Unintended Cultivator

“How long do you think?” Sen asked, not for the first time.

“Tomorrow. In a month. In a year,” answered Master Feng, not for the first time.

“I thought we’d know more by now.”

“We were always going to be at a disadvantage in terms of information. It didn’t have to be this way, but human beings are short-sighted at best.”

“How so?” asked Sen.

“How much land do humans actually control? How much land do the spirit beasts control?”

Those were depressing questions. Human beings had carved out areas of control, but Sen knew from firsthand experience that it was a fraction of the space occupied by the wilds.

“Not much and too much,” Sen admitted.

“I’ve advised mortals kings and sects in the past to make an effort to expand those areas of human control, but there were always excuses. Too much expense for not enough gain. Too much loss of life for no profit. Once, I personally cleared enough space around a city for them to expand fifty miles in every direction. Within a few generations, half of that land was the wilds again. Within a century, all of it was.”

“Doesn’t matter. The place doesn’t exist anymore. The real problem is that people are scared of the wilds. No, that's not right. People should have a healthy fear of the deep wilds. The problem is that people are superstitiously terrified of anything that even remotely resembles the wilds. You occasionally see some people made of sterner stuff that carve out a place away from the big human cities, like your town here, but it’s rare.”

“It’s not my town,” said Sen.

Master Feng shook his head and said, “Of course, it’s your town. It stopped being their town when their main sources of income became your academy, people looking to join your academy, and the students from your academy. To say nothing of the merchants that come here because of you or looking to buy crafts that you introduced to other places. If you packed everything up and left tomorrow, this town would cease to exist within a couple of years.”

“That sounds like a bad thing,” said Sen.

“It’s not a good or bad thing. It’s just how it is. Like it or not, your presence here draws attention. That attention brought money with it. The townspeople are adapting to serve new needs and new demands, as they should. If they hadn’t adapted, they’d be starving to death or forced out. Yes, they’re dependent on you or at least the continued existence of your academy. Really, though, it’s not that different than the capital being dependent on the presence of the royalty, nobility, and sects there. Port towns depend on shipping and fishing.

“So, yes. If something fundamental changes, it’s bad for them. On the other hand, the people here have seen huge improvements in their lives. People who used to do every bit of labor themselves have an apprentice or five now. Just look at that seamstress friend of yours. I bet she only picks up a needle these days when she wants to. They’re making more money in a month than some of them used to make in a year or two. Merchants come here on purpose, and not only every so often. They bring new goods, which can also make life easier or more comfortable. Bad and good,” said Master Feng.

He held out his hands palms up and moved them up and down like a scale. Sen nodded, if a little begrudgingly. He knew that Master Feng was right. It just made Sen very uncomfortable to have so many people’s lives depend on him, directly or indirectly. It made every decision feel heavier, and he constantly had to weigh how his choices would affect not only him and the members of his sect, but everyone who lived in the town. A town that was growing increasingly crowded. Part of him knew that he should encourage them to expand. Honestly, it would be useful to have a second wall that he put his students to work on. It would give them much-needed practice not only in building but also in creating formations.

At the same time, it would encourage more people to come to the town, and he was quite certain that would include elements he didn’t want there. Crime in the town was infrequent, but that had as much to do with how well everyone there knew each other. Add hundreds or even a thousand new people, and that closeness would start to break down. Crime would become more commonplace. The relatively small force of town guards would have to be expanded and trained. That shouldn’t be his problem, but Sen knew that it ultimately would become his problem. Sen was well aware of what happened when town guards were stupid, lazy, and poorly trained. He’d been on the receiving end of that kind of town guard’s attention often as a child.

He also knew that the training he was giving the mortals wasn’t well-suited for that kind of work. He was training people to do exactly one thing. Kill spirit beasts. He wasn’t training them to investigate crimes or subdue humans. If he wanted people who were good at that, he was going to have to find someone who was already good at it and convince them to come here. Not that convincing someone was necessarily the biggest difficulty. Money had a way of doing that for Sen. While he had handed over most of his money to Grandmother Lu to support her efforts at stabilizing the House of Lu and securing their interests, the Sect was turning out to be more profitable than Sen expected.

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It wasn’t a river of money, but core formation cultivators seeking entry almost always brought good stuff, at least some of it intended for Sen specifically. He usually just dumped it all into the sect’s resources, but he didn’t have to do that every single time. Plus, he could always run another auction. Something the sects in the capital had been quietly lobbying Grandmother Lu about for months now. It might take a few days out in the wilds to gather up what he needed, but one auction would be enough to rake in substantial funds. There were other, longer-term reasons to consider an auction, not just in the capital, but in some of the other cities in the kingdom. While Sen hated to blindly provide resources that could strengthen cultivators he might find objectionable, the coming fight would need people to be as strong as they could reasonably get.

