Book 11: Chapter 19: Inspection (3)

It wasn’t much of a surprise when their next stop was the training area. What was more surprising to Sen was how much space it consumed. He’d only ever seen it from the air or the top of the wall. On the ground, there was no escaping the reality of thousands of people doing spear drills or sparring or even just some basic calisthenics. The ground would sometimes tremble as several hundred people took a hard step forward and executed a thrust. That was to say nothing of the sheer scale of the noise as they all let out simultaneous battle cries. If he had seen something like this as a child, he might have one day dreamed of joining their ranks.

To his older, cultivator eyes, they looked hideously fragile, like they all wore tiger pelts over eggshell bones. He knew it was unfair to see them that way. Many of these people were survivors of those bloody, impossible fights at the top of the walls. It was just hard to see their limited speed and strength and not think that he was doing something wrong by taking them into battle. However, much as he hated it, he also knew it was necessary. It would be the army that stood as his representatives to the mortal world. Taking them into battle would legitimize them in ways nothing else could. He also knew responsibility would largely fall to them to keep the peace and hold back the lesser spirit beasts that would rise in the future.

Sen hadn’t told anyone about that, much as he noted that none of the other cultivators brought it up where mortals could hear them. The sects and wandering cultivators all knew that there was no way to avoid the growth of spirit beasts short of killing every single animal in the world. As long as animals lived and there was qi in the environment, there would be spirit beasts. Sen also knew that there wouldn’t be enough humans left after the war, assuming they won, to possibly exert full control over the entire continent.

He’d do everything he could to ensure that they maintained firm control over a far greater part of the continent, but nothing would give them full control. It was simply too much land. Parts of it, especially the inhospitable parts of it, wouldn’t attract people. The wilds would return in one form or another. Perhaps not on the same scale, but it would exist. With the wilds would come new incarnations of the deep wilds, where truly dangerous spirit beasts would grow and thrive as they struggled for survival every day. A part of Sen wondered if things would have been different if humanity had been forced to struggle in the same ways.

Not that life wasn’t already hard for many, but there was a kind of brutal purity to how the spirit beasts fought and advanced. Certainly, they had politics of their own as the foxes and ghost panthers had learned the hard way, but he suspected that humans would have been better equipped to fight this war if their hardships more closely resembled those of the spirit beasts. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything. He doubted he would have ever been born or survived to adulthood in a world like that. Might makes right is always hardest on the young.

He once more set aside his grim thoughts to observe the soldiers and not merely let his eyes drift over them. With so many people gathered in one place, there might be some hidden talents among them. Sorting through what he was seeing would have been a terrible challenge at one point. Now, with his attention in a proper place, he found it almost laughably easy to pick out the skilled from the adequate, and the gifted from the skilled. It took a depressingly short time before he and General Mo were noticed, and everything ground to a sharp halt.

The closest soldiers stared, while those who were farther away twisted and craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the general and the cultivator. A familiar woman with a patch covering one eye came running over. She bowed, but it was ambiguous enough that it might have been aimed at him or at Mo. Sen found that more than a little amusing.

“General Mo. Lord Lu. We are honored by your presence,” said the woman.

“Thank you, Commander Li,” said Mo. “Lord Lu, this is Li Chanchan, one of my most competent officers.”

The woman went pink in the cheeks.

“Li Chanchan. This one is Lu Sen. If General Mo speaks so highly of you, I’ll expect much.”

She went even redder in the cheeks but kept her voice steady when she said, “Thank you, Lord Lu. I will not disappoint you.”

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“I’m sure you won’t,” said Sen with a small smile.

He instantly realized the smile was a mistake when he

heard

her heart speed up, and her visible eye went a little vacant. He and she were saved from that awkwardness by the arrival of several other officers who vied for his attention. Sen dismissed all of that as mostly irrelevant, since it had very little to do with him and everything to do with their understandable ambitions. He was much more interested in how they reacted to General Mo. Some of them tried to ingratiate themselves to the man, while others kept their distance. He noted the faces of both groups.

