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Unintended Cultivator V10: Chapter 2 – Displacement
🕑 Added 2024-08-23 07:50:11 +0000 UTCEven getting the displace villagers into temporary shelter turned out to be a monumental and time-consuming task. There was a lot of, to Sen’s thinking, needless confrontation about that temporary housing. Granted, it was little more than a warehouse that might be used to store grain. It was short on luxury, but it was protection from the elements and well-stocked with food. Plus, all that complaining happened after Sen and Cao Kai-Ming explained, repeatedly and at length, that more permanent homes were available. It would just take a few days to get everyone settled. Sen eventually concluded that the villagers were being aggressive because they were tired, far from home, and unhappy about both things. He just couldn’t find it in him to care. He’d protected them for the entire journey. Time he would much rather have been spending with his family, or training, or helping to plan strategies to survive the war.
“Enough,” he said.
It wasn’t a shout but multiple types of qi carried that word through the air and the stone beneath their feet. He knew from experience that everyone would have felt that word in their bodies. The room went silent. The overweight man, although much less overweight than he had been at the beginning of the journey, who had been agitating about everything froze in place. He wasn’t the only instigator, but he had been the loudest and the closest to where Sen stood. Not that any of them had directed their ire directly at him. Most of them had seen him casually kill more than one spirit beast and cut down bandits with ruthless efficiency. Of course, they didn’t need to direct those complaints directly at him to make sure he heard them. The instigator turned and found Sen glaring at him from about ten feet away. He flinched back from the glare and found something on the floor to hold his attention. Sen swept his gaze across the big open space and found a whole lot of people suddenly unwilling to meet his eyes. He raised his voice so it would carry.
“I realize that this is not ideal. As I said before, though, it is temporary. Houses, shops, and farmland have all been prepared for you. There simply is not enough time to get all of you into those places today. People from my sect and the town will come tomorrow to begin organizing that effort and, no, preference will not be given to any particular person or occupation. However, those who make nuisances of themselves,” said Sen, locking his eyes on the overweight agitator, “will be moved to the end of the line. So, for tonight, eat and rest. The next few days will be hectic.”
The quiet and not-so-quiet complaining did not resume after that announcement. Sen gave it another ten minutes before he went outside and took a deep breath to settle himself. It wasn’t just the villagers that were bothering him. He didn’t want to be dealing with them anymore. He’d been putting up with them for weeks now, and he’d reached him limit. He’d never had any connection with those people save for that one brief meeting with Cao Kai-Ming. While he was glad that he had taken the time and expended the effort to save the ones he could, he was beyond ready to be done with the task. The worst part was that he probably would have liked some of them but the wall between mortals and high-ranked cultivators made it impossible. He hadn’t even tried during the trip. Whenever he drew near, conversations died and people grew nervous. Just live with it, he told himself. It’s all you can do.
The colors on the horizon told him that, somewhere along the line, they had transitioned from afternoon into evening. With the villagers more or less settled, he thought he was finally free to leave them behind to manage on their own for a while. He supposed that had been true from the moment they reached the warehouse. He just wasn’t cruel enough to leave the task of wrangling them entirely to Cao Kai-Ming. She had more than done her part keeping the mortals safe on the trip. She might have been more invested in it than he was, but she could have just left the work to him. He was the famous, dangerous one. He’d also been the more powerful of the two. It stood to reason that he could exert more authority than she could.
She also could have followed orders and nothing more. Sen knew perfectly well that the Twisted Blade Sect had been a place where that sort of behavior was expected and encouraged. While almost all cultivators learned to fight, some were better at it than others. Some were more suited to it than others. Cao Kai-Ming was not a master of combat. She specialized in finding plants for alchemy. She just needed to be competent enough to fight off spirit beasts or, more often, stealthy enough to escape them. That lack of supreme skill and talent hadn’t stopped her. She’d jumped into the fighting whenever it happened. It had honestly been more work for him since he’d needed to keep an eye on her as well as everyone else, but it was the thought that counted.
“You’re frustrated with them,” said Cao Kai-Ming as she joined him outside.
“You caught that, did you?” asked Sen. “And here I was thinking I’d been so subtle about it.”
