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Unintended Cultivator Vol 11: Chapter 21 – What?
🕑 Added 2025-01-28 07:00:51 +0000 UTC“Are you adopting more strays?” asked Lo Meifeng as she peered out a window and down into the courtyard of Lu Manor.
“Not exactly,” said Sen. “But I will a need a little help with them.”
She turned a baleful look his way and asked, “Did you feel like I wasn’t pulling my weight? I don’t have the time to be training—”
“Not that kind of help,” said Sen in a soothing tone. “I’ll be doing most of their training.”
He proceeded to explain the role he intended for them to play.
“Okay. I can see how they would be useful for you. That doesn’t really tell me what kind of help you need from me?” she asked with a frown.
“I need help coming up with some way to mask their identities. They’re mortals. I want them to be able to retire and lead at least semi-normal lives someday as younger mortals replace them.”
Lo Meifeng smirked at him.
“What?” he asked.
“Have you considered just having them wear, you know, actual masks?”
“I have considered that,” said Sen giving the amused woman a withering glare. “But it’s not enough to just put them in any masks. They need a collective identity. Something that will intimidate.”
“We should dress them up as you,” said Lo Meifeng.
“If you’re not going to take this seriously—” Sen began.
“Okay, not you exactly, but how about dressing them up as yecha?”
Sen blinked at her as the word yecha stirred something deep in his memory. He tried to recall the stories he’d heard in his youth.
“Are you talking about those blue-skinned demons?” he asked in a dry tone.
“I am,” she said with an enthusiastic nod. “Just think about it. We can put them in blue robes, which will associate them with you, and give them frightening masks. Add that to whatever terrifying things you intend to teach them, and that ought to do a decent job of protecting their identities. Then, when they need to vanish after delivering your orders, they can just take off the disguise and disappear into the local population.”
“Isn’t that leaning a bit too obviously into that stupid Blue Demon name people gave me?”
“Obvious isn’t bad in this case. You said you want them to be a sort of public extension of your will. By giving them masks and leaning into that name, their individual identities become secondary. People will learn to view them less as people than as frightening messengers of something far vaster and more dangerous.”
Sen had known, way in the back of his mind, that what Lo Meifeng was describing was more or less what he wanted. He just hadn’t considered it in such blunt terms. After a moment of internal resignation, he nodded. This is the lot of the tyrant, he reminded himself. You rule by fear, not by kindness.
“I don’t suppose you know anyone who can make those robes and masks and also be trusted to keep quiet about it?”
She waved a hand at him and said, “I’ll take care of it. That’s the easy part. You’ve got the harder job.”
“How so? I just need to polish their combat skills.”
Lo Meifeng gave him a blank look for several seconds before she laughed.
“I forget sometimes that you’re not actually made for this whole absolute ruler thing. You do a pretty good of faking it sometimes, but you’re still a naïve little country boy in your heart, aren’t you?”
“If we could maybe skip past the mockery and get around to the point, that would be terrific,” said Sen.
“Why would I do that?” asked Lo Meifeng. “The mockery is my favorite part.”
“Clearly, but it’s not like I have an infinite number of minutes to spend on this. I might not be made for the absolute ruler thing, but I still have to show up and do it from time to time.”
“You’re so grumpy.”
“I am not—” Sen started before he sighed. “Okay. Yes, I am grumpy.”
“It’s good that you can admit that.”
“Meifeng,” said Sen in a low growl. “Your point?”
“Alright. Alright. Teaching them to fight is easy. I expect you picked them because they’re already good at it, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“That’s about half the job. The other half of the job is teaching them to think in the right way. It’s not enough that they look scary or seem like they might do terrible, violent things if they’re defied. They actually have to be scary and willing to do terrible, violent things.”
Sen considered that before he said, “Damn it. I should have picked cultivators for this.”
“No, you did the right thing picking mortals for this. Whatever else is going on, cultivators will never stop challenging each other. The last thing you need is for your yecha messengers to have to deal with those kinds of challenges everywhere they go. Not that they’ll be entirely safe. Nothing will make them entirely safe with a job like this, but not having to deal with challenges from cultivators will make them safer.”
