Book 11: Chapter 70: Evaluations

“I’m not entirely certain you want these people as your vanguard,” said Grandmother Lu.

“Agreed,” said Lai Dongmei. “This is not an impressive showing, particularly for the cultivators.”

Sen looked at Falling Leaf.

“They’re bad at this,” said Falling Leaf in her usual blunt manner.

“They really are,” said Sen.

He shook his head as they looked down on the “battle” happening below. The mortals were screaming and cowering as the shadow constructs formed a tight protective circle around them. He could forgive them. The mortals hadn’t received the kind of training that so many of the people back in his city had volunteered for. He hadn’t really expected them to do anything, yet, although the weeping seemed a bit much given the veritable wall of constructs protecting them. The cultivators were another matter altogether. They were fighting a, to Sen’s mind, small pack of spirit beasts. He almost choked when one of the cultivators screamed something about a

beast tide

. Falling Leaf turned to look at him, confusion writ large across her face.

“Do they believe

this

is a beast tide?”

Sen just shrugged and said, “I guess.”

“This is not a beast tide,” she said with conviction. “There can’t be more than a hundred. We fought beast tides. This is just—”

“Sad,” Sen offered when her voice trailed off.

He made a casual gesture. A bear-cat that had been menacing a pair of inept foundation formation cultivators was converted from a threat into a pile of ash. He hadn’t intended to intervene so soon. He wanted to evaluate the skill, or apparent lack of skill, among the cultivators he’d forcibly recruited. He’d make an exception for those damned, vicious bear-cats. He’d warned them not to be caught within his sight again. If they couldn’t be bothered to listen, he couldn’t be bothered to stay his hand. Sen turned his attention back to the larger fight and watched with increasing dissatisfaction.

Yes, he’d intended for this entire vanguard role to be a punishment. Now, he wasn’t sure he could make himself follow through. His anger hadn’t cooled that much, but putting them at the tip of the spear would be little more than sending children to the slaughter. He couldn’t help but wonder just who had failed so profoundly in teaching these people. They were unskilled, but they didn’t need to be as bad as what he was seeing. He’d made a mental list of dozens of easily correctable mistakes that would increase the group’s overall offensive power by close to half if his estimates were correct.

Not that they were all entirely hopeless. The late-stage core cultivator who had led the other cultivators…Sen realized he’d been so angry he never bothered to learn the man’s name. He was holding his own and had even killed some of the stronger spirit beasts.

Perhaps he received better foundational training than the rest

, mused Sen.

Focusing on the stronger spirit beasts shows at least some tactical sense

. There was a smattering of other core cultivators in the early and mid stages. He wasn’t decided about them yet. They were either killing or holding off spirit beasts, but they were relying too much on brute force and not enough on skill or techniques.

He had spotted a few foundation formation cultivators who, unless he missed his guess, were uncommonly talented. It looked like they had also been uncommonly unlucky in the place of their birth. No doubt they’d been recruited into whatever passed for sects farther north and had been hampered by the poor instruction they received. He shared his thoughts with Lai Dongmei, pointing out the ones he thought might actually have a chance of advancing with proper instruction. She largely concurred with his assessment, with one main exception.

“I’m not so sure about that one,” she said, pointing at a woman with a patch over one eye. “She’s not that talented.”

Sen nodded in acknowledgment of the point, but it was Grandmother Lu who supplied the answer to Lai Dongmei.

“Consider that look in her eye. She wants it more than anyone else down there. She’ll succeed where others will fail if it’s a matter of will or perseverance. She’ll work harder than anyone else to get the most out of the talent she does have. She might not make it to nascent soul, but I don’t think she’s reached her limits.”

Lai Dongmei gave Grandmother Lu a surprised look before she focused on the cultivator with the eye patch for several long moments. The nascent soul cultivator slowly started to nod, but a rueful expression overtook her face.

“I’ve been in a sect for too long. We focus so much on talent and the possibility of ascension that we can grow blind to other salient factors.”

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“It happens to everyone. It’s the price of getting old,” said Grandmother Lu with an amused little smile.

Lai Dongmei’s eyes went a little wide before she laughed.

“I suppose it is, honored grandmother,” replied Lai Dongmei, giving the other woman a respectful bow.

“I guess I brought that down on my own head.”

“Well, I think I’ve seen enough from the cultivators,” said Sen, ignoring the teasing. “It’s time to see what the constructs can do.”

With a swell of carefully directed air qi, Sen flung every spirit beast back from the fight. More than a few of the foundation formation cultivators sagged in exhaustion. Several qi-condensing cultivators outright collapsed. 𝔯ἈΝo͍ΒΕṦ

“No endurance,” muttered Sen before he issued a booming order. “Cultivators, withdraw! Protect the mortals.”

