Unintended Cultivator

Sen flew over the forest at a speed that would have seemed reckless if he’d brought anyone else with him. He hadn’t. He very specifically and intentionally hadn’t. He’d left Falling Leaf to “guard” the last four survivors with a glowering Master Feng as backup. Sen had briefly explained the situation, as well as the assassination attempt on Falling Leaf, to his increasingly stone-faced master.

“I wouldn’t want these four to get any ideas if at all possible,” Sen had told Master Feng.

The look that Master Feng directed at those trembling survivors had been something truly terrible.

“I’m sure they’ll behave,” said the elder cultivator in a voice carved from glacial ice.

Satisfied that no unfortunate incidents were in the near future, Sen had set off in search of what remained of those spirit beasts who hadn’t been willing to come to terms with him. If they had simply left, or stayed out of the fight, he’d have been willing to largely ignore them. They were going to be irrelevant in the larger course of the war, so he didn’t need to do anything about them. Not that he would have put them entirely out of mind. He’d have set a watch on them to ensure they didn’t decide a nice sneak attack was a great idea if the war looked like it was going to go against humanity. Beyond that, though, he simply didn’t care about them. At least, he hadn’t cared about them.

The second he found out what they intended to do with Falling Leaf, all of that changed. Sen could only guess at what the beast king might have done with her. His imagination, however, was more than happy to conjure one nightmare-inducing image after the next. She would have been made an example to keep the rest of the spirit beasts in line. This is what happens when you side with the humans. Of that much, Sen was sure. Given her advancement and the healing it allowed for, the making an example process was one that could have been dragged out for a very, very long time. It was thoughts like that which transformed the small band of indecisive spirit beasts from possible unreliable allies into enemies. And Sen could not tolerate enemies this close to his town.

More importantly, he needed to send a message that would leave every spirit beast trembling. He needed them to understand that targeting the ones he loved was to invite a level and kind of retribution that no one wanted to dare. In other times, he might have chosen a less extreme option. At the very least, he might only have targeted the leadership of those sad, uncertain spirit beasts. With humanity already on the back foot and pushed into a defensive posture, it wouldn’t take much for whatever hope remained to crumble under the pressure. He could hear the hope dwindling in the messages that kept flooding in, and the constant pleas for assistance of any kind. Sen knew all too well how fragile a thing hope was when you were under pressure. He’d lived in the shadow of that kind of hopelessness for years as a child. It took something jarring to shake that sense of sense of doom. Such as a cultivator deciding that a street rat would become his disciple. Anything less than that just wouldn’t get the job done.

Humanity needed something equally jarring to shake off the miasma of defeat that was swiftly taking root. They needed something they could cling to until the cultivators and mortals got organized. They needed a victory, and they needed it to be decisive. He hadn’t planned to provide that light in the darkness for them. He didn’t want that much attention, but this threatened to be a long war. He expected this minor contribution would have long since faded from memory before everything was said and done. He could do this one thing, and then drop out of view again to focus on protecting what was his. That sending this message could accomplish both ends with one move was just a convenience that Sen was ready to take advantage of.

As he closed in on the area where he’d been told the rest of the spirit beasts had congregated, he felt them appear in his spiritual sense. There were more than he’d expected. By his rough estimate, there were anywhere from a hundred to hundred and fifty of them. It was hard to be sure because they were almost all trying to flee directly away from him. He wasn’t sure why they were bothering. Unless one of the handful who had chosen to stand their ground against him got very, very lucky, the end of this particular day would prove a foregone conclusion. Sen supposed some other cultivator might have waited for those challengers to rise up to meet him in the sky, or maybe they would have descended to engage in honorable combat.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Sen had neither the inclination nor the patience for such a contest. Instead, he fell back on an old trick that he’d largely sworn off because it was so insanely dangerous to use it anywhere near civilization. But he wasn’t near civilization anymore. Instead of drawing his jian, he compressed lightning qi and killing intent in his hand. The balance was different than when he used Heavens’ Rebuke with his jian. It was also different than the times he’d used it accidentally. He’d spent idle moments over the years figuring out how to make something a touch more stable. He supposed it might reduce the overall force of the final result, but he expected he’d make up for that with pure quantity and quality of both qi and killing intent. A ball of pure darkness grew and grew over his palm, black lightning crackling along the surface. To Sen, it felt like it grew visibly darker in his vicinity, as though the technique were swallowing light from the very environment.

