Unintended Cultivator

A few days later, just when Sen was on the verge of thinking that maybe he could have brought Ai along for this trip, an explosion made the entire building shudder. For a second, Sen was caught completely flat-footed. He hadn’t sensed any surge of qi. There had been no warning at all. A moment later, he brushed aside that irrelevance and rushed over to the window. He looked down into the courtyard below and mostly just saw smoke and fire. Where he could see clearly, he saw the dead and injured. He almost went straight through the window, but realized that it wouldn’t really save that much time and just create another problem to fix. The door burst open and Pan Shiji crashed into the room, only for Sen to blur past her on his way out. It had been a while since he was so hyper-focused that he fell into that state of mind where every second seemed to stretch out.

I don’t understand what just happened, he thought. It’s obviously an attackbut where did it come from? And why didn’t I sense anything? He also couldn’t understand why it had happened in the courtyard. He’d always assumed that any attacks here would target him, specifically. That was why he’d created such aggressive defenses. It would give him those few heartbeats of warning he’d need if some hostile cultivator showed up who had the kind of power necessary to bring him down. However, the defenses hadn’t so much as twitched. Even now, they were calm. Had someone found a way to tamper with them? It seemed unlikely given their complexity. It would have been easier to take them down than to alter them. Plus, there was that disturbing lack of any kind of qi before or during the explosion.

This attack, though, didn’t make any sense. It looked like it had intentionally targeted the mortals down in the courtyard. Was it designed to instill terror in the people who had chosen to come work for the House of Lu? A warning to scare off any would-be servants and guards? Or was it simply an attack meant to lash at him in any way possible? Who stood to benefit from that? The list of people who might want to hurt him that way was depressingly long, and it didn’t matter right at that moment. He’d reached the entryway and, unlike up in his office, he didn’t choose the path of least destruction. Sen crashed through the doors, almost unconsciously reaching out and catching all of the flying debris with air qi before it could hurt anyone.

The courtyard was pure chaos. Things were on fire. The smoke was so thick it impeded even Sen’s enhanced vision. People were running. They were screaming. They were dying. Up until that moment, Sen’s relationship with all of the people working for the House of Lu had been tenuous. A lot of them were former House of Xie members. A group he had mixed feelings about at best. The rest had been virtual strangers. He could only name a handful of the people they’d hired, largely because he so rarely interacted with them. It wasn’t due to some intentional design to keep them at a distance. They just had jobs that didn’t include necessary trips to the room he was stuck in most of the time. When he did have the opportunity to wander around, it almost always happened late in the night when the mortals were asleep. It had also been easy to dismiss them because nothing bad was happening. I should have known better, thought Sen, I should have known it wouldn’t last.

That tenuous connection Sen had felt with the many servants and staff that had accumulated solidified into something far more real. None of them would have been hurt if they didn’t work for him, or hadn’t been all but blackmailed into working for him. They wouldn’t have been targeted or gotten caught up in some plan to get at him that backfired. Their pain could be laid directly at his feet. He owed them all for this pain they hadn’t brought down on themselves. He owed them, and he would find out who had done this. He would find those people, and he would make examples. But first, he had to save as many people as he could.

Qi burst from Sen like a hurricane. He used fire qi to redirect and douse the oddly persistent flames that stubbornly clung to everything. Water qi followed immediately on its heels, snuffing out stray embers and offering at least a momentary reprieve from burn injuries. Wind qi roared through the courtyard. It seized up that thick, choking smoke and drove it high into the sky like a pillar of unspent anger. Then, he was in motion. His spiritual sense guided him. He hurled debris out of the way to find the most injured. Summoned healing elixirs that were safe for mortals and all but force-fed them to the injured. He was everywhere, ordering those who could walk into the manor and flying those who couldn’t on qi platforms. He tried not to look at the expressions of the people. Their fear was bad enough, but worse still was the hope in their eyes as he imposed order on the chaos through sheer force of personality. They’re putting their hope on the wrong person, he thought. If I was worth a damn, I would have prevented this from happening in the first place.

His hands curled into white-knuckle fists every time he found a body. Someone who he’d been too late to help. His spiritual sense could only help him find the living, so it felt like a punch to the gut every time he found one of the dead or, worse still, parts of them. This will not go unpunished, he promised the fallen. He knew it was really a promise to himself and to the living. The dead were already gone and starting their journeys in Diyu. The memory of this day would soon be washed away as they moved on to their next lives. That they would have a next life, another chance, should have been a comfort to Sen. It wasn’t. He was… He was whatever came beyond rage, beyond fury. As for any fool who imagined he’d simply give up if finding the culprits proved difficult would discover that he was willing to wait as long as it took. Lo Meifeng and Grandmother Lu soon joined him in the courtyard. Lo Meifeng’s face was a cold mask. Grandmother Lu, on the other hand, looked as livid as he felt.

