Unintended Cultivator

Sen supposed it was a testament to just how much he was asking for when Jing stood there in motionless silence for most of a minute. Given Sen’s well-known feelings about nobles, it was entirely possible that Jing thought Sen was playing some kind of bizarre joke on him. Sen was even tempted to say that it was a joke. But that would ultimately throw confusion into the situation that he didn’t want because Sen wasn’t joking. He was absolutely serious.

“The House of Lu?” asked Jing, almost as if he was checking to make sure he’d heard correctly.

“The House of Lu,” confirmed Sen.

“That is complicated,” said Jing, obviously scrambling to buy himself time.

Sen tried not to take a little pleasure in seeing the usually self-possessed man on the back foot for once. Jing walked over to the throne and sat down. For a moment, Sen thought the man was trying to convey a heavy-handed message about who was in charge, but that thought evaporated when Jing slumped back. Oh, thought Sen, he just needed to sit down for a minute.

“That is very complicated,” muttered Jing.

It was clear to Sen that the other man was talking to himself, so he just waited patiently for Jing to gather his thoughts. It took a few minutes before Jing looked up at Sen.

“Do you really understand what you’re asking for here?”

Sen snorted and said, “I am supremely confident that you know that I don’t know. On the other hand, are you really going to tell me that you’d rather have the House of Xie? A family that has proven it will work against your interests and wishes.”

“No. I’m definitely not saying that, but this isn’t the kind of thing you can manage by popping in every few years. You’d have to be here, all the time, running the house every day.”

“Well, we both know that’s not true. I figured out that much running my academy. Oh, I didn’t tell you about that did I?”

“No, but I’d also heard rumors of you starting something up north. And the word academy is self-explanatory.”

“Yeah,” said Sen, “I guess it is. Anyway, I don’t run that any more than you run this palace. Staff run most things. The patriarch or matriarch or whoever makes big decisions, and they let everyone else deal with the details.”

“So, if I were to agree to this, you’d just immediately hand off all of your responsibilities to other people?”

“Not just any other people. I have someone in mind who would be ideal for making decisions for a large house with far-flung holdings and operations. As for me, though, no, I wouldn’t be taking up residence in the capital. I already have obligations.”

Sen couldn’t decide if the king looked disappointed or relieved at that statement. Maybe it was both.

“You realize that the only reason I’m even considering this is because you’ve already decided to do whatever you’re going to do the Xie. Something you intend to do regardless of anything I might say about it.”

“As opposed to what? Wait. Are you asking me to spare them?” asked Sen, his eyes narrowing. “After what they did? Would you spare them?”

Jing reached up and started to massage his eyes.

“The truth is that I would probably have no choice but to spare them. I’m sure that they made a point to use someone low in the house to make the actual arrangements, or even used someone outside the house entirely. Not that it would take cultivators very long to ferret out the truth. But I doubt I could gather enough evidence to do anything meaningful to them,” said Jing.

Sen remembered having a similar conversation about evidence with Jing when they’d been trying to free Chan Yu Ming from her unwanted engagement. Of course, in the end, Sen had simply done what he thought was best.

“You, however, are not me,” continued Jing. “You’re a cultivator and a famous hero. You can likely do what you want to do to them based on nothing more than your word. If you say that they tried to have you assassinated, the common people will believe you. Hells, even the nobility will probably believe you. But the other noble houses will also never forget it. They’ll never trust you. They’ll always be waiting for the day when you come for them. It would make running your own house hard, harder than it would be for anyone else. They’ll constantly be looking for ways to ruin you, interrupt your operations, anything they can think of to bring you down, so long as it won’t lead back to them.”

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Sen shrugged.

“So, you’re saying they’ll act like nobles.”

“I’m saying they’ll act like frightened people because that is exactly what they’ll be.”

“If they don’t interfere with my affairs, they’ll have nothing to fear from me.”

“Do you honestly think they’ll believe that?”

“No, but you can always remind them that if I genuinely wanted to purge this city of the nobility, I could have done it already.”

Jing sighed and said, “I doubt that would help.”

