Book 11: Chapter 2: Pacified

Red, orange, and yellow spread out like a small sea below Sen as yet another part of the wilds disappeared inside an inferno. The grisly work was largely over at this point. He had been at a loss at first about the best way to destroy large areas of the wilds while sparing the non-spirit beasts

and

still slaying the spirit beasts. It had taken a bit of trial and error before he hit on a method that mostly fulfilled those three separate goals. What he had finally settled on was igniting the wilds in an almost completed square. Then he would drag the fire inward, slowly herding everything to the one spot in the square he’d left untouched.

Everything that lived on the ground would flee toward that spot where he had a group of cultivators waiting. He had not been surprised to find sect cultivators volunteering in droves for this particular duty. After they’d had a little time to recover from the battle, it turned out that many of them were feeling a towering need for vengeance. The sect leadership had wisely recognized that forbidding them from pursuing their revenge would only lead to an unacceptable level of dissension in the ranks. More than a few cultivators had simply disappeared after being forbidden in those first chaotic days and gone looking for vengeance on their own.

Sen was equally sure that the sects realized that letting their juniors accompany him for these missions would help him solidify his hold over these cultivators. Not all of them, of course, as sect loyalties could be fierce, but

enough

of them. He knew that he needed to establish what amounted to an emotional death grip on the people in this kingdom. From what Lo Meifeng and the foxes were telling him, he more or less had that with the mortals in the capital. This was going to let him do that with the sect cultivators. Not that he wanted to completely strip away their loyalties to their sects.

He had contemplated it. He’d never entirely let go of his disdain for sects, given how much unnecessary trouble they’d caused him. In the end, Lo Meifeng had talked him out of it.

“But why not?” he demanded.

“You’re not looking at the bigger picture, Sen,” said Lo Meifeng.

“I’m not?”

“No. You’re looking at the sects and thinking about how much you’d like to smash them all to itty bitty pieces.”

Sen winced at being so easily read.

“Okay, fine. That’s probably true, but how is that a bad thing?”

“This kingdom is already fractured. You can probably bring it under your direct control through pure force, but that’ll be a bloody affair. The last I checked, you were trying to minimize the number of human beings we kill. Do you think that problem will be made better if we turn loose thousands of cultivators who are suddenly beholden to

no one

?”

“No,” admitted Sen and tried not to sound sullen about it.

“I’m glad to see you’re reasonable enough to admit that.”

Sen scowled at her, but his heart wasn’t really in it.

“I hope there’s some other benefit to be had from not breaking the sects.”

“There is,” she said cheerfully. “They’re established powers, but they’re also powers who are constantly at odds with each other. In the short term, we can use that to our advantage. Play them against each other. If they’re primarily worried about spirit beasts and each other, they’re going to be spending much less time plotting your murder.”

“Well, I’m certainly all for

that

,” observed Sen, his tone dry.

“As any rational person should be. I almost wish that Lai Dongmei was a little less open in her support of you—” Lo Meifeng had trailed off before continuing. “There’s no fixing that. It would have been useful if her loyalty was an open question, but it’s not. So, there’s no point in wishing for something different.”

“You do realize that I have absolutely no idea of how to play factions against each other, right?” asked Sen.

Lo Meifeng waved a hand as if shooing a pesky fly and said, “That’s not going to be your problem. That’s going to be

my

problem. I’ll probably rope you in occasionally to stir the pot by acting a certain way toward one person or another, but your main job is the war. I know it. Hells, everybody knows it. More importantly, that’s where everyone wants your attention.”

Sen frowned and said, “If that’s what everyone wants, that almost certainly means it’s not going to be to my advantage to follow through on it. At least, not the way they want.”

“It wouldn’t be. Except, you’re going to start undermining their hold on power. And the best part is, they won’t be able to stop it without undermining their power in an even worse way.”

Then, she’d explained what was happening with people abandoning the sects and suggested he offer them the

opportunity

to get some vengeance at his side. It had worked better than he’d hoped. He supposed it was hard to lose when betting on people’s irrational anger. There had been so many volunteers that they’d had to set up a rotation of cultivators to accompany him on these little missions to destroy the wilds and kill spirit beasts. After a month or so, it had become a fairly well-oiled machine of destruction.

Sen largely allowed the cultivators on the ground to organize themselves. Ironically, having clashed repeatedly over the centuries, the sect cultivators knew their respective capabilities far better than he did. They worked out attack patterns, deployed formations, and generally only turned to him for approval or to work out the pecking order if someone became a little too intractable. While they handled matters on the ground, Sen dealt with anything that tried to escape into the sky. Sometimes he was accompanied by other nascent soul cultivators or peak core cultivators, and other times he worked alone.

