Unintended Cultivator

That boy takes too much on his shoulders, thought Ma Caihong. Not that it was entirely a bad thing. She shifted her gaze to the darling little girl who was playing with that flock of birds that followed her around everywhere. The cultivator in her had wanted to study that thing with the birds. It was odd. She could feel that the child was doing something, but it wasn’t a technique as she understood it. In the end, though, she’d let it go. She had no intention of turning Sen’s daughter into some kind of experiment. Besides, it was infinitely more rewarding to simply enjoy the child’s presence. Most mortal children were burdened by fear. Sensible fear passed down to them by equally sensible parents, perhaps, but it had a way of stunting them. Not her, though. That little girl was fearless and curious, which just made watching Sen fret about her safety simply priceless.

Caihong sighed. It was hard to fault Sen’s sense of personal responsibility when it had led him to take in Ai. Being a parent had been a good thing for him. He was still so close to that mortal mindset that it had matured him in the same way it tended to mature mortal parents. It wasn’t exactly the same thing as the many centuries of experience he should have with his ridiculous level of advancement, but it was probably the next best thing. Still, pairing that sense of personal responsibility with a need to remain self-sufficient was a dangerous thing. If he had simply asked her, or Jaw-Long, or even Ming, any of them would have simply gone and taken care of that trivial sect that had bothered him. It wouldn’t even have been hard. She had just the thing to deal with a sect that had developed an inflated sense of its own importance. Maybe not, she thought. That particular solution might be overkill for this situation.

Of course, learning to fight his own battles was an important thing, but taking on a sect single-handed was something best left to nascent soul cultivators. She supposed he was practically operating on that level already, but he didn’t have the experience to go with it. He didn’t have thousands of past battles to draw on, to say nothing of the fearsome reputation to go with it. After all, no sect with competent leadership would have allowed their young masters to issue challenges if they understood what that boy could really do. The display he’d put on in the town was a good start to getting that message out, though. Even she’d been a little startled by the utter ruthlessness of it. He’ll need that for the war that’s coming, she mused. What an annoying trial that’s going to be.

Even she hadn’t been alive for the last spirit beast uprising, but she had known cultivators who were. It wasn’t new. It would set humanity back. Apparently, things had been different before that. The world had still been a violent place, but societies had been kinder if she could trust the stories she’d heard. Cultivators had been… She hesitated to believe they had been less selfish, but supposedly they had been less like they became in her lifetime. Supposedly, they took more responsibility for sustaining a common good. She had to think that had been an aberration or the personal project of some peak nascent soul cultivator like Ming.

If it were the natural course of things, it stood to reason that society would have developed that way again. No, it was more reasonable to think that those ideas had been imposed from the top down, probably after an ocean of blood had been spilled. Eliminating everyone who doesn’t see things your way wasn’t necessarily the best method of changing minds, but it was definitely the easiest. If Ming wasn’t so monumentally lazy about anything that didn’t spark his interest… But he was that lazy. She supposed that she ought to be grateful for that. If he had decided to take over everything, there’d likely be countless pastry shops in every city. Not that she disliked pastries, but she didn’t need to eat them every day. And she would be eating them every day if they were so readily available.

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She did wonder how much of human civilization would survive this latest uprising. Sen seemed determined to maximize the amount. It was a laudable goal. It had even led to that very interesting long-distance communication idea he was testing with that spiderkin friend of his. She’d had to hold back a laugh that first time she’d met Glimmer of Night. It was such a Sen thing to do, dragging home a stray transformed spirit beast. First, he’d adopted the panther girl, and now the spider. She kept expecting him to befriend a dragon and bring that home too. Although, he had met a dragon and lived to tell the tale, which was more than most cultivators could say. Those stories usually ended with a dead cultivator. Even she was wary around those ancient creatures. Still, if he ever showed up with a dragon, she wouldn’t be surprised.

She was curious to see how well those communication cores of his functioned, even if she didn’t understand quite how they worked. Oh, she understood the general idea, but the details were elusive. She thought that Jaw-Long understood it better than she did, even if he pretended that he didn’t. She smiled at that. Her husband was brilliant. He always had been. He just never wanted her to feel like he was smarter than her about something. It was silly. He didn’t mind that she understood alchemy better than he did. Why would she mind that he understood one of Sen’s mad ideas better than her? The most adorable part was that he thought she didn’t know. Since she was a loving wife, she let him have that secret.

She smiled as she saw Zhi join Ai in playing with the birds. Caihong didn’t especially love birds having had a close call with a roc’s lightning once upon a time, but she did believe in the healing power of nature. It certainly seemed to be helping Zhi after her encounter with those Twisted Blade Sect cultivators. Oh, that had made her furious. She didn’t normally let herself get too close to mortals. They died so quickly that she’d be in constant grief if she did. There’d been enough grief in her life already. However, she’d spent enough time with Zhi that it had been impossible not to develop an attachment to her. She’d been ready to seize the lot of them and pour things down their throats that would have turned their bones to jelly and charred their organs. Not anything that would kill them right away, though. Core cultivators were very resilient. She would have confined herself to using things that would only make them pray for death.

It was good that Jaw-Long had talked her down. Not that he hadn’t been livid as well, but he’d been able to resist the urge to act for long enough that Sen had been able to resolve it. He hadn’t done it the way she would have, but she’d found the outcome satisfying enough. That reminds me, she thought. I’ll have to do something nice for that assassin of his. She appreciated how vindictive Long Jia Wei had been when he’d retrieved little Zhi. She rather wished that Sen would take that man along with him when he went to deal with the Twisted Blade Sect. It was hard to have too much help when doing something dangerous, especially if he meant to keep Jaw-Long in the background. Honestly, there was such a thing as being too self-sufficient.

“I may need to suggest taking the assassin along to him,” she mused out loud.

Caihong put away thoughts of murder and sect destruction when she saw the girls running over to her. She could think about all of that later. She only had a brief few years to enjoy Ai and Zhi being so young. Not that she wouldn’t enjoy their presence as they grew older, but it would be different as they started to grow concerned with adult problems. Right now, they just wanted to think about things like flowers and birds. She was more than willing to bask in that simplicity. And if some stupid young master or young mistress decided to show up looking to disrupt that simplicity and joy while Sen was gone, she would deal with it in her own way. Then, she would write a very sternly worded message to that sect expressing her displeasure and ask Ming to deliver it. It was even possible that he might let someone survive long enough to read it.

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