V11 Bloopers

Boulder’s Shadow continued, “One cultivator wiped out the entirety of our forces at the city. One. Man.”

“You lie,” said the Beast King. “How could one man do such a thing?”

“He is the student of Fate’s Razor.”

The Beast King hissed and took a step back. All of the spirit beasts had heard the story of the disastrous trap and Feng Ming’s answer to it. Few had escaped that slaughter. The elder cultivator had taken on mythic proportions in the eyes of most spirit beasts. He was less a man to them than an avatar of destruction.

“Even so,” said the Beast King. “You stand here.”

“Because

he

willed it to be so.”

“Or you ran away,” whispered someone in the room.

“Many tried to run,” said the ghost panther. “They ran for their lives. It didn’t matter. There was nowhere to run. He took command of the skies for as far as the eye could see. He called down tribulation lightning. He called down fire. He called down oblivion.”

“You’re just making excuses,” said the Beast King.

“You did not feel his wrath!” roared Boulder’s Shadow. “You did not see his eyes! You did not hear his words.”

He hid it quickly, but Boulder’s Shadow saw the flicker of terror in the Beast King’s eyes.

“What were his words?”

Those words were seared into the ghost panther’s memory, but he could simplify the message.

“He means to burn the wilds to ash and hunt us all into extinction,” said Boulder’s Shadow. “And he can

do it

.”

Silence reigned in the room following that pronouncement. After all, what was there to say to something like that? Yet, Boulder’s Shadow wasn’t finished.

“Once he’s done turning our homes into glowing coals, he intends—”

“He intends what?” demanded the shaken Beast King.

“He intends to open a continent-wide chain of taco restaurants.”

Excited murmurs of

tacos

wafted through the room. The Beast King’s eyes lit up.

“Taco restaurants, you say? I think there might be another path to victory here. How open would you say this cultivator is to a joint real estate investment?”

Boulder’s Shadow blinked at the Beast King in utter confusion before he asked, “Are you drunk?”

***

“You asked me who trained this paranoia into me. It was Fu Ruolan. She was very strident about it. Very insistent that I consider how people might use me. It’s almost as though she was once in debt to someone and lived to regret it,” said Sen while staring hard at Jin Bohai.

The man flinched a little under that stare. Sen didn’t think it was guilt, at least not the kind of direct guilt of someone who had abused their position in some way. But he thought that the man knew

something

about what had caused Fu Ruolan such deep and abiding pain. Perhaps Jin Bohai had failed to properly protect his student from someone in the far-distant past. Maybe he’d only found out about it after the fact, when there might be gratifying revenge to take, but the damage was already done. Sen was a little curious, but he didn’t mean to extort Fu Ruolan’s history out of someone else. She’d tell him if she ever decided she wanted him to know. Jin Bohai’s mouth opened and closed a few times, but Sen waved a dismissive hand.

“I’m not interested in other people’s secrets,” he said. “Particularly secrets that don’t involve me in any way. You asked who trained me to be paranoid. I answered you. Now, back to the matter at hand. What do you wish in exchange for your knowledge? I’d be happy to have it if we can come to an acceptable accommodation.”

“I don’t mean to haggle like a merchant with you,” said Jin Bohai in a disdainful tone.

“Like a merchant,” repeated Sen in a very soft voice. “A merchant like my grandmother? Is that what you meant?”

Lai Dongmei took three swift steps back from the two men, although she retained that same icy calm expression. That move on her part, maybe even more than Sen’s words, seemed to tell Jin Bohai exactly how far he had stepped over a line. A line that wise people tread very carefully around. He lifted a hand as though to ward off a blow.

“I spoke in haste,” said the nascent soul cultivator.

“Yes,” said Sen as killing intent started leaking from him. “You most certainly did.”

Sen wove together a truly staggering number of qi threads, even as Jin Bohai took a few cautious steps back.

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“Lord Lu—” began the elder cultivator in a conciliatory, even pleading tone.

Sen was beyond caring about that. Instead, he plunged his hands into the ground and shouted, “Wrathful dandelion!”

“Wait. What?” asked Jin Bohai with a perplexed look.

The next moment, dandelions burst from the ground all around Jin Bohai. Except, these dandelions ranged in size from the approximate length and thickness of a man’s arms to ones that towered like trees. The smaller flowers seized Jin Bohai’s limbs, while the larger ones began beating him mercilessly. It didn’t take long before pained cries filled the air. Lai Dongmai walked over to where Sen was enjoying the show.

“You know that won’t kill him, right?” she asked.

“Yeah, I know. He’s got too much information that I want to kill him outright. But he’ll never live this down, will he?”

“Beaten into submission by flowers,” said an amused Lai Dongmei. “No, I don’t think his pride will ever recover.”

Sen watched with a certain petty satisfaction as wails of “I’m sorry!” rose from the center of that mass of cheerful-looking plant life.

***

“Are you adopting more strays?” asked Lo Meifeng as she peered out a window and down into the courtyard of Lu Manor.

