Unintended Cultivator

Shen Mingxia had been aware of the fight between Sen and the nascent soul cultivator. It was impossible not to be aware of it with the kind of power those two were throwing around. Her very being shuddered every time one of them ignited a technique. She’d thought, after all of the fighting they’d done recently, that she had a handle on Sen’s true strength. Now, she knew how terribly, disastrously wrong she’d been in her assessment. The man was trading blows with a nascent soul cultivator and had survived beyond the first two seconds of the fight. It should have been like her taking on any of the core cultivators out for their blood. One burst of aggression followed by an ignominious death. Instead, Sen had kept that man locked down for entire minutes. She wouldn’t have believed it if she wasn’t here to witness it. Not that she’d seen much of that fight. She’d been far too busy trying to survive this madness.

She’d always been uncertain about the spider, Glimmer of Night, but she was intensely grateful for his presence now. Not that the spider wasn’t terrifying in his own right, but he was a terror on her side. His webs seemed to eat techniques, and may the gods help anyone that the spider actually managed to close with. His brute power was unbelievable. She’d watched him casually rip off heads, arms, and legs, and then use those removed body parts as improvised weapons. It had a remarkably chilling effect on the enemy when they saw a friend’s dead face racing toward them. As for Righteous Wu Gang, well, that was a man who lived up to his legend. He was a storm of violence with fists that fell like hammers. Whatever misgivings he’d had about the fight, he’d left them behind when the battle started. She even had to, however grudgingly, give Long Jia Wei his due. He used a pair of twin daggers and perfectly timed air qi attacks to devastating effect.

She’d just started to find her rhythm when everything changed. One second, she’d been fending off attacks from two people closer to her own cultivation, the next second, no one was moving. No one was breathing. It was as if some vast, inhuman thing, some monster that was perfectly content to snuff out the lives of anything it saw, had turned its awful gaze on them.

***

Wu Gang froze, and silence fell beneath the weight of that presence. He was a man who took an earned pride in his lack of fear. He had single-handedly faced down ravening spirit beasts, entire gangs of bandits, and even the occasional cultivator. He had braved weather that could kill mortals to find lost children and bring them home. Bit by bit, he had ground away that fear and built strength and resolve in its place. In one moment, all of that was stripped away. Suddenly, he was that same fool he’d been back in Orchard’s Reach. A young man too certain in his own strength feeling true fear for the first time as Lu Sen’s fist nearly shattered his ribcage. He felt sweat pop out on his forehead and his hands shook as he tried to comprehend what was happening. Then, almost against his will, he turned his eyes to where Lu Sen, no, to where Judgment’s Gale stood. The man was bloodied but on his feet. He still held his jian, which continued radiating that awful sense of doom, but that seemed almost trivial compared to what was radiating from the man himself. He was the source of whatever was happening. Not that it was apparent from his utterly blank expression. If this was a storm, then Judgment’s Gale stood in the eye of it.

***

Glimmer of Night paused for a moment as Sen did something interesting. He would have to remember to ask about it later. In the meantime, though, if all these enemies were just going to stand around looking afraid of things, well, he wasn’t a spider to waste an opportunity. He immediately began weaving that special web around all of these people who had volunteered to die. If they were all so eager to see where the Great Web would lead them next, who was he to deny them that opportunity? He did need to modify the web so it wouldn’t hurt the Mingxia boy, or the other two Sen had decided could come along. Glimmer of Night hadn’t bothered to learn their names yet. He just thought of them as the not-Sen and the not-Mingxia. Although, he wasn’t sure he used even those pseudo-names for the same ones each time. Oh well, he thought and activated the web.

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***

Long Jia Wei couldn’t decide who he was most afraid of at the moment. The nascent soul cultivator who appeared to bar their path had seemed like he would be the scariest thing here, but then Judgment’s Gale had gone off, by himself, to fight the nascent soul cultivator. Defying all reason, he’d survived so far and then triggered whatever the hells it was that was bearing down on them all. Long Jia Wei didn’t even have a name for this experience. It felt like his very soul was being squeezed. He was certain that was going to be the most frightening thing he’d experience this night, and probably for the rest of his life. Then, the one called Glimmer of Night had activated his web and moved right to the top of the list of things to be afraid of as every enemy cultivator inside the technique started dying horrific deaths. It was as if all the qi and life were being drained out of them. It even looked like they were all screaming in pure agony but had somehow, someway, been rendered silent.

***

This isn’t right, thought Tseun Rong. None of this is right.

When he’d been approached for this task, he knew he wasn’t the first person they’d asked. He was never the first person to get asked. He had a “reputation” as someone who liked killing a bit too much. Someone who took that as the first option when other, better choices were available. It had made him unpopular in the unfortunately small world of nascent soul cultivators, which he’d discovered was more of a problem than he’d anticipated. There was no alternative to that world, at least not if you wanted peers. And those peers were the kind of people with long, long memories and a decided lack of a sense of humor. He wasn’t entirely shut out of those circles even if no one wanted him around. No one shared knowledge with him. But they didn’t want him gone, either, because there would always be someone like Lu Sen out there. A rising power that left the old demigods trembling in their secret domains.

He hadn’t put much stock in all of those absurd Judgment Gale stories. People exaggerate, and mortals couldn’t tell the same story twice. He’d also heard the warnings that this Lu Sen was the student of Feng Ming, along with rumblings that Ma Caihong and Kho Jaw-Long had a hand in his training as well. But what did anyone have to fear from those three anymore? A new story would crop up every few hundred years, but Tseun Rong doubted that Feng Ming was even still alive or on this plane of existence anymore. As for Kho Jaw-Long, the man had exiled himself to some mountain ages ago. There were rumors that the three of them had gone on a demonic cultivator culling a few years back, but Tseun Rong knew better than to put stock in rumors. He hadn’t seen them. No one he knew had seen them. That meant that someone had probably made it all up. Besides, this Lu Sen was just a core formation cultivator.

That was how they’d described him. Just a core formation cultivator. And Tseun Rong had to admit that it was technically true. He could sense the core in the man, but the pure physical strength and speed, the potency of his qi, to say nothing of the reserves he had to have… It seemed impossible. This mere core formation cultivator had fought him, a nascent soul cultivator, to a standstill, and not briefly. Lu Sen hadn’t simply delayed him for a moment. The man had brought the fight directly to Tseun Rong and seemed to come out of it less scathed than he had any right to. He’d needed to change the game, to break that monstrous focus that Lu Sen carried. So, he’d done everything he could to rile the man up. It had failed. The man hadn’t become enraged. He hadn’t made a stupid mistake. He’d just gone blank. Then, the world itself seemed to writhe in displeasure, and Lu Sen brought something to bear on Tseun Rong that should have been impossible. That initial auric imposition, a soul technique, had been shocking enough, but this was something wholly different. It felt like that man’s gaze alone would reach inside of Tseun Rong, seize everything that made him a person, and crush it.

Then, as if all of that weren’t bad enough, he felt the lesser cultivators he’d recruited dying in droves. They were simply fading and then winking out of his spiritual sense. Tseun Rong made a decision. He had signed on to fight a man, not some incarnated god. He wrapped his injuries in hardened ice, and then all of his instincts started screaming. He saw Lu Sen lift that apocalypse he called a sword and point it at him. He didn’t know what the man intended, and he had no intention of finding out. He launched himself toward the sky. He would flee this doomed fight. Then, he heard a voice carried on air qi.

“No. You don’t get to leave.”

Tseun Rong’s vision turned white as all of the agony in the world tried to find a home inside of him.

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