Unintended Cultivator

V13 Chapter 8 – Excavation, Part 1

Falling Leaf looked from Sen to the ground, and then back at Sen.

“Is there a cave?” she finally asked, seeming perplexed.

Sen shook his head. The idea of a cavern of some kind might have been the natural assumption, but this city had simply been swallowed up by time and the soil. At least, that was the best assumption he could make about it. He’d only been able to glean so much from his spiritual sense and qi. He could tell that there were structures down there, some of them quite large, and that they seemed to follow the patterns of human construction. Nothing in his education suggested that spirit beasts built cities, but the sapient ones might have at some point in the past. That it was improbable didn’t put it beyond the realm of possibility.

“No,” Sen reiterated. “It’s just a city’s worth of buildings that have been covered over with thousands of years of dirt.”

The ghost panther still seemed to be struggling with the idea, because she asked, “Did the humans abandon it?”

“Either that, or some very irate nascent soul cultivator with a focus on earth qi punished the city for something. That seems unlikely to me, though. The sheer amount of qi it would take to sink an entire city—” Sen trailed off.

It was mad. Even contemplating the very idea was madness. Unfortunately, once the notion of trying to lift the entire city to the surface appeared in Sen’s mind, he couldn’t suppress it. Sen understood why it appealed to him so much. He’d done almost nothing but kill for the last two years. Yes, that had allowed him to refine many of his techniques and improve his qi control, but it had been taxing on his soul. The prospect of reaching back into the past and dragging a whole city out of it was, well, not the exact opposite of killing. It was still miles closer to creation than he’d been in a long time. He tried to push the thoughts away. Even if he wanted to do it, he doubted that even he had that kind of power.

“Although,” he murmured.

“Although, what?” asked Falling Leaf.

He wouldn’t actually know if he could do it until he worked out how he would do it.

“I’m thinking about pulling that city up to ground level,” Sen answered.

The ghost panther tilted her head to one side and asked, “Why do such a thing? It seems pointless.”

“Mostly to see if I can,” admitted Sen absently. “But, also, I’m pretty sure whatever I’m looking for is in that city. It’ll be a lot easier to find that thing if the city is up here and easily accessible.”

It was probably true, as far as it went. Not that it helped his words sound any less like an excuse to do something he wanted to do. Falling Leaf’s skeptical expression told him it didn’t just sound that way to him. Something in his expression must have told her he was going to do this one way or the other. She held out a hand. Sen peered at it blankly, unsure what she wanted.

“Um,” he said.

“I’ve seen this before. You’ll be here until you’re done. It will be very, very boring while you mutter and do things with flags for hours and hours. Then, it will be terrifying.”

“I think that might be exaggerating things a little.”

Falling Leaf stared at him, her gaze threatening to bore into his skull.

“Okay,” said Sen, “let’s say that’s all true. What do you want?”

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“Give me delicious things to eat, so I’ll be less bored.”

“Don’t you have entire storage rings filled with food?” he demanded.

“Yes,” she said without the slightest trace of embarrassment or shame.

“I—” Sen started, but he wasn’t sure what should come next.

Should he chide her? Should he laugh? Finally, he just decided that submitting to the demand would be easier. He’d give in eventually anyway. Why not just skip past the bickering and do it? He walked over to a tree that looked like it would provide shade for most of the day. He summoned a table and two chairs from a storage ring. Then, he loaded the table down with pastries, hot dishes, and some fruit. Falling Leaf came over. She eyed the food critically before nodding in approval. Sitting down, she pulled an entire roasted duck to her and began to pull pieces of meat off it. She made a contented noise. Since that was probably the last thing she was going to say until she ran out of food, Sen turned his attention back to the problem at hand.

Even after all this time, working with earth qi was still more challenging for him than working with other kinds of qi. Not impossible, by any means, but he just didn’t have as much practice. Some of that was because working with soil and stone was simply slower. Most of the time, he needed techniques that could work in a split second or, barring that, ones that only needed a few seconds of preparation. Even the stone spear technique he used took more time to prepare than he’d like. It was generally something he could only use at the very beginning or very end of a fight or battle, and that was working on a relatively small scale. Moving an entire city was so far beyond that kind of technique that he considered them practically unrelated.

Sen crouched down and placed his hand against the ground again. Then, he spent the next three hours exploring the situation underground. The city was vast and stretched for miles in each direction. It would dwarf the current capital of the…Sen mentally replaced the work kingdom with province. However confident he might sound when he said those things out loud, it still felt very uncomfortable in his head. He was also forced to admit that Falling Leaf was right. He did mutter to himself while he was doing these kinds of things. It took a few seconds of hard thought to figure out why no one had ever said anything about it before. Oh, he realized. It’s because I usually do this kind of thing by myself.

What he learned from his extended study was that the problem was even more complicated than he thought. Part of the reason why the city was now buried had to do with where they’d built it. Sen had spent enough time sinking his qi and senses into the earth around cities that he’d picked up a few things he’d confirmed with the people who designed and constructed buildings. They normally tried to build on bedrock if they could get to it without too much trouble. Apparently, it added tremendous stability. The people who’d built this city probably thought they were building on bedrock, and it would have been fine if they’d been building a village.

But the rock they’d been building on was relatively thin and sat on top of a lot of loose material. Time, the total weight, and what he had to assume were a lot of other things he didn’t know about let that thin slab of rock sink. It wouldn’t have even been a problem if there wasn’t a city on top of it. As things stood now, though, Sen needed to draw rock up from far deeper to support that slab. He’d also need to clear away all the loose material between that deeper rock and the slab supporting the city. As if that wasn’t enough, all of the soil, trees, and plants over the city would also need to go somewhere else. He could end up creating small mountains of loose soil, rock, and plants.

Sen didn’t need to imagine what that would mean the next time a heavy rain came through. He’d witnessed what Master Feng had called a mudslide. Even knowing that he could survive it without much trouble, the sight had still been unnerving. The destruction after the disaster finally ended had been truly appalling. If I am going to do this, mused Sen, I need to figure out something to do with all that loose material. I don’t want to unearth this place just to have it swallowed up or destroyed by mud the next time it rains. Depending on the condition of the buildings, we might even be able to reclaim this city someday.

Sen wasn’t sure about that last part. It might be more work than it was worth, but he’d started clinging to any reason to be hopeful. He could even make rebuilding the city a kind of punishment. There were bound to be people after the war, cultivators and mortals, who didn’t like the new order. He would need somewhere to put them, as well as something for them to do while they reflected on their errors. Rebuilding a giant city would be enough to keep even powerful, long-lived cultivators occupied for a while. Of course, that all depended on whether he could actually raise the city. A small smile played across his lips at that thought. He could do it. At least, he thought he could.