Unintended Cultivator

Jing stared out at the land that he used to think of as his. The hubris of that notion was made painfully evident to him as he watched that ravening horde of spirit beasts draw closer and closer. Every foot they covered made it feel like it was their land and always had been. It also felt like a rope tightening around his neck. Not that those feelings were brand new. He’d felt the same things, if on a lesser scale, when Fate’s Razor had made his pronouncement about the new order of things. What he was witnessing now, though, brought things that Sen had told him into sharp relief. He’d said things about cultivators just being visitors and not really living in the same world as mortals. Jing had taken those comments to be metaphors of some kind, but these monsters that were making the very wall beneath his feet tremble and shudder as they charged were not metaphors.

This was the world that Sen had been talking about. A world where these terrible creatures were not stories or things heard about secondhand or even thirdhand in reports. A world where people did battle with these kinds of things as a matter of course. A world where only the seemingly excessive power of cultivators was a necessity not for any kind of meaningful success but meager survival. No wonder he didn’t want to involve himself in mortal politics, thought Jing in dawning understanding. It must have all seemed so petty. He was worried about things like this. He reconsidered that last thought and decided that Sen probably hadn’t been worried about this exact kind of situation, not back then. But he had no doubt been thinking that cultivators had other, more pressing concerns.

Surrounded by court intrigue his entire life, Jing had thought of himself as a worldly, educated man. He supposed he was in some sense. Yet, he’d considered Sen to be something of a country boy for all his terrible strength. He’d simply misunderstood. Sen was as well educated in the matters of his own world as Jing was in the matters of court. They were just very, very different kinds of education. All of it made Jing feel terribly naïve. Not that he could dwell on those thoughts for long. General Mo Kegong took one last look over the wall before he turned to Jing.

“You should really go now, my king,” said the general.

The man was right. Jing had received training in several weapons. It had been the best training available for a mortal. Yet, in the face of those spirit beasts, what could he possibly hope to accomplish? He had no practical experience on battlefields. By the time Jing was old enough that his father would let him join the army, the kingdom’s borders were secure. There was nowhere left to gain experience. Although he supposed that all held true for most of the people who were about to fight. The generals had experience, as did some of the most senior of the other officers, but he doubted that most of the spearmen and archers on the walls had ever faced more than minor skirmishes. It was jarring to realize that the cultivators on the wall were likely the most experienced people, but they weren’t soldiers. They might cooperate, for now, but they couldn’t be relied on to follow orders.

It's not like I’m really the king anymore, thought Jing. I stopped being the king the second Sen stepped foot in this city. Not that the role had been particularly kind to Sen so far. Jing knew that he’d collapsed after hurling those horrendous spheres out into the wilds. There had been dangerous talk after that about what should be done regarding the upstart cultivator. There had been equally dangerous talk that it had been nothing but a mirage intended to scare people. All of that talk had vanished when spirit beasts started pouring from the wilds. Now, the only thing people wanted to know was when Lord Lu would rejoin the fight.

Jing had managed to get a moment in private with Lai Dongmei or, more likely, had been allowed to get that moment. She had been wholly unwilling to disclose any details about what Sen was doing, save that he was recovering from the massive expenditure of qi that he had used to make that technique happen. Yu Ming had told him enough about how cultivation functioned to know that a cultivator’s qi was not some limitless resource. They had to gather it and condense it somehow. A process his sister described as equal parts tedium and necessity. Considering the overwhelming size of what Sen had done, the explanation sounded perfectly plausible. Except, Jing had been at court for a very long time. He’d developed an intuition about when people were lying to him, and Lai Dongmei was lying. She lied well. That impossibly beautiful face of hers never betrayed anything, but he felt it all the same.

Of course, knowing that she was lying told him nothing about what was really happening. Lu Manor was sealed up tighter than a ship’s hull. No one was permitted to enter or leave. All messengers had been turned away. It suggested that something bad had happened to Sen, and his people had closed ranks around him as a defensive measure until the man recovered. If he recovers, thought Jing. Until Sen made his reappearance, the capital had to see to its own defense. It occurred to Jing that the same would probably be true after Sen reappeared. The city was too big for any one man to make a difference everywhere.

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Jing looked at the man, at the scared-looking people lining the top of the wall, and then out at the beast tide. It was close. The last few miles had been covered while Jing had been lost in thought. He smiled at the man he’d called Uncle Kegong in his youth. The general had never liked Jing’s father, and the feeling had been mutual, but Kegong had been instrumental in winning many battles. It had earned him grudging tolerance at court and a kind of minor celebrity in the capital.

