Unintended Cultivator

V13 Chapter 11 – Bones

Walking through the ruins of the sect was somewhat eerie for Sen. It wasn’t the emptiness of the place. He’d long since grown used to the grim sight of empty towns, empty farms, and even empty sects. The war had shown him enough of them. It was rather that this ancient sect had been vast. It monopolized a disproportionate amount of the city's grounds and must have functioned almost like a city within a city. Yet, in the now, it was gone. Whatever triumphs and failures this sect had experienced, whatever heavens-kissed geniuses it might have produced, all of it had been ground out of memory and even legend by the millstones of time and death. It felt like an ominous warning of what the future might hold for his sect and his empire.

Sen was realistic enough to understand that no sect or empire could last forever. An eternal empire outside the domain of the heavens truly was the goal of madmen. No matter what a man or cultivator built, it could never withstand the flaws that arrogance, imperfect insight, and simple haste would introduce into its very foundations. That meant that it was not a question of if a sect or empire would fall, but merely when and how its inevitable demise would arrive. Time would apply pressure to those weaknesses, and death would slowly but surely cull those who held faith in the sect or empire’s principles. After that, anything from stagnation to an external threat or internal strife could bring it down.

Sen had read about kingdom after kingdom and even small empires that had risen and fallen in precisely that way. He had personally brought about the end of more than one sect because the people in the sect were too arrogant, too bloodthirsty, or simply too unprincipled to tolerate. That was to say nothing of sects eliminating each other or falling to the spirit beasts. In the last case, though, Sen was willing to accept that it been a matter of numbers more than any specific failing on the part of those sects. Numbers were the great equalizer. It was something that he was careful never to forget. No cultivator could hurl techniques endlessly, not even him. Once he ran out of qi to use for techniques, he’d have to rely on his body alone.

Granted, body cultivation had given him terrible strength and speed, but what would that mean against fifty thousand or a hundred thousand spirit beasts? If he had to fight them all with nothing but a jian or spear in hand, he would get tired. It might take days, but it would happen. That was why most cultivators did their best to end their fights quickly and with an overwhelming show of strength. When you couldn’t do that, though, it exposed the flaw in cultivator arrogance. Bring enough bodies to the fight, and you could bring anyone down. All it took was an enemy willing to shed an ocean of blood to accomplish the feat. Of course, most cultivators would retreat from such a fight, but retreat wasn’t always possible. Some fights, you had to win no matter what.

But the fight against time and death was one that no empire or sect could fight against forever. Nor did Sen intend to create an eternal empire. His only goal was to create an empire that would last long enough to protect his daughter for the length of her life. Maybe that would be a hundred years, and maybe it would be a thousand. As long as the empire remained to protect her, that would be enough. However, the sight around him seemed to mock that goal. All things crumble, the ruins seemed to whisper like a specter of death. All power is finite. He did his best to shove those thoughts to the back of his mind. Suppressing them entirely was out of the question. They were just too close to all of his current problems. What he could do was quiet them while he found whatever he’d been drawn to this disquieting place to retrieve.

“Where are the bones?” asked Falling Leaf, shattering the silence that had permeated the ruins.

“What do you mean?” asked Sen.

“This city was large. Unless it was abandoned, shouldn’t there be bones?”

Sen thought that over. He had no idea how long it took bones to degrade, but he thought he knew why there weren’t any in view.

“Unless I miss my guess, they’re in those mountains of dirt, stone. and trees over there,” said Sen, gesturing to the new additions to geography rising into the air outside the city. “We’ll probably find some bones inside the buildings.”

Falling Leaf nodded and asked, “Which building should we look in?”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It was a good question. Dozens of buildings, or the remains of buildings, surrounded them. It was easy for Sen to imagine thousands of cultivators moving between these buildings. He let the pull guide him in the right direction.

“A little farther that way, I think,” he said, walking toward what he hoped would be a useful find.

After several minutes of silence, Sen broke the silence.

“I wonder who they were,” he said, before clarifying. “I mean, the sect.”

“They were cultivators,” said Falling Leaf as if it required no additional explanation.

