Book 12: Chapter 68: Or In A Grave

Sen found himself both relieved and sad as he watched Uncle Kho fly off on a qi platform with Shui. The girl had not been enthusiastic, at all, about the prospect of being separated from him.

“It isn’t safe where I’m going,” he told her. “There will be a lot of those mean spirit beasts.”

I also don’t want you to see it if I’m forced to cull half the nobility of another city

, he thought. A prospect that he’d foolishly let himself believe wouldn’t be necessary more than once. After what the local nobility in Emperor’s Bay had done, though, he was starting to think it might become necessary in every surviving city. He hoped it wouldn’t be, but Sen had already started to steel himself to the idea. Things in other kingdoms wouldn’t be like they had been here. In this kingdom, he’d had at least some legitimate claim to power. He’d be straight up usurping power everywhere else. That wasn’t going to happen without bloodshed. If he were being honest, it would probably mean a lot of bloodshed.

At least the talk of mean spirit beasts had done most of the work of convincing Yue Shui. Those memories were still fresh for her. She knew what they would do. It was only her connection to him that had made going somewhere else seem like a bad thing to her, if he was reading the situation correctly. Not a guarantee, but he thought he had the right of it this time.

“I want you to go somewhere safe. Somewhere that people will protect you. Uncle Kho will take you there and make sure nothing bad can happen to you on the way.”

The elder cultivator was going back to the sect anyway, so it wasn’t any trouble for him to take her. Sen also had the impression that it wouldn’t be the first child the man had tended. It wasn’t something that Uncle Kho and Auntie Caihong talked about directly. However, they had implied enough things for Sen to guess that they’d had children in the past. Maybe the very distant past, but they had experience. That there shouldn’t be anything between Emperor’s Bay and the sect that could pose a legitimate threat to Uncle Kho just added to Sen’s peace of mind.

Shui had hemmed and hawed about it. Even with those assurances of safety, she clearly would have preferred to stay with Sen. He just wasn’t willing to be that irresponsible with her life. Too many things could kill her by accident, to say nothing of the spirit beasts that would try to kill her on purpose. In the end, she had grudgingly accepted that she was going to go with Uncle Kho. Not that it made watching the child fade into the distance any easier for Sen.

“You made the right choice by sending her away,” observed Master Feng.

“I know,” conceded Sen. “I really do know it’s the right thing. I just wish—” he gathered his thoughts. “I wish a lot of things. I wish she hadn’t been deprived of her parents. I wish the place where she lived hadn’t been destroyed. I wish that I were the one going back to the sect with her. But the heavens don’t grant wishes. Not really. Not the way people think they do.”

“That’s certainly true,” agreed the elder cultivator.

“I’m surprised you aren’t going with them,” said Sen.

He was finally giving voice to the notion that had been in his head all day. Sen had fully expected Master Feng to return to the sect for a rest, if nothing else.

“The only thing there for me is Ai,” said Master Feng thoughtfully. “I mean, I would dearly love to see her. But I can do the most good for her by staying with you. I know you think that everything you did in this kingdom was awful, and I’m sure it was in its own way. The reality is that you were only getting the hang of things here. Getting a taste for the kind of resistance you can expect in the future. Learning what it will take to get the results you want.”

“So, you’re saying that this was the easy part?”

“

Easier

, maybe. Not easy. Based on what you told me, you were hoping you could get by as a king. Sadly, you had the right idea way back when all this started. You have to be a tyrant, and tyranny is a bloody thing.”

“I just keep asking myself how it came to this. How could we all have been so unprepared for this violence?”

“Mortal memory is short. It’s hard for them to be afraid of something that hasn’t happened in their living memory. As for cultivators, well, most of us are focused inward rather than outward. Unless problems from the wider world come looking for us, we tend to ignore them. Something as nebulous as the possibility of the spirit beasts rising up this way, it wasn’t the sort of thing to strike anyone as urgent.”