The spirit beasts who had thought to fight him seemed to realize that wasn’t going to happen. Several tried to flee, while a couple tried to take the air in an attempt to meet him where he flew over them. It didn’t do them any good. Sen hurled that ball of annihilation down at them. Once it was free of his immediate grasp, the ball expanded rapidly. It simply swallowed whole the spirit beasts in the air. Then, the ball struck the ground below. Sen had never really been far enough away to watch the technique in action before. The earth seemed to ripple for a moment like it was made of water, and then the ball detonated. Purest black rolled outward and consumed everything in its path. Sen could watch the destruction in his spiritual sense as the technique killed everything. The death of the spirit beasts was the most noticeable because they shone the brightest, but the technique didn’t discriminate. Soon, even the ambient traces of life that Sen had long ago learned to ignore vanished as well. There was just a blank spot in his spiritual sense where there used to be life.

The sensation of nothing where there had been something before unnerved Sen more than a little, but he couldn’t focus on that. While the technique had killed the waiting fighters and the trailing edge of the fleeing spirit beasts, the bulk of them had managed to get beyond its range. As the darkness of the technique dispersed, Sen did pause to look down at what he had wrought. It was chilling. It was like some great hand had reached down and simply scooped part of the world away. There was a crater-like shape in the land below that stretched out to nearly a quarter mile in every direction from the point of impact. Seeing that destruction drove home to him that mortals were right to fear cultivators, and that cultivators were not truly part of this world. It’s too much power, he thought. How could we ever be anything but visitors in this place?

Shaking off that grim thought, he turned his attention to the spirit beasts that had escaped his initial wrath. Where there had been at least a semblance of order in their retreat before, now it was outright panic. Spirit beasts were scattering in every direction with only one group of perhaps twenty-five moving together. Once again drawing on past experience, Sen began fusing qi types and thrusting them up into the sky. A great mass of cloud, shadow, fire, lightning, metal, and Sen’s own untempered killing intent began to swirl into life. As the technique formed and grew, Sen felt the spirit beasts draw to a stop. He could imagine them looking up at the sky. He could imagine their sense of futility as his killing intent began to permeate the air.

They likely assumed that they would all die. They were wrong. There would be a survivor. This would all be pointless if there wasn’t at least one spirit beast to spread the tale of terror. The technique was starting to gain momentum and life of its own. It all but blotted out the sun for miles in every direction. I’d better use it now, while I still have control over it, thought Sen. Tiny filaments of metal shot down from the sky and pierced through spirit beasts. That alone was enough to kill a few of them, but that hadn’t been the point. The filaments served as guides for what was to follow. Spears of shadow and metal, spears of flame, and spears of lightning fell from on high like hail.

Some of the spirit beasts managed to put up defenses or take shelter beneath the ground. Sen poured more qi into the technique. The spears landed like meteors, laying waste to everything on the surface and below. The spirit beasts in his spiritual sense began winking out by fives, tens, and then dozens. Finally, there was a solitary spirit beast below. Sen descended from the sky to land in front of the creature. It was another of those bird-man spirit beasts. Sen wondered if this one was kin to the one he’d killed before. It stared at him with equal parts terror and hate in its eyes. Neither thing moved Sen.

“You butchered them!” screamed the bird-man. “You murdered them.”

“You sent people to murder my friend. You declared war on me,” said Sen. “This is what war with Judgment’s Gale means.”

The bird-man opened its beak to say something, only to find itself hurtling through air after Sen backhanded it.

“Go now,” said Sen. “Tell others what you witnessed here today. Tell them what comes of making me your enemy. Go, before what little pity I possess runs dry.”