Unintended Cultivator

“You needn’t participate in this,” said Sen. “I almost think it might be better if you didn’t.”

“It’s kind of you to want to spare me,” said Grandmother Lu. “But I have to be there, and your people have to see me being there.

Sen offered a reluctant nod. She was likely right about that. He just didn’t like that he was making her a party to his revenge. It was like he was somehow making her less by associating her with something he expected was going to be gruesome. In the end, she had the right to make her own decisions. I should probably be grateful that she wants to show me her support. He turned to Long Jia Wei.

“The gates are sealed?” he asked.

“They are, Lord Lu.”

Lo Meifeng was already in the courtyard, making preparations for the first half of Sen’s demonstration of his unhappiness. That just left one person in the room. His gaze fell on Yeung Fen. The woman looked gaunt, and she flinched as soon as his eyes landed on her. Sen had been shocked when Lo Meifeng’s people had not only found the woman but dragged her back to the manor alive. He’d expected her to be long gone and far away by the time anyone knew that she was involved. If not that, then he would have thought she’d prefer to go down fighting. He knew that’s what he would have done. Still, he wasn’t one to bemoan a positive turn of luck. She had proven truculent about providing information. So, Sen planned to use today’s demonstration as one method to motivate her cooperation.

“Yeung Fen. I want you to pay close attention to what happens here today. Think of it as a window into the future. Your future,” he said.

He walked over to the door, dragging Yeung Fen along with a tether of air qi he’d wrapped around her neck. Her hands were bound by manacles that Sen had personally crafted and reinforced. He’d felt her laughable attempts to break them with her own qi, but she had not experienced his explosive growth in power over the intervening years. She was still in foundation formation, which meant that the only way she was breaking those bonds was if he gave her a hundred years of uninterrupted time to get it done. She stumbled along in his wake. Long Jia Wei and Grandmother Lu simply ignored her. He supposed that they’d already started thinking of her as dead and not worth the effort of giving their attention.

He pushed open the front door to the manor. There was usually a servant there, but almost everyone in the manor save for the children and their minders were in the courtyard already. As were a small number of people who were kneeling, hands tied, and watched over by hard-faced guards. These people were the most directly responsible for the attack. The ones who had done the most to bring the explosives into the manor. One had been separated out. He was the one who had actually lit the fuse. Sen intended to make him into the first example. With a negligent wave of his hand and a minor application of air qi, he drove Yeung Fen to her knees. Then, he walked out in front of the crowd of people, his people, and assumed a thoughtful expression.

“We were attacked,” he said without preamble. “It was unprovoked. Carried out by cowards who tried to hurt as many people as they could while avoiding anything so honorable as a direct fight. I know some of you were injured. Some of you lost people. I know your anger because it is also my anger. I also know some of you may have thought I intended to simply accept those losses. To ignore it because I’m a cultivator and those who died were not. You were wrong. These people you see behind me are some of the guilty. They are the ones who delivered this evil into our lives. Today, you will have vengeance. I will have vengeance.”

There was barely a sound in the courtyard. No one moved. They all just stared at him. He saw the hunger in their eyes. The need to see action taken. That desire to reclaim control from a world that had ripped it away from them. Sen had thought long and hard about how to handle this moment. His first instinct had been to destroy these men himself. To destroy them as slowly and painfully as he possibly could. Of course, he couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t accomplish what he wanted. Instead, he would personally make an example of just one of the men. He walked over to the prisoner who had been separated. The man looked up at him, his eyes rolling in panicked terror. He was trying to say something, to scream something, but it was just muffled whining through the gag. Sen sliced the ropes away from the man’s hand with a tiny wind blade, then dragged him to his feet.

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“You,” said Sen, making sure his voice carried. “You lit the fuse. Of everyone here, you are the one I hate the most.”

Sen locked the man in a cage of air qi, then used that air to move the prisoner like a puppet. He dragged the man’s arms out to each side, hands forced open, palms up. Sen deposited a very small pouch in each of the man’s hands and forced those hands closed around the pouches.

“Since you like explosions so much, I want you to experience them yourself,” said Sen. “This is my judgment on you.”

