Unintended Cultivator

The dark clouds overhead seemed to threaten another storm. However, Sen’s senses told him that it would just be a normal autumn storm, rather than some divinely augmented, nature-defying act. Not that his attention was on the weather at that moment. He had been surprised. The nobles and sects had waited for three entire days before they began trying to assassinate people they didn’t like. There had been a few attempts directed at him, but it seemed that the people around him were, for the moment at least, invested in his survival. The same couldn’t be said for almost anyone else in the city.

He’d spent a disturbing amount of time over the last two weeks preventing murders of all stripes. He’d have thought that people would try to become more circumspect about it. Then again, his senses were good enough to bring him information from across the city. The same probably held true for the other nascent soul cultivators, but they at least pretended not to do it. He did not feel so constrained. That was what had brought him to hover far above one particularly blind alley. He’d heard some less-than-sober noble brats plotting how they were going to corner some scion of another house and relieve her of the burden of life. He didn’t always intervene. Sometimes the targets of these little plans proved more formidable than expected. If they could handle it on their own, he’d let them.

In this case, though, he expected that his intervention would be, if not entirely necessary, then at least a bit gratifying. It seemed that Chan Yu Ming wasn’t the only person who found themselves on the wrong side of a marriage proposal from a house they didn’t truly have the strength to defy. Yet, defy it they had. He watched from the air as the woman’s guards fought what would have been a losing battle in other circumstances. Well, I better do something before this gets too out of hand, he thought. He wasn’t high enough that the fall had a chance of doing him any damage, so he positioned himself to fall more or less between the two groups and cut off his technique. He took a moment to enjoy the feeling of the wind around him before he focused.

He landed like a stone hurled from a siege engine. His air qi caught the shattered stone and dust before it could hit the woman and her guards. He didn’t bother shielding the rest. There were startled yells and a couple screams of pain. Confusion reigned for several seconds as everyone tried to understand what had happened. Sen did nothing to alleviate that confusion. It was only when the dust was going to start settling by itself that he conjured a bit of wind qi to send it out of the alley. It was just a happy accident that doing that let him send a bunch of dust straight into the faces of the attackers. The ringleader of this doomed endeavor wasn’t even finished rubbing the grit out of his eyes before he started issuing boasts and threats.

“Are you insane!” he shouted. “Do you have any idea who I am? I will have you killed for this affront!”

“You know my laws,” answered Sen in an even tone.

The young noble finally cleared his sight and stared at Sen. The man’s face went whiter and whiter as his eyes went almost comically wide.

“Lord Lu,” choked the young man. “You… I… There is no need for—”

“You know my laws,” repeated Sen. “I made certain of it. Yet, here you are.”

“She shamed me! It’s my right—”

“She didn’t shame you. She rejected you. Apparently, a wise choice. Wiser than your choice.”

“I—” started the young noble, only to fall silent as Sen snapped his fingers.

Masked figures cloaked in black seemingly melted out of the shadows and pounced on the young man and his murderous friends. In no time at all, they were bound and gagged.

“You know what to do,” Sen instructed the shadowy figures.

“Yes, Lord Lu,” they said in unison.

The doomed young noble and his friends were dragged away none too gently. However, he expected that they would find their journey a pleasant memory once they reached their destination. Sen hadn’t truly needed to do anything himself, but part of this was establishing the foxes in their new roles as his mysterious emissaries. The kind of emissaries that people did not want to show up in their homes. To do that, he needed people to see them obeying him. Satisfied that he’d accomplished everything useful he could in the situation, he started to rise into the air.

“Lord Lu!” the young woman shouted.

He’d hoped to avoid this, but he supposed that had been a fool’s hope. He settled back onto the ground and turned to face the noble girl. Her guards were on their knees, foreheads pressed to the ground. Sen had to repress a wince. The heavens alone knew what kind of foulness was on that stone. The young woman was staring at him with eyes as wide as the young nobleman’s had been on recognizing him. She lurched forward into a bow so deep she looked like she might topple over at the barest breeze. He had to resist the urge to step forward and grab her arm to prevent the minor disaster.

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“Thank you, Lord Lu. You saved me and my brave guards. I am forever in your debt.”

“Rise,” he ordered as much for his comfort as theirs.

The girl straightened, and the guards climbed back to their feet. He considered the trio. He addressed the guards first.

“You men were very brave to stand that way against a larger group.”

The guards puffed up at the praise.

“Thank you, Lord Lu,” said the one who recovered his wits a little faster.

The other man echoed the words a moment later.

“As for you,” he said, addressing the young woman. “You owe me nothing. My laws are clear. My servants will visit your would-be suitor’s family and inform them that there will be no wedding.”

The young woman looked like she might burst into tears at those last words.

“Thank you, Lord Lu,” she said, choking a little on the last word and bowing again.

