Unintended Cultivator

V13 Chapter 7 – Maybe, It’s A Trick

As Sen flew them over the wilds, he couldn’t help but stare a little at the trees. They were different from the trees where he grew up, if no less dense. Despite having seen them for a while now, he hadn’t taken the time to really study them. There were more fruit trees than he was used to seeing outside of an orchard. Some of them were even oddly bright shades of orange and yellow. It was only when Master Feng had said the orange ones were quite tasty that Sen had even thought about eating them. If there was one thing every alchemist knew, it was that you didn’t eat anything you didn’t know was safe.

Aside from the fruit trees, he noticed that the leaves of the trees were different as well. Some were almost absurdly sized to his eyes, while others were long and slender. The plants at ground level were different as well, although not quite as starkly different. He was used to grasses, ferns, and various kinds of mosses that were only occasionally broken up by flowers and other plants. Here, the grasses were taller and thicker, but tended to grow in clumps. Almost like they were trying to defend themselves from all of the other plants, like some of the vividly colored flowers. Months earlier, Master Feng had surprisingly been the one to explain why the vegetation was different in the south.

“It’s the weather. It’s warmer in this part of the continent. It means most of these plants get a longer growing season. Plus, the winters are mild. Plants that couldn’t survive the harshness of Kho’s mountain will thrive in a place like this.”

Sen had stared at his master for half a minute before he asked, “Why do you know that?”

Master Feng gave him an amused look and answered with his own question.

“Why wouldn’t I know that?”

Sen had taken that for what the gentle denial it was. There was a story there that Master Feng didn’t intend to share with him. At least, he didn’t intend to share it at the moment. Of course, knowing the answer didn’t take anything away from the strangeness of what Sen was seeing. Taken as a whole, the sight was so different from what he grew up around that it threatened to unnerve him. Fortunately, the alchemist in him was far more interested in what his intuition told him he could do with some of the plants, roots, and the reagents he sensed.

He had been picking things up as the army moved, but only occasionally. The top priorities for him and the army were always killing the spirit beasts and, if necessary, restoring order. Sen felt that there had been too much of the latter in this kingdom, but he had to take the situation in each country as he found it. Here, the threads that held society together were apparently thinner and weaker than they were elsewhere. It was sad, but it might have actually helped him in some ways. People who weren’t firmly loyal to a strong ruler often proved more than willing to give that loyalty to someone else. At least, they would as long as that other person provided trivial things like protection and food.

The longer the campaign dragged on, the more Sen found himself thinking about the nature of a society. What it was. What held it together. He spent even more time thinking about what tore one apart. Some things were obvious. If the nobles and royalty abused the commoners or were just indifferent to their suffering, that tended to erode things. It would have been easy to stop thinking right there. He had put away his childhood biases enough to acknowledge that not every noble was evil right down to their marrow. However, much of what he’d seen since had made him very skeptical of the nobility. Even the ones who weren’t malicious were often blind to obvious suffering.

Sen’s goal wasn’t to alleviate all the suffering in the world. He’d heard that some groups of monks were dedicated to such things, but he was a cultivator. Suffering and pain were part of his path. Sometimes, cultivators were the recipients of them. Other times, they delivered them. But blindness to them was something different. He didn’t know if the nobles were intentionally choosing not to see it, or if they simply lacked the experience to recognize it. Either way, it made them poor stewards for those beneath their sway. Add even a little basic human greed to that, and it wasn’t shocking that so many nobles were so lacking in empathy and compassion.

However, Uncle Kho would never tolerate such lazy thinking on Sen’s part. It was part of why the elder cultivator had made Sen read all those historical scrolls. Those scrolls were often flawed. They did have a singular advantage. They were often also written long after anyone they talked about had died. That gave them a certain latitude, but it also gave them perspective. Yes, nobles could be and often were a big part of the problem. They were rarely the only problem. Poverty could undermine a kingdom just as fast as terrible leadership. It only took a few years with bad harvests to create utter chaos. Royalty with even a shadow of conscience would often open their treasuries to buy food from neighboring kingdoms in that situation. That could alleviate the problem, but it wasn’t something they could do over and over again. After a few years, the kingdom could be bled dry.

