Unintended Cultivator

Sen could hear shouting and screaming throughout the sect, but he wasn’t sure how much if any of it was because of Falling Leaf and Glimmer of Night. He was vaguely aware of their positions but he was doing his best not to focus too hard on where they were or how many of the sect cultivators were around them. They knew what they were doing. They didn’t need him watching over their shoulders. It was entirely for his own equilibrium. He wanted to pay enough attention so that he could go to them if it looked like they were in real trouble. Not that he was sure he would recognize it if they did get into real trouble. He’d watched Falling Leaf scythe through enemies before. For that matter, he’d watched Glimmer of Night do the same. I’ll just have to trust my intuition, thought Sen.

For his part, Sen was doing his best to make himself into an obvious target. Walking in the open, on the biggest paths. It was a little disorienting for him, given how hard he’d worked to avoid these paths during his time inside the sect. He was seeing everything from angles that looked a little wrong. Not that he was paying much attention to the buildings. He was watching for people, and he wanted people watching him. If any core cultivators or elders had survived his little surprise, he wanted to make it easy for them to find him. In this outer area of the sect, though, he mostly expected to find qi-condensing cultivators and that’s what he got.

Most of the people he saw at first were dead or dying. They were the ones who had been closest to the doors of the buildings. He steeled his heart at the sight. They hadn’t died particularly good deaths. What he had tried to do was ensure that they got quick deaths. There had been no way to ensure immediate deaths. At least, there had been no way to ensure it with the method he’d picked. If he’d been willing to go room to room and cut people’s heads off, he supposed that would have done it. He just hadn’t had the kind of time or, if he was being honest with himself, the stomach for something like that. So, he’d settled on quick deaths.

There were two main variables with poison. It took poison a little while to get into people’s systems, and everyone’s constitutions were a little different. Following exposure, the poison generally needed to get into the bloodstream. The amount of time that took could change depending on whether someone was asleep or awake, as well as their state of mind. Someone meditating or asleep would generally have a slower heart rate, which slowed down how fast the poison spread. Beyond that, while the same poison might be equally lethal to two individuals, the time between exposure and death also depended a great deal on how robust their health was and even on their cultivation path.

He’d once fought someone who he thought was an acid cultivator. Such a cultivation path was exceedingly rare, but it also meant he had to acknowledge the remote possibility that there could be a poison cultivator somewhere in the sect. Someone like that might have survived the poisons he used in the part of the sect assigned to the outer disciples. They had been potent but were nothing compared to the poisons and toxins he’d used deeper inside the sect. Of course, as he’d known would be the case, the trap hadn’t gotten everyone. As he strode down the path, four cultivators carrying spears and looking like any bad fright might kill outright charged into view. They all stumbled to a stop when they saw him. He gave them all a flat look that made them take a collective step back.

“Who are you?” demanded a petite cultivator with wide eyes and a quavering voice.

“I am Judgment’s Gale,” he answered in a bored tone.

There was a collective inhalation of breath from the four cultivators. He casually evaluated them. They were all outer disciples. The petite cultivator was right on the cusp of breaking through to foundation formation, but she hadn’t. Not yet. He drew his jian, and they all took another step back. He spoke again.

“I haven’t come to kill qi-condensing children. This sect is dead. I have ensured it. If you leave now, I will not stop you.”

Three of the four wore looks of profound relief, but one of them apparently didn’t know good sense when he heard it. He rushed forward, howling something about the sect, and trying to muster a technique. Sen had given the man a chance, and it had been squandered. He crushed the technique before it could form and removed the man’s head. The other three looked at their fallen sect mate with looks of horror that transformed into looks of raw panic when they turned their gazes back to Sen. He simply raised the still bloody jian and pointed toward the gate. The remaining three didn’t need more an of invitation. They ran off as fast as their legs would carry them.

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Sen resumed his steady walk through the sect. He let three more groups of qi-condensing cultivators with healthy survival instincts go. A fourth group attacked him on sight and died confused two seconds later. Sen was starting to wonder if he’d managed to get all of the core members and inner sect disciples when a man crashed to the ground perhaps ten feet away from him. He was a large man who gripped a guandao in shaking hands. His eyes were filled with rage. Sen regarded him calmly and assessed his cultivation as somewhere in the middle of core formation. This was someone he had come here to kill.