The discomfort was threatening to rear its ugly head again, but Sen knew what Auntie Caihong would tell him to do.

“You’re welcome,” he answered before rising into the air.

He landed on a rooftop not too far away. Misty Peak stepped out of the illusion that had been concealing her. She removed her mask and rolled her eyes at him.

“I’m definitely prettier than her, and I promise I’m more fun,” she said.

“Was there a reason you shared that?” asked Sen.

“The reason is that I might get jealous if you keep adding to your collection of lovelorn cultivators and mortals.”

“I’m sure you’ll survive the pain, somehow.”

“That’s not the point,” she pouted before changing the subject. “You move too fast. We barely had time to get into position.”

“I waited until I knew they were there,” said Sen.

“You can see through our illusion now?”

“That would be telling,” said Sen with a smirk.

In truth, he couldn’t see through most of their illusions. What he had discovered he could do was detect the presence of their illusions. The illusions created a minor distortion in his spiritual sense. Even so, it was a subtle thing. He wasn’t at all confident that he’d recognize the presence of a fox illusion if he wasn’t looking for it. He was all but certain that Laughing River’s illusions would still fool him, assuming the elder fox hadn’t made his ascension yet.

“Things in the city are tense,” said the fox-woman. “People are very concerned about the food situation.”

“I know,” said Sen.

The removal of the spirit beast threat had let the farmers from the surrounding area return to their fields, but those fields had gone untended for a long time. The harvest would be severely limited. Fortunately, that was a problem with a solution.

“You don’t seem overly concerned. I know that you nascent soul cultivators don’t need to eat, but all of these mortals do. More importantly, I still need to eat. My people need to eat. We like eating, Sen.”

“Unless I’m mistaken, the answer to that problem is entering the city right now. Come along.”

Sen formed a qi platform and carried them both to the north gate of the city. Someone saw him approaching, and a murmur of Lord Lu rippled through the crowd. People backed away, which provided him with a generous open space to land in. He looked at the small collection of blue-robed cultivators. He didn’t know all of their names, but he recognized all of them as members of his own sect. There was something comforting about having more of his people close at hand. Especially since he knew what they were all there for. A cultivator with a distracted expression stepped forward and bowed.

“Patriarch,” said the man. “This one is Kao Jun Lai.”

“Disciple Kao,” said Sen with a nod.

Jun Lai glanced at the once more masked Misty Peak with a curious expression, but didn’t give voice to his questions.

“Elder Sua Xing Xing sent us here to assist you.”

“Then, I take it you’re the one who has been conducting the experiments?”

“Yes, patriarch. More time would have been better, but—” he glanced around at the obviously underfed people in the crowd. “I can see the need for haste.”

“Good. One of my servants will escort you to Lu Manor. Rest until tomorrow, and then we’ll begin the work.”

This time, it was Misty Peak who snapped her fingers. Another masked and cloaked fox appeared as if from nowhere and walked over to the blue-robed cultivators. Jun Lai hesitated before he extended a hand palm up. There was a storage ring on it.

“Forgiveness, patriarch, but Elder Sua was quite insistent that I give you this as soon as we arrived.”

Sen took the ring and examined its contents. It was food. Not even a fraction of what would be needed to fend off disaster for the winter, but enough to provide a little relief.

“Thank you, Disciple Kao. I’ll see that this is put to good use.”

All of the cultivators from his sect bowed and then followed after the disguised fox. Sen meant to leave immediately, but the half-hopeful, half-fearful looks on the faces in the crowd made him wait. He needed to give these people something more to hang onto than fleeting glimpses of him in the sky and rumors that might or might not be. He could feel Misty Peak looking at him. He lifted himself a little way up into the air so that most of the crowd could see him.

“I know that you are all still afraid. You’re afraid of what the spirit beasts will do, as you should be. You’re also afraid of what the winter will bring. You fear that those cold, dark days will bring famine and death. Those cultivators you just saw have traveled here from my sect in the north. They are experts in growing crops and, more importantly, growing them quickly. You will not starve. Your children will not starve. On my word, this city will not starve.”

There was a moment of silence, and then someone in the crowd broke into sobbing tears. That opened the gates for everyone else. There were more sobs. There were cheers. He spotted children in the crowd who were too young to understand what was happening. Some looked confused, but joined in the cheering nonetheless. Sen was also very careful to note the people who didn’t look happy at the news. They had no doubt planned to profit in one way or another from the food shortages. He glanced at Misty Peak, who gave him an almost imperceptible nod. She was paying attention as well.

“As for the mad spirit beasts who have taken up the Beast King’s cause, I won’t pretend the fight is won. It isn’t. But we have struck a vicious blow against them. They won’t be eager to return to this city. They have treated us as prey, and we have let them. No more. I will build an army of soldiers and cultivators to hunt the spirit beasts who hunt us. We will track them. We will find them. And we will kill them.”