Unintended Cultivator

“That’s good to know,” said Sen. “I’ll be sure to clue you in if and when the time comes.”

“Future plans aside, what about your preparations here? I know what I see, but that’s rarely the whole story. How are they progressing?”

Sen frowned. His focus for the academy and the sect hadn’t changed, not entirely, after Master Feng had told him about what the spirit beasts were planning. Of course, that was in large part because he was already teaching mortals about how to kill spirit beasts. As for the cultivators, he wanted them prepared to defend Ai and the House of Lu. Preparing them for that and preparing them for a fight against hordes of spirit beasts were, much to his shock, not that far apart. Of course, close wasn’t the same thing as identical. He’d initially intended for the cultivator’s martial training to focus on individual combat with only periodic forays into group tactics. He’d seen that as the optimal choice because most cultivators fought each other one-on-one or fought an individual spirit beast.

Those plans had changed. Now, individual and group tactics got an even split, which he recognized was to the detriment of both. True mastery required focus. He was essentially training people to be competent in both areas. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was the best solution he could come up with when facing the certainty of the coming war. Not that he’d shared that information with most of the mortals or the cultivators, yet. It wasn’t that Sen wanted to keep the information hidden. If anything, he wanted everyone to know. He was just worried about causing a panic.

When he’d gone to talk with Lai Dongmei about the situation, she had advised him to keep the information to a close circle for the time being. She had been the one who suggested that spreading the information around prematurely could cause more harm than good.

“How so?” he’d asked.

“The prospect of a war is rightly terrifying to people. But, when you know the enemy and where they’ll come from, it can be a rallying point. Right now, all we know is that the enemy will come from the wilds, which is the same thing as saying the enemy could come from anywhere. The longer that goes on, the more rumors will spread, and panic will follow the rumors. When people don’t have information, they’ll invent it. Let’s say that people get it into their heads that the spirit beasts will come from the north, panicked farmers and villagers will flee south. The towns and cities there will be overwhelmed. That kind of chaos can only serve the spirit beasts’ ends.”

Sen had wanted to have a bit more faith in people, but he had been assured by Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, Uncle Kho, Jing, and leaders of every sect he’d spoken with that Lai Dongmei had the right of it. In most cases, that certainty had stemmed from actually having seen it happen in the past, not once, but repeatedly. So, his own misgivings aside, he had kept the information largely to himself. Even so, he didn’t want things at the academy or in town falling to pieces the first time that spirit beasts showed up looking for a bit of easy slaughter. He had quietly but firmly instituted several plans designed to strengthen the defenses around and inside the town and academy.

Much of that work had been masked as projects for some of the foundation formation and core cultivators. He’d worked with Uncle Kho to develop a variety of defensive formations, then broken them down into pieces that the students could erect. He’d cast working on the town walls as a kind of low-grade punishment. Those walls had been raised and reinforced over and over again. He’d personally started adding layers of formations to them. The work was progressing, probably faster than he had any right to expect, but it wasn’t fast. Solid formation work took time and knowledge. Reinforcing walls took time and energy. And all of it had to be assigned in plausible ways. While Sen could acknowledge the probable need for secrecy, it also put a hard limit on how much could be done at any given time.

Beyond that, installing those defenses had to be carried out around the rest of the work that everyone needed to do. Most cultivators needed blocks of time every single day to simply cultivate. Sen had broached the subject of teaching everyone the passive cultivation technique that he had learned from Master Feng. The elder cultivator had been immovable on the subject.

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“Wars come and go, Sen, but cultivators live a very long time. Once a technique gets out there, you can’t ever take it back. I can think of at least twenty cultivators that I would never, ever, want to learn that technique.”

