Unintended Cultivator

With the executions clearly over, the crowd started to disperse, although Sen could hear their hushed, fearful whispering. At least that part seemed to be going to plan. Lo Meifeng cast another disdainful look at Chan Dishi before she headed for the gate, obviously happy to have an excuse to leave. Grandmother Lu offered the man a shallow bow before she also went back to the manor. Chan Dishi wore that look of vague confusion again as he watched them leave, seemingly still uncertain when or where he might have encountered Lo Meifeng before. It was only then that Sen really became aware of Yeung Fen again. He’d dragged her along with him without even thinking about it. Her eyes were locked on the place where the prisoners used to be. Oh, right, I should finish cleaning that up, thought Sen. He didn’t know for sure that breathing the ashes of human remains was bad for people, but it stood to reason. He used wind qi to gather the ashes up, opened a hole in the stone of the street, and sank the ashes deep underground.

“Well, you certainly know how to send a message,” said Chan Dishi, grinning at Sen.

“I have my moments,” said Sen.

“So, now that you’ve made every noble, criminal, and most of the cultivators in the city soil themselves, what’s next?”

Sen only hesitated for a moment. It wasn’t like it was going to be any kind of secret when he left, so there wasn’t much point in being cagey about it. And, almost despite himself, he did like Chan Dishi. He didn’t understand the man, or his seemingly unshakeable good cheer, but Sen liked him all the same.

“I’m just about done here,” said Sen. “After I wrap up a few last tasks, I go back north. Let things here settle down.”

“North, eh? Not much up that way.”

“I have a little academy I started.”

“Oh, that’s right, you started a sect up there.”

Sen almost said that it wasn’t a sect on reflex, but he supposed he couldn’t do that anymore. It might not be sect right that second, but it would be soon enough.

“Something like that. I need to do a little recruiting while I’m here. I need some extra teachers. Weapon masters.”

Chan Dishi lifted an eyebrow at that.

“The way I hear it, you’re a master swordsman and a spear master. Why would you want to recruit some second-class talents to teach what you can teach?”

“There’s only one of me,” said Sen with a shrug. “There’s only so many hours in the day. Plus, if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t think I’m a particularly good teacher. I mean, I’m not terrible, but I lack a certain amount of patience.”

Chan Dishi nodded along and said, “Yeah, it’s like foreplay. It’s only fun if you’re invested in it.”

“Um,” said Sen, uncertain how to respond to that. “Sure.”

“Well,” said the other man, stretching, “I suppose I should go report in. Thanks for the entertainment. I may have to come and see what kind of sect you’re building after I’m done playing bodyguard.”

“I’m not that hard to find. It was interesting to meet you.”

“I know, right?” said Chan Dishi with a laugh before he sauntered away with a wave.

Sen watched the odd man go before shaking his head and looking at Yeung Fen. She flinched when he focused on her. He headed for the gate, all but dragging her along in his wake with a fist of air qi. Everyone he passed offered a bow, and he soon grew tired of nodding acknowledgment at people, but it was simply the price of the position he’d seized by force and with a bit of collusion from Jing. Playing into the role would also, he hoped, help make things easier for Grandmother Lu. She’d have to establish her own kind of authority with them eventually. However, if she had to borrow some reflected authority from him at first, the least he could do was make sure that he didn’t undermine it before he left. Sen stalked past Pan Shiji and into his office. He’d expected to find Lo Meifeng and Grandmother Lu there, but it seemed they’d been called away already to handle something. Sen dropped into a chair and finally released Yeung Fen from the fist of air qi. He pointed at another chair.

“Sit,” he ordered.

The woman sat, trying to maintain some kind of dignity.

“I—” she started.

“You just saw how I deal with people who attack me and mine,” Sen said. “The only reason you weren’t in that line of prisoners outside is because I think you know some things that I don’t yet. So, tell me a story, Yeung Fen. Tell me things that I don’t already know.”

“If I do, will you let me live?”

“Of course not. I let you go once already, and you didn’t take advantage of that mercy.”

“Then, I don’t see that I have any incentive to tell you anything.”

“Would you like me to provide you with one? Alright, you don’t get to live, but you do get to decide how you die. You can tell me what I want to know and die a fast, relatively painless death. Or you can waste my time, and die a very slow, very painful death. I recently discovered how to regrow limbs. So, I can make this last. You can lose your arms and legs, over and over again. I don’t know how many times it’ll take before you spill every secret in your head, but I can promise that you’ll be ready to talk a long time before I’m ready to stop. That’s before we even discuss the possibilities of poison. Take this one, for example,” said Sen, summoning the poison he hadn’t given to the Wu patriarch.

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He gave her the same explanation of what it would do that he’d given to Wu Chia-Hao. The feeling of burning, the rot, and the ultimate drowning. He didn’t know if it would actually work on a cultivator the same way it would on a mortal, but she didn’t need to know that. After he wrapped that up, he smiled at her and shrugged.

“You wanted an incentive. There you go.”

“You didn’t strike me as this ruthless the last time we met,” she said.

She did an admirable job of keeping a calm façade in place, but the mask was fragile. She was well and truly frightened.

“I’ve been through some things since then,” said Sen. “The sad part is, I really would have left you alone if you’d left me alone. I’d all but forgotten about you. If we’d just crossed paths randomly somewhere, I doubt I’d have given you more than a second glance.”

