Unintended Cultivator

V13 Chapter 35 – And What If The Gods Descend

Leaving a conquered capital was always a logistical challenge for Sen and his people. They needed to leave enough soldiers and cultivators to realistically defend not only the city, but the nation at large. He couldn’t count on the nobility to do it, since many of them were dead or their houses disbanded. The same held for the local sects. Trained house guards, whose loyalty would always remain questionable, were usually absorbed into the army. That meant that the people he left behind needed to be at least nominally loyal to him, or at least not loyal to the fallen kingdom. Those ranks were usually comprised of the latter.

The leadership was typically a small core group who had originally come with Sen, or those who had been with him for long enough that they comprehended the realities. That held for the cultivators as much as the mortal soldiers. Of course, the total number of people left was always smaller than the remaining nobles of the kingdom thought was appropriate.

“Lord Lu, surely you jest. A thousand men?” demanded the handsome noble who had escaped death by virtue of not mistreating commoners. “How can so few people possibly defend us?”

Sen sighed, having already answered this question repeatedly. The fact that people kept asking told him that no one was paying nearly as much attention as they should be.

“Defend you from what?” asked Sen in a tone that should have alerted the wary to his growing impatience.

“From the—” started the man.

“Spirit beasts?” asked Sen, cutting him off. “The spirit beasts that I’ve all but culled from these lands?”

That seemed to leave the noble flatfooted for a moment, but he rallied.

“Spirit beasts are not the only threat to a kingdom. There are other kingdoms to worry about!”

“Which kingdoms? The ones to the north no longer exist. That is the empire. My

empire. Do you imagine that one of my provinces will attack another of my provinces? Perhaps you’re imagining an attack from the kingdoms to the south. I suspect that they will be far more worried about the army that I’m bringing to them than they will be about bringing an army to you.”“And what if the spirit beasts come over the Mountains of Sorrow?”

“And what if the gods descend from the heavens?” asked Sen.

“What?” asked the clearly baffled noble.

“Yes,” conceded Sen, “it is possible that the spirit beasts will come over the Mountains of Sorrow. It’s also possible that the gods will descend on us and usher in an age of peace. However, neither of those things is even remotely likely to happen. I have it on very good authority that there are only a few reasonably safe ways for man or spirit beast to cross those mountains in any numbers. If that was the strategy of the spirit beasts, it would have happened by now. After all, they have no incentive to allow anyone to unify the lands on this side of the mountains.”

“Perhaps, but you can’t know that for sure.”

“And?” asked Sen.

“And it will be my people who suffer if you’re wrong.”

“Your people? I think you meant to say my people. And, don’t delude yourself. Your people were already suffering. Just because nobles weren’t starving or attacked in your homes, it doesn’t mean that commoners were escaping those fates. You’re still here to make pointless arguments only because you didn’t actively make their lives worse. Rest assured that I’m aware you did exceedingly little to make their lives better.”

The man opened his mouth but hastily closed it when Sen’s expression almost dared him to suggest that improving the commoners’ lives wasn’t a noble’s responsibility. It was no secret that most nobles assumed that they enjoyed safety and luxury by some manner of right. It was also not a secret that many of them thought commoners deserved their lives of danger and poverty. Sen had reached a slightly more nuanced position on the matter. The concept of nobility was just too deeply entrenched in the minds of the people to do away with it entirely. If Sen had more time, he might be able to abolish it, but that wasn’t the work of a single generation. He was stuck with it for the time being.

Stolen story; please report.

But if he was stuck with it, the people allowed to have or maintain nobility weren’t getting it for free. Holding those titles would come with the expectation that they would protect the commoners in their domains. Protect them in truth. Not just make the occasional halfhearted gesture. It would also come with the expectation that they would act to improve the lives of the commoners. Sen wasn’t blindly optimistic. He didn’t think for a moment that the nobles were going to empty their coffers to provide free food to everyone. But he could ensure that they didn’t leave children and the elderly to die alone on the streets.

