Unintended Cultivator

Sen was a little surprised to hear the woman identify him as Feng Ming’s student, but that was nothing compared to Elder Deng’s reaction. Sen could almost hear the Elder’s heart rate triple, and he saw the sweat beading on the man’s forehead. The elder looked at Sen.

“Is that true?”

“It is. Since we’re sharing secrets, apparently,” said Sen, shooting the new woman a look, “you should probably know that Master Feng owns the Silver Crane.”

“What?” Elder Deng demanded.

“I didn’t pick this place at random from all the places in the city,” said Sen. “I was sent here.”

“I see,” said the elder, raising a trembling hand to wipe at his face.

“My question is, who are you?” asked Sen, pointing at the new woman.

“This one is called Lo Meifeng. I am but a humble servant of Feng Ming.”

That raised a lot of questions in Sen’s mind, but most of them were questions he didn’t especially want to ask in front of Soaring Skies elder or even Shen Mingxia, for whom he actually had a modicum of trust. Instead, he just shot the woman a look that promised her he’d be asking all of those questions in a more private setting. Sen also had some doubts about how humble of a servant she was. Humility and being a core formation stage cultivator didn’t seem to be things that went hand-in-hand, and Lo Meifeng was a core formation cultivator. She wasn’t at the peak of core formation like Elder Deng, but she wasn’t fresh to it like the man Sen had beaten either. There was more going on, and it made Sen more than a little edgy.

On top of that, whatever little boost he’d gotten from burning up a drop of liquid qi was fast ebbing. He needed to get all of these people to leave. Then, he needed to find a bed and sleep. Sen tried to figure out the fastest way to make that happen. He’d avoided looking at the pile of bodies, but there was light on the horizon. People would follow that light soon enough, especially with Sen casting his voice across a big piece of the nearby area of the city. He gestured to the pile, and to the suppressed elder in the formation.

“They should be removed and laid to rest in whatever way seems most appropriate to you,” said Sen.

“Yes,” said Elder Deng, who still looked shaken. “I’ll have our people come and collect the bodies. I’ll deal with transporting that traitorous abomination personally. The sect will have many questions for him.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” asked Lo Meifeng.

Sen thought that she was speaking to the elder about some protocol he didn’t know about. It took him a moment to realize that she was looking at him, expectantly.

“Am I?” asked Sen.

He cast a sidelong look at Shen Mingxia, who gave him a tiny shrug of one shoulder.

“Indeed. You defeated all of these cultivators. What was theirs is now yours. You must claim it.”

Sen knew that looting the dead and defeated was something of a tradition among cultivators, but he hated it. He didn’t even really like harvesting parts from defeated spirit beasts, although Falling Leaf hadn’t let him get away without developing some acceptance of it. He glanced at Elder Deng. The old man grimaced, but he gave Sen a short nod. Sen supposed he could understand the old man’s reluctance. Anything Sen took was something that the sect couldn’t reclaim. While it probably wouldn’t amount to much from the qi condensing cultivators, the formation foundation cultivators had all possessed storage treasures. There could be nearly anything in those.

Sen didn’t relish the idea of pawing through that pile of bodies, so he did with them much as he did with the spirit beast corpses in the abandoned town. He cycled air qi to generate wind and sent his spiritual sense looking for things of relative value. Using that combination, Sen retrieved half a dozen storage rings, ten pouches that he assumed contained money, and about a dozen other objects that had radiated qi on some level. He also retrieved a few of the better weapons from the foundation formation stage cultivators he’d killed. As for the core formation elder, he’d have to do that with a more hands-on inspection. The suppression field kept Sen’s air qi wind techniques out as effectively as it kept out pretty much every other kind of environmental qi.

The injured elder had lost consciousness at some point, so it wasn’t difficult to search him. Sen made a point to claim that man’s jian, which was at least as good as Sen’s own. He also found no less than four storage rings on the man. Sen couldn’t help but wonder what the man could possibly need so much storage for. He plucked a pouch from the man’s robe that felt unnaturally heavy to him. Opening it, he found it stuffed with gold taels. That seemed like far too much money for the man to have, even as an elder. Sen surreptitiously slipped that pouch into his own storage ring before anyone could see it. There was a mystery of some kind there and this wasn’t the first time he’d found someone with more gold than they should have. But he was too tired to give it any real consideration at that moment. The last item of interest he found was a jade carving of a dragon in flight over a city. Sen peered down at it and, unless he missed his guess, the city was Emperor’s Bay.

