Unintended Cultivator

If Sen were able to physically sweat, which he was pretty sure he wasn’t able to do anymore, he would have been soaked to the bone. He’d moved on from the zone of authority that was given to the inner sect and core members and moved into the elders’ domain. Life got a lot harder at that point. There were fewer people around, which was a blessing. It seemed that no one wanted to be found around the elders’ homes without an exceedingly good reason. That made moving between the buildings infinitely easier. He was able to move around during the day and not just at night. Getting into the buildings undetected, however, had been an almost nightmarish prospect.

Unlike the rest of the sect, the elders were like Sen. They might choose to sleep, occasionally, but they didn’t require it the way less advanced cultivators frequently did. That meant that he could find a building occupied by an elder who was awake at any time of the day or night. Worse, there were almost always servants or direct disciples around. Working around them and the individual defenses had pressed Sen to his limit. He couldn’t drop his guard for a second. Tasks that had taken seconds in the buildings for the outer disciples took hours. Inserting the vials of insanely dangerous poisons and toxins into the walls had to be done with excruciating slowness. That ensured that the movement of qi and the establishment of the massive formation Sen had set up looked like the normal movement of environmental qi.

It was a task that he had assumed would take a night. Instead, he spent three days and nights creeping and crawling, sometimes quite literally, around the elders’ portion of the sect. He’d had so many close calls that he was getting numb to them, which he recognized was a bad sign. Granted, that apathy had actually turned out to be useful since it prevented him from acting rashly, but it was still an indicator that he was dangerously worn out on a mental level. Premature action could get him killed, but so could failing to act appropriately when it was warranted. There were benefits to the extended foray into secrecy. He was far more adept at using his shadow qi to mask himself from sight. Even shadow walking was ever so slowly becoming a less jarring experience. Still, he’d known that he needed to leave the sect soon.

The moment of truth came when he started to approach what he assumed was the patriarch’s residence. It was the largest and most opulent home in the sect. it was also located in the very center of the compound. That was all he ever learned. While the formations and defenses of the rest of the sect were of variable quality, the ones around the patriarch’s home were on an entirely different level. He took one look at them and knew that he was out of his depth. If he had six months to study those defenses, he might be able to get around them. As things stood, Sen didn’t even dare try. He wasn’t even sure what some of those formations did. It just wasn’t worth the risk.

He knew it could well mean facing the patriarch in combat. If it came down to that, though, Sen wasn’t too proud to ask Uncle Kho for help. Sen wanted to keep the elder cultivator’s hands as clean as he could but not at the cost of his own life. Uncle Kho would not understand or thank him for that dubious kindness. In fact, he’d likely be furious at Sen for not properly analyzing the risks. Sen could look back and see the method in Uncle Kho’s madness. He’d given Sen all those scrolls on history as a kind of primer for how battles could go right and horribly wrong. One of the ways they could go wrong was by not employing your resources wisely. Sen understood that it was easy to see those things in hindsight. The fury of battle did not lend itself to cool calculation. But he’d had days and days with nothing to do but think about the situation he’d gotten them all into. In this situation, as much as Sen didn’t like to think of Uncle Kho that way, the elder cultivator was a resource.

As all of that passed through his mind in an abstract calculation, another part of him, a more primal part of him, continued to stare at the patriarch’s home. It was a challenge. Even when he’d been living on the street, he’d viewed the world as a kind of challenge. Granted, those challenges had the highest possible stakes. They were challenges like finding enough food not to starve and securing sufficient shelter that he didn’t freeze to death. He’d risen to those challenges. He’d risen to them when many others failed. He hadn’t been smarter than all of them or stronger than all of them. He’d just wanted it a little more badly than they had. He’d risen to the challenge again when Master Feng took him up the mountain. He knew now that the stakes hadn’t actually been life-and-death, but he hadn’t known it then. He’d survived, thrived even, by accepting challenges. And all of those odd formations and mysterious defenses were a challenge like he hadn’t faced in a long time.

He wanted to throw himself against that wall of uncertainty and demonstrate that he could rise again. He desperately wanted to prove that he could do it by filling the patriarch’s home with a tide of poisons that even a nascent soul cultivator couldn’t survive. He almost took a step. He almost let himself stop hiding. He forced himself to stop and think. This isn’t what I came here for, he reminded himself. If I could have done it easily, it would have been worth the time and effort, but this will just get me caught. It took entire minutes to walk himself back from that cliff of stupidity, but he did it. Then, he slunk back deeper into the shadows.

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“Nothing?” asked a male voice that Sen didn’t recognize.

