Unintended Cultivator

Book 11: Chapter 18: Inspection (2)

There were several different kinds of silence after that outburst. The other cooks were either in shocked silence or, more tellingly to Sen’s mind, a resigned sort of silence. A glance at Mo showed that the man was unperturbed by this and maybe even a little amused. A look at Kang showed that the man had been struck dumb by incandescent rage. His eye was twitching furiously as his face grew redder and redder. He thrust a finger at Zhang Bai.

“You insubordinate wretch!” roared Kang. “I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” said Zhang Bai with a deadly, cold, assured calm. “Go ahead, Kang. Tell me what you’ll do.”

Sen looked back and forth between them with growing fascination. While Kang hadn’t had the faintest idea of where the cooks were located, he clearly knew Zhang Bai. It was also clear that the two men didn’t like each other. Based on the way that Kang’s mouth worked but no words came out, it seemed that Zhang Bai was, somehow, in the position of greater power. A supposition that he proved by walking right up to the general, seizing the man’s robes, and hauling him to the tent flap.

“How dare you!” shouted Zang, equal parts startled and outraged.

“Don’t let me see you again,” said Zhang Bai with that same deadly calm.

Then, he threw the general out of the tent and, almost certainly on purpose, into a pool of muddy slush. He turned to glare at Kang’s hangers-on and pointed to the flap.

“Out. Unless you want the same,” ordered the cook.

Sen was torn between confusion and mirth. He shot another look at General Mo, who gave a slight shake of his head.

The rest of Kang’s people trudged out of the tent beneath Zhang Bai’s baleful glare. The only one who dared look at the cook flinched at whatever he saw on the man’s face. After the last man left, Zhang Bai closed his eyes, took a very deep breath, and shook his head. Sen didn’t think that anyone was supposed to hear what the cook said, but his superior hearing picked the words out of the air.

“That man needs to have an accident.”

The strange emphasis on the last word was enough to let Sen know that there’d be nothing accidental about that accident if it ever came to pass. There was another moment of silence before Zhang Bai spoke again without opening his eyes.

“I don’t hear anyone working.”

Sen watched as the rest of the cooks and what he supposed were assistants jumped a little before resuming their previous tasks with renewed vigor. Zhang Bai listened to the work for a little while before he opened his eyes and turned toward Sen and Mo. His expression was inscrutable when he looked at Sen, but warmed into something that might have been a distant relation to friendliness when he turned to Mo.

“General,” said Zhang Bai. “I would say it’s nice to see you, but you brought the jackass here. So, now I’m not so sure.”

“I didn’t bring him,” said Mo with an amused chuckle. “It’d be more accurate to say that he brought himself when Lord Lu asked to come here.”

Zhang Bai shifted his eyes back to Sen.

“So, you’re really him. The mighty wandering cultivator who became a king. I thought you might be with those robes and being, well, huge. By the heavens, man, are you part ox?” ɽãŊỔβÈ𝓢

Sen knew that he should probably feign a little indignance to protect the dignity of his position or something like that. He just couldn’t dredge up the feelings. He liked this Zhang Bai too much for that.

“No,” said Sen cheerfully. “Not part ox, but I do know some oxen. They’re good people.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Zhang Bai. “My original question still stands. What in the thousand hells do you want? We are busy here. I wasn’t making that up.”

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“I wanted to see what you were feeding the army,” said Sen.

For the first time, the cook seemed taken aback.

“What? Why?”

“Because I was curious,” said Sen.

“No— I— I meant why do you care?”

“An army lives or dies on the food it gets. I wanted to see what kind of food they were going to get, so I could see if I was going to need to change anything. Plus, I don’t know what’s involved with feeding this many people. It seemed like something I should have at least a little knowledge about.”

The cook stared at him for so long that Sen started to wonder if the man’s mind had been damaged by some unseen attack. Finally, Zhang Bai looked to General Mo.

“Is he serious?” asked the cook.

“In my experience, he’s almost always serious,” observed the general.

Zhang Bai’s face twisted a little like he meant to object before he just shrugged and said, “It’s your time, I suppose. Come with me.”