It made sense. It wasn’t ideal, but practically nothing that had happened in the last year or so was ideal by Sen’s accounting. He was making do with everything. Giving authority to people he didn’t trust entirely or barely trusted at all. Planning to overthrow every human government and installing himself as some kind of absurd cultivator emperor. Hoping that he’d scared the spirit beasts enough that they’d largely leave him alone to secure this kingdom. Plus, there was a the constant worry that his melding with the social order would lead to complete chaos. No, not a single thing was ideal. He decided to ignore that mountain of worries for a little longer. It wasn’t like those concerns were going anywhere.
“How is your little project coming along?” he asked.
“Which one?” she asked.
“Building your spy organization from the ground up,” said Sen.
“It’s going slowly,” said Lo Meifeng with an exhalation that seemed to carry all the fatigue in the world. “Too slowly for our needs if I’m being honest. If we’d been doing this before the spirit beasts lost their collective minds, it would have been a lot easier. There are people that I would have tried to recruit. Unfortunately, recruiting people requires that you can find them. Right now, I don’t have the faintest idea where to find most of them. I don’t even know if they’re alive. So, I’m stuck working with whoever I can find that’s in the capital. Since I’m trying to not openly offend the bigger sects, I’ve been steering clear of their people but that makes it harder.”
Sen leaned back in his chair and asked, “Would you want to recruit people from the big sects here?”
Lo Meifeng waggled a hand in the air before she said, “Yes and no. It’s always good to have people with diverse cultivation skills. It opens up more options. I’m a fire cultivator. It would be very easy for me to start thinking that every problem could be solved with enough fire. The same thing happens with most cultivators. If your problem really can be solved with enough fire, or enough earth qi, or enough air qi, that’s great. In my experience, most problems aren’t solved that way. You need the right tools on hand or people who can work around not having them. If you have cultivators who specialize in lots of different things, you can pick and choose who to send to do what work.”
“But you don’t want to poach people from the bigger sects?” asked Sen.
“I don’t. It could be politically problematic for you.”
Sen snorted and said, “Everything is politically problematic for me at that moment.”
“True, but the sects aren’t openly opposing you. At least, they aren’t right now. If I start stealing some of their best people, that could change in a blink.”
“I’m not sure they’d do that, but I see your point. You don’t want to make people into enemies if you don’t have to.”
“That’s part of it. The other part is that I don’t think that I’d ever be able to fully trust them.”
“How would that be different than how you see everyone already?” asked Sen, not even trying to hide his grin.
“Very droll,” said Lo Meifeng. “It’s one thing to not trust people on principle and keep them at arm’s length. It’s something else to not trust people in your own organization because their loyalties are always in doubt. The biggest sects haven’t survived as long as they have by being stupid. They’re perfectly capable of and would probably be delighted to embed a spy of their own into my organization.”
“Your organization?” asked Sen with a lifted eyebrow.
“Our organization. Still, if you think they wouldn’t spy on you, that would be a dangerous level of naivety. They’ll probably keep playing nice during the war, but after that, they’re going to want things to go back to the way they were. You’ll be an obstacle to that. Which means…” Lo Meifeng trailed off.
“It would be a huge boon to them to have a spy in place to help them assassinate me on the off chance that we both win the war and I survive it.”
“I can’t be sure they’ll do that. You do have very, very scary backers, but it’s what I’d be planning to do if I was in their place.”
“I guess that’s not really news to me,” admitted Sen. “It’s just exhausting to think about.”
“Which is why you have me to worry about threats that might not emerge until years down the road.”
“Have you coordinated with the foxes at all?” asked Sen.
He’d made the suggestion to her before, but hadn’t followed up on it. Lo Meifeng made a sour face that told Sen that all was not well in the world of spies and assassins.
“I’ve spoken with the one that’s so infatuated with you.”
“I take it you don’t think they’re competent.”
“No, it’s not that. I mean, yes, it’s that, but it’s also not that. On paper, they’re ideal for the work.”
