Unintended Cultivator

Sen had expected his frankly disproportionate attack on the duplicitous spirit beasts to have some kind of an effect when word spread. After all, that was half of the reason why he’d made it so disproportionate. Even his wildest predictions were nothing in the face of the reality. His people made a point of spreading the news, and everyone they told seemed to tell everyone alive. The story of the spirit beast defeat, however lopsided the fight had actually been, seemed to galvanize the human forces. Judgment’s Gale had taken the fight to the enemy. He’d single-handedly killed a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand spirit beasts in retribution for something. The something in question didn’t seem to matter much to the people telling or hearing the stories. It changed with every telling. What mattered to them was someone had taken decisive action and won. A figure out of stories had stepped forward and shown the spirit beasts that the fight wouldn’t be that easy.

In some ways, this pleased Sen because it had accomplished his goal. It had, in some way, restored people’s hope. In other ways, it frustrated him. He knew that he wasn’t the only cultivator who had gone out and hit back at the spirit beasts. He got occasional reports of sects taking similar action, if generally in groups bigger than his one-man slaughter. The problem was that they were only taking those actions to help themselves. They mounted assaults only when spirit beasts threatened their compounds. They were far less apt to react when it was the villages and towns in the surrounding areas. He had lost his composure when he discovered that one sect had done nothing when a town less than ten miles from them was razed to the ground. It had taken Master Feng physically restraining him to prevent Sen from going to that sect and killing everyone in sight for being shortsighted, cowards, or both.

Of course, hope wasn’t the same thing as tangible help. It didn’t stop the killing. Refugees were still fleeing in every direction, desperately searching for some safe place to stay. Some of them found their way to Sen’s town. He had learned, to his horror, that it had been renamed Gale’s Bastion. He thought it was a monumentally stupid name, even if he knew it had been done to honor him in some abstract way. Some of the absurd town names he’d heard over the years started making more sense to him. He couldn’t know for sure that it was true, but he had a suspicion that the people who had inspired those absurd town names had thought them just as foolish.

He had been equally horrified to learn that no one was even pretending that his rule in Gale’s Bastion was covert. The town elders, it seemed, had concluded that their best and only chance of survival had been to throw their unanimous and unilateral support behind Sen. He’d been forced to assign someone to literally sit in on their meetings and nod sagely just avoid having to review every decision the elders wanted to pass. Sen had never wanted to be formally in charge of anything. That was why he had shoved control of the House of Lu into his grandmother’s hand at the first possible opportunity and then fled the capital to make sure it stuck. With the country at large in a state of perpetual chaos, Sen had found himself effectively made a king. The kingdom he ruled was a tiny one to be sure, but it was a kingdom all the same.

Moreover, the flood of refugees meant it was a growing kingdom. The problem of food supplies weighed on his mind. They had been, until recently, buying food from elsewhere and shipping it into town. Sen had been wise enough, or rather his small coterie of often boring but highly efficient staff had been wise enough, to start laying in a stock of dried goods. There were entire warehouses filled with rice, grains, and beans to be handed out in emergencies. Keeping those warehouses free of pests of one of the duties that qi-condensing sect members were tasked with. To ensure that they didn’t view it as a punishment, Sen had been forced to give a short speech to them. He’d thought that he’d have to do the whole introduction thing, but they all bowed the second he appeared. He did his best not to show how much he hated that.

“As you all know,” he began without preamble, “the war with the spirit beasts is raging. One of the most critical things we need to do to ensure our survival is to protect our food supply. We have warehouses filled with rice and other dried goods, but rodents and other pests could easily turn those supplies into garbage. Saboteurs might try to poison that food. While cultivators might be able to eat tainted food without concern, the mortals in town cannot.

“It is essential that we keep that food intact for emergencies. That is why you will be assigned to the warehouses. Dealing with those pests might sound trivial, but it is not. Preventing anyone from poisoning that food is most certainly not trivial. It could very well be the difference between life and the slow horror of starvation. I am entrusting the lives of every man, woman, and child in town to your diligence and care. Will you fail them?”

At the beginning of that little show, the assembled cultivators had looked attentive but largely unimpressed with the topic. Their expressions had changed as he spoke. The seemingly unimportant duty they had viewed as a way to disgrace and punish them was put into a wholly different context. They had straightened up and looked increasingly invested. When he had mentioned starvation, more than a few of the cultivators had gone very pale. Perhaps a few of them have seen that horror up close before, thought Sen. He had come close to it enough times as a child to understand just how critical a steady food supply would be in the days to come. By the time he’d issued his challenge to them, every cultivator before was ramrod straight, their eyes blazing with conviction.

