Unintended Cultivator

Book 9: Chapter 49: Monsters

Bin Enle stood on the walls and tried to suppress a yawn. It wasn’t tiredness, just boredom. Aside from the strange beast tide a week or so back, nothing interesting ever happened on the wall. It had given him an excuse to fire an arrow into the darkness. It hadn’t been entirely unjustified. He had thought that something was moving out there. Spirit beasts were attacking the walls. He’d been wrong, but it was still exciting for a few seconds there. Then, things had mostly gotten back to normal. In other words, things had gotten boring again. He didn’t even know why they guarded the walls this way. There literally hadn’t been an attack on the sect proper in more than a century. It struck him as a waste of energy, but no one listened to lowly Bin Enle.

Although, he had to admit that hearing about those two fools murdering each other had been a little amusing. The rumors were still flying around the sect about that. Discussing the event had been a way to pass the time for the first day or two, although he’d lost interest pretty quickly. He hadn’t known either of them personally. The sect was simply too large for everyone to know everyone else, especially if you didn’t share an interest or profession with them. He thought he might have met one of them a decade or two back, but he wasn’t sure and there was no way to check now. So, for him, life had resumed its usual dullness. He was a martial specialist but not one of those geniuses who garnered the personal attention of an elder. He was going to have to advance the hard way, by actually working hard. That meant wall duty, as pointless as it was.

The Twisted Blade Sect was too well-known and powerful, at least in the region, for anyone to do anything so monumentally stupid as attacking them. It would invite the kind of reprisals that left nothing but charred stone and funeral pyres in their wake. He knew he wouldn’t want to be a part of any force that meant to attack the sect. Bin Enle had been staring blankly out into the darkness and thinking. Advancement would make darkness no impediment to him, but that was likely decades away. In the meantime, it was very easy to let that darkness lull him into introspection. That was why it took a few moments for the sounds to register. He snapped back into focus and listened. What was that sound? Was that screaming?

He spun around and peered into the sect. He saw people moving around. There were too many of them, and they were moving wrong. Cultivators were, as a rule, graceful. The figures he could see were… They were falling, thrashing, and screaming. Bin Enle was torn. Should he go help? Should he stay on the wall? He had a duty to remain where he was, but he also had a duty to help his fellow sect members. Before Bin Enle could decide what to do, a killing intent like nothing he’d ever felt before crashed down on him. No, not just him, over the entire sect. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t breathe. This was no ordinary killing intent. This was the killing intent of a monster. Even as a world of shadow, fire, and impossibly sharp blades overwhelmed his mind, he saw three figures materialize out of the darkness. The monsters had come.

***

Zhan Shaoruo jerked out of his cultivation. As the patriarch of the Twisted Blade Sect, he was more deeply connected with the sect than anyone would likely credit. He’d found that out that hard way when he’d usurped… That is to say, when he’d inherited the role from the previous patriarch. However, it meant he knew the moment that a foreign formation was activated inside the sect. It wasn’t one of the trifling formations that some idiot outer sect disciple had put together on their own time. It was powerful. Powerful enough to slap aside the suppressions that should have kept such a thing from happening. It was also massive. Zhan Shaoruo tried to understand how such a thing could have been installed inside of his sect without anyone knowing.

A cold moment of clarity struck him. The lurker. There had been that talk among the elders that someone who didn’t belong in the sect was there. He hadn’t been able to find them, though, which was troubling. Very little escaped the spiritual sense of nascent soul cultivators. He’d even set up that trap with Elder Mu. The awful old shrew had extorted him for several natural treasures, and it hadn’t even worked. After that failure, he’d convinced himself that it was just people's imaginations running away with them. Escaping his notice and her frankly unnerving ability was the next best thing to impossible. They’d just been jumping at shadows and reading too much into a lover’s quarrel gone wrong.

But if someone had set up a formation that large and powerful, he struggled to imagine who could have done it. Formations were tricky business, which was why he’d moved his sect away from such unreliable things. Oh, they still had a formation master or two in the sect, but he made sure they never forgot their place. Cultivators should be warriors, not a bunch of scholars hunched over scrolls and alchemy cauldrons. Setting up a formation that large, without anyone noticing, and without getting caught. The list of people that Zhan Shaoruo thought might be able to do it could be counted on three fingers, and he doubted they could have gone wholly unnoticed.

Whoever had done it and why they had done it was immaterial. It almost certainly meant as an attack. He needed to get back. He was just thankful that he hadn’t gone too far from the sect. The cave he’d been in had been an amazing find. Granted, it probably would have benefited the core cultivators in his sect more than it was benefitting him, but he was the patriarch. That meant he got first pick of everything. He raced to the entrance of the cave at speeds that would have rendered himself invisible to most eyes. The moment he exited the cave, he launched himself into the air only to jerk to a stop as someone unveiled their killing intent.

