Unintended Cultivator

Sen knew that going into the valley was a bad idea. He also knew that Lo Meifeng was going to go down there and throw herself into the fight anyway. She had at least listened to his advice to approach quietly, suppressing her presence as much as she could. Sen was full-on hiding. His only consolation was that, since advancing his body and spirit cultivation, hiding no longer blinded his senses so badly. Granted, they only really functioned the way he was used to in a forty-foot radius, but that was almost enough to give him some breathing room. Sen’s real concern was that he had zero experience with this kind of large-scale fighting and no clue about Lo Meifeng’s experience with it. He was aware of things like battle strategy, but that didn’t make him competent to simply insert himself into a battle. He didn’t have the background to assess the field and make judgment calls. He could just as easily disrupt a carefully planned trap as save lives.

Just as importantly, he was quite sure that there were cultivators in that battle who were peak core formation cultivators. He could probably distract people like that for a little while, but he didn’t like his chances taking them on head-to-head. Not without falling back on a technique that he had no intention of showing off to a thousand people. His only relief was that he was also pretty sure there were no nascent soul cultivators out there. At least, if there were, they weren’t participating directly. If they had been, he doubted that there would be anything left of the valley or much of anything else within ten miles of the valley in any direction. Even having multiple core formation cultivators on the field threatened everything nearby. Sen knew how much damage he could do all by himself and that was before he advanced. He tried to imagine what ten or fifteen people like him, only more powerful, could do to the countryside. Of course, he didn’t plan to start throwing around powerful techniques right out of the gate. Crushing force was all well and good against one opponent or even a handful. When killing ten people wouldn’t even put a dent in the opposition, though, there was little value in draining his qi reserves for a big, showy display of power.

His most immediate concern, however, was their lack of information about where the fight was happening. He’d been able to see where the core of the fighting was happening, but there had been a lot of fighting happening away from that main battle. He didn’t want to find himself confronted with a group of hostile cultivators from either side as they made their approach. He also didn’t think that either group was going to react well to them just appearing out of nowhere. If they’d taken a little time to talk out an approach, they might have thought of some way to avoid these kinds of problems, but Lo Meifeng had clearly been in no mood to wait. Instead, they were covering ground as fast as their qinggong techniques would let them. Sen thought it was nothing short of miraculous that no one had seen them yet, but that couldn’t last. The only piece of good luck in the whole mess, as far as Sen was concerned, was that they got to jump in and look like heroes to the fire cultivators when they did stumble across people who were fighting.

Sen had caught the sounds of fighting before Lo Meifeng and grabbed her arm. She dropped her qinggong technique and lifted an eyebrow at him in lieu of speaking. He pointed to his ear and then forward and to the left. Lo Meifeng cocked her head and closed her eyes. After a few seconds, she opened her eyes again and shook her head. Sen leaned in so he could whisper next to her ear at near-inaudible levels.

“There’s fighting up ahead. Stay here. I’ll go take a look.”

She scowled at him and mouthed the words, “Why you?”

“You’re kidding, right?” whispered Sen.

“Oh, right,” whispered Lo Meifeng at that same barely perceptible level. “Sorry.”

Sen mouthed the words, “Be right back,” and started moving forward between the sparse trees in a crouch. It didn’t take him long to find the fighting. In this little skirmish, the fire cultivators were clearly outclassed. He couldn’t get close enough to get a good read on everyone’s cultivation levels, but it didn’t take a tactical genius to recognize that four fire cultivators versus ten water cultivators wasn’t going to end well for the fire cultivators. The fire cultivators had managed to erect a small shelter to prevent the water cultivators from just shooting them full of arrows and calling it a day. But the hasty fortification of dirt and what looked like a couple of half-rotted logs wasn’t going to hold up for long. Sen slipped away and went back to Lo Meifeng. He explained in terse, quiet sentences what he’d seen.

“We kill all of them,” she said, cold fury in her eyes.

“I was hoping for a bit more strategy than that. We could be at this all day. I don’t want to waste qi on side fights.”

Lo Meifeng made a visible effort to calm herself before shaking her head. “I’m too angry and worried to plan anything.”

Sen thought it over. Realistically, he could probably kill them all by himself with nothing but some shadow to give him cover, but Lo Meifeng couldn’t operate in the field of total darkness he preferred. He eyed her.

“How good is your memory?”

“What? It’s fine, I guess. Why?”

“Because I can blanket that whole area in fog. Once I do that, though, you need to be able to remember the terrain and the location of the enemy. Can you do that?”

She glared at him. “Can you?”

“Yes,” he said.

Lo Meifeng was quiet for a moment before she said, “I can remember well enough.”

“You’re sure?”

“I said I can do it,” she growled in a harsh whisper. “Let’s go.”

Sen slid his jian from its scabbard and took the lead. He knew that the water cultivators were mostly focused on the fire cultivator victims, so he worried a little less about stealth until they got close. Then, he started cycling up the combination of fire qi, air qi, and water qi he’d need to make this plan work. He saw Lo Meifeng studying the area where the fight was happening and fixing a look of grim concentration on her face. He wondered just how much of her claim that she could remember the terrain and enemy locations was truth and how much was bravado. He almost changed his mind and went with the shadow cover plan instead, but that would no doubt just cause a fight he didn’t want to have. So, he started mixing together the right elements to produce what he needed. A few of the water cultivators seemed to hesitate for a moment when he first started, but almost immediately focused on the fire cultivators again when nothing obvious happened.