Other things could come later if there was a later. If he had his way, the empire would establish schools for the commoners. Sen’s own experiences with the differences between being literate and illiterate, between being able to do basic arithmetic and not being able to, informed his thoughts on that matter. If everyone were able to read, write, and do arithmetic, society as a whole would be a better, smoother-functioning thing. None of which dealt with the irritation in front of him, but those ideas soothed some of Sen’s misgivings about being a tyrant. There was the possibility that some good other than winning the war might come from it. Narrowing his eyes at the noble, Sen continued.

“The spirit beasts on the other side of those mountains have wars to fight there, which means that they’re likely to stay there. At least for now. Equally important, I have dispatched people to monitor the regions where a crossing is reasonable. They might come, but they will not come unnoticed.”

Sen neglected to mention that he’d only ordered that monitoring after he learned that Hsiao Jiayi had made the fraught journey with a whole group of cultivators and mortals. Granted, they hadn’t been hostile, but it was a detail he’d overlooked. Hells, it was a detail that everyone overlooked. Those mountains were such a profound barrier that it was easy to think of them as inviolable. Even Master Feng hadn’t considered it likely that anyone would attempt the crossing so early in the war. It was just so difficult that only a few groups of highly experienced merchant families had done it with any regularity before the war.

Since the war started, only Hsiao Jiayi had been doing it. She had, for what he considered very obvious reasons, brought increasingly large groups of mortals over those mountains on three occasions. While doing so had slightly softened his opinion of her, it hadn’t changed his thoughts about the rest of the cultivators on that side of the mountains. Sen’s real fear was that it was only a matter of time before refugees tried to make the journey in desperation. He feared crossing those mountains only to find the other side littered with the corpses of mortals who had tried and failed to escape.

Yet, like so many other things, there was precious little he could do about it. He had his own war to fight and limited resources. Even after conscripting the armies of failed nations, his own army had only grown so much. Leaving soldiers behind in every conquered land had contributed to that. Not every nation had a large standing army. Some didn’t have one at all. Sen’s army had also taken losses in every battle. It was inevitable, even when everything went right. So, while his army was bigger than it had been when he started, it wasn’t some unstoppable force. The generals estimated that it was perhaps three times the size it had been when he started. To Sen’s mind, it was an impossibly large group of mortals, but that only mattered when you were fighting other mortals.

They were fighting spirit beasts. For every weak spirit beast, you needed at least three or four trained mortals to bring it down. Usually at the cost of the mortals’ lives. If you wanted to preserve them, you needed to group those mortals with a cultivator, of which there were a finite number. More powerful cultivators changed the math a bit, since they could kill spirit beasts faster and in larger numbers, but their power was also finite. An army of thirty or forty thousand mortals was, with normal cultivator assistance, perhaps the equal of an army of ten or fifteen thousand spirit beasts. Nascent soul cultivators could shift that math even more, but truth was truth. There were more spirit beasts than mortals and cultivators to fight them.

The spirit beasts could absorb loss after loss and continue the war. Sen had to win every battle with as few losses as possible. That meant reserving cultivators whenever possible so they didn’t spend their qi too quickly, and could recover it enough for the next battle. That had put more of the fighting on the mortals than Sen had expected. The number of mortal dead was in the thousands already, and would just continue to grow. He was going to have to live with that. Sen did not expect it to prove easy.

“Lord Lu—” started the handsome noble again.

“Enough!” roared Sen, making everyone in the throne room freeze.

He stood and walked over to the noble, looming over the man. It wasn’t a conscious looming. He was just a lot taller than the noble.

“Lord Lu,” said the man in a tight voice.

“Are you harboring some fantasy that this war is to serve my ego? My vanity?”

“Of course not,” said the noble in an obvious lie.

“Of course not,” repeated Sen. “I suggest that, before you utter another word about your people, or your lands, or the defense of this place, you speak with the generals in this room. Ask them what we’ve spent most of our time doing. Ask them what my goals and orders have been. Ask them what it’s like to face down thousands of spirit beasts that are charging straight at you with no goal but to kill every last human they see. Then, ask yourself if you’d like to see that in person, because that is where this conversation will end if you continue to try my patience.”