“Yes, but they had to have believed in things. I wonder what they believed in.”

“They believed in power. Like every cultivator. Everything else is just--” she trailed off as a look of concentration overtook her face. “Artifice.”

Sen gave his friend a strange look. It wasn’t the kind of word she used most of the time.

“That’s one way to describe it, I guess.”

“It’s what the Caihong called it,” said Falling Leaf.

“Ah,” replied Sen, finally understanding.

That was absolutely a word Auntie Caihong would have used, although he was surprised she’d used it to describe what cultivators did. She’d always struck him as friendlier toward sects and their traditions than Uncle Kho or even Master Feng. Then again, she also talked about them in terms of their utility. He’d once heard her call them a useful tool. And they are a useful tool, he thought. They provide structure for younger cultivators and a way to sift for the true geniuses. I suppose they also provide a way for the sect leadership to accomplish trivial yet necessary tasks. However, for a nascent soul cultivator, that was just about the limit of their utility.

The only other things a sect might do for a nascent soul cultivator were allow them to pass down a specific cultivation approach or build a legacy. That was what Sen was trying to do with his sect. Pass down an approach that was, he fervently hoped, a shade kinder and less maliciously ruthless. Not that he had high hopes for that goal. The more realistic outcome was that his sect would produce a handful of individual cultivators who were kinder and less maliciously ruthless. Even that much would be a victory of near monumental significance. Soon, though, the pull inside of him grew so potent that it drowned out almost every other thought. He looked around and pointed at a mostly intact building.

“That one,” he said.

Stepping through the empty doorway at the front of the building, it was immediately clear that this had been a sect library. There were shelves filled with scrolls and manuals. Sen walked over and gently touched a scroll. It crumbled immediately, which made him sigh. There was potentially priceless knowledge in these scrolls and manuals, and he had no idea how to preserve them. He resisted the urge to touch other scrolls. Just because he didn’t know how to save them, it didn’t mean they couldn’t be saved. He’d need to talk to Uncle Kho or Master Feng. If anyone knew of a way, one of them would.

“Bones!” shouted Falling Leaf.

He glanced over to see her wearing an excited look that swiftly faded into a frown. A smile briefly crossed his lips. He understood her brief excitement and why she might be having second thoughts about it. After all, those bones had been a person once. The fact that they were dead was a questionable reason to be excited. At least, it was if they weren’t an enemy. He walked over to where she was standing and, indeed, there was a skeleton there wrapped in a few tatters of what might once have been cloth. Sen wondered who they had been. They might well have been the final master of this library. Of course, they might also have just been some unfortunate disciple caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. A mystery he wasn’t likely to ever solve.

“Don’t touch any of the manuals or scrolls,” Sen warned Falling Leaf. “They’ll crumble to dust.”

“You like those things better than I do,” she answered with an indifferent shrug.

It took an hour of cautious searching before Sen finally found what he’d come for. In a small room that had probably been an office, there was another skeleton. Reaching out, Sen tried to slip a storage ring off the bone finger. The bones immediately broke apart at the slightest movement. Sen concentrated for a moment and undid the laughably rudimentary protections on the ring. After deeper consideration, he thought that maybe he should be impressed that the ring still functioned at all. He knew enough about them to know that they didn’t last forever. He got a partial explanation for the ring’s longevity when he found only one item stored inside the ring. Withdrawing the manual, he considered the plain cover before opening it.

He glanced over the first few pages. Written language had changed in the last few thousand years, it seemed. Adding to the complexity, he got the feeling that it had been written in a dialect. He managed to glean enough meaning to understand the title and what the manual was about. The uninspiring title was The Celestial Form. What was very inspiring to Sen was that it was a body cultivation manual. If the bits and pieces of the language he was grasping were giving him an accurate picture, it was a manual aimed at nascent soul cultivators. He also knew he’d found what he’d been looking for when that pull inside of him vanished.

“What is it?” asked Falling Leaf.

“Something I didn’t think even existed,” said Sen, staring at the thin manual in his hands.