The planning necessary to set those things up would be a huge pain, but probably worth the effort in the long run. Sen added yet another item to his truly monumental list of things to do. Something must have shown on his face because Master Feng gave him a look.

“I’m just thinking about…” Sen tried to find the right word. “Everything, I guess. Everything that should be done, that I’d like to see done, and things I could possibly do that would benefit the war effort.”

“You need to find yourself some good help. Barring that, find yourself some reasonably competent help. Half the things you’re doing right now are things that no sect patriarch should be doing. Those are problems they hand off to sect elders, and most of them hand part of that work off to their reliable help.”

“They probably trust the people in their sect,” observed Sen with a wry note in his voice.

“Probably, but I think you sometimes mistake dislike for distrust. They aren’t the same thing. At least, they shouldn’t be,” said Master Feng, nodding toward something.

Sen followed his teacher’s gaze.

“Her? Seriously?” asked Sen.

“I know it looks like that I spend most of my time being a doting grandfather,” said Master Feng. “Okay, I really do spend most of my time on that. But I do occasionally look in on what the cultivators here are doing. She’s competent.”

“Of course, she’s competent. She’s a core cultivator, but—”

“You just don’t like her,” said Master Feng.

“No. I don’t like her. She just wants to use me to advance her own cultivation.”

“So?” asked Master Feng.

Sen stared at his master with slack-jawed incomprehension. He would have expected any number of reactions, but blanket indifference wasn’t one of them.

“That doesn’t sound problematic to you?”

“Why would it?” asked Master Feng. “Sen, the entire sect system is about people using each other to advance. Everyone goes into that situation knowing it. It’s formalized and restricted in some ways, but young cultivators go in hoping to use more experienced cultivators to learn and push their advancement forward. Older cultivators use younger cultivators to do things they don’t want to bother with, but also as a method of refining their own knowledge. Nothing exposes your weaknesses like teaching, after all.”

Having become aware of some of his own shortcomings through teaching others, Sen was hard-pressed to deny the statement. It didn’t mean he liked any of it.

“That doesn’t mean I have to do things that way,” objected Sen.

“You already do. You’re a softer touch than most, and that has trickled down a bit, but the same expectations still apply here as they do in any other sect. Wanting people around you who are there solely because you have a deep, mutual respect is… I suppose it’s a little admirable, but it’s also naïve. What you’re establishing here is a sect, not a family. And when the fighting starts, I promise that you’ll meet people, work with people, you despise much more intensely than you dislike her. So, let me ask you this. Has she lied to you?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” said Sen.

“Has she failed to fulfill any of her responsibilities?”

“No.”

“So, aside from being ambitious and a little too obviously willing to jump into bed with you, a trait she shares with plenty of other people, I might add, do you have a single good reason not to give her more responsibility?”

“I don’t know that I can trust her.”

“You never know that,” said Master Feng. “Not ever. Not with anyone. Not for sure.”

“I know I can trust you. I can trust Grandmother Lu, Falling Leaf, Auntie Caihong, and Uncle Kho,” said Sen, feeling triumphant.

“No. You believe you can trust us. It’s a belief backed up with a lot of evidence, I’ll grant you that, but it is still just belief. Beyond that, we’re your family. That’s an unreasonable standard to apply to everyone else in the world.”

Sen wanted to deny the words, but he couldn’t quite make himself do it. The kind of trust he shared with all of them was an unreasonable standard. In large part, it was unreasonable because it required shared experiences from which Sen would automatically exclude most people. Falling Leaf had been his closest friend for half his life. Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, and Uncle Kho had been his teachers, to say nothing of the first people who ever acted like he could be more than a street rat. Grandmother Lu had almost certainly saved his life as a child. They had given him his first sustained experiences of respect and love. No one else would ever live up to that. How could they?

But he still had to live in the world. Even if he couldn’t ever trust anyone else with that depth, trust wasn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. He trusted Jing, even if that trust was conditional. After all, Jing had a country to run, which meant he had to do things that benefited the entire country. It was a position that Sen had a lot more sympathy for now that he was stuck worrying about an entire town. He trusted Lo Meifeng, even if he’d made her work ridiculously hard to earn it. He could trust beyond that small circle of people he saw as family. He just had to be more reasonable about it.

“I hate being reasonable,” complained Sen.

“Yeah,” agreed Master Feng. “That never stops being bothersome.”

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