Unintended Cultivator

Almost the second they were out of sight, Sen mentally dismissed the two cultivators he’d let go. They might become a problem down the road, but the dead thing on the ground in front of him was much more likely to become a problem. It had been a situation without a way to win. If he simply let them all go, it would signal weakness. He’d find himself hounded by entitled cultivators who would think they could come to the academy and do whatever they wanted. The other path was no more palatable, it just offered the slightly better chance of preventing people from showing up and being insufferable. Still, it had been a while since he’d last had to kill another cultivator. He hadn’t missed it. He didn’t move or speak until Sua Xing Xing stepped close and reached toward the body.

“What in the hells do you think you’re doing?” asked Sen.

She froze, straightened, and turned a very cautious look toward him. “I was just—”

“It was rhetorical,” said Sen. “Nothing on that corpse belongs to you.”

She shot him an affronted look. “If not for me, do you really think you would have won that fight?”

“If not for you, do you think there would have been a fight? Do you think they even would have been here? I don’t.”

Sua Xing Xing opened her mouth but couldn’t seem to find an answer.

“As for your question,” he said, “yes. I most certainly would have won the fight with or without your intervention. None of which matters to this discussion. I’m the one who did the killing, so I get whatever dubious rewards there are to have.”

Sua Xing Xing’s eyes drifted down to the jian Sen still held. She seemed to take it for an implicit threat, and Sen supposed that it probably was one. Her eyes moved from the sword down to the body. A flash of frustration crossed her face before she smoothed it to calm acceptance. Maybe the man had something that she thought was hers, or maybe it was something that she thought would embarrass her. Then again, she might have just known about a treasure he possessed that she wanted. Sen almost asked before he decided that he didn’t care what it was. She wasn’t getting it. He wasn’t so foolish as to lay all the blame on her for the way things had gone. He sincerely doubted that she had come along for the express purpose of alienating those cultivators. That didn’t change the fact that her mere presence had immediately and irrevocably escalated the situation. She wasn’t getting rewarded for that.

Did he detect a bitter undertone to the word patriarch? Sen wasn’t certain, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. Core cultivators usually got what they wanted when they were out in the world away from their sects. She’ll just have to treat being shut down that hard as a new and novel experience, thought Sen. There was a calculating part of him that hoped she would use this whole matter as an excuse to leave. It was, however, a dim hope. She might have seen all of this as an unexpected opportunity, but he doubted her failure to seize the opportunity would influence her long-term agenda. He gave her a flat look.

“I’m not a patriarch,” corrected Sen. “This is an academy, not a sect.”

“Of course. My mistake. I apologize, founder,” she offered with a sickly-sweet smile before turning and walking away.

Founder was only nominally better than patriarch, but Sen lacked the mental energy to pick that fight. It just wasn’t worth the effort. If she needed to poke at him to assuage her bruised pride, then so be it. Instead, he focused on the body. An examination with his spiritual sense and qi revealed three storage treasures, as well as an amulet that did… He could tell it did something. He pocketed all of them and took the man’s sword. He’d have to look in the storage rings and maybe ask Auntie Caihong about the amulet, but that would have to wait. He didn’t want the townspeople walking out of the training hall to find a dismembered body. Sen cycled for earth qi to open a deep pit beneath the corpse pieces. They dropped down into the hole, where he incinerated them until nothing but ash remained. He closed the hole and used a bit of wood qi to encourage a fast bit of minor plant growth. It would be obvious to everyone that something had happened there but the details should remain obscure.

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Sen looked down and was surprised to find he was still holding the jian. He used a flash of intense heat to burn away the blood that still coated it. That kind of heat would have warped a mortal-grade blade or melted it outright, but it barely warmed the enhanced metal of a blade made for those in core cultivation. With a flick of his wrist, the ashes fell away from the jian. He sheathed it and then tried to remember what else he needed to do. The altercation had pushed all other concerns out of his mind. He looked around at the buildings in a futile search for inspiration or maybe even just someone to ask where he was supposed to be right then. He was usually supposed to be somewhere. There was a telltale tink noise of something hard bumping against glass that drew his eye to one of the windows in the mortal training hall. He saw a cluster of faces pressed to the glass. When he turned his gaze directly on them, they all disappeared with varying looks of guilt, fear, and surprise.

Sen debated just going back to the galehouse. He didn’t want to talk to the townspeople, or the small band of cultivators who had joined the academy, or anyone else who saw him as a cultivator first. He just wanted to see Ai and listen as she regaled him with stories about pictures she drew, or how she’d discovered some new bug, or how Uncle Kho had taken her flying. That wish was so powerful that he’d walked nearly twenty feet before he stopped himself. As much as he loathed the thought of explaining anything to anyone at that moment, he knew he needed to do it. Otherwise, rumors would spread. There were enough fake stories about him in the world already. He didn’t need to add to that pile because he didn’t feel like talking. Sen allowed himself ten seconds to just tilt his head back, look at the clear sky overhead, and take calming breaths. Then, he made himself walk to the doors of the training hall and go inside to do what needed to be done.

No one was training. People were standing around in small groups and, there was no other word for it, gossiping. A silent, awkward hush fell over the space when he entered. Everyone stared at him with all of their questions barely held back behind their teeth. That silent regard was damning. The day before, they would have asked those questions in a tumultuous upswell of incomprehensible noise. The day before, they saw him as, maybe not one of them, but not an incomprehensible and dangerous outsider either. Now, he saw the fear that held their questions in check. He wasn’t Sen to them anymore. Now, he was a cultivator, or the founder, or – may the heavens shield him – the patriarch in their minds. A remote, distant power that might offer some level of protection and teaching, but one that might also turn on them in a moment of capricious malice.

Maybe, this had been inevitable from the moment he started to train the townspeople. That distance between him and them wasn’t just in their imaginations. He had avoided it recently, but a cultivator never truly escaped the Jianghu. It was always going to come looking for him unless he followed Fu Ruolan’s example and hid himself away deep in the wilds. He’d let himself overlook the truth for a time, but he did live in a different world from the mortal townspeople. He was, as he had once told Jing, just a visitor in their world. And now his world had arrived on the doorstep of these mortal bystanders. He might not owe them an explanation, but they still deserved one.

“I’m sure you’re all wondering what just happened out there,” he said in a voice that even he thought sounded tired. “I’ll tell you what I can.”

So, he gave them an unvarnished, if incomplete, version of the facts. He omitted the information he’d inferred about the relationship between Sua Xing Xing and Sheung Tian Kuo. He also withheld his suspicions that this hadn’t been a sanctioned action by the Thunderous Sky Sect. That was a different kind of rumor he didn’t want spread around. If it hadn’t been sanctioned and he kept that information from spreading, it could give him a bit of leverage if someone else from that sect showed up in some official capacity. If it had been sanctioned, spreading falsehoods was a sure way to guarantee that someone would show up with retribution in mind. No, silence on that matter only benefitted him and, while they’d never know, the townspeople. No one interrupted his explanation. When he finished, everyone held their tongues, proving to him that they saw him differently. Helpless to alter that change, he did the only thing he could. He lived up to their expectations.

“Return to your training,” he ordered.

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