Unintended Cultivator

Elder Mu tried to glare at him, but her heart was in it. She looked at the decapitated head of the muscular elder before turning her gaze on Aihan. Shaking her head a little, she reached out and closed the other woman’s eyes. Sen watched this in silence. He could be patient while the person he suspected was the last remaining elder of the Twisted Blade Sect paid a last little bit of respect. Elder Mu slowly rose to her feet, but she didn’t turn to face him immediately. Instead, she looked around at the ruins Sen had left in his wake.

“Is the Patriarch dead?” she asked.

“Do you care?”

“I’ve never liked the man. That much stupidity almost has to be intentional. It’d be nice to know that he’s getting dragged into the thousand hells with the rest of us for all his sins.”

“I expect Uncle Kho killed him. I didn’t ask him to, but I should have expected it.”

“Uncle Kho,” said the woman with a visible shudder. “By all the gods, I can’t imagine anyone calling that man Uncle. Then again, you both seem to have a flair for the indiscriminate destruction of sects.”

Sen felt his expression harden.

“Don’t you dare try to put the blame for this on me. I didn’t choose this fight. You did. You just didn’t think you’d lose.”

The woman shot him a dirty look.

“A sect? This was no sect. It was a pit of vipers.”

“Your ignorance is showing, boy. Every sect is a pit of vipers as bad as this one. We just didn’t work so hard to hide it.”

“Was that meant to shock me?” asked Sen. “It didn’t. I don’t need anyone to convince me the sects are corrupt. I already thought that. But even I know that not every sect is bent on mindless destruction.”

“Who told you that nonsense?” asked Elder Mu.

“The evidence of my own eyes. If every sect were really as bad as yours, there would be one sect and no kingdom left. As much as it pains me to admit it, most sects do actually show some restraint,” said Sen before releasing a weary sigh. “Is this really what you want to discuss at the end of your life, Elder Mu?”

She gave him another hard look but then shook her head.

“No. It isn’t,” she said and looked down at her disfigured hand. “How long do I have?”

Sen took a long look at her hand. He had a pretty good of which of the poisons he’d concocted had caused it.

“Longer than you’ll want,” he admitted. “But not long enough to find a remedy.”

“Is there a remedy?” she asked, although she didn’t seem at all invested in the answer.

“Not a known one,” he said. “I could probably make one if I tried.”

“Not that you will,” she observed.

“Not that I will,” he agreed. “It would be contrary to my purpose.”

“I know you left two core members alive. I can still feel that they’re alive in what’s left of my spiritual sense.”

“I did.”

“But not me?”

Sen shrugged and said, “Take that up with the heavens.”

She gave him a sharp look.

“You’re serious.”

“I was going to kill them. I hadn’t planned on letting anyone go, save for whatever qi-condensing cultivators managed to survive. I expect most of those are halfway to Emperor’s Bay by now. As for the two I spared, the heavens intervened. I have no idea why.”

“So, what happens now? Do you execute me?”

Sen pondered that before he said, “It’ll probably be more of a mercy than an execution if I do. I intended for those poisons to kill quickly, but it depended on you getting exposed to all of them. As it stands now, your death will be… It will be something no sane person would want to endure. You don’t want to do battle with me? Try to end my life?”

“There might have been a chance when there were three of us, but your poisons worked a bit too well. I barely have the strength of an early core cultivator now. Since I am to die, would you answer a question for me?”

“I can do that,” said Sen.

“Who are you? Honestly, are you some master from across the Mountains of Sorrow? Some scion that Fate’s Razor had kept hidden away all these years?”

Sen gave her a look that was a little bemused and a little sad.

“I doubt the truth would comfort you much right now. I’m not what you think. I’m not some foreign master or hidden scion.”

“What are you, then? The stories about you, the kind of power you wield, making a formation that could do all of this, that doesn’t come from nowhere.”

“It does,” said Sen. “I’m literally no one. Just some street rat that Master Feng plucked up from a town that no one has ever heard of.”

“That can’t be. It just can’t!” shouted Elder Mu. “A no one from nowhere destroyed this entire sect? You expect me to believe that?”n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

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“Why would I lie?” asked Sen. “You’re dying. Even if I don’t end it, you don’t have long. There’s no reason for me to lie to you.”

Granted, he hadn’t told her everything, but he still didn’t have any proof about most of his suspicions. It was all guesswork and conjecture, not fact. It certainly wasn’t verifiable truth. He had told her what he knew to be true. Elder Mu stared as if searching for some hint of dishonesty in him. Not finding it made the woman grind her teeth.

“Unbelievable. Leave it to that heavens-kissed old monster to find a young monster living on the streets.”

Sen wasn’t sure what he could possibly say to that, so he just made a non-committal noise. They stood there in awkward silence for a time before Elder Mu shook her head.

“It’s not an easy thing, you know,” said the woman.

“What isn’t easy?”

“Deciding to die. I’ve been alive for a very long time. I thought I was going to live for a lot longer. It’s hard to accept that it’s over. Especially when you get as close to ascension as I have.”

“How close were you really?”

“Not as close as any of those old monsters you seemingly know,” she said. “Still, I am… I was a lot closer to it than most cultivators ever get.”

“I don’t know why everyone is so eager for ascension,” said Sen.

“Who doesn’t want to become a god?”

“You don’t honestly believe that’s what happens when you ascend, do you?”

Elder Mu looked at Sen like she’d discovered he had some kind of terrible and highly contagious disease.

“Everyone knows that’s what happens.”