For his part, Sen strove to remain uniformly polite but distant with them all. While some of them might be in Kang’s camp, it wasn’t an automatic mark against them. People had to find their way with the resources they had. For many of these people, he had to assume Kang’s patronage had been instrumental in their advancement. That was likely to make some of them deeply loyal, but he imagined it was a more practical choice for many. The trick in the long run was going to be figuring out who was who since he might have to promote some of them one day.

The growing noise from the crowd of soldiers was distracting, and he almost said something. Then, a glimmer of puckish humor dared to peek out of his heart, and he decided that it wasn’t his responsibility to maintain order. As the noise grew, so did Sen’s amusement. The officers weren’t paying any attention as the crowd pushed in closer and closer to get a look at the infamous Lord Lu or maybe just to try to figure out what was so interesting. It finally got bad enough that General Mo glowered around.

“Who is training these soldiers?” he roared.

The crowd went silent and still as that bellow carried. The officers all froze in place, realizing that they’d abandoned the positions to try to curry favor. At least some of them seemed to recognize that their opportunity to do that was now over. Li Chanchan immediately turned away and stormed off, pointing and shouting at the people she’d been in charge of. Some of the others watched her for a moment before starting after her and doing the same. Sen noticed that the ones who stayed were the ones who had avoided General Mo. His fun had, Sen leveled a flat stare at them and pointed at the crowd.

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing something right now?” he asked.

The rest of the officers dispersed. General Mo shook his head. Sen felt like doing the same, but maintained the calm expression he’d been wearing most of the day. He did shoot Mo a look, though.

“It seems to me,” said Sen quietly enough not to be overheard, “that my presence here is more of a disruption than a benefit.”

General Mo sighed and said, “I imagine you’re a disruption most of the places you go.”

Sen wanted to object, but he couldn’t justify it to himself.

“I suppose that’s fair,” he conceded.

They waited while order was restored and the drilling and sparring began again. Sen and the general walked up and down the rows of soldiers. Sen had the general stop one group. He walked over to a man who looked to be in his late twenties. Sen didn’t know why the man hadn’t been given some position of authority. His talent with the spear was almost blindingly obvious. The man’s fear was obvious in the way he shifted back and forth and by the trembling in his hands and arms. Sen wasn’t even sure why he’d come over to get a closer look at the soldier.

“Join us,” said Sen.

He still wasn’t entirely sure why he was doing what he was doing. It was just an intuition.

“Lord Lu?” asked the man in a voice that cracked.

“Come with me,” said Sen. “I have something for you to do.”

The trembling turned into a shaking, but the man just bowed and fell in behind Sen and Mo. The general gave the man a curious look that he transferred to Sen. The look was met with a small shrug.

Of course

,

now I have to come up with something for the guy to do

, thought Sen.

Talk about making my own messes

. It only got worse as they continued walking. Sen picked out another eleven people from the ranks of drilling soldiers and those who were sparring. He would have preferred to just leave, but General Mo insisted that he say something to the entire group.

Grumbling under his breath, Sen walked to the front of the gathered soldiers and used a qi platform to lift himself high enough that everyone should be able to see him. He used a minor air qi technique to ensure his voice would carry to every ear.

“It’s clear to me that you are all training very hard. You should be proud of yourselves, because I’m proud of you. Your families are proud of you. And the spirit beasts, well, if you keep training this way, they will learn to fear the thunder of your footsteps!”

Once again, Sen felt like his speech wasn’t very good. Apparently, it didn’t need to be very good. The soldiers shouted and cheered and thrust their spears toward the sky.

I guess that’s good enough

, thought Sen as he lowered himself to the ground. He strode over to Mo.

“Let’s get out of here before they want me to talk some more,” said Sen.

Before he could make good his escape, a painfully tentative voice reached his ears from the group he’d plucked out.

“Lord Lu?”

It was the first man he’d picked. The man was shuffling his feet and trying to avoid direct eye contact.

“Yes?” asked Sen, half his mind still fixated on leaving.

“What are we supposed to do?” asked the man.

Sen frowned and said, “That’s a very good question.”