Unintended Cultivator

As the royal guards led them through the city, Sen did his best not to grind his teeth. The royal guards were clearly under orders to take their time getting Sen and his companions to wherever they were going. They became a moving spectacle, which Sen supposed might even be a nice change of pace for the people in the city, even if he hated it. Men, women, and children came out of their homes and businesses to watch them pass and whisper among themselves. Or, in the case of one particularly enthusiastic and brave little boy, to race between the legs of the royal guards flanking them and rush up to Sen.

“Is it true?” the boy gasped.

Sen had come to a halt and quietly waved off the scowling royal guard who was closing fast on the little boy. The boy was craning his head so far back that it looked both comical and painful. The sun was also making the boy squint furiously. Sen crouched down so the kid could look at him more directly.

“Is what true?” Sen asked.

“Are you really Judgment’s Gale?” asked the boy, his voice a strange mix of hope, excitement, and doubt.

Sen suppressed his urge to deny everything.

“Yes,” he said. “Some people do call me that.”

“Did you really fight a dragon?” asked the boy.

Sen frowned. He’d actually fought two dragons and wyvern, but he wasn’t sure how anyone could possibly know about any of that. Those fights had all happened out in the wilds, far from spying eyes. Had Falling Leaf been telling tales about him behind his back? No, she wouldn’t do that, thought Sen before the terrible truth became clear. No, Falling Leaf would never do that, but Laughing River would. Not only would the elder fox do something like that and think it was hilarious, but he’d probably try to argue that he’d been doing Sen a favor. I’m going to poison that fox the next time I see him. Still, if this little boy in the capital had heard the story, there was a pretty good chance that everyone had heard the story. Sen could tell he’d been quiet and frowning for too long by the nervous look the kid was giving him. Deciding there was little point in denying that it had happened, he gave the boy a smile.

“Yes, that is true. I did fight a dragon,” said Sen before he leaned in a little and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “I even won, but don’t tell anyone. It’ll be our secret.”

Then, Sen pressed a finger to his lips and gave the kid a wink. The boy had a huge smile and offered a return wink so obvious that people on the other side of a stone wall could have seen it.

“I won’t tell,” said the kid a whisper that carried to the crowd that had gathered to watch the odd little exchange.

When Sen saw all of the gawking people in that crowd, the very last vestiges of hope that Sen had of staying even minimally unobtrusive vanished. Everyone from the street rats like he’d been clear on up to those sitting on the lofty peaks of leadership in the sects would know he was there. Some of it had been unavoidable. Word had long since leaked that he was coming. Those with an interest and ears in the right places would have known to be on watch for him. Of course, knowing he was coming and knowing he was here were two very different things. You are lucky I owe you, Jing, Sen growled in his head. Without that debt in place, Sen would have turned right around and left the capital. The little boy had seemingly noticed all of the adult attention that focused on him and seemed frozen in place. Sen held out a hand between them, palm up, and summoned a copper tael. If they’d been alone, Sen might have offered the boy a silver tael, but in front of so many eyes, it would just invite someone to steal it. The appearance of money seemed to jolt the kid out of his petrified state, and his eyes focused on the coin.

“Do you want to earn this?” asked Sen.

The little boy nodded.

“Then, this is what I need you to do. I need you to promise me that you’ll mind your parents. That’s them, isn’t it?” asked Sen.

He nodded toward a man and woman who stood just outside the protective ring that royal guards had formed around them. The woman had her eyes glued on the little boy, and one of her hands had a white-knuckled grip on her husband’s forearm. The father kept looking back and forth between Sen and the boy, like he was certain disaster was about to strike. The boy looked to where Sen nodded. He gave his parents a big smile and waved at them.

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“That’s Mama and Papa,” said the boy.

“So, do you promise?” said Sen, holding up the copper between his thumb and forefinger.

The little boy grew very solemn, nodded, and said, “I promise.”

Sen extended his hand a little closer to the boy, who hesitantly took the copper and clutched it in a tiny fist. Sen didn’t imagine it would buy the boy much in the capital, but it might be enough for some kind of treat or candy. Sen stood up, struck a vaguely heroic pose with his hands on his hips, mostly for the benefit of the boy, and looked into the middle distance.

“I must go now,” he announced before turning his eyes to the boy. “You should go back to your parents.”