Sen shrugged. He decided there was no value in arguing the point with the woman. If she wanted to carry that idea into death with her, it was nothing to him. It wasn’t like he actually knew any better than she did about what happened after ascension. Again, he only had suspicions. He thought his suspicions sounded more plausible than godhood, but what didn’t sound more plausible than that? He was ready to let it go, but it seemed that she wasn’t.

“Did Feng Ming tell you something about ascension that the rest of us don’t know?”

That notion caught him a bit off guard, but it made sense coming from an outsider who didn’t actually know Master Feng. If any cultivator in the world would have more information about what happened after ascension, he would be that cultivator. The man had admitted that, to his knowledge, he was the oldest and most powerful human cultivator in the world. He was also famously indifferent to any nascent soul cultivator who wasn’t Uncle Kho or Auntie Caihong. He didn’t seem to mind Fu Ruolan, but she seemed deeply hesitant around him. Given all of that, he could see how other cultivators might assume he knew things they didn’t. Barring that, they might assume that reaching the very peak of the nascent soul stage would provide some insights that were denied to everyone else. Sen knew that wasn’t true, but only because Master Feng had openly explained his own ignorance about what happened after ascension.

Shaking his head, Sen said, “Nothing like that. I just have my own thoughts on it.”

“Since you’re the last person I’m ever going to talk to in this life, enlighten me. What do you think happens?”

Sen tried to think of how best to say it before he swept his arm in an all-encompassing way.

“More of this, just with more powerful cultivators.”

Elder Mu was silent for nearly a minute before she said, “What a staggering disappointment that would be.”

“Now you know why I’m not excited about the idea of ascension. You endure all the suffering that it takes to reach the peak here, just to start over again somewhere else where everyone sees you as weak.”

“I think I’ll take godhood.”

“Fair enough.”

Elder Mu took her time to stare up into the night sky and around at the sect. Sighing, she finally turned to face Sen.

“Waiting isn’t helping. I’ll never decide that it’s the right time to die.”

“We can still fight,” offered Sen.

He didn’t really like the woman, but she could have made this encounter a true ordeal instead of a relatively calm conversation. He felt like he owed her something for that. Even if it was the minor mercy of letting her choose the manner of her death. She shook her head.

“I don’t need that false comfort. Just be quick about it. I’d rather not have a lot of time to think about it.”

“Very well.”

While he wasn’t as fast as that other cultivator, Aihan, he was more than fast enough that Elder Mu wasn’t left to suffer. One of his jian pierced her heart, and the other removed her head. Even in death, she looked like she couldn’t quite accept that her life had ended the way it had. He considered the three bodies before he incinerated them with fire qi. It wasn’t exactly a funeral pyre, but he did take the time to offer the appropriate prayers for them. That task done, he retrieved the storage rings and what he assumed were sect treasures from the ashes. The fact that any of the treasures other than the storage rings had survived the fire surprised him. Storage treasures were always insanely durable. He assumed it had something to do with how they were made. For the other treasures to have survived a fire that could consume the bones of nascent soul cultivators suggested they were powerful.

Sen found himself just standing there, motionless, trapped in place by a feeling of numbness. He couldn’t believe it was over. He knew it wasn’t truly over, yet, but what was left could probably happen without much help from him. Unless there was an elder hiding out in one of the few buildings he had spared, Falling Leaf and Glimmer of Night were more than capable of doing whatever needed to be done. Sen thought he should be happy. He all but ordered himself to be happy. He had won, after all, but it didn’t feel like a victory. The closest he could get to happiness was a vague feeling of relief, but even that felt distant. Like he was experiencing a trickle of something that someone else was feeling. Someone who he thought he should know but didn’t.

Sen finally staggered over to a nearby tree and leaned his back against it. He thought that maybe he just needed to rest for a minute. He felt so tired, empty, and washed out. It made sense that he was tired. He had done something hard. It was necessary, but it had been so hard to do it. He hadn’t been able to let himself think about that while everything was happening. He had trapped that poisonous idea in a cage in the back of his head because letting it out would have made him waver, and he could not let himself waver. Now that it was over, though, he could admit it to himself.

Destroying the Twisted Blade Sect had been terrible. He had killed so many people. He hadn’t killed them in duels. He hadn’t challenged them openly. He had invaded their home and turned the very walls around them, walls they had trusted to help keep them safe, into the vessels of their destruction. He had used all his talent in alchemy, the same talent that had saved Luo Ping all those years ago, and his skill with formations, the same skill that protected his sect and nearby town, and turned these cultivators’ homes into poisoned tombs. He knew, knew, that it had to be that way. It was the only way he could reach the outcome he needed.

Even so, he had done that. He had done it intentionally. He had done exactly what the Twisted Blade Sect had done so many times before. He had come to a place where there had been life and all but swept that life away. His reasons were different, but the outcome was the same. He had decided that an entire group of people needed to die, and he had killed them. He had killed the weak and the powerful alike. The few that had been allowed to slip the net had only been to ease his conscience, and it was not eased. He had brought his friends, his loved ones, and let them participate. He saw now that he should not have let them come. He should not have let them bloody their hands in his massacre.

Sen slid to the ground, his legs no longer able to support him. He had pushed and pushed to keep himself moving. He had debated morality in his head like it was some kind of intellectual exercise. Now that the grisly business was complete, there was nowhere to push toward. Those intellectual exercises he’d kept himself busy with fell away. All that was left was the awful truth of what he had done to protect what was his. As the crushing weight of that truth crashed down on him, Sen felt the hot tears on his cheeks. He wept for what he had done. He wept for what he had become. He wept for all the lives that had been lost beneath his callous hand and heart. He wept until he thought the world would drown in his tears.