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Unintended Cultivator Vol 10: Chapter 67 – Uncertain Condition
🕑 Added 2024-12-13 04:07:09 +0000 UTCSen stayed to observe until Boulder’s Shadow disappeared back into the forest, miles away at the edge of the destruction. He didn’t believe the ghost panther would actually try to do anything. The spirit beast would have tried to intervene or attack him if he meant to do something. However, it would have been foolish to just walk away from a potent threat like that. Sen slumped a little once Boulder’s Shadow passed beyond the range of his spiritual sense. Manipulating the clouds on such a large scale had been taxing, even with the heavens providing all of that divine qi. Using his auric imposition at the end there had been enough to make him feel a little lightheaded. It might have been different if his body wasn’t still going through some kind of transformation. He thought it was slowing down, but it was hard to be sure.
All he wanted to do was return to Lu Manor and sleep, but even a brief glance around told him that would prove nothing but a vain hope. There was still too much to do. He had wreaked havoc on the land and couldn’t leave it as it was. That was to say nothing of the all the people in the city who were injured. Then, there would have to be discussions about funeral arrangements for the dead and rebuilding. The thought of those discussions almost convinced him to head north then and there. Given the choice, he’d much rather listen to Ai talk about her birds than do any of that. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a choice.
He was supposed to be some kind of leader. Auntie Caihong would almost certainly tell him that leaders needed to be seen after the battle, if for no other reason than to reassure the people that they were safe. Not that he thought they were safe. Sen might have dealt the spirit beasts a blow that would slow them down in this kingdom, but he hadn’t crippled them. At best, the people in the capital might be safe for now, but this war was just getting started. That thought made him even more tired. To truly win the war would mean battles across the length and breadth of the continent. It would take years.
He shook off those thoughts. He wasn’t responsible for the continent. Not yet. He’d secure this kingdom first. Only then would he consider looking beyond those borders. Everyone else would simply have to fend for themselves. Not that securing even this part of the continent would be easy. He suspected he really would have to burn the wilds to the ground to root out the spirit beast threat. Most of the wilds, he corrected himself. Falling Leaf would never forgive him if he burned all of the forests. And I need to leave the spirit oxen somewhere to live, he realized. He hadn’t been looking all that closely at the composition of the spirit beast army, but he couldn’t recall seeing single a single ox.
“I’m going to have to give very strict orders about those oxen,” he muttered to himself as he slowly ascended into the sky again.
He considered what was left of the storm clouds. His fire technique had obliterated a lot of them, and he could see patches of blue sky through the holes. Even so, enough remained to serve his purposes. Sen let himself work more slowly as he smoothed the clouds into an even layer that covered the city and the ring of destruction he’d left in his wake. Water and wood qi threaded into the clouds in response to his will. He figured water qi would encourage rain. The wood qi wasn’t a replacement for healing pills and elixirs, but it would encourage some recovery in both people and the damaged land.
They were going to need that land to be viable very soon if the reports he’d heard about the food situation were truly as dire as they seemed. When death seemed to be nothing but hours away, nobody was really worrying about it. The removal of that spirit beasts meant that surviving the coming winter was going to become everyone’s main concern. There was no way to know for sure, but Sen doubted that there was enough surplus food in the rest of the kingdom to import sufficient stores. He just had to hope that Sua Xing Xing’s experiments were going to prove as useful as they sounded or a great many people would starve. When the clouds finally started releasing some rain, he descended toward the city.
Up until then, it had been necessary to focus on the large-scale problems. Now, at least for a little while, he could afford the luxury of focusing on his personal concerns. He let his spiritual sense wash over the city but took care to apply it very gently. There were many mortals down there who could be killed if he was careless with it. For that matter, there were probably injured cultivators who might not have the strength to endure it. He was looking for specific people. That was something that would have been beyond him before his advancement into the nascent soul realm. His spiritual sense had been potent, but it had also been a blunt instrument with little value in identifying individuals. Now, it provided him with enough information to pick out individuals and even get a feel for the condition.
He found Shi Ping first, slouched on the top of the wall. The man seemed mostly unharmed. He found Grandmother Lu next. She was alive and well back in Lu Manor. He hadn’t been too concerned about her, but there had also been spirit beasts inside the walls. He didn’t think they could have gotten through the defenses and into the manor. Yet, battles were fickle, unkind things that could turn in an instant. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that they might have targeted her specifically. He found Jing and Lo Meifeng at almost the same time and froze. They were both alive, which was a relief, but neither of them was in good condition. He wasn’t sure who to go to first.