“Maybe not,” admitted Sen, “but I expect the looks on their faces would be hilarious.”

“I think we might have different definitions of hilarious.”

“Probably so.”

A pensive look stole over the king’s face, then it seemed to harden into a rigid neutrality before he asked a question that Sen had not been thinking about.

“Do you intend to kill the children as well? The staff? The guards? Just how far will your destruction of the House of Xie go?”

Sen found that he had a sudden need to sit down after hearing those questions. He summoned a chair from his storage ring and dropped into it. He’d been so angry about all those cultivators coming for his head that he’d just let himself think of the House of Xie as some kind of monolith made up of decision-makers. It had been easy to think of their destruction in the abstract. Jing had brought that abstract idea crashing right back down to the unforgiving earth. Do you intend to kill the children as well? That question echoed inside his ears. Reason told him that sparing anyone was foolish. It would just invite foolish attempts at reprisal down the road. The safest course was to end the line entirely, root and branch. Wipe the world clean of them. Of course, reason was the domain of the mind, not the heart. Do you intend to kill the children as well? Could he kill them all? Did he have that in him? Sen examined his own heart. The answer was clear. No. He did not have that in him. Not the children.

“Anyone in the house leadership has to die. Anyone who was involved. But no, I won’t kill the children. I probably won’t kill the cooks, maids, or anyone else like that. As for the rest, I’ll just have to see what they do.”

Jing seemed to relax a little at those words.

“Bringing the house under control won’t be easy. They have scions scattered across the kingdom. They’ll try to seize property, withhold earnings, and they may even destroy things in an attempt to thwart you or take revenge.”

“Then, they die.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” said Sen. “They won’t be nobility anymore. If they aren’t a part of the House of Lu, they’re just thieves and bandits. I have no use and no pity for thieves and bandits.”

“They’ll see you as the thief.”

“That sounds like a them problem.”

Jing grimaced a little.

“I forgot that you could be quite this ruthless.”

Sen considered the other man.

“No, you didn’t. You need someone ruthless for your plan to keep your foreign guests off-balance to work. You need someone who simply does not care what they think. Someone who won’t be put off by ending them if they try to do something to you. Besides, I suspect that this might even work to your advantage.”

“How so?”

“A ruthless cultivator comes in and wipes out a house in revenge. Rather than starting a feud you can’t win, you find a way to quell that anger and even nominally bring that cultivator into the fold. I don’t understand politics all that well, but I imagine that will probably make you look quite competent.”

“It’d be more impressive if everyone didn’t know that we have an existing relationship.”

“You can’t always get everything.”

“No, you certainly can’t,” said Jing. “So, your goal in all of this is what?”

“I don’t care about controlling a noble house, but it will provide a future for my daughter. A future with options. A future that doesn’t involve needing to stay by my side for the rest of her life.”

“Is she a cultivator as well?”

“Not yet. Maybe not ever. She’s still a little too young for all of that.”

“Is she with people you trust? People who can protect her? Once you start down this road—”

Sen started to laugh.

“Oh, I’m not worried about that. Anyone who goes looking for her in the immediate future will have to contend with Auntie Caihong and Uncle Kho. I don’t see that ending well for anyone who turns up with a mind for giving my little girl some trouble.”

Jing stared at Sen with a dumbfounded expression on his face.

“You have the Living Spear and Alchemy’s Handmaiden babysitting?”

“Are you kidding me? They volunteered. I honestly don’t know what they might have done if I didn’t let them have her while I was away. I’ll probably have to physically drag her out of their nascent soul clutches when I get back.”

“You are frighteningly casual when you discuss them.”

“They’re family,” said Sen. “I mean, I understand now how powerful they are, but Auntie Caihong would check me for head injuries if I started acting all frightened and humble around them. Uncle Kho would just give me odd looks and tell me to stop acting like a fool.”

Jing shook his head and said, “I struggle to imagine that.”

“It’s still true, but we’ve drifted off the topic at hand,” said Sen, giving Jing a look that said he knew the man had been stalling.

Jing sighed and said, “Long live the House of Lu.”

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