The cultivators stumbled back toward the shadow constructs, which smoothly moved aside to let them enter the protective circle. Some of the cultivators gave him grateful looks, happy to have survived and been allowed to retreat from what they believed was an unwinnable battle. Others glared at him with pure venom in their eyes, furious at having been forced to fight or forced to expose their incompetence in front of nascent soul cultivators. Maybe both.

“Constructs,” Sen boomed. “Advance.”

The shadow constructs burst outward like an expanding ring of darkness. Where that darkness met spirit beast flesh, only carnage was left in its wake. Even Sen was taken aback by the pure speed and ferocity of the shadow constructs as they slaughtered the spirit beasts. Blood flew as one construct’s jaws closed over the back of a large lizard and literally shook it to pieces. Two shadow constructs pulled a spirit beast that vaguely resembled a horse in half. In a spectacular show of power, one of the constructs that had come from the core of a shadow leopard leapt thirty feet straight into the air and eviscerated a lightning hawk as it dove.

It wasn’t an entirely one-sided fight. A spirit bear with an affinity that was at least related to earth qi, a beast that Sen suspected was sapient, managed to destroy half a dozen of the constructs. Sen wasn’t clear on exactly what it did, but it managed to disrupt the constructs at a physical level. It looked like the bonds between the different kinds of qi he’d use to construct them simply unraveled, which caused several explosions of shadow qi. This was the exact kind of situation he’d feared would end with lots of destroyed constructs. If he’d suppressed them too much, they’d just ignore the bear in favor of whatever was closest.

It was a pleasant surprise when several of the constructs abandoned easier fights to attack the bear as a group. Surprise turned to shock when two of the constructs managed to generate actual techniques. One of them incorporated metal qi for a primitive shadow lance that drove through one of the bear’s back legs. The other put a shroud of shadow around its head to blind it. The spirit bear panicked, lashing out in every direction but too distracted to generate another of those devastating techniques. Within moments, it was dead. Hamstrung by shadow wolves and throat torn out by one of the other constructs. Sen hadn’t seen which one. Then, as if given a command, the group of constructs split apart and returned to individual fights.

That was very impressive

, thought Sen,

but it just raises new questions

.

Like

h

ow in the thousand hells did that one construct make a metal-enhanced shadow lance

? Sen had used a similar technique to create shadow spears. Forcing the metal and shadow to cooperate wasn’t easy. It took a lot of concentration to brute force a merging between those two particular kinds of qi. He wouldn’t have imagined that he’d left enough personality intact to generate that kind of strength of will. It was interesting, but it was also troubling. Equally troubling was how the constructs had changed in his spiritual sense. Before, they had looked like largely identical masses of qi. Now, some of them had become more, for lack of a better word, distinct. More like they had qi signatures like mortals, cultivators, and spirit beasts.

And none of those are things I can figure out right now

, he told himself. Much as he might want and eventually need those answers, he’d have to be patient. He set aside his concerns and watched the swift end of the fight. It had been fast, very fast, even by his standards. The cultivators had fought those same spirit beasts for the better part of fifteen minutes before he’d let them withdraw. Once he’d unleashed those shadow constructs, it was definitely over in less than two minutes. Falling Leaf turned to look at him.

“They’re good at this.”

“They certainly are,” said Sen with a nod of approval.

He lowered his qi platform to the ground. Falling Leaf immediately wandered off to inspect the remains of the spirit beasts and, Sen suspected, to get a better look at the constructs. Up until now, she’d come across as dismissive of them. It seemed they’d gotten her attention. Sen turned

his

attention to the weary cultivators and stunned mortals who stood huddled in a mass. He just looked at them, letting his silent judgment do most of the heavy lifting in telling them what he thought.

“Well, that was telling,” he finally said.

Almost everyone averted their eyes. The ones who didn’t avert their gazes were, in no surprise to Sen, the exact same ones he’d picked out as having some genuine potential. The decision about whether to do anything to encourage that potential was still being weighed. He wanted stronger cultivators for this war, but he also wanted these particular cultivators to suffer. It was a quandary that he didn’t know how to solve just yet. Instead, he extended his qi into the surrounding forest and dragged a huge pile of fallen wood to the road.

Most of it was still wet and covered with snow, but a negligent application of water qi dried the wood. He set the pile on fire, and warmth soon spread into the air around it. The mortals swiftly moved into that limited area of heat, while the cultivators trailed behind them. In a moment of pity, Sen also produced some tables and basic food. None of it was food that he had prepared, but it was better than the rations that had been packed onto the shadow constructs.

“Get warm. Eat something. Rest. We’ll leave in two hours.”