Unintended Cultivator

Luo Ping was frowning down the road. “There’s a big part of me that wishes you had killed him.”

Sen gave her a sympathetic look. “I would have. Hells, I probably should have. At the end of the day, though, you and Min have to live here. I’m leaving.”

“Soon?”

Sen nodded. “Yes. It’s not time, yet, but soon. I’m still supposed to do something or learn something here. I’m just not quite sure what. Are you worried about him?”

“He’s the kind to hold a grudge,” said Luo Ping with a grimace. “He may blame you. He may blame us. I hope you won’t think too badly of me if I hope he blames you.”

Sen laughed. That was a kind of practicality that Grandmother Lu would have appreciated. It was also the best possible outcome, all things considered.

“I won’t. I hope he does, too. Still, I’ll pay him a visit before I go. His axe is over there somewhere,” said Sen, gesturing. “It’ll give me an excuse to stop by.”

“I never did thank you for helping me.”

Sen shrugged. “I’m glad I could help.”

“You’re different than I thought cultivators would be. I always thought they’d be,” she trailed off, a thoughtful look on her face.

“Arrogant. Violent. I am those things, sometimes, when I need to be. It’s just not all that I am. It cost me nothing to show compassion for your situation, except maybe a little lost sleep. I can afford to lose a little sleep now and then.”

“When you leave, do you know where you’ll go?”

Sen thought about it before he shook his head. “South, I expect, but that’s about as much as I’ve decided.”

“You don’t have a grand plan, then?”

“Grand plans are for sects and old monsters. I am a mere wandering cultivator. I make do with vague ideas.”

“Well, I hope your vague ideas get you to stay somewhere occasionally. It might seem small to you, but you helped a lot more people here than just me. Some of those problems you fixed were things people suffered with for years. You’re a bit of a hero in these parts.”

Sen snorted at that. “I’m no hero.”

“Maybe not to yourself. You’re a hero to Min, though. It’s going to break her heart a little when you leave.”

Sen sighed at that. “Perhaps, but it’s also best for her that I leave.”

“I wish I could say that you were wrong about that, but you aren’t. You’re too handsome for her own good. You’ll stay that way, too, won’t you? Isn’t that how cultivation works?”

“Not exactly, but close enough. Assuming I live, I’ll still look like this when she’s an old woman.”

Luo Ping shuddered. “What a terrible thing that would be.”

Sen almost asked what she meant, but he supposed he already knew. It would be terrible for any mortal to be confronted daily by the ever-youthful appearance of a cultivator. That pain would likely only be compounded for a lover. For the cultivator, the certain knowledge that they would have to bury any mortal they grew close to would serve as a permanent stone around their necks. It would be equally terrible, if terrible in a completely different way. Yet, the whole thing took on a depth for Sen that it hadn’t before. He’d known all of that that way he knew his numbers, in an impersonal and abstract way. Having spent weeks of his life living on this farm, getting to know Luo Min and Luo Ping, and indirectly participating in the community, he could get a taste of how terrible it would all feel in practice.

Sen knew that he was nowhere close to true immortality. As things stood now, he would live for centuries. At least, that was how Master Feng explained it. Yet, he might as well be immortal to the people who lived in this village. The thought of watching all of them wither and die, then watching their children wither and die left him feeling ill. The thought of standing the deathwatch over Luo Min wrenched at his heart. That brief, imagined future pain helped Sen understand the sects a little better. People surely came and went in the sects. People no doubt died sometimes, but there was a kind of continuity that you could expect. The faces around you would remain as ageless as your own. The decades and centuries would pass, and you would still have known at least some of the people in the sect the entire time you were there.

He also understood Uncle Kho and Auntie Caihong a little better, as well. Sen was aware that Uncle Kho had other reasons for staying isolated, but he suspected steering clear of attachments to mortals played a meaningful role in his choice to stay on his mountain. Withdrawing for years, even decades at a time let Auntie Caihong keep a certain mental and emotional distance, even from the people who presumably ran her various businesses. Sen had to imagine that decades away did a lot to erode emotional bonds. To make matters more complicated, most of the relationships wandering cultivators formed would be with mortals. Sen planned to steer clear of sects moving forward, after all, which also meant steering clear of most of the other cultivators in the world.

Just like that, Sen knew why he’d been sent to this place, or at least a part of it. He’d needed to understand a key part of what being a wandering cultivator meant. While Sen could afford to be friendly with mortals, he couldn’t let them into his heart the same way he’d let people like Grandmother Lu, Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, and Uncle Kho into his heart. The sheer volume of loss as time moved inexorably forward would destroy him. It wouldn’t matter how strong he was. There would come a point where his life would feel like a constant funeral. Strong ties to lots of mortals just weren’t sustainable. Settling down somewhere among the mortals wasn’t sustainable. He knew himself well enough to know that he couldn’t live among mortals and not form relationships. Perhaps others could, or simply had more practice at keeping people at a certain remove, but Sen wasn’t among their numbers. For him, for the time being, travel was the answer. Moving on all the time would be the only way to preserve his sanity.

Of course, that didn’t mean he had the tools to simply ignore the relationships he had already formed. The people who lived on this farm, and in the village to a lesser extent, mattered to him. He could be a part of their lives. He couldn’t do it all the time, for that way lay madness, but certainly from time to time. This could be the place that he orbited from, venturing out into the world, maybe for years at a time, but always coming back. He could check in on Luo Min, like an older brother or an uncle, and ensure that she didn’t suffer a life of want or desperation. He could spend a week or two dispensing his elixirs to the villagers. Yes, he decided, he could be like a quiet blessing to this one village. It might not be the ideal solution, but the time for ideal solutions had come and gone already. It was a solution he could live with.

Even cultivators needed something to ground them in the world. Sen had seen in himself the possibility of losing his way in the constant pursuit of a more perfect cultivation method or simple fixation on challenging the heavens. Those higher pursuits could become obsessions if he let them. This little village, at least for the next few decades, could serve as the anchor that kept him tethered to the world. No, it certainly wasn’t a perfect solution, because it would mean that he’d eventually have to bury Luo Min, but Sen supposed that loss was a part of balance as well. He would enjoy a great many benefits from cultivation over the long years ahead, but those benefits had a cost. Suffering those losses, weathering them, that would be his cost. It wasn’t something he could look forward to, but it was something he could prepare himself for.

“You look like you just understood something very important,” said Luo Ping.

“I suppose I did. A piece of it anyway.”

“Care to share?”

Sen ran through what he’d gleaned and ultimately shook his head. “I wasn’t the kind of insight that translates especially well. It was a tiny bit of enlightenment, but only for me, for my particular path through the world.”

“So, it helped?”

Sen offered the woman a half-smile. “It’ll take me a lifetime to answer that question. Maybe a couple of them. It did help me understand why I needed to come here, though. And what being a wandering cultivator will mean for me. So, yes, I guess it did help.”

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