“Not exactly,” said Sen. “But I will need a little help with them.”

She turned a baleful look his way and asked, “Did you feel like I wasn’t pulling my weight? I don’t have the time to be training—”

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“Not that kind of help,” said Sen in a soothing tone. “I’ll be doing most of their training.”

He proceeded to explain the role he intended for them to play.

“Okay. I can see how they would be useful to you. That doesn’t really tell me what kind of help you need from me,” she asked with a frown.

“I need help coming up with some way to mask their identities. They’re mortals. I want them to be able to retire and lead at least semi-normal lives someday as younger mortals replace them.”

Lo Meifeng smirked at him.

“What?” he asked.

“Have you considered just having them wear, you know, actual masks?”

“I have considered that,” said Sen, giving the amused woman a withering glare. “But it’s not enough to just put them in any masks. They need a collective identity. Something that will intimidate.”

“We should dress them up as you,” said Lo Meifeng.

“If you’re not going to take this seriously—” Sen began.

“Who said I’m not being serious?”

Sen took a beat to try and understand her meaning before giving it up as a lost cause.

“Explain,” he demanded.

“Well, we’ll just get them some latex masks of you. Except not you like you are now, all calm and reasonable. We’ll get them made of you putting on your mean face.”

“My ‘mean face?’”

“Yeah, that one you use whenever you’re about to do some terrible miracle. Or kill a lot of people. Or both.”

Sen sighed, pressed a palm against his left eye, and said, “I’m pretty sure I’m getting a migraine.”

“Oh, that’s all in your head.”

Sen gave the woman a withering stare.

“Did you seriously just migraine pun me?”

“Yes,” said Lo Meifeng with a positively smug expression. “Yes, I did.”

***

“It is more than just shadow,” admitted Jin Bohai, “but I strongly suggest that you never speak of it that way openly.”

Sen frowned at the man. That response had seemed peculiar, especially for a nascent soul cultivator. It was like the man feared something, but Sen was at a complete loss as to what that something could be. He knew better than most that nascent soul cultivators weren’t true immortals, but they also had very little to fear aside from the heavens, other nascent soul cultivators, a vast number of enemies all in one place, and extremely powerful spirit beasts.

Well, those things and time itself. Time would eventually kill even the mightiest nascent soul cultivators if they couldn’t manage ascension. Still, that was a ludicrously short list of threats compared to what everyone else in the world had to fear. More salient to the current situation, none of the things on that short list were in play. At least, they weren’t to Sen’s knowledge, which didn’t exclude the possibility of some other reason to fear that he wasn’t aware of.

“Why not?”

“Because cultivators have their superstitions, just like the mortals.”

Sen was even more confused after that explanation than he had been before it.

“I don’t understand your meaning.”

“Cultivation as a practice is

old

. Possibly even older than this world, if some theories are right, but let’s just stick with this world for now. Cultivation has its roots in a time that predates most mythology and all known written history. No one knows the names of the first cultivators. We don’t know where they lived. We don’t know how they began cultivating in the first place, although it’s probable that the heavens interceded.

“What we can surmise is that they developed in a savage time. A time when so much as venturing forth at night meant certain death at the teeth and claws of animals, spirit beasts, devils, and demons. A time when darkness itself was the enemy. As much as cultivators like to pretend that we’re so much more than mortals, we are still prone to mortal mistakes. We carry prejudices that are passed down to us through our teachers from time immemorial, along with all the irrationality that goes with those prejudices.”

Sen stared at the man for five seconds before he responded.

“So, let me see if I have this surrounded. We call it shadow qi, which it isn’t, because cultivators are like a group of small children who are terrified of the dark?”

Jin Bohai hemmed and hawed for a few seconds before he answered, “I wouldn’t describe it quite that way, but—”

“I’m having diapers delivered to every sect in the country with a note that says,

It’s darkness qi

.”

***

“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.

“Don’t hold back,” Sen said to the ghost panther. “Tell me how you really feel.”

She gave him a baffled look and scrunched her face up in concentration

Finally, in a tone that almost made it a question, she said, “They’re

very

bad at this.”

“They really are,” sighed Sen as he watched the pitiful showing from the mortals and cultivators below. “Hey, Larry! Can you help me out, buddy?”

A massive spirit ox crashed through whatever dimensional membrane he normally hid behind and began to savage the other spirit beasts. The mortals and cultivators who had been fighting started running in every direction, screaming in terror. Meanwhile, the shadow constructs, which were normally entirely docile unless given a command, lost their collective minds. They started clustering around Larry in what Sen could only describe as an outpouring of unadulterated joy. Sen noticed Lai Dongmai shaking her head at him.

“You really are a chaos magnet,” she noted.

“That’s—” Sen started to object before he thought better of it. “No, that’s fair.”

***

So ends Unintended Cultivator Volume 11. Sen and company will return in Unintended Cultivator Volume 12.