“But,” prompted Sen.
“Their personalities aren’t suited to it. The ones here in the city are better than most, but foxes are easily distracted and impulsive. It’s hard to ask them to do anything because I can’t be sure they’ll see it through.”
“Is that all?” asked Sen.
“No. They’re being held together by Sun Linglu, but she’s half of the problem.”
It took Sen a second to recall that Misty Peak called herself Sun Linglu to everyone but him.
“Why is she half the problem?”
“If she was doing all of this specifically to keep her people alive, I’d trust her more. A motive like that is selfish and that very selfishness makes it predictable. But she’s doing this at least partly because she’s fixated on you. If that ever goes sour, I can’t predict what she or her people will do.”
Sen was certain that he’d have a headache right then if he was still capable of getting headaches. The last thing he needed was to be worrying all the time that Misty Peak and her people might turn on them at the drop of a hat.
“What do you suggest?” asked Sen. “I don’t want people hunting them in the cities, and they can be useful.”
Lo Meifeng was silent for most of a minute as she studied him a way that made him feel oddly naked and exposed. When she did speak, the words were nothing he’d ever expected to hear.
“Seduce her,” said Lo Meifeng.
“What?” asked Sen in a flat, unamused tone.
“Take her to your bed and then make a habit of it. It’s not like it’d be hard. It’s what she wants. It will also help to turn a mercurial ally of convenience into someone with a vested interest in helping you.”
Sen just stared at the woman, barely able to comprehend what she was suggesting.
“Don’t look at me like that,” said Lo Meifeng. “It’s not like I told you to poison her. I told you to do something that she wants and that you’d probably find at least nominally pleasurable. It’s not like she’s hideous.”
When he managed to find his voice again, Sen asked, “That doesn’t strike you as ruthlessly manipulative?”
“Of course, it’s ruthlessly manipulative. It wouldn’t be so effective if it wasn’t.”
“And you’re just assuming that I’d be alright with that?”
“Sen, you are many things. Some of them are even admirable. But you’re also a man. An unattached man, unless you went and married Lai Dongmei when nobody was looking.”
“I did not,” said Sen with a scowl.
“There you go. There’s no reason for you not to take that fox-woman to bed. It may be ruthless, but it’s also practical. It removes a threat. Just as importantly, being a man, you’re going to stop caring about the morality of it about two seconds after she’s naked.”
“I feel like I should be offended that you think so poorly of me.”
“Don’t be offended. I’m not chastising you. If anything, it’s an advantage. Use it.”
Sen stood up from his chair.
“Where are you going?” asked Lo Meifeng.
“I—” Sen tried to order his thoughts. “I think I need to go find a puppy or maybe take a very long bath.”
“If you decide on the bath, take Sun Linglu with you. She’d like that.”
As Sen left the room, he muttered, “This cannot be my life now.”
Comments
Tyrant Villager
That’s only currently, with a long war and many deaths ahead. And it’s very easy for things to get lost or confused in such a time frame. Even in the camp it’ll be limited to officers and soldiers that directly knew the people chosen and the officers are currently walking on very thin eggshells around Sen. Odds are good most of the camp wouldn’t recognize the yecha in person compared to the very scary demigod taking everyone’s attention
GreenB
I like the idea of Sens new gang being a frightening force, but isn't it too late to hide their identities. He made a pretty big spectacle of picking out talented spear wielders. I think it will be easy for someone to connect the dots on who these new yascha are.
Trevor Mergen
Thanks!
Angela Roberts
I mean, yes, Meifeng makes good points and no, she's confusing Misty with a human which is dangerously stupid. I'm betting Sen approaches Misty with the intent of seducing her but Misty being Misty she turns him off yet again.
CipherFTW
Im.. what? Lmaoooo
Bunny Waffles
I kinda hope Sen just refuses to give in and bed her. Our boy should NOT pick up a habit of seducing women infatuated with him for the purpose of using them and their affections to his advantage. That never ends well and sets a wildly dangerous precedent