For the next hour, Sen followed the cook as he moved from tent to tent, issuing orders, correcting mistakes, and occasionally offering some insight into what was happening. When he wasn’t in the tents, he was by large fires where massive pots of food were being prepared or meat was roasting.

“The thing about feeding this many people is that you can’t get creative. At least, not very often,” said Zhang Bai as he tested a slab of meat with a thin blade.

“Why is that?” asked Sen.

“It’s too complicated. It gets too difficult to source the things you need. Takes too long. That’s why the food is always a little boring. You need to build every meal around things that are readily available and straightforward to prepare,” said the cook while pointing at a pot. “Rice. You can get it just about anywhere. The only things you absolutely need to make it are water, fire, and a pot. It’s filling. And if we make enough today, we can make rice porridge in the morning, which cuts down on our workload and provides a decent meal. But, as long as we keep things simple, we keep feeding everyone for a long time. Right now, we can roast fresh meat because it’s available, but once we start marching, it’ll be mostly dried meat.”

“Right,” said Sen with a nod. “Lighter. Easier to transport. Lasts longer.”

“Exactly!” said Zhang Bai, pointing at Sen.

“You know, we have storage rings that will keep food fresh,” said Sen.

Zhang Bai froze for a second before he turned to look at Sen.

“You have those? And you’d use them for food.”

“I do, and I would,” said Sen. “I mean, you need a cultivator to put things into them and get things back out, but we can stock some fresh meat and vegetables to take along. Probably not enough for every meal, or we’ll clean out the city, but we can take some. And we’ll be killing a lot of spirit beasts along the way. Mortals can’t eat all of them, but they can eat some of the weaker ones.”

The cook’s gaze was locked onto Sen’s face.

“We can eat spirit beasts?” asked the cook, as though he wanted to check and make sure he’d heard correctly.

“You can. Some of them at least. It’s not really a safe strategy for mortals to hunt them, but that won’t be a problem this time. It might even help improve people’s health and strength a little.”

Sen was careful to phrase that last bit as a possibility, rather than a certainty. He’d discussed the possibility with Auntie Caihong and Fu Ruolan. They both seemed to think it was plausible, but neither of them knew for sure. It just wasn’t something that anyone had explored that closely. Cultivators were more interested in what would benefit cultivators, so that’s where they focused their attention. Not that Zhang Bai seemed to care that much about those potential benefits. He seemed far more interested in the prospect of cooking the meat.

“Are there any special preparations that the meat needs? Unusual things in the meat we need to watch out for? Which spirit beasts can we eat, and which ones should we avoid? Are some of them poisonous?”

The questions continued to pour out of Zhang Bai without enough of a pause for Sen to even start answering them. He patiently waited the man out before he started to explain that no, they didn’t need special preparation. No, as a rule, there was nothing strange about the meat. He had to go a bit more in-depth about which ones were safe to eat. The problem was less the specific kind of beast than its advancement. If the spirit beasts were too advanced, the density of qi in the meat became dangerous for mortals to consume. Their bodies simply didn’t have the core and qi channels to support, process, and distribute that qi. By the time the cook had run out of questions, it was well into the afternoon. The man had actually handed off his duties and sat down to take detailed notes about Sen’s answers.

“We’ll have to talk more about these spirit beasts and those storage rings,” said an excited Zhang Bai as Sen and Mo left the tent.

“We will,” promised Sen before falling in next to General Mo.

“Well, I think you just added someone new to your cult,” said the old soldier.

“Cult?” asked Sen.

“Well, it’s probably not a cult, yet,” admitted the general, “but give it time.”

“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. I got captured by a cult once,” said Sen.

“Really?” asked Mo.

“It’s not one of my favorite memories. However, I’d like to know just why it is that Zhang Bai felt comfortable enough to hurl a general out of that tent. Is he a secret prince or something?”

“No. Not a prince. Well, not exactly. Let’s just say that Kang wouldn’t survive angering Zhang Bai’s family.”

“You’re not going to tell me who his family is, are you?”

Mo looked a little pained but shook his head.

“It’s not my secret to tell.”

Sen sighed and then pushed that question out of mind. While it might be interesting to know, he decided that it must not be something he needed to know. Otherwise, he suspected that Mo would have found a way to tell him.

“That’s fair,” said Sen. “Where to next?”