She lifted an eyebrow at him and asked, “Was that a joke? It’s hard to tell with you sometimes.”
Sen waggled a hand in a so-so gesture.
“It was a bad joke,” admitted Sen.
“They’re scared,” said Cao Kai-Ming. “They were already scared but that bird didn’t help at all. That thing scared me, and I might have had a chance to fight or get away if it got hostile. They would have just died, and they knew it. Plus, we made a lot of promises about what they’d get if they came along. Right now, all they see is this warehouse.”
Sen sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose in a wholly meaningless gesture. It didn’t help. It hadn’t helped in years. It just made him feel a little better remembering the way it used to help relieve some tension. She wasn’t wrong. Those villagers had abandoned everything they knew. They’d given up everything they understood based on nothing more his promises and Cao Kai-Ming’s reassurances that he could be trusted. It wasn’t much of a life that they’d given up, in his opinion, but the familiar always felt safer than the unknown. And he was a stranger. A powerful stranger that commanded the fear and respect of someone they did know and nominally, but a stranger all the same. That was a mighty thin thread on which to hang your future and the future of everyone you loved. He knew that. He just didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to be done.
“I understand that,” said Sen. “I truly do, but it’s a bit late to be second-guessing their choices, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. Then again, maybe now is the time when most people start worrying that they picked wrong. After all, this is the seat of your power. We’re all at your mercy here. If you decided that those villagers would make great mine slaves, there isn’t anything anyone can do to stop you.”
Sen gave her a hard look and said, “Do you really think I’d do that?”
“I don’t,” said Cao Kai-Ming, “but you also let me live. Mercy has a way of reshaping the way you see someone. They haven’t seen you grant mercy. They’ve only seen your strength and, frankly, they’d all be stupid not to fear that strength.”
Sen sighed again before he nodded.
“I see your point. I just don’t know what to do about it.”
“Maybe just try to look a little less like you’re ready to slap someone hard enough to kill them,” suggested Cao Kai-Ming. “It’s hard to stay calm when a legend is glaring death at you every few seconds.”
Sen’s mouth worked a few times before he said, “All right. That’s fair.”
The two of them shared a short, awkward, tense silence. The source of that awkward tension was not mysterious to Sen. Cao Kai-Ming had watched him kill everyone on her failed expedition into the wilds. Letting her live and coming to save the people of her village might have bought him some goodwill, but it wasn’t like they were actually friends. They were barely acquaintances. Their conversations on the trip back had been short and largely impersonal. Some of that was out of necessity, but some of it was the dread he saw lurking in the back of her eyes. She did a better job of hiding it, but she was as frightened of him and what he might do as the rest of those villagers. And he couldn’t blame her for that. They’d likely never be very close. Not that he saw that as a particular problem. He wasn’t trying to recruit her to his sect.
He wanted her around to help ride herd on these villagers during what would probably be a long integration with the swiftly growing… Sen almost called it a town. He just wasn’t sure that was entirely accurate any longer. It wasn’t quite big enough that he’d consider it a city. The place was growing so fast, though, that it might become one in another year or two. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. His experiences in cities had been less than fantastic as a rule. The idea of being some kind proxy ruler over a city did not fill him with warm and happy feelings. He hadn’t set out to found a city, that was for damned sure. Nothing to be done about now, he thought. I bet Fu Ruolan is ready to throw a fit.
They weren’t really that close to her little domain but the prospect of a fast-growing town so close by was sure to leave the nascent soul cultivator with a sour taste in her mouth. She’d come all the way out there to avoid large groups of mortals and cultivators. Now, they were coming to her. Sen added that to the incredibly long list of problems for later. He looked over at Cao Kai-Ming.
“I can find you somewhere nicer to stay for the night,” he offered.
The other cultivator mulled those words for a while before she gave her head a definitive shake.
“I appreciate that, but things will go smoother if I stay with them.”
Sen nodded. She was probably right.
“Very well. Then, I’ll leave you to it. I need to go make some arrangements for tomorrow.”
He started to walk away when she called out after him.
“Thank you for helping them.”
He peered back over his shoulder and offered a shrug.
“I try to the right thing,” he said before muttering under his breath. “When I can.”