“I think the time of kings might be over, Uncle Kegong. I think that this might be the time of survivors and the dead.”

With that, Jing walked over to where a small pile of backup weapons had been stored and picked out a bow. He slung a quiver over a shoulder and, ignoring the horrified expressions of everyone around him, he took a spot on the wall. Kegong walked over to where Jing stood, a grave look on his face.

“My king. This is where the battle will be most fierce. The danger to you—”

“Is no different than the danger to everyone else here. If I’d been a better king, we might have been better prepared for this. The least I can do is help defend this city.”

The general looked like he wanted to order people to drag Jing away from the wall, but he either didn’t have the will or maybe just the time for that fight.

“As you command, my king,” said Mo Kegong before he started bellowing orders. “Archers, prepare!”

Jing drew an arrow from the quiver and nocked it on the string. His eyes moved back out to the horde. Visibility wasn’t good courtesy of the storm clouds overhead that still hadn’t released their fury on the world below. However, he suspected that poor visibility was probably a benefit for his sanity. He could see things he had no names for racing toward the wall. There were enormous creatures in the shape of bears, but covered in scales and feathers. There were bounding beasts that reminded him of deer, except their horns were metal and looked like they had lightning shooting between them. He saw tigers that appeared to have obsidian teeth and claws. There were so many of them that his mind simply refused to catalogue them.

Even if his mind was drawing back from those approaching horrors, his heart was not. It pounded frantically inside his chest, like its very own chaotic war drum. He could feel the trembling in his hands and nearly lost his grip on the arrow. Mortals aren’t meant to fight these things, some particularly terrified part of Jing’s mind screamed at him. Worse still, there were flying spirit beasts above the horde. However, they were far enough back that they mercifully remained ominous implications of coming death, rather than death itself.

“The cultivators will handle the flying beasts! Focus on the horde below!” shouted Kegong. “Archers! Draw!”

Jing forced his hands to still and drew the fletching to his ear. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears. He wanted to run away from this nightmare. He wanted to flee, but there was nowhere to flee to. They had to win this fight, or everyone died. It was everything he could do not to scream or accidentally release his arrow into flight when the arrowhead abruptly burst into flames. Jing momentarily glanced to his right. Every arrow had done the same thing. Farther down the line, he could see a woman in cultivator robes with a hand lifted. There was a look of strained concentration on her face.

“Release!” screamed Kegong.

It was the scream itself, rather than the order, that made Jing’s fingers twitch. Arrows with burning tips shot out toward the horde in a mostly clean arc. Jing glanced left and right and saw that similar things were happening up and down the wall, even if the arrows weren’t all burning. He didn’t have time to figure out what, if anything, had been done to those arrows. He didn’t even have time to see what that first wave of arrows accomplished.

“Archers! Prepare!” came Kegong’s next order.

That almost paralyzing fear faded as the Jing drew and fired arrow after arrow in rapid succession. It was only when there came a brief pause in the bellowed orders that he was able to get a look at what that work had accomplished. There were spirit beast bodies littering the field, but that actually made things feel even more hopeless as they were trampled under hoof and paw by countless more spirit beasts.

“Ballistae!” hollered Kegong.

Jing heard the same word pass down the line of the wall. Jing found himself holding his breath, waiting to see what would come of Sen’s surprise. There were several resonant twang sounds, and large bolts shot down into the horde. For a second, nothing happened, and then Jing had to shield his eyes as fire and lightning erupted from the ground and spread out like they were eager to kill. Terrible, pained roars, screeches, and sounds that Jing had never heard before rose into the air and clawed at his sanity. Part of him rejoiced that so many spirit beasts had died, and part of him recoiled at the icy brutality required to create such a thing, let alone deploy it against living things.

It was only when he looked again that he understood that it hadn’t just been fire and lightning. There were places where dozens of spirit beasts were frozen into solid blocks of ice. Spirit beasts had been impaled or crushed where stone had burst from the ground like miniature mountains seeking the sky. He had to look away when he saw several of the impaled spirit beasts thrashing. He didn’t know if they would die, but it wasn’t something he had any power to change. He might have looked toward other places on the battlefield, but another shout jarred him from his observation of the carnage below.

“Archers! Prepare!”