The prisoner tried to thrash but he was held rigidly in place. He tried to scream again. Maybe they were shouts of anger. Maybe they were pleas for mercy directed at Sen himself or the heavens above. It didn’t matter. Sen was fresh out of mercy. As for the heavens, asking them for mercy seemed about as fruitful as asking the sun to rise in the west, at least in Sen’s experience. Sen took a few steps back and erected a barrier of solidified air around the man to contain the blasts and the noise. He didn’t intend to compound this man’s intentional destruction with negligent destruction of his own. He had added more barriers inside the larger barrier to ensure that the blasts didn’t immediately kill the prisoner. He wasn’t kind enough for that. Sen walked back over to stand next to Grandmother Lu and Lo Meifeng, who had joined the other woman.

“Everyone. Witness my justice,” said Sen, using qi to carry his words to every ear.

He snapped his fingers, a wholly unnecessary act, but it served well enough to announce what came next. Sparks of fire qi came to life inside the pouches and the contents exploded. There was a spray of red and a hail of white shrapnel as the explosions removed the man’s hands at the wrists. The barriers did their job, containing the blast to just where Sen wanted it. The prisoner screamed for a few seconds before blood loss, trauma, or both rendered him unconscious. Well, we can’t have that, thought Sen. He strode over the man, the barriers parting around him, and poured a healing elixir down his throat. For good measure, he used fire qi to sear the stumps. Otherwise, pure blood loss might kill the man. He gave the healing elixir a little time to do its work before he reached out and used his qi to force the man back into consciousness. The prisoner started screaming around his gag.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” asked Sen. “Well, you don’t get to die yet. I’m not done with you.”

Sen repeated the process, except he took off the man’s feet with the second round of explosions. He had considered repeating the process several times to take off more and more pieces of the man, but Sen doubted there was any point. The sheer level of pain had probably obliterated anything like rational thought from the man’s mind. Sen stared at the man hanging suspended in the air and waved his hand. A white-hot inferno turned the prisoner from a person into ash in a matter of seconds. Sen glanced at the crowd of his people. He wasn’t sure what they would think of this brutality. A few looked sickened. A few looked terrified. Most of them, though, looked satisfied. Sen turned his eyes to the rest of the kneeling prisoners.

“I will leave the fate of those prisoners up to you. Should I execute them? Or should I leave them to your justice?”

There was a moment where nothing happened. Then, a man pushed his way to the front of the crowd, his face contorted with grief and rage. He ran toward the prisoners, screaming incoherently. That opened the floodgate. With very few exceptions, the crowd surged forward. Sen waited as his people vented their anger and loss on those prisoners. In other circumstances, he might have felt a twinge of pity for those bound men. Being beaten to death wasn’t a fast death. Even if it was a whole lot of people doing the beating. He kept an eye on things with his spiritual sense, waiting until the last flickering ember of life in the last prisoner went out.

“Enough,” he called out, his voice seeming to resonate from the very walls.

The enraged crowd fell back from what was left of the prisoners. They lurched drunkenly, as though they weren’t entirely in control of themselves.

“Today, we took our vengeance,” said Sen.

Some of it, at any rate, thought Sen. Enough for the crowd, I hope. Apparently, it was enough. The people in the crowd started cheering, or sobbing in each other’s arms, finally able to release emotions that had been held in abeyance. Sen sent out swift flames to deal with the prisoners’ remains. Then, he did something he hadn’t ever tried before. He manipulated the air above the manor. Clouds started to form, blotting out the morning sun. They grew thick and heavy as he drew water into them. He took great care not to let lightning form in the clouds. Suppressing it by force a few times.

“Now, let us be washed clean!” he roared.

The clouds overhead unburdened themselves. At first, there were just a few drops but steady rain soon descended from above. The crowd of people, his people, turned their faces up and let the water soak them. He let it go on for several minutes before he dispersed the clouds and sent a warm wind weaving around the courtyard, drying people and the stone around them in kind. Sen didn’t have a plan beyond this point. He sort of expected the people to simply disperse now. Instead, they all looked to him. He hazarded a quick look at Lo Meifeng and Grandmother Lu, but they were looking out at the crowd. Sen turned his eyes back to the crowd, only to see that people were bowing at him, and there was a whisper that grew into a steady chant.

“Lord Lu.”