Gritting his teeth in frustration, he went to Jing first. Of the two, Lo Meifeng was more likely to survive injuries for long, which meant that she had to wait. He landed in what had probably been a market square at some point. Now, it was filled with the injured, the dying, and the dead. He strode past people and ignored the silence that fell at his passing. He would have to speak to these people at some point, but he didn’t have the mental resources for more than one thing at a time at that moment. He pushed open the door to a building and walked in.
“Lord Lu?” asked someone.
Sen turned his eyes and found a familiar-looking, older man in bloodstained armor looking at him in shock. It took him a minute to put a name to the face.
“General Mo,” said Sen. “Where is Jing?”
The general grimaced and gestured. Sen finally noticed that everyone else was staring at them, or pretending not to stare at them but with their heads cocked in a way that suggested they were listening to every word. He followed the old man up some stairs and to a room. There were two guards outside the room. They both had dark bags under their eyes and bandages that told him they had participated on the wall or against the spirit beasts in the city. Despite what had to be bone-deep fatigue, they straightened as they saw the general. Mo nodded to them and then led Sen into the room. Jing was on a bed, under a thin blanket. There was a bandage covering the man’s left eye and more bandages wrapped around his right hand.
“How is he?” asked Sen.
He asked the question mostly to be polite. His qi and spiritual sense were already at work assessing the damage. Sen didn’t like what he was seeing.
“His condition is uncertain. A sect healer attended to him briefly, but with so many others in such dire condition—” the general trailed off.
Sen nodded his understanding. A sect healer might be well-intentioned, but they dealt almost exclusively with cultivators. They would overlook injuries or conditions in a mortal because a cultivator would easily survive them. He was certain that was what had happened here. The healers were focusing on the obviously life-threatening injuries, not realizing that Jing was dying right in front of them. It wasn’t obvious. If he hadn’t spent days and days trying to claw Luo Ping back from the brink of death and observing her body trying to fail in so many different ways, he might have missed it too. It was simple. Jing had pushed himself beyond his limits, and then kept doing it. He’d drawn too heavily on his body’s resources.
That alone might not have done it, but then he’d been injured. There was the eye, of course, but he’d taken some kind of blow to the torso. It had cracked bones, but there was more damage beneath. Organs had been injured. Paired with the overexertion and exhaustion, Jing’s body couldn’t heal itself. It was simply giving up. Sen looked down at his friend and wondered if it might not be kinder to let him go. If he saved Jing, what would he be saving him for? To hold an imaginary throne in a kingdom at war?
Sen didn’t think he would thank anyone for putting him in that position. Sen let all of those rational considerations linger in his head for a moment before he ignored them all. He intended to save his friend’s life. The problem was that he didn’t even have the right ingredients to make what Jing needed anymore. He’d used them up over the years and never replaced them. That was a stupid oversight, he thought. It had been all too easy to grow accustomed to having healers and alchemists at the sect to help the townspeople. Then again, he was in the capital. Someone had to have what he needed. He walked over to a small table and summoned the writing case that Auntie Caihong had given him. He swiftly got to work making ink as the general watched on in confusion.
“I’m going to need some things,” said Sen. “Do you have people who can act as runners and track them down?”
“Yes,” said General Mo, straightening up and looking very determined.
Sen wrote out a list of ingredients, dried the ink with a swift application of fire qi, and handed the list over. The general studied the list for a moment.
“Can we get these things from the sect healers?” he asked.
Sen considered that. It could work, as long as they didn’t send him anything too potent.
“You can. Just make sure they know I need things that are appropriate for mortals.”
“Yes, Lord Lu,” said the general before he left the room like a man intent on wringing whatever he needed out of the world.
Sen returned to the side of the bed and watched Jing breathing for a little while before he shook his head. He wanted to ask what Jing had been thinking, but it wasn’t even a real question. Sen knew what the man had been thinking. He’d been thinking that everyone was going to die, so holding anything back was pointless.
“Well,” said Sen. “I guess I finally get to pay you back for a tiny bit of what I owe you.”
Comments
Captain Nuclear
I always thought that Sens alchemy was his greatest, hidden strength. All that sword skill and slear skill and ... technique skill, obvious hard powers. But think of all the times he made pills, elixirs, and poultice for himself and others.
Trevor Mergen
Thanks!
Michael Head
Cool down after the peak. It might be weird, but I think I appreciate these parts more than the big battles. They shape how the story flows going forward, and I enjoy seeing the aftermath of everything the MC accomplished.
Angela Roberts
Just doing those Sen things.....like, yeah, I killed many thousands of beasts but that's yesterday's news, who's hurt?