Sen watched in morbid interest as a pair of cultivators stepped into view. He felt their spiritual senses wash over him with the recognizable strength of nascent soul cultivators.

“I sincerely doubt anyone has the strength of will to deny that command I put out there,” said the woman.

Sen had to keep himself from jerking in shock. He’d been under the influence of a mental or soul technique. He hadn’t recognized it. He hadn’t even felt qi moving. Because it wasn’t moving, you moron, he chastised himself. It was an established field. You stepped into it. The man looked around like he was half-convinced that someone would come out if he just waited another moment or two. Then, he shook his head.

“I think I need to cull the elders again,” said the man. “They’re so jumpy. Convinced that there was someone lurking around the sect, despite the fact that nothing has happened. That’s what I get for letting crafters and scholars be elders. I know better, but I keep having to learn the lesson. I should never have indulged them with this experiment. Feel free to ask for whatever recompense you want from those fools for wasting your time and energy.”

The woman bowed and said, “Thank you, Patriarch. I have a list.”

The patriarch of the Twisted Blade Sect laughed. It was a warm, throaty thing, but there was metal hidden in it. Blades of cruelty lurking just below the surface.

“I’ll leave you to your business, Elder Mu,” said the patriarch.

“Will you not stay for a time? There is that little war coming?”

“That’s not a sect war. That’s a training exercise to thin the ranks of the outer disciples. Why should we do the work when Judgment’s Gale and his sorry excuse for a sect will weed out the weak for us? I won’t waste my time overseeing something so trivial. Pick one of the useless elders to go along. Maybe the tiresome boy will do us a favor and kill them as well before we crush them.”n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

“It will be as you say, patriarch. If I might ask, what will you be doing?”

“Preparing for the real war to come. If the rumors are true and the spirit beasts mean to do war on us, it may be time for me to try to advance.”

Elder Mu looked a bit startled but only bowed.

“I wish you luck, Patriarch.”

“The strong don’t need luck,” said the man before he vanished into the night sky.

Sen watched with interest as the look of polite subservience that Elder Mu wore transformed into one of sheer contempt.

“Useless brute,” she muttered. “If the gods are kind, one of those spirit beasts will eat your heart. Then, this place will be mine.”

That little display of internal division was interesting to Sen but ultimately of no consequence. He might have been able to do something with it in some other circumstances. In the current situation, he couldn’t see any realistic way to make use of it. Seeing the patriarch’s disdain for, well, practically everyone in his own sect made him wonder why the man had ever bothered to establish a sect. Then again, maybe he hadn’t established the sect. Sen realized that the man had probably inherited the leadership position at some point. Although, he had to wonder why the man had pursued the position. He clearly didn’t care about the sect in any meaningful way.

Sen shook his head. It didn’t matter. He supposed that wasn’t entirely true. It didn’t matter to him. He suspected that it all mattered a great deal to the people in the sect or would matter if they knew about it. He was much more concerned with whatever technique had almost made him expose himself. He’d never encountered anything like that before. It had been so subtle. He’d need to learn about those techniques if he could. He’d also have to be very careful about such things in the future. Stealth meant nothing if he could be tricked into simply walking into the open. Of course, the fact that he hadn’t even noticed what was happening told him that it was time to go.

He gave the woman with the frightening technique a good half hour to go wherever she was going before he started slowly making his way toward the wall. After the challenges he faced in the elders’ part of the sect, getting back out to the wall felt almost too easy. Sure, there were more people, but he’d been keeping out of the way of much more dangerous formations and observant cultivators that could be found anywhere else in the sect. He felt a momentary surge of relief when he reached the wall before brutally suppressing that feeling. It was premature. Even with the cover of darkness, he still needed to get away. He watched and waited until he was certain that no one was paying attention before he stepped through to that in-between place. He passed through the solid brightness of the wall and stepped back into reality proper.

A part of him truly expected everything to fall apart then. He waited for some outcry or to be swooped down on by elders. He expected so firmly that he just stood by that wall for almost five minutes. It was only when he realized that wasn’t going to happen that he cautiously slipped away into the darkness of the night, cloaked in shadow, and filled with disbelief. That disbelief stayed with him until he finally dragged himself up to the camp they had set up several hours later. He supposed that they should have established some kind of a password to prove that everything was fine. Instead, he just announced him.

“It’s me. Don’t kill me, please.”

Then, he stepped into the camp. Uncle Kho looked relieved. Glimmer of Night was nowhere to be seen. When he let his gaze fall on Falling Leaf, he realized that his dreams of sleep were going to need to be put off for a while. As opaque as her expressions often were, he didn’t have any trouble reading her expression right then. She was furious.