Unintended Cultivator

Li Yi Nuo looked at the gates to the Vermillion Blade Sect with a complex set of feelings that were somehow still numb. There was relief that the journey was done. A trip that she might have made in a week, or even a few days if she pushed herself hard enough, had taken weeks. She looked over her shoulder at the three men in the back of the wagon. It had taken all of her very meager skills in healing to simply keep them alive. Getting them to even eat anything had been a daily chore that consumed hours. If they hadn’t been left on the road in the middle of winter to die, it might not have been so bad. By the time she’d found them, though, they had been close to death. She had second-guessed her choice not to let them die a hundred times. Their moments of lucidity were mercifully infrequent because she found it hard to bear their pleas for death. Part of her had fervently hoped that taking them away from the site of their attack would relieve them of some small part of their pain, but that hope had been in vain.

Another cultivator had wanted these men to die but had also wanted them to suffer first. Whatever technique that mysterious, terrifyingly powerful, and pitiless cultivator had afflicted them with had done its work well. The shadow of that cultivator had hung over her the entire journey, growing in size with each passing day. She had gone days without sleep as the thought of the faceless specter tracking them down haunted her. After all, that person she so desperately wished to never meet had meant for those fellow sect members to die. She had interrupted that plan. What if they knew? What if they came to punish her as they had punished the men in the back of the wagon? With that idea gnawing at her peace of mind, coming up to the sect gates was a relief. There were elders in the sect who could, if nothing else, provide her protection from whoever had done this thing to the poor wretches she had found.

Yet, returning to the sect would bring with it an old problem that she had neither the patience to tolerate nor the power to stop. It was made worse by the fear that the unknown cultivator would come to finish what they had started and include her in that delayed retribution. She needed the protection of the sect until they understood better what had happened on that empty patch of road. Staying meant enduring the unwanted advances of Elder Joeng, a woman that Li Yi Nuo had learned to loathe. Leaving meant accepting all of the dangers of being a wandering cultivator and the phantom threat of a cultivator capable of imposing a technique of pain and horror that could endure for weeks, possibly even months. She could only hope that someone in the sect had some bit of esoteric knowledge that might shed light on the matter. As she drew up to the gate, she felt a weight lift off her heart. Her teacher was waiting for her with a kind smile. She climbed down off the wagon and approached him. She gave him a deep bow.

“Master.”

The old cultivator smiled at her, but there was a grave look in his eyes. “Li Yi Nuo. You have returned at last. Were you successful?”

She knew that he could already sense the men in the wagon, but he wanted the guards to hear her say that she had succeeded in her task. A minor bit of sect politics, perhaps, but she would take every shred of political capital she could acquire.

“Yes, Master. Although, I fear their condition is grave.”

Li Yi Nuo trailed behind her master as he walked to the back of the wagon and looked down at the wayward formation foundation sect members. He studied those nearly inert forms for a long time. Then, he started issuing orders. Healers and alchemists were to be summoned at once. The wagon was brought inside the sect and a flurry of activity happened around Li Yi Nuo that she barely noticed. She had gotten back safely. Now, the responsibility for those men could be handed over to others with more skill or more wisdom. The elders would demand a report of her. She didn’t look forward to that as she doubted she would be able to tell them more than the healers would discover. Any evidence had long since been erased or buried by the winter weather by the time she arrived. Still, it was a relief to be able to stop thinking, stop worrying, and stop planning, even if only for a few minutes.

She followed her master to her own home, where he made sure that there was a fire to warm the small building. He made and poured her tea, waving off her halfhearted protests that she should serve him. He even sent someone to fetch her something to eat. He asked her a few gentle questions but seemed to sense that she had used up her mental resources. He told her to sleep and that the elders would summon her when they were ready. She had collapsed into her bed, feeling ready to sleep for days. It seemed that fate was not feeling kind toward her because the elders summoned her the next day.

The Vermilion Blade Sect was neither a large sect nor a small sect. They had a reputation for training cultivators of quality, but they were situated too far from any major city to become a true powerhouse sect. The sect patriarch and elders, with a few glaring exceptions, encouraged a modest approach to building. They reasoned that money was best spent on resources and tools to support the sect and its disciples. There were no grand structures. Even the elders’ hall could have been mistaken for a small library building in the outside world. As her master had told her, it was foolish to equate opulence with power. Far better to judge based on the talent of the cultivators within those buildings than by the buildings themselves. Li Yi Nuo was more aware than most how much actual cultivation talent and power was contained in that modest building. While she didn’t let herself hesitate as she approached it, she wished she could.

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When she stood before the assembled elders of the sect, she was relieved that it was her own master who spoke first. She worked very hard not to look at Elder Joeng, fearing that she might see lust or fury in those eyes. After all, it had been that woman’s desire to punish her that sent Li Yi Nuo off in the middle of winter in the first place. Instead, she kept her focus on her master.

“Describe to us what you found?” her master asked in his gentle voice.