Suspicious, Sen stood and showed the carving to Elder Deng. The old cultivator’s eyes went wide, and fury radiated off of the man. He pointed at the carving.

“Give that to me!” the man commanded.

“No,” said Lo Meifeng. “It is his by right of combat.”

“It is a treasure that creature stole from the Soaring Skies sect.”

“Perhaps, but it was not stolen by my master’s student. It is not his responsibility to return what you could not secure within your own walls. Would you return a treasure you won in combat, simply because the person you got it from was a thief? I think not.”

Elder Deng directed a glare at Lo Meifeng that could shatter stone, but the woman remained magnificently indifferent to his ire. For all his initial bluster, though, he didn’t raise any additional objections. Sen was about to move away from the suppressed elder when Lo Meifeng pointed at the man’s ankle.

“What?” Sen asked, confused.

“You missed something,” she said.

There was a kind of malicious glee in the woman’s eyes, which made Sen suspect that he was about to uncover another sect treasure. From the way that Elder Deng was grinding his teeth, the man knew it, too. Sen pulled the suppressed elder’s robe up to reveal a heavy silver anklet. It was also heavily carved with a dragon as the most prominent element. It took a moment, but Sen managed to find the catch and release it. He didn’t ask what it was, simply put it and the jade carving into his storage ring. Stepping away from the suppressed cultivator, Sen deactivated the formation.

“I’m done,” he said to Elder Deng.

“He might be willing to return the treasures,” mused Lo Meifeng to no one in particular, “if he was offered something of sufficient value in trade.”

Elder Deng spared one last glare for Lo Meifeng before he seized the demonic cultivator by the throat and flew off. Sen watched the advanced qinggong technique in action with more than a little envy. Not quite ready to deal with the strangeness that was everything about Lo Meifeng, Sen turned to Shen Mingxia.

“It seems you’ll retain your place with the sect, after all.”

The woman seemed pensive, almost abstracted now that the danger seemed to have truly passed. She gave Sen a searching look. “You knew he was corrupted. You knew he was a demonic cultivator. How? How could you know that when an entire sect, when sect elders an entire stage higher than you managed to overlook it.”

Sen gave the matter a long moment of thought, trying to decide how many secrets he wanted to reveal. “I knew he was corrupted. As for the demonic part, that was just a guess on my part. His first instinct was to try to murder you when I exposed him. You don’t go straight to killing to protect a secret unless it’s a big secret. A this-will-end-my-life-if-it-comes-out kind of secret.”

Shen Mingxia nodded. “I suppose that follows. What about the other part?”

“As for how I knew and why your elders overlooked it,” Sen just shrugged. “Maybe we were looking for different things.”

“Or maybe he wasn’t the only one,” she said.

Sen let that hang in the air for a long moment, trying to decide how best to play it. It was a possibility. It was also a problem he wanted no part of. By telling him that she thought it, Sen suspected that Shen Mingxia was looking for, or maybe just hoping for, someone she could call for help if it turned out to be true. And there he was, fresh off of defeating one sect elder right before her eyes. He supposed he could see her reasoning. He was a cultivator with no strong ties to her sect but ties to a terrifying old monster that would likely take a dim view of demonic cultivators wherever they were found. To a qi-condensing stage cultivator, he must look like a potent ally. If she only understood the true depth of the differences between foundation stage cultivators and core cultivators. Even as something of an aberration, with a lot of advantages, he still wasn’t really a match for even an initial core cultivator with some experience. His victory had been luck as much as skill.

Yet, all of his many attempts to stay out of it, no matter what it had been, had largely blown up in his face. In fact, they had often left him in situations that were worse than simply meeting the problems head-on would have been. Those worse situations, in turn, had put him in positions to make bad choices, choices driven by anger, choices driven by fear, choices driven by pride. He had killed those who likely hadn’t deserved it. He had spared those who hadn’t deserved it. He’d tried to assuage that guilt on the Luo farm, helping the villagers with his alchemy. He didn’t regret that choice, nor would he ignore them in the future, but he’d been out of balance even there.

There was a choice to be made here, as well. He could choose to acknowledge Shen Mingxia’s words and, in doing so, form a kind of implicit agreement to come back if the need arose. Or he could ignore it because he feared to get involved. He’d thought of the wandering cultivator’s life as a constant process of moving on, and it was, but he hadn’t been moving on. He’d been in a constant process of running away. Sometimes he’d run away from what he’d done. Sometimes he’d run away from what he didn’t want to do. He could move on from here, or he could run away, again. It was a simple choice, and it was all up to him.

“Yes,” Sen agreed, “or maybe he wasn’t the only one.”

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