Unintended Cultivator-Chapter 72Book 10: : To Save It

Sen watched the newly arrived members of his sect from atop the new wall he’d personally constructed. Food was going to be such a crucial matter for the capital over the following months that he wasn’t prepared to leave the safety of their food production to chance. He’d walled off an expansive piece of nearby land and, with a bit of input, reshaped it to better serve the city’s needs. He’d even gone so far as to redirect a nearby river to make it possible for them to establish rice paddies. At least, that’s what they’d told him. He’d never been involved with any kind of serious farming, only some minor gardening on the mountain, so the requirements of growing rice were largely mysterious to him.

For that matter, there was much going on below that he didn’t entirely understand. Some of it was obvious enough. Fields were being planted with root vegetables and infused with what looked like carefully controlled amounts of wood qi. There were also formations being set up that tightly controlled the temperatures, ensuring that the fields never suffered from a catastrophic freeze that would kill everything. There were also fields of more perishable vegetables that were in desperately short supply. He could reason out why those things were happening.

What was less obvious to him was why there was construction happening down there. Vast buildings were being erected, and glass had become almost impossible to buy in the city. All of it was going toward those buildings. Beyond that, every glassmaker in the city had been conscripted to produce more. He could have simply flown down and demanded an explanation, but he’d decided that the answers for that could wait. Kao Jun Lai was clearly enacting a plan. The work was too orderly and organized to be something that the man had thrown together at the last minute. Also, Sua Xing Xing trusted the man enough to send him here. Sen didn’t think the woman would jeopardize her position by endorsing a plan that didn’t have a good chance of succeeding.

Sighing, he turned and looked over the city proper. One might make the mistake of thinking that nothing had happened if looking at it from a distance. Sen knew better. Social order, which had been frayed when he arrived, had threatened to come undone entirely. Something not helped at all by all of the people trying to settle their old scores. His swift and public executions of those would-be murderers had cooled people’s enthusiasm for such activities. Oddly, they had also seemed to restore a sense of order. He supposed it helped that he didn’t discriminate between mortals and cultivators. He had personally executed the cultivators who refused to bury their grudges. The number of them screaming about their sects right up until the moment their heads left their bodies had surprised him.

The leadership of the sects had been publicly silent on the matter, which most people took as tacit acceptance if not approval. They had been less enthusiastic in private. Most had complained bitterly that they would have disciplined their wayward disciples. Of course, that was the problem. Sects were generally loath to kill people they had invested time and resources in, which ran contrary to the draconian law that Sen had put in place. He had made even planning an assassination of anyone an offense that carried a penalty of death. The only grudging exception he’d made was allowing formal duels between cultivators at the same level of advancement. He’d thought that would curb sect disciples trying to outright ambush murder each other, but it hadn’t. People were still people. The possibility of extinction remained an abstraction to most of them, despite the recent attack. Burning hatred was immediate.

He understood better now just why Master Feng and Uncle Kho had decided to set him up as a tyrant. A tyrant could do things that someone like Jing simply couldn’t. Jing had to at least pay lip service to the country’s existing laws. Sen didn’t. He could rule by fiat. He mostly tried not to do that out of fear that he’d be the one to upend social order, but he could just decide that some people were too troublesome to let live. He didn’t like it, though. The casual ease with which he could order death troubled him. It would be all too easy to grow comfortable using executions as a means of resolving issues that had other, better solutions. The problem was time.

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As much as he wanted to believe that the spirit beasts would follow the human custom of not warring during the winter, he didn’t trust that they wouldn’t. He wouldn’t in their position. They were far better suited to surviving in winter than mortals. They were also used to surviving in the wilds under conditions that few mortals could endure and most cultivators would find challenging. The change in season would make moving large groups of spirit beasts without getting noticed more difficult, but not impossible.

That meant that Sen needed to move quickly and secure this kingdom. Of course, doing that meant leaving the capital, and he couldn’t leave until he possessed some confidence it wouldn’t fall to treachery. Ensuring the capital would remain in his hands forced him to be harsher than he might be if there wasn’t a threat like the spirit beasts. Then again, if not for the spirit beasts, he never would have seized power in the first place. Or, he wouldn’t have let others seize power on his behalf. He just didn’t see a better path. He couldn’t make people better than they were. If they insisted on putting their own concerns or petty pride ahead of the survival of humanity, he couldn’t tolerate the risks of leaving that kind of poison behind him. The stakes were simply too high.

“You look grim,” said Lai Dongmei as she landed on the wall next to him.

“I was thinking about the future,” said Sen. “The things I’ll have to do to make sure everything doesn’t fall apart the second I leave.

“That would explain the grim look.”

“I hate that I’m going to have to rule by fear.”

Lai Dongmei looked out to the horizon before she said, “Everyone rules by fear.”

Sen gave her a sharp look and asked, “What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t matter how benevolent a ruler appears. It doesn’t even matter if they actually are benevolent. At its base, all rule is based on fear. The fear of something larger and more powerful exercising that strength. That’s all a government is in the end. Something larger and more powerful. The mortals dress it up more than the sects do, but it amounts to the same thing.”

Sen sniffed and said, “Might makes right?”

“Right?” asked Lai Dongmei. “I imagine some see it that way. Might doesn’t make right. Might makes it the reality. The good or the evil of it is, well… It’s largely irrelevant.”

“Well, that certainly made everything seem less grim,” offered Sen with a wry smile.

“Would you prefer a comforting lie?”

“Do you have one for me?”

“No,” said Lai Dongmei.

Sen turned to look out into the distance. He could see the damage he’d done on the border of the wilds. Things were starting to grow there again, but they were just tiny plants starting to push up through the ash. He thought about just how much of the country was covered by the wilds. He shuddered to imagine just how many more spirit beasts might be waiting in those unexplored stretches of land. The threat they could pose was simply unacceptable. Sen had thought he was just trying to scare Boulder’s Shadow when he threatened to burn the wilds. Now, though, he came to a much starker realization.

It wasn’t just the wilds. Humanity had thousands upon thousands of years to prepare for something like this. Yet, they were fractured. On this side of the Mountains of Sorrow, they were divided into mortal kingdoms. On the other side, cultivators ruled with the heavens alone knew how many mortal corpses crushed beneath their heels. Humanity as it was had failed. The blame didn’t rest on any one group. The mortals had failed as badly as the cultivators, and the spirit beasts would hurl them all into oblivion if something didn’t change.

“I’m going to have to burn it,” he said in a quiet voice.

“Burn what?”

Sen closed his eyes and admitted something out loud for the first time.

“The world. To save it, I’m going to have to burn it all down.”