Unintended Cultivator

As someone who wielded lightning and even storms, Sen was accustomed to loud noises. It just went with the territory. That was without even considering things like the sounds that were produced when he hit something very hard. So, the sheer, overwhelming noise of the explosion was a bit of a shock to him. The great gaping hole in the ground and the pulpy remains of trees for twenty feet in every direction came a very close second in the surprise department. He'd sacrificed what little sleep he was getting to have some free time to work on alchemy and poured every second into playing with the explosive mixture that had caused so much harm in the courtyard. He’d had a few insights, adjusted the formula a little, and then let his intuition guide him. After all that work, he had been expecting good results, but these results might be too good.

The kind of force that a tiny packet of the explosive was creating now could destroy buildings and bring down city walls. Maybe not by itself, but if he threw a couple of them into a building or at a wall, he’d made himself a nice crater or hole to walk through. The only reason Sen didn’t abandon the project entirely was the simple fact that, as far as he knew, he was the only person who could do what he’d done. Yet, he had the disturbing intuition that, unlike some of his alchemical creations, this wasn’t one of those things that other people would find impossible to replicate. He simply wasn’t well-versed enough in this kind of alchemy to have stepped beyond the capabilities of others. His intuitions had simply taken him farther down a road that others could follow. He’d gotten a shortcut and nothing more.

Just as importantly, this was something that mortals and sects alike would want. A powerful explosion from what could be fit into an elixir vial. A sect could fill storage rings with it. cultivators who were running out of qi could simply start hurling the things at each other and setting them off with little more than a flicker of fire qi. The potential devastation could be horrifying. Not that Sen was especially worried about cultivators using these explosives on each other’s sects. He was worried about sects using them against mortals as a way to save on qi. It could make them less restrained, and he felt they lacked restraint as it was. Setting them free to spread explosions wherever they went struck Sen as a bad idea. However, for all his reservations about this advancement, he could not pretend he was unhappy with the results. He’d set out to make something devastating and accomplished his goal. He just wished the accomplishment didn’t come bundled up with a lot of problems and questions he lacked good answers to.

On the upside, he had managed to scare away all the spirit beasts in the area of the wilds he’d chosen to test his creation. He expected it would be a while before the nearest village had to deal with them. Granted, that village was probably two days away for a mortal traveling on foot, but a motivated spirit beast could likely make the trip in a matter of hours. Some of them were absurdly fast, and their very nature as spirit beasts tended to give them appalling stamina. Humanity truly would be in trouble if the spirit beasts ever managed to get organized. The advantages that humans possessed, cultivation and technology, would be hard-pressed to withstand spirit beasts working in concert and with well-developed strategies.

Their fractious nature was humanity’s best defense. As long as they remained splintered, human beings were relatively free to build smaller settlements. Yes, some villages were overrun from time to time, but most of them survived. Those settlements grew a substantial amount of food, much of which found its way into the handful of large cities in the kingdom. If the spirit attacked, those villages and their food would vanish, even as people tried to find refuge in the cities. It wasn’t even a far-fetched idea. It had happened during human wars in the past. That exact strategy of destroying farming villages before mounting sieges on cities had toppled more than one mortal kingdom in the past.

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Sen looked down at the small pouch into which he’d packed more of his refined version of the explosive. Buckets of these on the top of the walls would probably give mortals a fighting chance against even powerful spirit beasts, at least for a while, thought Sen. Of course, to produce those buckets of explosives would require Sen to share what he’d learned. He shook his head. No, that was the alchemy of pain. Maybe, someday, if the situation in the world changed in some fundamental way, he’d consider it. Until then, he’d keep this discovery to himself. Sharing it with mortals or cultivators was simply too dangerous, unpredictable, and destabilizing. He didn’t even plan to tell his teachers about it. While he didn’t think that they would be careless and spread the knowledge around, he didn’t want to burden them with secrets. He feared they all carried enough of those without him adding to the pile. Beyond that, it was a far simpler matter if he was the only person who needed to keep the secret.

In the back of his head, Sen knew that he was always worried about the potential karmic consequences. He didn’t know what kind of karmic debts he would bear from sharing that knowledge. Would he be forced to carry a debt for every person his explosive killed? It was possible. It might also be far enough removed from him that it wouldn’t affect him at all. He didn’t know, nor did he wish to test the possibility in an attempt to discover the truth. As Lo Meifeng had once told him, not all questions deserve answers.

For now, simply possessing the explosive was enough. It would be a kind of backup plan for him if some fight ever started to go horribly wrong on him. After all, nobody expects a giant explosion from something without any qi in it. If he ever used one, though, the ignorance that made it effective would swiftly vanish. He’d need to think long and hard before he fell back onto that desperate step. The first time would need to be an utterly hopeless situation, which would make the explosive’s use all the more shocking for Sen’s enemies. In the meantime, he had made lesser improvements along the way. He would use those inferior formulas to make the explosives for his object lessons. The differences between those improved formulas and the original recipe wouldn’t be obvious to the untrained eye. Some other alchemist might grow suspicious, but suspicion would be as far as they could take it without his active involvement.

At that point, if they made something superior, they’d have to get there through their own work, rather than by way of his insights. It wasn’t perfect, but Sen decided that it was good enough until he came up with a better solution. The only way to stop any knowledge from escaping into the world was simply to never use the better explosives, and it was too good of an advantage to give up entirely. Sen might want to do what was best for human beings, but he wasn’t a saint committed utterly to a single principle. He wouldn’t sacrifice his life in the name of keeping the knowledge a secret. That was just too much to ask. He’d come too far and suffered too much to let his path end that way. Maybe that was selfish, but Sen decided that he was okay with being selfish that way. Let someone else become a martyr if they wanted it that badly. He didn’t.

While he wanted to test the explosive some more, he had a feeling that his one experiment would draw attention. If he set off more explosives, someone was bound to start asking questions. They were simply too noisy and that noise would not go unremarked. No, better to let explorers draw their own false conclusions. They’d likely think that some spirit beast had done it, or a cultivator was trying out a new technique. He supposed that idea held some merit. Even if it wasn’t a true cultivator technique, it would eventually become associated with cultivation. So what if history forgot him on this planet? The only people he cared about remembering him would do so even if he never did another noteworthy thing.

With an annoyed noise, Sen made himself put the second pouch of explosives back into his storage ring. Soon, he told himself. This whole business will be over soon, and you can get back to Ai and a little town where things make sense.