At that moment, he was waiting for the last powerful spirit beast that was trying to outlast the fire. He’d felt it below. At first, it had tried to flee, but he could only assume that it had worked out his strategy. It had hunkered down in one spot. The fact that it was still alive meant that it must possess a powerful fire affinity. It was a strategy that might have even worked if it were just dealing with a regular fire. Those would eventually run out of fuel and burn themselves out. Unfortunately for this particular spirit beast, it wasn’t dealing with a regular fire. Sen had been slowly intensifying the fire around it. After all, an affinity wasn’t the same thing as an immunity. The only real question was whether it would try to escape on the ground or run to the sky. Sen couldn’t tell for sure exactly what kind of spirit beast it was, so he was curious to find out.

He intensified the fire a little bit more, and that seemed to be the final push the spirit beast needed. It burst upwards, trailing fire, embers, and ash behind it as cleared the tops of the trees and flying as though it meant to touch the heavens. Sen shot after it like a bolt loosed from a crossbow. It looked like a bird of prey of some kind, but he didn’t recognize it immediately. Much of its form was obscured by fire and smoke. He felt a little stab of guilt. Ai wouldn’t be happy if she learned he was killing birds, even if they were bad birds.

He pushed that thought away. The spirit beast wasn’t likely to show any restraint toward him, which it proved a moment later when it hurled a fireball at him. Even a few years earlier, that fireball would have been of serious concern to him. Now, he simply dodged it, which bought the bird an extra half-second of life. A blade appeared in each hand, both a shade of blue that was nearly identical to the robes he wore. He poured lightning qi into the weapons, and they exploded with light and crackling power.

The bird surprised him as it abruptly changed direction and dove back toward the burning forest below. It took Sen a moment to adjust his own flight. Even by his standards, that move of the bird’s had been fast. He closed the distance, only for the bird to abruptly change directions again, leveling out and streaking away over the fiery treetops. Sen was faster to redirect himself that time, but he concluded that the bird must be using some kind of technique, or whatever the spirit beasts used in place of techniques, to make those impossible changes in direction.

Sen swept one of the jian forward, and a wind blade laced with lightning leapt toward the bird. Either the god of luck was on the spirit beast’s side, or it had sensed the attack coming, because it shifted direction again and evaded the wind blade. For a second, it disappeared into a plume of smoke. Sen only realized his mistake after he’d entered the plume. A fireball crashed into him from above. He used fire qi of his own to douse the flames. It hadn’t hurt his body, but it had charred his robes badly enough that he doubted the repair enchantment could salvage them.

It had also redirected his momentum straight down. He’d been so distracted by the fire that it took slamming into the ground to draw his attention. Grimacing, he launched himself back into the sky. Any tiny sense of play or fairness evaporated from him, and the lightning around the swords turned black. His spiritual sense told him exactly where the bird had gone. He bore down on it again and, when he got close enough, he seized it with his auric imposition. The bird let out a shriek of pain that could probably be heard for miles. At the last second, Sen withdrew his killing intent from the blades and let the lightning return to its original form. The swords passed through the bird’s neck a hair’s breadth apart from each other.

The two pieces plummeted back into the forest below. Sen descended at a more leisurely pace, and the fire parted around him. His qi plunged into the two parts of the bird, searching for the spirit beast’s core. Preserving that resource had been the motivating factor in not attacking it with Heavens’ Rebuke. He’d been stockpiling them. There weren’t going to be any new beast cores in this part of the world for a long time if he had his way. So, he couldn’t go around destroying them unnecessarily. They would be valuable commodities soon enough, and he wanted to corner that market ahead of time. It would be one more piece of leverage over the sects.

Storing the core, he rose back into the air and flew over to where the rest of the cultivators were either watching for any stragglers to come out of the inferno or harvesting parts from the slain spirit beast. Since he didn’t intend to pay these cultivators with gold, he let them keep some of what they harvested. He suspected their sects demanded they turn most of it over, but that wasn’t his problem. The cultivators all straightened up and bowed when they noticed him arrive.

“Lord Lu,” said the man who was nominally in charge of the cultivators for today’s purge.

Sen tried to remember his name and came up empty. He’d been introduced to so many people over the preceding few weeks that he’d just stopped paying attention after a while. He nodded to the man and then spoke.

“This section of the wilds has been pacified,” he said, using the same word Master Feng had after purging Uncle Kho’s mountain of its most dangerous spirit beasts. “Finish your harvesting. It’s time to go home.”