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While Sen could accept those answers as likely true and accurate, they didn’t satisfy him. Just because a problem wasn’t actively trying to kill you at that very moment, it didn’t mean you could or should ignore it. Spirit beasts were dangerous individually. A small group of even moderately powerful ones could wipe out an entire village and maybe even a town. He’d seen them do it, or the immediate aftermath of it at least. Yet, everyone from the lowliest mortals to the mightiest of cultivators had just chosen to see them as local problems. Problems best dealt with by other people. Now, an entire continent was paying the price for that apathy. Sen’s dissatisfaction must have been written on his face because Master Feng continued.

“I didn’t say they were good reasons, and this isn’t me trying to make any excuses for myself. I overlooked this issue the same way everyone else did. That makes me just as responsible for this situation. Hells, I was probably in a better position than anyone else to notice and act before things reached this stage. Yet, my attention was focused elsewhere. I thought I had more important things to do than worry about spirit beasts. As it happens, I was wrong. Not that acknowledging that makes a bit of difference to the dead.”

“Is that why you’re coming with me? To make amends for overlooking the problem?”

Master Feng drummed his fingers against his chest while he thought that over.

“It’s one of the reasons,” he admitted, “but it’s not the only reason. It’s not even the main reason. The main reason is that there are some dangerous cultivators in the south.”

“Dangerous to you?”

“Let’s not get overexcited. They’re not that dangerous to me, particularly one-on-one, but they are absolutely dangerous to you. Some of them, you can probably beat if you’re focused

and

lucky. Especially if you advance again. The others—” he paused to consider. “Unless you’ve picked up some unspeakably dangerous new tricks since I last saw you, they’ll prove impossible for you to beat. Assuming they don’t line up behind you the way they should.”

“So, you’re coming along to make sure they find their place in that line?”

“Or in a grave.”

Sen gave the elder cultivator a weary look.

“Sen, if there was a time for half-measures, it’s over.”

“I know I can’t leave people that dangerous behind if they aren’t firmly in my camp. I’m not sure I can afford to risk it even then. I just hate the waste of killing them. The loss of knowledge and skill will hurt us all if we win. As Song Lan pointed out to me recently, I need to prepare for an eventual peace. But we aren’t at peace, yet. So, if they won’t follow, we’ll do what’s necessary.”

Master Feng nodded, almost to himself, before he said, “I guess you did learn some things here.”

“I think I’d have been happier if I hadn’t.”

“Happier, maybe, but it would have come at a price you couldn’t have stomached in the end.”

Sen looked around to make sure they were alone before he raised a wind barrier around them to obscure their words. Master Feng lifted an eyebrow in question.

“I’ve made a lot of bold claims about how we can win. How we’ll take everything on this side of the Mountains of Sorrow. How we’ll take the continent eventually.”

“But?” prompted Master Feng.

“But can we actually do it? Is it even possible?”

“Are you asking me or yourself?”

“Both,” Sen sighed.

The elder cultivator thought about that for so long that Sen expected the man not to answer at all. It would be in character for him to let Sen figure it out for himself. His teacher surprised him for once.

“It

can

be done. You’re at the beginning of the road. Worse, you’re at it for the first time. So, it’s understandably hard for you to imagine what it’s going to be like farther down the road. I have been down the road to war before, so I know some things you don’t.”

“Such as?”

“It won’t come cheap. The war will steal away the weak. It will kill the strong. Most people never see beyond that. If they could see beyond it, though, they’d discover that the people who remain, those who survive after the weak and the strong fall, are tempered like steel. They’re all more dangerous than they have any right to be. When you take an entire army of mortals and cultivators who have been forged that way into battle, it’s a sight to behold. A terrible sight, I’ll admit, but it’s also enough to inspire awe. They will do things and achieve victories you never imagined possible. Those are the people who can win this war for us.”

“At what price?”

“Do you even need to ask?”

Sen thought back to everything he’d been through on his road to power. He considered the oceans of pain he’d been forced to swim through. All of those things had forged him in a way he thought was similar to what Master Feng had described. Then, he thought about all the things it had cost him. He’d long ago had any possibility for an even vaguely normal life more or less ripped from his hands. He couldn’t even hope for a normal life by cultivator standards. His truly close relationships could be counted on two hands. A number he expected would decrease as the war progressed. And all of it was lived beneath the threat of early ascension.

“No,” he answered. “I guess I don’t. But how will they live afterward?”

“The way everyone does. As well as they can.”