Unintended Cultivator

Sen was pleasantly surprised when the crowds dispersed and even the sects departed. He had half expected the patriarchs to come down and offer their very unwanted opinions to him. That was an event he was in no mood to deal with. The servants— Your servants now, he reminded himself – decided that this wasn’t the time to let the Xie children mob him with what were countless questions. Instead, the children were unevenly herded back into the manor. The younger ones mostly just seemed confused. Based on the dark looks he got from a few of the oldest ones, though, they had at least a sense of what was going on. Worse, there wasn’t much he could do about them. Unlike the parents, the children couldn’t give him bidding vows. The heavens were often fickle and even ruthless, but they did mandate that people actually understand the vows they took. It was generally understood that there was no point in asking for them from anyone who hadn’t come of age. For some of the youngest, that time was easily a decade away. For the oldest, it was just a few years.

“What do you mean to do with the children?” asked Long Jia Wei. “We can keep them here for now, but that’s a short-term solution at best.”

Sen honestly had no idea what he was going to do with them. On the one hand, he had forcefully claimed responsibility for all of them. That meant it was on him to see to things like providing them with food, shelter, and some manner of education. On the other hand, every single one of those children could blossom into an enemy that might trouble him or his interests one day. He wasn’t particularly interested in arming them with skills that would help them toward those kinds of ends.

“I don’t know, yet. I suppose some of it will depend on how many of their parents come back.”

Long Jia Wei seemed to waver for a moment before he said, “Then if I might offer a suggestion.”

“Go ahead.”

“Take them out of the city. You said you run some manner of school in the north. Take them there, far beyond easy reach.”

Sen had to admit that the idea had some merit. The academy was comparatively isolated and largely under Sen’s direct control, which made it easy to keep watch for trouble. Of course, making that work would mean hiring and relocating a lot more people just to teach the children the essentials. Maybe for the first time in his life, Sen wished he had more people with him. There were a lot of things to investigate and a decided shortage of people he could trust. However, he supposed he could ask Shen Mingxia and Wu Gang to look into things that were strictly mortal. Their status as cultivators would open a lot of doors. Even so, what he could really use was about a half-dozen core formation cultivators he found reliable. Sadly, he didn’t think he even knew six core formation cultivators that he would trust to go buy salt in the market, let alone handle something important. He supposed that was one advantage of the sect system—willing and semi-trustworthy minions.

Sighing, he dismissed that daydream. He'd just have to work with what he had available. He supposed he might be able to borrow a couple of bodies from Jing for mortal stuff. Maybe Lai Dongmai has someone in her sect who doesn’t hate me that I could borrow for cultivator-related issues, thought Sen. He didn’t like the thought of relying on people he didn’t know, but he also didn’t want to spend six months away from Ai trying to get things settled in the capital. He decided then and there that he wouldn’t let that happen. If it came down to it, he didn’t care that much about setting up the House of Lu. He could make other arrangements for Ai. Plus, he had sent word to Grandmother Lu. Depending on where she was at the moment, she might arrive sooner than later. He knew he could rely on her, and she had a small army of loyal employees that he could lean on by proxy. Sen realized that Long Jia Wei was giving him a questioning look. I must have been standing there staring at nothing for a while, thought Sen.

“It’s worth exploring,” said Sen to the man’s idea about taking the children out of the city. “For the very immediate future, though, just make sure that they’re getting fed and bathed. I have to assume that some of these servants were employed as teachers. Find out which ones. If these children were being taught to read, write, and do math, there’s no reason to stop that.”

“Reasonable,” said Long Jia Wei.

He turned to the young woman that Sen had all but forgotten about and relayed some orders. She kept a neutral expression, but Sen could tell that she wasn’t pleased to have been foisted off onto Long Jia Wei. He decided that was her problem. He hadn’t asked her to do something so foolish as swear herself to him personally. He couldn’t even imagine what she had been thinking when she’d done that. She shot Sen a quick look before she disappeared into the manor. Sen put her out of his thoughts. She was a tomorrow problem or a next month problem. He had right now issues aplenty to keep him occupied. He really wanted to go investigate the formation array, but that would hold for a while as well. Turning his attention back to the manor, he gestured at it.

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“I suppose we should go see what kinds of secrets and treasures they have hidden in there before someone else finds them.”