Sen took more time than Lo Meifeng liked, but when it happened, it happened fast. Over the course of about five seconds, the entire area went from completely clear to being so thick with fog that nothing could be seen more than a foot away. Sen pointed at Lo Meifeng and then in the direction she should go. Then, he pointed at himself and the direction he planned to go. She gave him one nod and then vanished into the fog. Sen started walking toward the first of the water cultivators he was going to target. The fog didn’t give him the kind of local omniscience he enjoyed when using shadow, but it did offer general locations of people. He could hear the water cultivators calling out to each other, their voices oddly muffled and distorted by the fog. He felt a couple of them try to use their qi to manipulate the fog, but their attempts shattered against his control. Foundation formation, at best, he thought. Sen moved through the enemies like a lethal ghost. Three of them were dead when he heard someone start screaming about wraiths and devils in the fog. Sen knew that was going to cause problems. Two of the water cultivators near him had managed to find each other in the fog and were standing so close that they looked like one person in his senses. They started hurling water blades and compressed balls of water in every direction.

After dodging three compressed water balls and two water blades, he decided to forego subtlety in the name of efficiency. He cycled up some lighting and sent a bolt of it at the huddled pair. One went down immediately, but it seemed they had taken the brunt of the strike. Almost immediately, a blade of water shot toward him from the other water cultivator. Sen almost broke the technique, before he thought better of it and dropped to the ground. The blade passed through the air over him. Sen sent another bolt of lightning at the remaining water cultivator. When they toppled over, Sen stood and walked over to them. He thought they were probably both dead, but he wasn’t comfortable with that kind of probably scenario. He found the two cultivators still smoking with weird discolorations all through their undamaged skin. He slid his jian into their hearts, one after the other. They had both already been dead.

For a moment, Sen just looked at them. He knew that age was largely an illusion for cultivators, but they barely looked older than he did. One had been a young man with curly dark hair. There was still an expression on his face. He looked confused and afraid. I did that to him, thought Sen, and I don’t even know why. Was the fact that he was just on the wrong side of the fight a good enough reason for me to kill him? Sen thought he’d made his accommodations with the necessity of killing, but these deaths struck him as especially pointless and without merit. It didn’t change anything, though. He shook off the discomfort as best as he could and focused on the information he was getting from the fog he was maintaining. He'd been following Lo Meifeng’s progress in the back of his mind. She’d gotten three of the five on her side but had either forgotten the locations of the other two or otherwise gotten disoriented. Sighing to himself, Sen closed the distance. The first one died without ever seeing him. The last of the water cultivators had found a tree and backed up against it. When Sen materialized out of the fog, she stared at him with naked terror on her face. She held a trembling dao in her hand and pointed it at him.

“Who are you? Why are you doing this?” she asked.

Sen regarded her for a moment and asked, “Why were you?”

“They’re my enemies.”

“Are they? What did they do to you?”

“They attacked my sect.”

“I asked what they did to you,” said Sen.

The woman opened her mouth, but no words came out.

Sen nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

The woman slashed at him only to stare in shocked horror as he caught the blade and brought it to a dead stop with his bare hand. He pulled the sword away from her numb fingers and tossed it aside. He held out a hand.

“Storage ring.”

She stared at him like he was the end of all things. After a moment, she lowered her eyes and pulled a ring off her finger. She dropped it onto his palm. Sen had become so adept with the storage treasures that it took him less than a second to access the ring and assess its contents. Satisfied that there were no weapons in it, he tossed the ring back to her. Then, he lifted his jian and pointed with it.

“There isn’t anyone from either side in that direction. I suggest you get lost and disoriented for the next day or two, then find your way back to wherever you came from.”

“I don’t understand. Why spare me?”

Sen didn’t have a good answer for her or himself. Try as he might, he just couldn’t shake the confused and frightened look that had been on the dead kid’s face. Maybe he just didn’t want to see that look or one like it on someone else’s face so soon. He honestly didn’t know. Lacking solid truth to lean on, he made something up.

“I don’t think you’re evil, just foolish. This is your opportunity to fix that.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“One last thing,” said Sen, staring at her until she met his eyes again. “Do not let me see you on this battlefield again. Now go.”

The woman ran off in the direction he’d pointed.

“You know she’s the enemy, right?” said Lo Meifeng from behind him.

“She’s not my enemy. She was willing to leave.”

“You realize that she’s probably going to run right back to her people. Odds are that we’ll be fighting her again in a few hours.”

“I don’t think we will.”

“If we do.”

“If we do, then she will be my enemy, and I will cut her down without a second thought.”

Lo Meifeng made a noncommittal noise. “I think I see what you meant, now.”

“About?”

“Balance being a work in progress for you.”

“Yeah,” said Sen in a tired voice. “Come on, let’s go say hello to the fire cultivators.”

Sen cleared the fog away with a brief application of qi. Then, they started walking toward the makeshift fortification. The fire cultivators, who had seen the fog come out of nowhere, and then heard the screaming and fighting, peeked out to get a look at their saviors. When they saw the bodies of the water cultivators scattered across the area, they stood up and stared in wonder at Sen and Lo Meifeng.

“Who are you?” asked one of the fire cultivators.

Sen stared at the one who'd asked the question. Their face was so covered in blood that Sen couldn't tell if they were a man or woman. After that, Sen mostly ignored the conversation as Lo Meifeng immediately started asking about her brother. He didn’t start paying attention again until someone asked about him.

“Okay, but who is he?”

Sen looked over at them and went to answer, but Lo Meifeng answered for him. “Him? That’s Judgment’s Gale.”

Sen gave Lo Meifeng a death glare she ignored and said, “Oh, thank you so much for that, your highness.”

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