Unintended Cultivator

Sen put up with the bowing and creepy chanting for a little while before he encouraged everyone to return to their homes or duties. He wasn’t expecting them to get much done the rest of the day. Catharsis might be good for the soul, but it tended to be a tiring thing in his experience. Plus, he wasn’t entirely done for the day. While he waited for the guards to drag out the rest of the prisoners, he turned to Grandmother Lu and Lo Meifeng.

“So, how do you think it went?”

“Well, they’re dead,” said Grandmother Lu. “That’s the definition of success with an execution.”

Sen was mostly sure that was meant as some kind of dark joke. He supposed it was enough that she hadn’t actively criticized the whole show, and it had been a show. He’d felt so pompous and ridiculous throughout the whole thing. Still, Lo Meifeng had told him that he needed to project a certain air if he wanted to pull all of this off in the long run. He couldn’t just say he was a lord. He needed to act like a lord, or at least what people thought lords should act like. It all seemed very silly to him, but nobility and everything attached to it were new to him. He had to trust that people with more experience than him knew what they were talking about.

“I doubt you’ll ever have the full loyalty of the Xie family members who grew up being nobles,” said Lo Meifeng. “There’s going to be a part of them that will hate you forever. But they also lost some people in that attack. This will have gone a long way toward making sure they hate you quietly.”

“In other words, take the little victories?”

“Exactly. Are you sure about this next part, though? It’s provocative, to say the least.”

“Sure about it? No. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s enough for people to simply hear that I killed the perpetrators. That’s just another rumor. If people see it, it becomes a reality.”

“You do realize that it’s going to be distorted into rumors by the end of the day,” said Lo Meifeng.

“They’ll have you executing a thousand men by dawn,” added Grandmother Lu.

“Probably so,” said Sen. “But the sects and the other noble houses will have people reporting back to them. This manor is under near-constant observation. The facts will reach the right ears. As for the rumors… I’m not sure it’s entirely a bad thing if what happens here today gets exaggerated. I want people to think that attacking us will turn into a disastrous bloodbath for them. If nothing else, it’ll make recruiting fools harder.”

He turned a hard look on Yeung Fen. She refused to meet his eyes. If anything, she looked like she was trying to avoid even breathing too loudly for fear of drawing attention to herself. It had been hard to avoid the impulse to simply kill the woman the moment he saw her. He’d shown her mercy once, and her response had been to launch an attack on him. He’d made himself think past that anger and sense of betrayal, though. Initially, he’d imagined that she was acting out some kind of revenge fantasy but that didn’t add up. Her best chance of taking revenge on him would have been to try to do it as soon as possible after he let her go. Waiting until now, when his strength was widely known, was stupid. She hadn’t seemed stupid.

Given that she’d used the Wu patriarch as a proxy, it stood to reason that someone might have used her as some kind of proxy. Picking someone that he might kill out of hand without asking too many questions made her involvement look far more reasonable. If he reacted out of blind anger, she became the person who took all the blame and he wouldn’t look any deeper. If he didn’t kill her immediately, her capture would be a signal to whoever had set all of this up to either leave or take steps to protect themselves. Sen wasn’t sure what those steps would look like, but his inability to imagine them didn’t mean that such protections couldn’t exist. If his experience with the defenses around the manor had taught him anything, it was that he was as capable of missing the obvious as anyone else.

It was only when the guards started marching people toward the front gate that he realized he’d been glaring at Yeung Fen for quite a while. She was making a valiant but failed effort not to shake under the weight of his displeasure. All things considered, he thought that was probably a healthy reaction. He watched in silence as the bound, gagged people were taken outside. He only followed after the last of them had passed through the gates. They’d been lined up along the wall and pushed down to their knees. He took his time with everything, making meaningless conversation with Lo Meifeng and Grandmother Lu just to delay the inevitable. He was beyond feeling squeamish about this. He just wanted to give all those nameless, faceless observers a chance to get into position to watch. What he hadn’t expected was the arrival of Chan Dishi. The other cultivator sauntered down the street, a stick with some kind of meat and vegetables on it in his hand, and looking keenly interested in the happenings. He strode up to Sen and offered a perfunctory bow. Any semblance of propriety done in by the man taking the opportunity to pull a piece of carrot off the stick with his teeth.

