Unintended Cultivator

V13 Chapter 22 – Better By Far

“Here,” said Master Feng, handing Sen two items.

One of the items was the original manual for The Celestial Form body cultivation method. The other was a plain scroll with, Sen assumed, the translation he’d asked Master Feng to make. It had almost felt like cheating to ask the elder cultivator do that for him. However, having someone who knew the ancient and forgotten dialect translate it seemed far safer than trying to do it himself. No matter how much faster or better he learned now, thanks to all of those advancements, it didn’t make him infallible. Plus, there were bound to be quirks in the language that Master Feng would recognize instantly.

Sen might puzzle over those quirks for weeks and still come up with the wrong answer. With something as potentially lethal as body cultivation, it was not the time to let pride get in the way. He’d learned his lesson from how the Fivefold Body Transformation had very nearly killed him. He wanted the manual in hand. He wanted an accurate translation. As far as possible, he also wanted to gather every single ingredient required for the entire process. Starting without all of those things felt unnecessarily hazardous to him. As he started to leaf through the translation, his brows furrowed. He’d never even heard of most of the medicinal plants, alchemical reagents, and other ingredients the manual required. He glanced up at Master Feng, who gave him a sympathetic look.

“You’ll need to have a long talk with Caihong about all of that. I’ve heard of some of those ingredients, but even I’ve only seen a few of them in person. They aren’t the kinds of things that cultivators admit to possessing. It’s a good way to start a fight to the death.”

Sen forced away his frustration. He’d been hanging on to a lingering hope that this might be easy, but that had been foolish. Of course, a nascent soul body cultivation technique was going to require absurdly rare and difficult-to-find components. Nodding to the elder cultivator, Sen stored the manual and the translation in one of his storage rings. He wasn’t going to be doing anything with either of them until he talked with Auntie Caihong and probably Fu Ruolan. It wasn’t a guarantee by any stretch of the imagination, but they might actually have some of what he needed.

“You never needed anything like that?”

“A few times, but only for very special blacksmithing projects. Speaking of which, you said you wanted new swords.”

“Want? No,” said Sen with a shake of his head. “I love the swords you made me.”

“Ah, right. Not want, but need.”

“Is that why we’re here?” asked Sen, gesturing at the empty sect compound around them.

He’d never learned the names of the sects in the city before dismantling them. He used to make a point of learning those. It had been out of a vague feeling that he ought to at least remember what he’d destroyed. Sen had abandoned that practice more than a year earlier. Remembering those things served no purpose. Perhaps, if he’d been at all willing to allow those sects to reform after the war, it might have mattered. But he wasn’t willing to do that. It would just encourage the same failures that had led them all to where they were.

He didn’t want to beat back the spirit beasts for another ten thousand or twenty thousand years. He wanted to change the balance of power permanently. Unfortunately, he couldn’t enact his original plan. That had been to wipe out the spirit beasts entirely, but he’d had a lot of time to consider that notion. He knew better than most how fragile things in nature could be. Even one minor change could ripple out and affect vast regions. He’d been doing more than making minor changes, and his inability to predict the result had started to leave him chilled to the core.

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It was why he hadn’t burned down the wilds entirely. The simple existence of the spirit beasts suggested their necessity to the world. That he didn’t understand the relationship or their role was neither here nor there. Wiping them out could very well unbalance nature to such a degree that it would turn once lush areas into wastelands for reasons no one could determine or change. That meant that, like it or not, he was going to have to spare some of them. Admittedly, spirit beasts might rise again on their own simply by virtue of there being animals in the deep wilds. That exposure to dense qi could be enough to trigger the change, but he wasn’t certain.

That uncertainty was going to force his hand in this matter. He was going to have enough terrible karma on his hands as it was. He couldn’t imagine what killing an entire world would do to his karma, but he had no doubt that it would be ghastly. Sen would spare some of them, but it would be on his terms, and he planned to leave an empire behind to enforce his will. The spirit beasts would be allowed some land. Enough that even a few small kingdoms of them could survive. The continent was more than vast enough for that. But they would never again control the massive portions of the continent they once had. They would never again be allowed to accumulate such numbers.

It wasn’t a solution without problems. There would be future spirit beast uprisings. That always happened with suppressed groups sooner or later. He’d read about it happening across recorded history over and over again. There were alternatives, and Sen had considered them, but none were practical. One option would be trying to integrate the remaining spirit beasts into society, but their very natures wouldn’t accommodate that. Only the nine-tail foxes had shown any desire or even ability to do so. In the end, most spirit beasts were violent predators. More importantly, most of them wanted to be violent predators.

They could interact with humans once they reached a certain level of development, but those encounters were always fraught. Sen’s own dealings with the dragon and Boulder’s Shadow were a testament to that. Spirit beasts simply wanted different things from humans. The integration idea also failed the basic test of whether human society would accept them. After this war, there was no possibility of that. The hatred would run so deep that he imagined it would leave a permanent scar on humanity. Not that the spirit beasts would think much better of them, but he cared considerably less about their reactions. He would let them live, and that would have to be enough.

“What are you glowering about over there?” demanded Master Feng.

“I was thinking about what to do with the spirit beasts after the war.”

“So, you’re sure about letting some of them live?”

“Not in the slightest, but I am sure that I don’t know what wiping them out entirely would do to the natural world.”

Master Feng frowned, but nodded.

“Nature is terribly complicated. I’ll give you that much,” said the elder cultivator. “Still, I’m not sure how eager any of your followers will be about letting spirit beasts survive.”

“The cultivators will support it. They use beast cores in too many ways. Wiping out all of the spirit beasts will hurt their future prospects. Cultivator self-interest is often obnoxious, but it is reliable.”

“Very true. Still, you’re going to get resistance.”

“I know. There isn’t a lot I can do about that other than to try to explain it to the people in charge. I’m hoping that by the time this war is over, humanity will be so tired of war and violence that they’ll just accept anything that brings it to an end.”

“That may work for a while, but let a generation pass and you’ll start to see a change. The children of the people who fought in this war will start talking about how they need to finish the job. Or they’ll talk about getting revenge for everything the spirit beasts cost them. It won’t be rational, which will make it very difficult to stop. Besides, isn’t it a bit early to be planning for what you’ll do when you win?”

“Maybe, but I don’t want to get there and discover I have no plans or answers for anything.”

That got Sen an approving nod.

“That was the right answer. Better by far to have the plan and not need it. Now,” said Master Feng, “enough talk about the gloomy future. Let’s discuss what you need for your new swords.”