, all things considered. Those from villages and small towns were often better-informed, since they were more likely to come under attack from spirit beasts. Those mortals understood the dire threat that even a few spirit beasts could pose. For anyone who had lived their lives in the capital, though, they were just stories. Their fear of spirit beasts might be real, but it was also nebulous, unanchored by the harsh realities of witnessing them kill, or losing loved ones to their primal violence. Sen watched the old man berate the poor city guard for another minute before his patience ran out. He walked over to them, put his hand on the old man’s shoulder, and simply loomed.

“Wh…who…who are you?” asked the startled old man.

“I am Judgment’s Gale,” said Sen.

The old man’s eyes went very wide, and he stammered, “Wh…wh…what do you want?”

“I want you to live. Very soon, spirit beasts will attack this city. Monsters with teeth as sharp as daggers, poison in their blood, and claws as long as your arm may very well swarm over that wall,” said Sen, lifting his other hand and pointing at the nearby wall. “They will rip apart anyone they find. This very nice man is trying to take you somewhere that we’ll have a better chance of defending your life. I’d take it as a kindness if you let him. He needs to help many others today.”

“Thank you, elder,” said Sen and gave the man a small bow.

Sen watched the stunned old man go back into his home, presumably to pack up some necessities. He turned to look at the city guard, who was studying him out of the corner of his eye while trying desperately not to look like he was doing just that. Sen snorted in amusement.

“You were very patient with him,” said Sen.

The guard stopped pretending and looked at Sen directly. The man was clearly curious about what could have brought Judgment’s Gale to intervene in the situation. He also couldn’t quite seem to figure out how to ask the question.

Finally, the city guard shrugged and asked, “What else is there to do? I can’t very well have him dragged away.”

“You probably could,” noted Sen, “but you didn’t. I’m grateful you showed so much restraint.”

“I had grandparents. I thought about how I’d have wanted people to treat them in this disaster. Then, I did that.”

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Sen nodded and then summoned a small blue token from a storage ring. He offered it to the man, who took it with an uncertain look on his face.

“Lord Lu?”

“If you ever decide you want to do something other than be a city guard, present that token at Lu Manor. We always have a need for decent people.”

The man just stared at Sen for a long moment before he jerked into a deep bow.

“Thank you, Lord Lu!”

Sen reached out and gently pulled the man upright again.

“Thank you,” he told the city guard.

“For what?”

“For being kind in unkind times.”

Sen left the man to ponder those words as he went to check on one of the other major projects that was underway. As much as Sen didn’t care for most sect cultivators, he knew he couldn’t maintain a wholly antagonistic relationship with them. That was why he’d ultimately given Bey Peizhi another chance to contribute an idea during the meeting. He hadn’t expected much but the man had come through with at least a couple of solid ideas.

“Bey Peizhi,” Sen said.

The other cultivator did an admirable job of keeping his fear and anger in check when he looked at Sen and said, “Yes?”

Sen pointed at the map on the table and asked, “If this were your sect compound and you needed to defend it from possible attacks on all sides, what would you do?”

The man had considered the map with narrowed eyes for a long beat before he said, “The walls.”

“What about them?” Sen asked.

“If attackers are going to come from all sides, you need walls that can withstand the kinds of attacks they might throw at them. Clearly, no walls can endure forever, but I’d start there. Gather what earth cultivators I could find, and have them thicken and reinforce the walls. The longer they stand, the longer the defenders can hold the high ground. I’d rather hurl techniques down on a horde of spirit beasts from above than try to fight them in the streets.”

Sen, having once fought spirit beasts on the streets of an abandoned town, wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment. He nodded along and gave the man an encouraging look. That seemed to startle the other cultivator, who went back to studying the map. The man reached out and tapped several locations on the map. Sen wasn’t sure what those spots corresponded to in the real world.

“What’s there?” asked Sen.

“The city gates,” Jing supplied.

Bey Peizhi nodded and said, “The gates are the weak point in any wall. If we were fighting a human army or other cultivators, we could expect them to concentrate forces at those points. It’s a weakness, but it’s also an advantage since you know to concentrate your own forces there. With what we’re facing, though, they’re just a weakness. We should have earth cultivators seal them off with stone once we’re sure nothing and no one else needs to enter through them.”

Sen glanced at Jing, mostly to see if there was some problem with that idea, but the king gave a reluctant nod. Sen supposed the man wasn’t eager to trap himself inside the city, but they were trapped anyway. At least this idea would offer them superior defense. Sen considered the other cultivator for a moment before he reached a decision.

“Very well, those ideas will be your responsibilities. See to it. Make sure to ask the earth cultivators for other ideas. It is their specialty. They might think of something we haven’t. Tell them to be creative.”

Bey Peizhi’s eyes bulged a little at being handed the responsibility, but he nodded his agreement. Once those ideas had been accepted, other cultivators had started offering up suggestions that might actually be useful. While he’d accepted most of them, he was of the opinion that the walls were the most crucial, which was why he landed on top of the walls next to Bey Peizhi. The man was standing in the center of a buzzing hive of people coming and going, issuing orders, taking reports, and looking very focused. Sen walked into the center of that activity, and silence fell around him. Bey Peizhi noticed him and waved everyone back.

“Lord Lu,” said the other cultivator.

“Bey Peizhi. How are things proceeding?”

The other man grimaced and said, “Slower than I’d like. One of the earth cultivators made a very good point that some spirit beasts live underground. That meant we needed to make a change of plans. We need to extend the walls down before we extend them out. Otherwise, we might well end up with creatures coming up from below.”

That was something else that Sen hadn’t considered. While it wasn’t necessarily likely, it was too plausible to ignore.

“A wise change, I think. Are there any other problems?”

“Stone,” said Bey Peizhi. “There’s only so much of it to harvest in the nearby ground. The earth cultivators are exhausting themselves dragging it in. We need it to do the work on the wall, but we also need them to have enough energy to do the work on the wall.”

Sen couldn’t quite understand the problem at first. There was almost endless stone in the ground if you went deep enough. Then, he realized his mistake. Just because he could get at that stone, it didn’t mean that everyone could. Even in a city this size, there were only going to be so many earth cultivators in the core formation and nascent soul stage. And only some of them would prove able to reach those deep places in the earth. Everyone else would have to work with what they could get closer to the surface. Well, I guess I know what I’m doing for the next few hours, thought Sen. Walking over to the edge of the wall, he closed his eyes and reached a hand out into the empty air. He sank his qi and his awareness down into the deep, dark places of the world. For the next ten minutes, he dragged stone up to the surface. When he opened his eyes again, there was a minor mountain of stone right outside the walls.

“There, that should help,” said Sen.

Bey Peizhi looked from the Sen to the stone and back again. The man remained slack-jawed for several seconds before giving his head a hard shake.

“It will certainly be helpful for this part of the wall,” said the Lunar Tiger Sect elder, “but the entire wall needs additional stone.”

Sen cocked his head at the man before he said, “I’m not just going to do that here. What do you think? Will every thousand feet or so be sufficient?”