Unintended Cultivator

“I don’t know what to do,” said Lo Meifeng.

Lu Sen remained as still and as silent as he had since he’d been brought back to the manor. At first, she had seen it as her first duty to protect the manor and the people inside of it. Or, at the very least, to protect Lu Jia. She was Sen’s family. The person that he would most want to see defended. After he’d been brought back in this coma, the realities were not lost on her. Someone would see it as an opportunity to remove a dangerous piece from the board. It would be a hideously stupid and self-destructive thing to do, but people were often stupid when it came to any perceived opportunity to increase their own power.

She also wasn’t so stupid as to believe that the manor defenses would prove sufficient to prevent such an assassination attempt. They were terrifying, but they couldn’t prevent someone who was already inside the manor from killing him. There were plenty of Xie family members remaining who might not be ready to kill him out of pure revenge, but who might be willing to try it for revenge and money. So, she’d taken keeping him alive as her new primary role, with protecting everyone else in the manor as an important but secondary role.

As the siege had dragged on for days and the deaths mounted, she had started to question her own reasoning. Rather, she’d started to question how Sen would interpret her reasoning. She wondered if he would have rather had her out in the city, doing what she could to protect the rest of the people. She wasn’t one of those nascent soul powerhouses, but she’d been inching up toward peak core formation for a while now. A feat achieved in no small part because of that house he’d just given to her. A house positively littered with those impossible qi-concentrating formations.

She didn’t know how much time he’d shaved off of her cultivation growth, but she suspected it could be measured in decades. Maybe more. Not that he’d appreciate that magnitude of that, she thought. That growth meant that she could probably kill anything that was on her own level or weaker. If she got a chance to ambush them, she might even be able to do some real damage to something stronger than her. Ambushes were something of a specialty of hers, but these were not ideal circumstances. She was used to being a dagger in the dark, not navigating true battlefields. Pure inexperience would put her at a severe disadvantage if the spirit beasts did manage to get inside the city.

Lo Meifeng took a deep breath as she recognized the problem. She was letting fear masquerade as indecision. At this point, though, not acting could help bring about the destruction that Sen had been so clearly desperate to prevent. Even Shi Ping was out there fighting, assuming he wasn’t dead already. She still didn’t know for sure what he would have wanted her to do, but she knew what he would do, what he would be doing at that very moment if he was awake to do it. He would be fighting. She frowned as the unmistakable presences of nascent soul cultivators flew out of the city and started fighting. It twinged some instinct deep inside of her that told her something bad was about to happen. She couldn’t keep delaying.

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“I don’t know if you can hear me, but I hope so,” she said to Sen. “I don’t know what has a hold on you right now, but you need to put it in its place. I need you to wake up and do what you always do. I need

With that, she opened the door and stepped out into the hall. There were a dozen people in that hall. Her people. People she had chosen and at least started to train. They weren’t terribly powerful, but they were all cultivators. That should make them more than a match for any mortal threats. She didn’t think there were any hostile cultivators inside the manor, at least. She looked around at those calm faces.

“No one but myself and Lady Lu are to enter this room,” she ordered.

There was a quick round of shallow bows.

“Will you not be present, senior?” asked a plain-faced young foundation formation cultivator she’d enticed away from a small sect that had no idea how to use his talents.

“I will be out in the city.”

“Why?” asked the same one.

“Because Lord Lu was willing to kill himself to protect it. How will I ever explain to him that I let the city fall without even trying to stop it?”

“Then, let us accompany you,” said the young man, determination on his face.

“How would I ever explain to Lady Lu that I let her grandson get killed because he had no protection?” she posed as a mostly rhetorical question.

The mere thought of that level of wrath was enough to make every face in the hallway go pale. Still, she thought, it might not be a terrible idea to have someone to watch my back. She considered the pros and cons for a moment before she pointed at the one who had spoken.

“You. Come with me.”

The young cultivator straightened a little and almost shouted, “Yes, senior!”

There were mixed looks of envy and relief on the other faces. She couldn’t blame the ones who looked relieved. If spirit beasts got inside the walls, the manor was one of the safest places in the city. Of course, that safety would be temporary if the capital was truly overrun. It was still profoundly safer than voluntarily abandoning the manor for the city at large. She was almost to the front doors before a voice called out to her.

“Are you going out there?” asked Lu Jia.

Lo Meifeng didn’t look back when she said, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“It’s what he would do.”

There was a long moment of silence before Lo Meifeng heard the other woman sigh.

“He would do something that reckless,” said Lu Jia. “Try not to get yourself killed out there. I don’t want to have to be the one to tell him you’re dead.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Lo Meifeng with a small smile.

As much as she’d put on a brave face in front of all her minion-in-training, even she couldn’t entirely repress a shudder when she stepped out into the city proper. She hadn’t recognized how much comfort she took from the protection offered by the manor’s defenses.

“Where will we go?” asked the young cultivator. “The walls?”

Lo Meifeng shook her head and said, “The center of the city.”

“You mean to defend the mortals?”

“I mean to at least check that their protections are still in place.”

She left out that she half-expected those foxes to abandon the mortals if things got truly desperate. They were foxes, after all.