“You did this!” bellowed the man.

“Yes. That’s what you do with blighted crops. You destroy them so the blight won’t spread,” answered Sen.

“When the patriarch discovers this—”

“Your patriarch is dead, or soon will be,” said Sen with cold certainty.

That certainty seemed to stop the other cultivator cold. While he feigned that he was paying complete attention to the cultivator in front of him, Sen was also paying attention to the half-dozen other cultivators who were trying to position themselves for a coordinated assault. It was probably a smart tactic. It was their best chance of taking him, even if that chance was vanishingly small. The guandao wielder seemed to regain his senses. He did his best to glare at Sen. Just as the man opened his mouth to speak again and the rest of the cultivators looked like they were about in place to strike, Sen spoke one word.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

“Die.”

Much as he had done to those Twisted Blade Sect members in a town far to the north, Sen dropped the entirety of his killing intent and auric imposition on the guandao wielder. Whatever word the man had been about to speak became a scream of agony that was cut off when his body gave out. There was the sound of bones splintering and a spray of blood as muscle tore apart. Not that Sen saw that part. While the man was dying, Sen had activated his qinggong technique. The technique carried him at speed to one of the supposedly concealed cultivators. His jian passed through her chest so fast that the woman blinked a few times before she fell into two pieces. There was a second burst of his qinggong technique, and his fist caved in the skull of a second hidden attacker.

The other four had been stunned into motionlessness by the grisly death of the guandao wielder and Sen’s abrupt attack on the other members in the group. They finally seemed to recognize the danger. Two tried to flee, while the other two tried to attack. Sen swapped his jian for a spear and used a qi platform to launch himself into the air. He cycled for lightning and, when he reached the apex of his flight, sent two lightning bolts as big around as his wrist at the fleeing cultivators. He wasn’t sure they were dead, but they were down. That was good enough for now. One of the cultivators below was fast and sent a twisted blade technique rocketing up him.

Pressing lightning into the spearhead, Sen brought it down onto the incoming technique. The cultivator below was fast in launching the technique, but he wasn’t as fast in letting it go. The spear cut the technique apart, and Sen watched blood explode from the man’s mouth as the backlash hit him. Sen sent a wind blade crashing down on the other cultivator. He managed to get his dao saber in between himself and the technique, holding the hilt in one hand and the blade in the other. Sen thought that might not have been a blessing. The sheer force of the wind blade first bent and then broke the metal of the dao saber. The man tried to get out of the way but only succeeded in having a huge gash opened from collar bone to hip.

The man had barely recovered his wits when Sen landed on the ground. There was no talking. No threats or bargaining. Sen’s targeted the man with the broken dao in his hand first. His spear punched through the man’s heart. He jerked the spear free, used the momentum to spin, and brought the haft across the back of the other man’s neck. There was a sickening crunch as the man’s neck was pulverized. Sen put the spear through that man’s heart to be certain and then made his way toward the first of the cultivators who tried to run away. He cleaned the spear before returning it to a storage ring and retrieving his jian. He found the woman sprawled out on the ground. The back of her robes had been burned away to expose hideously charred flesh. Her eyes were open but unfocused. He didn’t even break stride as he took her head.

He found the other one crawling through a copse of trees. Sen came up a little short. He had the gnawing suspicion that this was the same copse of trees where he’d killed those lovers. He did his best to ignore that thought as he focused on the cultivator on the ground. The woman had caught the lightning bolt in her back but this poor bastard had gotten it in the leg. He wasn’t sure if it had been a more direct hit or if the man was simply more susceptible to that kind of damage. Whatever the reason, Sen could see exposed bone where the bolt had simply burned flesh away. The cultivator turned terrified eyes toward Sen, who looked down on the man with uncaring eyes.

“Don’t do this!” the man screamed. “I don’t deserve this!”

“Maybe,” said Sen, “but that doesn’t matter.”

“Wh—” started the man before he choked.

The man looked at the jian that had been driven through his heart and back at Sen with disbelieving eyes.

“You picked the wrong side,” Sen finally answered as he twisted the blade.