Yeung Fen closed her eyes and took a shuddering breath. She seemed to be bracing herself. He wasn’t sure if it was to tell him she wasn’t going to cooperate or to tell him the truth. Neither option seemed to appeal to the woman.

“You may have forgotten about me,” she said, “but the demonic cultivators didn’t forget about either of us.”

Sen nodded. He might have been able to guess that it was them, but he simply had so many people who didn’t like him now that it was dangerous to guess about who was behind any one thing. He preferred confirmations.

“Yeah,” he said. “I knew we didn’t get them all. Honestly, I thought that they’d try to get me before this.”

“You moved around too much. You grew too powerful, too fast. Every time they got close, you’d vanish for months at a time, only to resurface somewhere else and even more powerful than before.”

“I suppose that makes sense. It doesn’t explain you, though. You didn’t have what it took to capture me all those years ago before I got this powerful. You had to know you didn’t stand a chance now. So, why?”

“It’s because I tried to take your advice. I went looking for revenge against Suen Hai. The one who set me up back then. It turned out that he had more powerful backing than I expected. One of those demonic cultivators your purge missed.”

“And what’s this demonic cultivator’s name? Where can I find them?”

“You think they introduced themselves to me? They just showed up, slapped me down, and told me that I worked for them now. It wasn’t ideal, but I was alive. Honestly, I think they thought I was too trivial to kill. Not a threat to them, at all. So, why kill me when they could make me work?”

She gave Sen a significant look as if he should be taking a lesson from that explanation. He couldn’t blame her for trying.

“You’re suggesting that I press you into service to me?”

“I could be useful to you.”

“An interesting proposition, except that I don’t trust you.”

Yeung Fen laughed. It was a cynical sound, laced with bitterness and more than a little self-loathing.

“You say that like you don’t have a manor full of people you can’t trust. You don’t honestly think you can trust all those Xie family members you turned into peasants, do you? Or those two assassins you have running around here pretending they’re housebroken? I’m no more untrustworthy than they are.”

She had a point, even if there were things she didn’t know about the situation. He only trusted most of those people as far as he trusted the admittedly imperfect protection of a vow to the heavens. Lo Meifeng was the one true exception to that rule, not that he planned to explain that fact or why it was the case to Yeung Fen.

“This is all very interesting, but you haven’t even given me a good reason to let you keep breathing for the next five minutes, let alone burden myself with keeping you around. Where is this demonic cultivator? For that matter, where is Suen Hai? I assume he played some role in all of this. I wouldn’t want him to miss out on all of the fun.”

“Gone. They started planning their escapes the second your hunting dogs started grabbing people. I expect they both packed up and left after you grabbed me. They’re smart enough to know that I’d drag them down into the thousand hells with me and smile while I did it.”

Sen leaned back in his chair, idly picking up the vial of poison he’d left sitting on the table. He rolled it back and forth in his hand while he thought. His inclination was to kill Yeung Fen and get on with his day. He’d said he would kill her, and he did make an effort to follow through when told people things like that. On the other hand, he’d done a lot of killing that day. It had been necessary, from a certain perspective, but he didn’t like killing mortals. He didn’t particularly like killing cultivators, either, but it bothered him more when he killed mortals. Cultivators at least had a chance of defending themselves from him. It might only be a slim chance, but it was a chance. When he decided that a mortal had to die, he might as well be a force of nature that had singled out a single person to bully. They could rail against him, but they could never win. Yeung Fen wasn’t a mortal, and she had wronged him, twice now, but she truly wasn’t a threat to him in a direct conflict. Killing her would be about as difficult as killing a baby chicken.

There was also the fact that Yeung Fen had managed to make herself useful enough to a demonic cultivator that they kept her around for years. That meant that she had to have some skills that weren’t made obvious by this conversation. Probably the kind of skills that Lo Meifeng could make use of in one way or another. However, he wasn’t going to saddle Lo Meifeng with this woman without at least consulting her. He turned his attention back to Yeung Fen, who was staring at the vial in his hands with the kind of intensity that only the proximity of death could generate.

“Sit there. Be quiet, and you might live to see the dawn,” Sen told her.

He put the vial back into his storage ring and promptly ignored the woman as he started going through the scrolls that had, somehow, piled up on the table since the last time he’d been there. Yeung Fen sat in perfect silence, barely moving. She wasn’t quite as unobtrusive as a statue, but she came close. After close to an hour, Lo Meifeng finally returned. She took in the scene at a glance and then lifted an eyebrow at Sen.

Sen focused on Yeung Fen, who straightened in her chair. He pointed at Lo Meifeng.

“If you can convince her that you’re worth keeping around, I’ll take her recommendation,” said Sen.

He stood from the table and walked out of the room. Lo Meifeng followed him.

“You want to keep her?” she asked.

“Not especially,” admitted Sen. “I’ve just had enough killing for a while. Talk to her. If you think she’s got skills that are worth preserving, we’ll figure it out. Otherwise, I’ll deal with her.”

Lo Meifeng gave him a long look.

“I’ll take care of it if it comes to that. I know,” she said before he could speak. “I’ll make it quick. We’re not making examples anymore.”

Sen hesitated before he nodded and said, “Thanks.”