Unintended Cultivator

V12 Bloopers

After a moment or two, Sen recalled something that he’d been meaning to ask about for a while.

“Did Laughing River ever ascend? I mean, I went through a lot of trouble to get that rock for him.”

“You mean that impossibly valuable spatial treasure?”

“Yeah, his special rock. Did he use it to ascend like he said he was going to?”

Her expression didn’t change. She just lifted her cup and took a sip of wine. Sen still felt something shift in the fox-woman, though. Rubbing his face with his hands, he tried to decide if this was something he needed to know about. I could just let it go, he thought. The problem was that, unlike even a year or two before, he couldn’t ignore extremely powerful old monsters wandering around and doing things. He was in charge now. That meant he actually needed to know.

“What’s he doing instead of ascending?” asked Sen in a tired voice.

“I never said—” started Misty Peak.

“Oh, by the thousand hells, just tell me.”

Letting out a huff of breath, she said, “He’s opened a dance club.”

“A dance club?”

“Yeah.”

“I have—” Sen paused and tried to gather his thoughts. “I have so many questions, but I guess this is the most important one. Why?”

“Apparently, that spatial treasure—”

“His special rock.”

“Apparently,” she continued through gritted teeth, “his special rock gave him a glimpse of something called dubstep. Now, he’s obsessed.”

***

It turned out to be a good thing that Sen didn’t wander off, because some other sect members eventually came looking for the woman he’d borrowed. He started to make his way down toward them and caught one of them trying to make a life-ending mistake.

“She doesn’t deserve that treasure. If she found it, she should have brought it back and given it to us. I’ll remedy that mistake before she wastes what’s left of it.”

“Will you now?” asked Sen from directly above them.

The man who’d been reaching out to take the natural treasure yanked his hand back and stumbled away from the woman. Sen landed next to the cultivator whose trance was so complete that she seemed to be wholly unaware of the situation unfolding around her.

“Lord Lu. I was just—” started the man.

“Stealing,” finished Sen, before he corrected himself. “Robbing, actually. That’s what it’s called when you thuggishly take something from someone.”

“Thuggishly?” said the bewildered man. “I wouldn’t describe—”

“Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t, but we all know that the only opinion that matters here is mine. So,” said Sen, walking a circle around the other cultivator, “the question is what to do with you. Clearly, you must be punished, and idle hands are the devil’s workshop. I guess I could just cut them off.”

“What?” shrieked the man.

“Yeah, you’d be no good for fighting after that. Scratch the dismemberment.”

Sen pondered on it for a long moment before he snapped his fingers and shouted, “I’ve got it!”

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He waved his hand, and several undersized desks and chairs appeared. With another wave of his hand, a chalkboard was summoned from a storage ring. He pointed at the desks.

“Sit.”

As the cultivators arranged themselves on the uncomfortable chairs, Sen scrawled a sentence on the chalkboard.

“You will write this out until I’m satisfied,” he commanded.

The cultivator with sticky fingers stared at the chalkboard for several long moments before he asked, “Does that say, I will not be a thuggishly thieving d-bag?”

Sen fixed him with a hard look.

“Yup.”

“How many repetitions do you expect it will take?”

“Not that many. Twenty, thirty thousand, tops.”

***

“Do you think we should help them?” asked Kho Jaw-Long as he watched the battle below with idle interest.

“No,” said Feng Ming reflexively.

“Ming,” chided Kho.

Sighing, Feng Ming glanced at his old friend before returning to his own evaluation of the clash between humanity and spirit beasts below. It was going about, well, about as terribly as it could go. The walls were ready to crumble at any second. The people who were fighting weren’t doing a good job of it. Half the place was already on fire. Even the spirit beasts looked like their hearts weren’t really in it. Feng Ming decided his first instinct had been the right one.

“Let’s just move on. Saving that place looks like a lot of work.”

“Where’s your compassion?”

“I left it in San Francisco with my heart.”

“That’s a good song,” murmured Kho.

They watched the scene below in silence for most of a minute before Kho looked at Feng Ming and asked, “What if I give you a cookie?”

Feng Ming gave the other cultivator a sharp, suspicious look.

“Do you have the cookie with you?”

***

Suppressing his smile, Sen turned to the second cultivator. Unlike the other sect members, she didn’t look relieved at all. If anything, she looked even angrier.

“You have no right to do this!” she shouted at him.

He could feel her qi clawing at the bonds that held her. He met her glare with a flat expression.

“You must have stolen something good,” he answered, making sure his voice carried.

He removed no less than three storage treasures from her person, one of them well hidden inside her robes.

“You bastard!” she shrieked.

“Quite possibly,” said Sen, unconcerned. “I never did know my father.”

The first two storage treasures held a lot of value. There was a meaningful amount of silver and gold. He also noted some decent natural treasures and a substantial number of pills. He might have been more interested in the pills if he hadn’t been certain he could make something better. Given the woman’s reaction, he suspected that at least a portion of what he’d seen had been stolen from the sect. But none of it was worth taking to him. When he turned to the final storage treasure, though, it contained only one item. Or, rather, it contained a multitude of one item. He removed one from the ring and just studied it for a while before he gave the woman a perplexed look.

“Okay. The money, the natural treasures, and the pills, I understand. But this,” he said, holding up the item, “I don’t get. Why do you have five hundred packages of cheap, shrimp-flavored ramen?”

“Don’t judge me. I like ramen!”

“It’s not the ramen. It’s the flavor!” shouted Sen. “Why? Why would you do that to yourself? Who hurt you?”

***

“I need to find nascent soul fire-attributed and water-attributed natural treasures. I need a few other things, but those are the crucial components. If I can’t find them, I can’t make what I need to make.”

Chou Dai Lu looked stunned and gave voice to what Sen imagined everyone else was thinking.

“Patriarch, such treasures are beyond rare. A cultivator can go a lifetime and never find such a thing.”

In other words, his statement about finding them in less than a day had to sound like an outrageous and unachievable boast.

“That’s true,” admitted Sen, “but most cultivators aren’t willing to go as far into the wilds as I am.”

“What about the spirit beasts?” asked Chou Dai Lu.

“What about them?” asked Sen, unsure of what she was getting at.

“What if they find you in the wilds?”

“I think it could go one of several ways. In the first scenario, the spirit beasts attack and, well, they all die terrible, gruesome, painful deaths. After which, I seize their cores as prizes of war.”

Chou Dai Lu’s eyes were wide when she asked, “And in the other scenarios?”

“In the second scenario, they all run away like frightened bunnies. And, because I’m basically lazy by nature, I let them go. In the final scenario, I convince them to betray the Beast King.”

“How will you do that?”

“Beachfront property.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That tells me you’ve never been to the beach,” said Sen, giving the disciple a sad look. “Here’s what you do. You get yourself one of those outdoor chaise lounges. Then, you whip up some Mai Tais. You lie out in the sun, sip your drink, and listen to the waves crashing. It’s magical.”

“What else?” asked Chou Dai Lu, her eyes sparkling.

Sen frowned at her.

“What do you mean, what else? That’s it. That’s what you do,” said Sen, before a thoughtful look crossed his face. “Well, I guess you could kill a sea monster now and then if you feel like you need some exercise.”

***

So ends Unintended Cultivator Volume 12. Sen and company will return in Unintended Cultivator Volume 13.