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Zhan Shaoruo’s blood ran cold. He knew this killing intent. He’d felt it once before centuries ago on a particularly dark and terrible day. He forced himself to rise to the level of the man who had clearly been waiting for him. There had been a sliver of hope that maybe he was wrong. That hope shattered when he came level with Kho Jaw-Long. While their cultivation levels were close, Zhan Shaoruo knew better than to think they were matched. He was formidable. More than capable of holding his own in a battle with most other nascent soul cultivators, but this was not most other cultivators. This was the Living Spear. A man who had crushed entire sects by himself. This was one of the old monsters.

“Why are you here?” demanded Zhan Shaoruo, trying to feign confidence.

“I don’t like you,” said Kho Jaw-Long.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

The tone was so casual that Zhan Shaoruo wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

“The way I hear it, you don’t really like anyone,” said Zhan Shaoruo as he attempted to rally.

The Living Spear considered that for a moment.

“True enough. Then, let us say, that I don’t like you in particular.”

“Why?”

Zhan Shaoruo was keenly aware that if something was happening at the sect, this encounter was specifically designed to keep him from getting back there.

“Oh,” said Kho Jaw-Long, “so many reasons. I dislike your doctrine, the way your sect behaves, and then there’s your face.”

“My… My face?”

“Yes. Your face. Every time I see it, I’m overwhelmed with an urge to cut off your head and throw it into a volcano.”

The finality of that threat was once again juxtaposed with the offhanded way the man had delivered it.

“Then, perhaps you should leave. I have business at my sect.”

“What sect?” asked Kho Jaw-Long. “That’s right. You must mean the Twisted Blade Sect. I doubt there’s much left of it now.”

“What?” demanded Zhan Shaoruo. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. I would have, but it turned out not to be necessary. My student is there at the moment, no doubt killing anyone who managed to survive that clever formation of his. I really want to be angry with you about pushing him to this, but someone was going to do it. And it’s a lesson he needed to learn.”

“Your student? What student?”

“Judgment’s Gale. The one you meant to declare war on.”

Like most people, Zhan Shaoruo had thought that the connection between that upstart boy, Lu Sen, and those three old monsters had been overstated. They had come out from wherever it was they’d been hiding to hunt that demonic cabal, but it was the sort of thing they were likely to have done anyway. The blunt statement that Lu Sen was, in truth, the student of Kho Jaw-Long sent Zhan Shaoruo into a panic. He had, however unwittingly, called down the wrath of one of the very few people he would have done almost anything to avoid angering.

“Wait,” said Zhan Shaoruo, lifting his hands in a placating gesture. “This doesn’t need to end in violence. Nothing has happened yet that can’t be undone.”

Kho Jaw-Long showed him some teeth in something that could have been meant as a smile but came across a lot more like a wolf baring its fangs.

“I might have been willing to let the threat to Sen pass, but your sect intended to march on his sect. On his home. On the place where my beautiful, innocent, beloved niece lives. For that, I have half a mind to drag you back and give you to my wife as a gift. She is very unhappy with you.”

With those words, it felt like the icy hand of death had rested its hand on his shoulder. When lightning burst into life around Kho Jaw-Long like he was the god of storms, Zhan Shaoruo almost felt relieved.

***

Glimmer of Night was quite pleased. Everything was proceeding more or less according to the plan that Sen had laid out. The formation had gone off and cultivators were vanishing from his spiritual sense by the score. Of course, not all of them had been caught in the trap. That had always been a possibility. They simply hadn’t been able to guess how many would be outside or have resistances or have potions. The ones who had been outside and able to push through Sen’s killing intent had been swiftly directed to the front gate where he, Sen, and the ghost panther were waiting. At first, he’d thought that he wasn’t going to get to use the clever web and cracked core idea he’d come up with, but he’d been wrong.

Sen had simply been waiting until the right moment to let him unleash it. It was only when there were around a hundred cultivators behind the gate, presumably preparing to mount some futile resistance to the oblivion that had come for this sect, that Sen had looked at him.

“It’s time to try out that new idea of yours.”

Sen had poured a few dozen of the cores out of a storage ring. Glimmer of Night had expected them all to be one kind of core, but Sen had elected to pick out a variety. Weaving the web, he captured the cores on the ground. Sen infused them all with enough qi to make them volatile. With a precise flick of his wrist, Glimmer of Night sent the web and cores hurtling toward the gate. He exerted a bit of control over his qi and the web expanded as it soared toward the gate. The web and cores struck the gate. Sen created some kind of barrier between them and the sect. He watched with fascination as the cores detonated and understood Sen’s intent.

The force of all those cores exploding turned the gate and about a dozen feet of wall to either side of the gate into dust and debris. Then, all of those different kinds of qi went to war with each other. Fire, ice, and wind turned into a maelstrom of destruction. If not for Sen’s barrier, Glimmer of Night thought there was a good chance that either the blast or the clashing elements might have washed back on them. Instead, it just passed around them. The cultivators who had been massing behind that gate, on the other hand, caught the full brunt of both. Glimmer of Night of Night nodded in satisfaction. When clusters went to war, one of the clusters was almost always wiped out entirely. It was good that Sen that knew the appropriate way to wage war.