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He smiled at them and nodded as though pleased with their obedience. He was pleased that they were taking it more seriously but the smile and nod had just been a bid to buy time. He’d thought hard about what to say during the speech. He hadn’t given any thought to what to say them after the speech. That was a stupid oversight, he thought. He’d been hoping that they would just sort of go away after he stopped talking, but they just stood there and stared at him with expectant gazes. It was Sua Xing Xing who saved him. She clapped her hands sharply and the noise drew the gazes of all the gathered sect members. She bestowed the crowd with a reserved, quasi-maternal smile.

“The Patriarch has much to attend to, as do you. Return to your duties.”

“Yes, Elder!” came another roared reply.

Sen watched them disperse with a sigh of relief. Sua Xing Xing eyed him with amusement in her eyes, but she spared him any clever comments.

“Thanks for getting rid of them. I didn’t give any thought to how to dismiss them.”

“You’re welcome, but it wasn’t just talk. There are things you need to attend to right now.”

Sen's relief turned to discouragement, and he failed to suppress his groan.

“What is it now?” he asked in a subdued voice.

“That’s the dried goods, but we need to talk about maintaining a supply of vegetables.”

Sen wanted to go do something else, but he couldn’t. She was right. They did need to talk about it. The farmers that Sen had brought back or who showed up as refugees were hard at work, but the food they were growing remained only a possible future source of food. Worse still, it was a horribly vulnerable future source of food. One motivated spirit beast with a fire skill could turn it all into ashes. Those farmers were just farmers. They couldn’t be expected to fight off spirit beasts. That’s why the town had walls, cultivators, and mortals who trained diligently. It was to give those farmers somewhere to retreat. Those defenses would protect people in the event of an attack. On the farms themselves, though, the danger was constant.

Cultivators from the sect did regular patrols around those farms, but they couldn’t be watched at all times. Granted, mounting those patrols without depriving cultivators of the critical time they needed to actually cultivate was getting easier. While the vast majority of refugees were mortals, not all of them were. Not every sect had successfully defended itself from attack and, unlike mortals, some cultivators had the speed or stealth to escape the spirit beasts. Some of those now sect-less cultivators had found their way to him. Wandering cultivators who had rightly estimated their long-term chances of surviving alone as zero had also trickled in. Most had been absorbed, provisionally, into Sen’s sect under the cold and ruthless gaze of Long Jia Wei. ȓАƝŐBÊⱾ

“For the moment, we’ll keep buying what the surrounding communities will sell us,” said Sen.

“I expected that, but what about when that becomes impossible?”

Sen gave her a long look. He’d been working with the woman long enough to recognize it when she had a suggestion. He also recognized that it was one that she wasn’t confident about.

“Out with it,” said an exasperated Sen.

“There may be ways to artificially speed up crop growth using cultivators,” she said hesitantly.

Sen frowned at that. She wasn’t wrong. It could be done. It was an entirely different question as to whether it should be done. Plants grew at the speeds and in the places they did for good reasons. Disrupting any of that could have all kinds of unforeseen consequences. At the very least, it could deplete the soil of the very things the crops needed to grow. It wasn’t a solution that would work for years. Of course, they might not need it to work for years, and there was a lot of the wilds around them that Sen would be perfectly content to see cut down to make fields.

“It’s not really a solution for the winter, though,” muttered Sen mostly to himself. “That’s when people need those vegetables.”

“I have someone working on that,” said Sua Xing Xing.

“Really? Doing what?” asked Sen.

Sua Xing Xing shook her head.

“I don’t want to say anything, yet. It may not work out. Honestly, it sounded like madness to me when I heard it, but these are mad times.”

“That’s the heavens’ own truth. Alright. Let’s clear some of the nearby forest and set up some tests for it. Those trees are closer to my town than I’d like anyway. Anything else that simply can’t do without my input?”

Sua Xing Xing gave him a wan smile and said, “We also need to talk about metal.”

“Metal?”

“Smiths are very talented, but they can’t make weapons and goods without metal. If we’re planning on food shortages, we need to plan on metal shortages as well.”

Sen rubbed his face with his hands and said, “You’re telling me we need a mine?”

“Mines,” she gently corrected. “Iron, copper, and nickel if we can manage it.”

Sen’s brow furrowed and he asked, “What’s nickel?”

Sua Xing Xing shrugged and said, “I don’t have the faintest idea, but the smiths were insistent that they need it. They kept talking about alloys.”

He’d been able to dump a lot of decisions on other people, but these were the kinds of things that he had to weigh in on. Allocating cultivators to the crop project meant they weren’t available for other things. Starting a mine meant someone needed to go out and find the right place. Then, people had to go and dig what they needed out of the ground. Those places and people would need to be defended. Sen also knew that metal had to be processed in some way before smiths could use it, which meant building whatever it was that did that processing. It all took resources. While Sen could afford most tangible resources, there were only so many skilled hands in his town. He couldn’t buy more of those. There were a finite number of cultivators. But they were going to need those smiths and the weapons they could make, which meant that they needed those mines. Sen started giving Sua Xing Xing general instructions about how to proceed, wisely leaving the details to her. He had become a king. And he wanted none of it.

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