Sen thought that he had probably killed the most valuable secrets when he’d killed Xie Caiji, but there were bound to be some things left in the place that no one had had the foresight to destroy or steal. The whole process turned out to be much more of a collaborative effort than Sen had initially expected. While he excelled at discovering the hidden spaces that absolutely littered the manor, he had very little facility at opening them without simply smashing through a wall or floor. Long Jia Wei, on the other hand, proved exceedingly capable at finding how to open them when told exactly where to look. They’d started in a set of offices that Sen assumed belonged to Xie Caiji and her closest advisors. There was a lot of mundane paperwork to be found there. Granted, those scrolls were all valuable in giving Sen a picture of what his new holdings were worth and where they were located, but it wasn’t what he was looking for.

There had been what amounted to a tiny closet hidden in a wall that was stuffed with scrolls, missives, and analysis. Sen glanced over a few things to get a feel for how dangerous and valuable the information might be, then swept every last bit of it into a storage ring. There was information on the other noble houses, the royal family, and even members of the Xie household, as well as merchants creating problems for the Xie family. If the rest of the documents exposed similar information, Sen didn’t want it falling into anyone else’s hands. The other offices didn’t yield another such horde of information, but they did expose that at least one of the Xie advisors was skimming from somewhere. They found a cache with two coin purses stuffed to bursting with silver tael and a smattering of gold tael as well. Sen’s relationship with money had become somewhat warped in recent years, he knew, but even he could recognize that he was looking at a small fortune. Maybe even enough to set someone up comfortably in some distant place.

Sen looked from the purses in his hands to Long Jia Wei. Sen dropped one purse into a storage ring. The other he opened. He reached in and grabbed a fistful of coins. He held the closed fist out to Long Jia Wei. The other man reached out with a quizzical look on his face. Sen dumped the fistful of coins into the man’s outstretched hand.

“I don’t understand,” said Long Jia Wei.

“Loyalty is great, but I need to not be worrying about every last thing you do for the next week or two. Consider yourself bought for now.”

Long Jia Wei considered the pile of coins in his hand for a moment. There was the glint of gold from at least two places. He nodded.

“I will consider myself bought,” said the man. “Or rented, at the very least.”

Sen snorted and held out the purse. Long Jia Wei took it with his other hand.

“Use that to buy some loyalty from the servants. It’s going to take a while to figure out the finances, so some silver now will probably go a long way toward keeping them on task. A little show of good faith.”

“I doubt most of them earn an entire silver in a month.”

“Even better. Tell them it’s a bonus for choosing to stay.”

“Very well,” said the man, slipping the purse into a pocket.

Most of what the pair discovered after that was more mundane. They found countless small amounts in purses that had obviously been left in the walls for centuries. They also found inexplicable things, such as a wooden hairpin with a cat’s face carved on it, a doll that crumbled to dust the moment it was touched, four daggers, a diary that detailed either some very vivid dreams or a particularly torrid affair, a bowl, filigreed chopsticks, and a dozen stone vials that had probably contained elixirs or poisons that had long since turned into sludge. Sen immediately claimed those, going so far as to slap one out of Long Jia Wei’s hand before the fool could open it.

“It probably had poison in it,” said Sen. “Given how long it’s probably been in these walls, it might be harmless, or it might have turned into something even I won’t know how to stop before it kills you.”

“I hadn’t considered that,” admitted Long Jia Wei. “My teachers would likely be disappointed in me.”

“I think it’ll be fine as long as we don’t open anything,” said Sen.

The sheer number of hiding places in just the main manor was enough to make Sen ready to give up on the whole task for the day. It was clearly going to take more than one night of exploration to find everything there was to find. But he noticed a hollow space in a wall that had no business being there. He supposed there was no harm in checking out one more hiding spot. He gestured at the spot and Long Jia Wei went to work. It was a testament to how well-hidden the catch was that it took nearly ten minutes for the man to find it. A door swung open and stale air spilled into the hallway. Sen eyed the narrow stairs that led down, shrugged, and began his descent. He ignited a ball of fire qi over his hand to light their way as Long Jia Wei stepped in behind him and closed the secret door. Wherever the stairs led, it was clear that no one had been down there in a long time. Sen kicked up clouds of dust with every step. When he finally reached the bottom of the stairs, well below the lowest floor of the manor itself, and stepped out into the rock-walled room, he drew up short.

“Well now,” he muttered as Long Jia Wei joined him. “Isn’t this interesting?”