Realizing that his audience with the hero was over the kid darted back to his parents, the royal guards smoothly moving aside to let him pass. Sen locked eyes with the boy’s father for a brief moment and nodded to him. With clear relief and gratitude on his face, the man nodded back. The boy’s mother was moving back and forth between hugging the little boy and scolding him. Sen recognized that lingering would only lead to an even bigger crowd, so he started walking again. After they’d cleared several more streets and the crowd had thinned out again, the captain fell back to walk next to Sen. The man wore a decidedly nervous expression like he wanted to say something but wasn’t sure if he should.

“Is there something I can help you with, captain?” asked Sen.

“I want to thank you,” said the guard captain apparently finding his nerve.

Sen lifted an eyebrow at the man, not sure what he was getting at. “For what?”

“For that boy back there. Not all cultivators are as,” the captain paused, “patient as you were.”

There were entire worlds of meaning buried inside that careful word choice. Sen could almost feel the impotent frustration roiling inside the man. He could even understand that frustration. The feeling that you were helpless to act against powers that dwarfed you, the knowledge that people would be protected by their position or power, could corrode a person from the inside out until there was nothing left but hate. Sen himself had been well down that road before fate had seemingly intervened and put him in Master Feng’s path. Sen wondered, and not for the first time, if cultivators understood just how short their lives would become if the mortal population ever figured out a way to kill them. The kind of frustration Sen could feel inside the captain wasn’t just personal, it was generational. Sen could almost hear the stories of cultivator abuses passed down from mortal parent to mortal child for thousands of years. He felt like he only needed to turn his senses in just the right way to sense that echoing hatred for those who felt that they were above such petty concerns as not killing a mortal who inconvenienced them.

“No, they aren’t,” said Sen with a sour expression, before he turned to the topic at hand. “But he was just a child. Children are curious. I wasn’t going to punish him for that.”

“The stories,” said the captain, “well, some of the stories, say that about you.”

“Say what?” asked Sen, both dread and curiosity blossoming inside of him over what was about to come out of the other man’s mouth.

“That you’re protective of children. That it’s a short road to a very bad end to harm them where you might discover it.”

Sen mulled that over for several steps before he snorted in amusement. The captain gave him a perplexed look. Sen shook his head and answered the unasked question.

“Who would have guessed? Sometimes, the stories get it right.”

An unspoken signal from one of the other guards drew the captain away to deal with something, and Sen let the steady pace of walking serve as a mechanism for him to find inner quiet and focus. He feared that there would be little enough outer silence in the coming days and few chances to be alone. He needed to grasp whatever opportunities presented themselves to maintain his equilibrium. He didn’t need a diviner to tell him that this visit to the capital was going to test his patience. It was already being tested. That would only grow worse as the nobles lined up to smile lies at him and the sects started sending invitations to visit with them. Invitations that he would be much harder pressed to decline this time. That hadn’t been as much of an issue when he was just a foundation formation cultivator or even when he’d been in the early stages of core formation. It was bad form, arguably even an insult, but one that the sect leaders could also overlook. He just hadn’t been important enough for a snub to be considered an insult worthy of retribution.

Now, those old protections would no longer apply. He had, despite his intentions and best efforts, become someone. He was a core cultivator who could and had killed nascent soul cultivators. Unlike the first one he’d killed, there had been no deceit or trickery involved when he ended Tseun Rong’s life. In fact, now that he considered it, it was entirely possible that the leadership of the sects in the capital had watched him do it. That fight had happened close enough to the capital that nascent soul cultivators, especially any who had also gone down a body cultivation path, would possess sharp enough senses to have observed the battle. At the very least, the bit with his fake tribulation lightning would have been visible for miles and miles in every direction.

While the sects could ignore him before, which left him free to ignore them, his own actions had closed off that possibility for all of them. By killing Tseun Rong so publicly, so visibly, he’d made himself a force to be reckoned with. They had to acknowledge him, his presence, and try to figure out where he fit into their world. In turn, he had to acknowledge them, at least enough that they could all preserve the fiction of politeness. And that meant doing something he normally avoided if at all possible. He would have to go into the strongholds of people he didn’t trust and pretend he wanted to be there. That thought shattered what little calm Sen had managed to build. I cannot wait to be done with all of this and go home, thought Sen.

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