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“Sen, you should go inside,” said Lo Meifeng. “You’re the best equipped to help the wounded until we can get some more people in to help.”

Lo Meifeng nodded and said, “Agreed. Whoever did this might still be here.”

Sen was surprised at how calm he sounded when he said, “I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care what it takes. I want whoever did this found. Find them for me, Meifeng. Bring them to me.”

Grandmother Lu was staring at Sen like she barely recognized him.

“What do you mean to do with them, boy?”

“I intend to make them tell me everything about why they did this. Then, I will make them all suffer.”

A sad look passed over Grandmother Lu’s face before she said, “Such a long way to come in such a short time.”

“You disapprove?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I just wish that it had been me who knew it had to be done, instead of you.”

Sen grimaced a little and said, “We all have to grow up eventually.”

“I suppose we do,” she said before looking around at all of the damage. “What a senseless thing.”

Sen nodded in agreement and then, at a gesture from Lo Meifeng, he went inside. The badly injured had been placed on the floor near the door, while the less injured had been moved somewhere else. I guess someone had their head on straight, thought Sen. A few of the servants were inexpertly tending to the wounded, while the rest milled about in a confused mass. Sen started barking orders, less because the servants could actually help the injured than because they needed something to do. He needed to let them feel useful so they wouldn’t feel utterly powerless. Even as he was doing that, he was summoning his pot, and shaping a stove from the stone of the floor itself. All of this felt far too much like the aftermath of that battle between the Order of the Celestial Flame and the Clear Spring Sect. People moaning, some of them screaming, and some of them so hurt that they had, mercifully, lost consciousness. Except this would be so much harder because mortal bodies were so much more fragile.

He summoned every last elixir he thought was safe for mortals from his storage rings. Servants were told to hand them out to the less injured people. He had sent people off to make bandages that he expected they wouldn’t need, but it was still useful to have them. He issued orders to make food for those who could eat. Soon, the confused disorder around him turned into purposeful action. Then, he got to work. Sen started out thinking everything through but soon dropped into that trance state where he wasn’t thinking so much as reacting. He moved from injured person to injured person. Burns were the most common injury, but he had plenty of experience with those. There were also puncture injuries from flying debris. The trickiest thing was the impact damage from the physical blast itself. That had proved catastrophic to delicate parts of their bodies, such as ears, eyes, and even their organs.

He fell into a rhythm with it. All of those years of gathering medicinal plants and alchemical reagents were serving him well. He didn’t need to think up substitutes because he had everything he needed. The screaming and moaning slowly subsided as the elixirs took hold. He’d even made some elixirs designed specifically to limit pain, even if he harbored some worries about the potential side effects. People were suffering now, so he had to help them now. The one kind of injury that gave him pause was the amputations. People had lost arms, legs, hands, and feet. One young man in what looked like guard livery had lost both his eyes. Sen saved them for last. It had probably looked a little cruel to the servants, but it had been done solely to give his intuition time to work the problem.

He’d had ideas about how the right elixir could possibly regrow limbs, but never tested them. He’d never even heard about anyone else attempting it, at least not with any success. For the first time since he’d started, Sen hesitated. The trance shuddered and threatened to break down before he strangled the life out of those doubts. The injuries were right in front of him and as recent as injuries could be. There would never be a better chance of repairing that damage. The longer the injuries had to settle, the harder it would become. Sen let himself fall even deeper into the trance. He was so deep that he couldn’t even describe what he was doing as thinking anymore. He was communing with something. Reaching out into the world to grasp that knowledge he needed.

“Sen!” Lo Meifeng almost shouted.

Startled by the unexpected noise, Sen snapped out of his reverie.

“What?” he demanded.

“You’re done. You’ve treated them all,” she said.

“Oh,” said Sen, his mind coming back into focus. “That’s good.”

It was only then that he saw the servants and staff and some people he didn’t even recognize standing around. They were all staring at him in ways that made him decidedly uncomfortable.

“Why are they looking at me like that?” Sen whispered to Lo Meifeng under his breath.

“Probably because they witnessed you performing miracles,” she said. “So, the usual, I guess.”