While the answer annoyed him, it put him in mind of the conversation he’d had with that coward of a patriarch who ran the Clear Spring Sect. They had talked about many things, but one of the things that stuck with him was that there were people who shouldn’t be helped to advance. That passive cultivation technique would make advancing faster a real possibility for a lot of cultivators. It wouldn’t be anything on the level of what Sen himself did, but it could reasonably shave decades off of the amount of time that a cultivator normally spent between advancements. Sen didn’t need to think very hard about it to come up with his own list of people he wouldn’t want to see advance faster.

Nor did he feel even close to confident enough about the people in his sect to feel like they could all be trusted. Too many of them had come from other sects, and he found their reassurances that they had cut ties to be anything but reassuring. He had no intention of feeding secrets to people who might turn around and give them to their old sects. A fact that he’d made no secret about to every single ex-sect member who had tried to join his sect. More than a dozen had simply left immediately when he told them straight out that he wasn’t going to teach them anything they couldn’t learn somewhere else. He was keeping a close eye on another half a dozen who hadn’t hidden their emotions well enough. He’d even taken it as far as not allowing anyone to leave the room with a pill or elixir he’d made. They either had to take it in front of him or leave it with him until they were ready to take it. That had caused three people to disappear from one day to the next.

Always needing to pay attention to what he shared with who was mentally taxing, which also didn’t help with the preparations. The constant analysis and always needing to remember who knew what had largely resulted in him not sharing anything with anyone that he didn’t consider public knowledge. Sen had to forcefully pull himself out of that quagmire of thoughts and focus on Master Feng.

“Slower than I’d like,” said Sen. “Training cultivators is a slow business no matter how you look at it. Having people come in who are already foundation formation and core formation helps, but it doesn’t really advance the qi-condensing cultivators any faster. And needing to do everything in pieces slows everything down as well. I know why we have to do it that way, but I hate the delays.”

“Trust me. You’ll hate it more when the need for secrecy is gone.”

“I expect you’re right about that.”

“You still haven’t decided what to do about the half-step mortals?” asked Master Feng.

Sen groaned. That was something that Master Feng had pointed out to him nearly a year before. There were some mortals in the academy who were teetering right on the edge of becoming qi-condensing cultivators. It would take nothing at all to nudge them over that line. Sen just wasn’t sure if he wanted to do that. He worried that he’d be dangling the prospect of cultivation in front of them while knowing full well that they’d likely just end up as victims in the coming war. It felt like tricking them, and he’d been so ambivalent about it that he kept pushing the decision off.

“I haven’t. Or, I don’t want to, which amounts to the same thing, I guess. I take it you think I should.”

“I think that it’s going to be one of those decisions that haunts you either way. If you do help them become cultivators, there’s a good chance that a lot of them will die. On the other hand, if you don’t help them become cultivators, there’s a good chance that a lot of them will die in some other way. It’s not the kind of decision with an easy right answer. If you’re asking if I’d do it, the answer is probably yes.”

Sen grunted to show that he’d at least heard the other man’s words. He didn’t think that he had any business making these kinds of decisions, but he supposed he’d given up that excuse when he’d decided to start a sect in truth. As the patriarch, the ultimate responsibility was always his. While he didn’t think anyone would blame him for not wanting more blood on his hands, not making the decision wasn’t a solution. He needed to make a choice about those half-step mortals and find a way to live with it.

“Do you think we can win this?” Sen asked, eager to change the subject. “I mean, I have no idea how many spirit beasts there are on this continent. Are we preparing for a war where we’ll simply be swallowed up by sheer numbers?”

“There’s always a chance at victory. And spirit beasts aren’t like human beings. They may well develop some tactics to use against us, but not every single spirit beast is going to be thinking at a human level. Many of them are simply going to be driven in a direction and hurled against us. That doesn’t make them easy to deal with, but it does make them easier to deal with. We can lean on superior tactics and some reinforced mortal construction to help level the field. We’ll also be able to use their animal natures against them. In the end, though, I think it’s going to depend on how well and how quickly we can organize and coordinate our efforts.”

“It’s going to be ugly, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”