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A different problem, one that Sen was increasingly aware of as his army moved across the land, was transportation. It didn’t matter if there was an excellent harvest in one part of the kingdom if the food couldn’t get anywhere else before it rotted. Even with wagons and oxen, the pace of travel was slow on good roads. On bad roads, there wasn’t even a point in trying. He had also learned that keeping roads in good condition wasn’t easy or cheap. It took an appalling amount of mortal labor to keep the roads in his home kingdom in their current passable condition. All of that labor soaked up way more of the taxes Jing had collected each year than Sen ever would have credited.

That, at least, was a problem for which Sen had a partial solution. There were plenty of cultivators with a focus on earth qi. They could do a lot to help speed projects like that along. Sen was going to make it mandatory that every cultivator spend at least a few weeks each year on projects that benefited the empire. Water cultivators could help with managing things like irrigation. Fire cultivators could, well, he wasn’t sure yet. He might have them do something with the military. He didn’t have it all worked out in his head, yet. What he did know was that those cultivators benefited from the roads, the crops mortals grew, and the general order created by having a society around them. They could and would, by the heavens, do something to contribute.

“Why are you making that expression?” asked Falling Leaf, drawing Sen out of his thoughts.

“What expression?”

She waved a hand at his face and said, “That expression. You look like you want to punish someone.”

“No,” he said. “Not punish.”

After he thought about it for a moment, though, he realized that’s exactly how all of the living cultivators would feel about it. They’d say that he was making them waste their hard-earned qi on mortal work. To say nothing of the time they couldn’t spend cultivating or mastering their techniques. Oh, they were not going to like the new world he intended to drag them into. Of course, they didn’t like the things he was making them do now. So, maybe only having to do some labor would seem like a reprieve. Probably not, he thought. They’ll just have to learn to live with itin the sameway I’ve had to learn to live with this war. Before his mind could fall back into contemplation, Falling Leaf posed another question.

“How much farther?”

Sen checked on how the tug felt. It wasn’t really a tug anymore. It had grown into a very strong pull.

“Not much farther,” he said.

After another fifteen minutes of flight, Sen brought the qi platform to a stop. Whatever it was that he was supposed to find, it was directly below them. He looked around from his vantage point in the air and saw…There was nothing but plants as far as the eye could see in any direction. Falling Leaf was peering around with curiosity, but she clearly hadn’t noticed anything worth their attention. Sen wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but this hadn’t been it.

“Maybe it’s a natural treasure I’m supposed to find,” he said, lowering the platform to the ground.

He didn’t think it was a natural treasure. He hadn’t sensed anything in the immediate vicinity that struck him as an unusually powerful source of qi. He just couldn’t fathom what else would be in this specific location. He and Falling Leaf spent most of an hour searching the area and came up empty-handed.

“This is bizarre,” said Sen.

“Maybe it’s a trick,” said Falling Leaf, casting a suspicious look around and then at the sky.

“I guess it could be,” admitted Sen, “but those feelings have always led me to something before now. It wasn’t always a good thing, but there was always a goal of some kind.”

Falling Leaf considered that for a moment before she shrugged.

“There are things here. Trees. Birds. Dirt,” she said with a light kick that exposed some dark, rich soil.

Sen huffed out a little laugh and said, “True, those are all things, but we could have found any of them closer to the city. Why bring us all the way out here just to look at trees and dirt?”

Falling Leaf studied the ground a little longer and nudged the exposed dirt with her toe.

“Maybe they buried it.”

“Buried treasure?” asked Sen with a lifted eyebrow.

Falling Leaf blinked at him a few times with an expression of utter innocence. It took Sen a moment to remember that the ghost panther would never have heard any of those stories. Burying something valuable might even be common practice among certain groups of spirit beasts. He smiled at his friend.

“I guess there’s no harm in checking,” he said.

Crouching down, Sen pressed his open hand against the ground. It wasn’t strictly necessary for his purposes, but it did seem to make it feel somewhat more natural. He sank his qi and spiritual sense into the earth, pushing it both down and out, looking for anything out of the ordinary. After a few seconds, he shot to his feet in surprise.

“Okay. I was not expecting that,” he said. “You were right. Buried treasure, of a sort.”

Falling Leaf slowly rose out of the defensive stance she’d taken when he’d lurched up to his feet.

“Of a sort?” she asked.

“There’s a city down there. Or, what used to be a city.”