Book 9: Chapter 25: Wrath (1)

Sen tapped the top of the table in his office pensively. He’d spent more than a few idle minutes wondering if he’d made a terrible mistake passing off some of the things on his list to Sua Xing Xing. He’d doubted the decision so much that he’d gone so far as to

hide

and peek in on her working over the course of a few weeks. That had ended with him feeling both stupid and vaguely dirty. Not only had she not been slacking off or behaving toward the mortals in a way he wouldn’t like, she’d been working like a woman possessed. While he could tell that she found his preoccupation with how the mortals were treated a little baffling, she went out of her way to be polite to them. It was all the more telling because she did it when she’d have no way to know that someone was watching. He’d ever heard from Long Jia Wei that she’d intervened when she came across a group of older boys bullying a smaller boy.

I really did judge her too harshly

, he thought. He’d taken his first impression of her, locked it in stone, and simply refused to notice anything that didn’t conform with that impression. Not that he thought he’d been completely wrong about her. She

was

ambitious. She

was

looking to use him, but not the way that so many others had meant to do. She wanted exactly what Master Feng had said she wanted. She was looking to advance, but she was also willing to

work

for it. That second part was what he’d been ignoring. And was that really so very different from what he had done with Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Auntie Caihong? He’d been willing to take any opportunity to escape the life that fate had seemed set on giving him. When the opportunity presented itself, he’d grabbed it with both hands. He had also worked himself to exhaustion to earn that new life.

He knew it wasn’t a perfect parallel. His main agenda had been pure survival with a vague idea that he might be able to help Grandmother Lu. Her agenda was advancement. He knew that most cultivators treated advancement as a life-and-death matter, but it was fundamentally different. If she never advanced again, Sua Xing Xing would have already outlived generations and generations of mortals and would outlive many more. If he hadn’t been brought onto the path of cultivation, he’d likely be dead now. He’d had no other options, at least none that a child could reasonably be expected to understand. She could have simply stayed with her old sect. She might have reached the nascent soul stage, she might not have, but she could probably have lived out a very comfortable life.

Still, there were more than enough commonalities to make him feel a little uncomfortable and decidedly petty. It was possible that the last year had smoothed off some of her sect-honed edges. Maybe she’d learned a few things. Even if that was the case, though, the foundation had to have been there. It made him wonder how often he’d made similar mistakes.

How many people did I dismiss forever simply because I didn’t like the way they came off in the first five minutes I knew them

? He feared that the number would make him cringe. On the other hand, there did seem to be a higher-than-average number of terrible people to be found in sects. He couldn’t know if sects simply attracted those people, or if it made them. He didn’t feel like he could use Sua Xing Xing as a good example. He simply had too many counter-examples of sect members who truly deserved every terrible thing that happened to them. Still, he could admit to himself that he’d been wrong about this particular sect cultivator.

Then, as if the heavens themselves wanted to remind him of all the reasons he hated sects, the door to his office burst open. That was a bit of an accomplishment in itself since that door was made of stone, like almost every door in the compound. Just as importantly, though, it had never happened before. The young man who usually sat outside his office had a frantic look on his face.

“Patriarch! In the town! There are cultivators destroying things!”

White-hot rage exploded inside of Sen. The sect was outside of the town. It was easy to find. If someone wanted to challenge him, they could just come to the gate and do it. Attacking the town and the mortals there served no purpose other than cruelty. He knew it was probably intended to provoke him as well. The fools probably thought it was a good trap. Maybe they intended to use the mortals as hostages or leverage.

Well

,

if they wanted to provoke me

,

they got their wish

, he thought. Sen rose from his chair and looked at the young man who looked even more frantic.

“I’ll deal with this,” said Sen.

Sen didn’t know what that poor young man heard in his voice, but he went very pale and just stepped out of the way. As qinggong-fueled steps carried him through the building and outside, there were shouts of shock and surprise following as everything not made of stone was dislodged in his wake. It took less than a second of expanding his spiritual sense to find where the cultivators were causing havoc. His teeth clenched as his rage found new heights. He arrived so fast that it probably looked like he appeared out of nowhere. There were eight of them. He didn’t bother noting their faces, just their uniforms. Then, his eyes locked onto the little girl that hung limply from one of the cultivator’s hands. Zhi. He could sense that she was still alive. His gaze swiveled to the remains of what had been Li Hua’s seamstress shop. There were people alive in the rubble.

“Well, it’s too late now,” said Bahn Huizhong.

Sen glanced at the man who was standing a little closer to the cultivators. It looked like he'd been trying to talk these fools down off the cliff they had all walked up to the edge of so very willingly.

“You clearly don’t understand how things work,” said one of the dead men.

That was as far as he got.

“Silence,” whispered Sen.

Then, he dropped his auric imposition and every last bit of his killing intent on the one who spoke. There was one brief scream from the man before his body ruptured in a fountain of blood and organs. The rest of the cultivators stared in horror before one of them started screaming at Sen.

“You murdering bastard, I’ll—”

“Silence,” Sen repeated.

A second cultivator was reduced to a bloody pile that only vaguely resembled a human being. Sen let his gaze travel across the faces of the rest of the interlopers as if daring them to speak. He fixed his eyes on the one who held Zhi. Sen suspected that he might be the only person in the town who knew exactly where Long Jia Wei was standing at that moment.

“Long Jia Wei. Please bring me my daughter’s friend.”

There were looks of confusion on lots of faces. Sen doubted anyone else saw it happen, which he didn’t mind at all. Long Jia Wei appeared as if by magic, there was a brief glint of sunlight as his daggers went to work, and then he was walking toward Sen with Zhi carefully cradled in his arms. It took a moment before the screaming started. The cultivator that had been holding Zhi was flopping around the ground. Long Jia Wei had apparently hamstrung the man, gouged out his eyes, and retrieved Zhi through the expedient of severing the man’s hand at the wrist. Sen could see the hand on the ground several feet away from the flopping, screaming cultivator. He ignored the remaining cultivators when Long Jia Wei stepped up to him. It only took a quick moment of concentration to ascertain that Zhi wasn’t badly hurt. He rested a hand on the other cultivator’s shoulder.

“Thank you. Please take her to see Auntie Caihong. I’ll be along with her mother shortly.”

Long Jia Wei ducked his head and then strode away. Sen finally turned his attention back to the new cultivators. The strongest of them, a peak core cultivator stepped forward. He thrust a finger at Sen.

“I am Wu Xiao Dan of the Twisting Blade Sect. I challenge you, Lu Sen.”

Sen regarded the man the way he might a dead animal he found in the forest. That’s all the man was to him now. A dead animal.

Bahn Huizhong shook his head as he stepped back and said, “I tried to warn you.”

“A challenge?” said Sen. “I see that you’re confused, Wu Xiao Dan.”

“And how am

I

confused?”

“If you came to challenge me, you should have come to the gates of my compound. You didn’t do that. You attacked innocents, destroyed property, and did your best to inflict terror.”

“What difference does that make? I’m a cultivator. They’re mortals. I can do what I want to them,” said Wu Xiao Dan.

Sen shook his head. He wasn’t even surprised.

“I suppose that trash like you might be allowed to remain a sect member wherever you come from. However, when you do those things here, you become common bandits. Little better than rabid animals. So, you will not be given a duel. You will not be challenging anyone. There will be no pretense of honor. You will simply be cut down like the animals you are.”