She made the briefest of descriptions of her journey, taking only a moment to mention the tales of some kind of wandering spirit of sorrow she had heard. They might be foolish tales from mortals, but better to make the sect aware and let them decide how best to deal with it. Then, she came to the heart of the matter.

“I found them in the road, buried in snow. I don’t know how long they were there, but all three were on the verge of death. They had been afflicted with some kind of technique, something that seemed to afflict their minds or hearts.”

The voice that Li Yi Nuo had least wished to hear cut her off.

“Do you fancy yourself a healer now?” asked Elder Joeng.

Li Yi Nuo steadied her nerves as she turned to face the woman who had been such a source of trouble for her. “I do not. I inferred it.”

“Based on what? Your vast experience?” sneered the elder.

“Based on the way that they begged me to kill them every time they had a moment of lucidity.”

That seemed to sober Elder Joeng. The elders questioned her for hours, digging for every scrap of information she knew and every scrap she hadn’t known that she remembered. They had her go over every feeling she’d had where she’d found the three men. By the time they finally dismissed her, Li Yi Nuo felt even more tired than she had the day before. Later that afternoon, her master came to her and told her that she was entering secluded cultivation for a time to recover from her trip. She didn’t need him to explain to her that it was a convenient excuse to avoid Elder Joeng. There were some things that not even elders dared to interrupt without exceptionally good reasons.

She was more than happy to comply with the order. No one managed anything remotely like decent cultivation on a journey. It was always a struggle to simply maintain whatever progress you had made. In most cases, though, it meant some loss of the accumulated qi in the dantian. Li Yi Nuo had been no exception to this rule. She worked hard to replace what she had lost, but her efforts were a fractured thing. The shadowy figure behind the attack on those outer disciples had taken up residence in her mind. The attack itself was frightening enough, but the complete lack of information about whoever had done it was even more frightening. It could be anyone. That uncertainty had driven a sliver of fear inside her mind that she couldn’t escape. Even in her sleep, a cultivator wreathed in shadow and death pursued her, consumed with the need to impose a reckoning on her for her interference.

Her period of solitude was all too brief. She’d barely been back for two weeks when she found herself summoned before the elders. She wondered if they had more questions for her. That couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Her eyes sought out her master, and the man looked like he’d been driven fifty years closer to death. She didn’t have to consider that grim change before Elder Joeng spoke.

“The men you retrieved have not improved. Our best healers and alchemists could do nothing. The technique used on those outer disciples attacks the heart and mind,” announced Elder Joeng like it was new information and not the very conclusion that Li Yi Nuo had suggested. “We summoned a man who specializes in such things at great expense. He informs us that while he can reduce the damage done, only the one who inflicted the technique can truly release them from it. Since you were the one to find these men, we deem it appropriate that you be given the extraordinary honor of seeing this task through. You will seek out the cultivator who did this. You will return them to us to undo this damage and face the sect’s justice.”

Li Yi Nuo couldn’t breathe as she saw the malicious light in Elder Joeng’s eyes. This wasn’t a mission. This was a glorified death sentence and all of the elders knew it. Any cultivator who could impose a technique that powerful and with that kind of longevity was a monster. The kind of cultivator who had bathed in blood and found it to their liking. The kind of cultivator who would kill her out of hand simply for bothering them. She also knew she couldn’t refuse. If she tried, it was entirely possible that she’d never leave the sect compound alive.

“H- How am I to find this person?” asked Li Yi Nuo, her voice a hollow whisper.

Elder Joeng smiled. It was a petty, cruel thing. She held up an object.

“This compass will guide you to them.”

There were more instructions that Li Yi Nuo didn’t really hear and the compass was placed in her hands. She had always known that cultivation might lead to death. She’d just never imagined it would be a death caused by the petty vengeance of an elder in her own sect. As she started walking toward the door, she felt an explosion of qi behind her that dwarfed anything she had ever felt in her life. She whirled around, her heart pounding in her chest, expecting to see the entire building in ruins. What she did see shocked her even more. Her master, the kind, gentle man who had seen himself as a guide and treated her more like a granddaughter than a disciple, was towering over the headless body of Elder Joeng. Her head was still in his hand, blood dripping from the severed stump of her neck.

Her master’s eyes were blazing with a rage she had never witnessed in the man and his killing intent blanketed the entire building like the barely restrained wrath of a god. Li Yi Nuo could see the shock and the naked fear on the faces of the other elders. These people had dismissed her master, pushed him out of the inner circles of the sect, and he had largely let them, content to train what he saw as his final disciple. She had never considered that such things lived inside the man. Yet, now that she considered it, he must have progressed as all cultivators progressed. He had grown through violence, and it seemed he had excelled at it. She could only surmise that the other elders, who must have known, had thought him a toothless tiger. His teeth, it seemed, were still strong and sharp.

“If she doesn’t return,” said her master in tones of pure granite, “every elder in this room will die.”

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