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“I, Chan Dishi,” mumbled the man around his mouthful of carrot, “on behalf of important people, have come to witness the,” he smirked, “entertainment.”

Sen lifted an eyebrow at the other man.

“Jing sent you to witness this?”

“Sent is probably a strong word for it. I enthusiastically volunteered for the job,” said Chan Dishi, eying the waiting prisoners. “I just had a feeling that this was going to be worth making the trip from the palace.”

“You find executions entertaining?”

“Not as a rule. But are you going to tell me that this isn’t meant to be some grand public statement? Something intended to strike terror in the hearts of men and geese alike?”

“Geese?” asked Sen.

“I don’t like geese,” said Chan Dishi. “They’re mean things. Used to chase me around when I was a boy. I like the idea of people doing things that scare them.”

“Well, I’ll try not to disappoint,” said Sen.

“Good man,” said Chan Dishi clapping Sen on the shoulder before he turned a speculative eye on Lo Meifeng. “And I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“Oh, we’ve met,” said Lo Meifeng. “I wasn’t impressed then either.”

“Cold,” said the man, pressing a hand to his chest as though he’d been wounded.

“Warranted,” said Lo Meifeng.

“Was I drunk at the time? I refuse to take responsibility for anything I said, did, or failed to do while drunk.”

Lo Meifeng simply sniffed in disdain and looked toward the prisoners. Chan Dishi looked mildly confused as if he was trying to remember when he’d met her before and couldn’t place it. He shook his head and grinned at Grandmother Lu.

“Chan Dishi,” he said. “And you might be?”

“Lu Jia,” said Grandmother Lu.

She looked a little amused by the man, but it was the sort of amusement that one reserved for small boys who were acting out. Chan Dishi appeared to read that amusement for what it was and grinned even wider.

“So, I take it you’re the mythical grandmother who will rule in his stead,” said the man, hiking a thumb at Sen.

“That’s what he tells me,” said Grandmother Lu with a long-suffering sigh. “Children these days.”

“Tell me about it,” said the man with a sage nod. “Mine are constantly causing me problems. Barely a decade goes by without one of them making some mess I have to clean up for them.”

Sen was startled at the idea that this man had even one child. He struck Sen as wildly irresponsible. Of course, he supposed that wasn’t really an impediment to having children, just raising them. Chan Dishi saw the surprised look on Sen’s face and shrugged.

“What? We’re not all like you. It’s taken me centuries to get this far. I got bored.”

“That strikes me as a terrible reason to have children,” said Sen.

“Probably,” admitted Chan Dishi. “Still, they are ceaselessly amusing. So, it’s not all bad. Anyway, are you about ready to get this started? I’m very excited to see what you have planned.”

“You’re a very strange man,” said Sen.

“No denying that,” said the man, wholly unperturbed by the comment.

Sen snorted and, putting on a stern expression, he walked over to the kneeling prisoners. He ignored their pleading eyes and the mangled words that came from around the gags as he hung pouches of explosives around their necks. He wasn’t looking to drag out their deaths. The explosions should destroy their hearts and kill them immediately. The results were the real message to the public, the sects, and the other noble houses. After he’d placed the final pouch, he stepped back so he could glare imperiously up and down the line.

“All of you participated in the attack on this manor. Your actions cost lives. The lives of my people. You will pay for that transgression with your own. May you make better choices in your next life.”

Sen nodded to the guard captain, who Lo Meifeng had needed to point out to him. The man barked a few orders and the rest of the guards moved well clear of the prisoners. Sen erected another barrier of solid air to contain the explosions. He met the eyes of each prisoner for a brief moment. Then, he used a bit of fire qi to set off all of the explosives at the same time. It was beyond messy. Containing the explosions had the side effect of redirecting all of the force back onto the prisoners’ bodies. It was carnage, plain and simple. He heard someone in the crowd of everyday people who had gathered scream. He stood there, looking at the mess he had made, and then burned the remains to ash. Snuffing the temporary inferno, he rejoined Grandmother Lu, Lo Meifeng, and Chan Dishi. He looked to the man that Jing had sent to watch him take revenge.

“What did you think of my public statement?”

Chan Dishi thought for a moment before he said, “I think geese the world over are trembling in terror.”