BOOK 12: CHAPTER 35: EASTWARD MARCH

Depending on whether it was the mortals or the cultivators, Sen’s return to the camp with the Matriarch and her disciples was met with one of two responses. The mortals reacted with near-total indifference. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand the value of adding another nascent soul cultivator. The military leadership certainly grasped her value in a battle, even while most of them probably saw their tenuous grip on power slip even more. Yet, for all the background implications, most of the mortals understood they would probably never interact with the Matriarch. That made her arrival in the camp a true non-event for them.

The cultivators, on the other hand, quietly but firmly lost their collective minds. The carefully established hierarchy they’d established was thrown into utter disarray. The Matriarch and her disciples were a new faction. They were by all measures a tiny faction. But they were a faction with a nascent soul cultivator. She could, by the unspoken rules of cultivation, order any and all of them around with impunity. Her nascent soul power stood ready to enforce her decrees. At least, it did right up to the point that Sen decided otherwise.

For his part, Sen didn’t care. He hadn’t cared when they were establishing that hierarchy in the first place. He certainly didn’t care now that they had to figure it out again based not only on their own power, but on their perceived favor with the new nascent soul cultivator. Nor, he suspected, did the Matriarch particularly care either. She had far weightier things on her mind than the petty squabbles of cultivators who were beneath her notice. Even her disciples reacted to that shuffling of standing with a sort of blank apathy.

That told Sen everything he needed to know about the health of their minds. Most cultivators were positively obsessed with honor and how cultivators from different sects perceived them. In other times, the remaining Order disciples would have worked tirelessly to cement the position of and opinions about their Matriarch. As things stood, they couldn’t even be bothered to pretend to care. That had a strange effect that Sen hadn’t expected. The less the Matriarch and her disciples seemed to care, the harder the rest of the cultivators seemed to work to gain their approval. In the end, he decided that it was better for them to occupy themselves with that stupidity than with some other form of more destructive stupidity.

As the march continued, turning east to follow the road to the coast, the strict routine made the days start bleeding into each other for Sen. There were occasional surprises in the kinds of spirit beasts they ran into. However, he found himself taking a less and less active role in the daily training of the troops as they refined their tactics. Instead, he found himself instructing the poor girl he’d almost accidentally left no choice but to join his sect. While she never complained, Sen suspected that she didn’t particularly enjoy the training.

He got the distinct feeling that, before she’d become his disciple, she’d considered herself a highly skilled swordswoman. It was a notion he’d found laughable, although Sen made a genuine effort not to let that opinion show. Master Feng’s standards were, he was coming to understand, of the sort that most cultivators simply weren’t able to live up to. It was an odd thing coming to that understanding. He’d known it before, but that knowledge had been largely abstract. He’d developed that knowledge in reaction to all of the people he’d fought who hadn’t been able to keep pace with him. The cases were isolated, which let him assume that the skills of those particular cultivators were simply poor.

Teaching someone was a different thing entirely. When he’d been training, they’d had to force him to stop. It had been an all-day, every-day occupation for him. After an hour or two of training and sparring with him, even when he limited his strength and speed, Chou Dai Lu would often be on the verge of collapse. Some of that would be resolved when she settled on a body cultivation method. It would help boost things like her strength and endurance. Yet, there was more to it than that. There was a mental aspect, a willingness to drive oneself beyond

exhaustion, that most cultivators seemed to lack.

At first, Sen had assumed it was subtle laziness. Watching Chou Dai Lu had cured him of that false assumption. There was no faking the dull eyes and deteriorating coordination that came with being pushed to the very edge of one’s ability and forced to stay there. In turn, he had been forced to increasingly limit the duration and intensity of their combat training. Otherwise, she simply wouldn’t have had the energy to learn anything else. Not that she was in quite the same situation that he had been in.

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She already knew how to read and write. Her grasp of history was better than his had been at the beginning of his training. Although, it wasn’t as good as his had eventually become. Sadly, he didn’t have the extensive collection of historical scrolls Uncle Kho had possessed. He was forced to make do with whatever he had in his storage rings, along with a handful he’d managed to pry from the mortals and cultivators. He didn’t believe that she absolutely needed that information, but he’d come to rely on it far more than he’d ever imagined he would. In the end, there was no harm in seeing that her historical education was improved.

Her cultivation training was more of a challenge. Master Feng and Uncle Kho’s decision not to impart too much information made so much more sense to him now. It had been a source of endless frustration to him at the time, but it had also spared him and them from trying to work around someone else’s wrong information. With Chou Dai Lu, his only option was to try to break down that wrong information. That work was slow at best. She was constantly saying things that made him want to groan.

The thing she said that made him want to groan the loudest was, “But Master Lu, everyone knows you can only use one type of qi.”

To which Sen held out his hands. Lightning crackled to life in one, while a sphere of water appeared in the other. She had stared at that obvious refutation of her claim for about five seconds before she blushed. Sen took pity on her. Most cultivators thought that wrong thing.

“It’s true that most cultivators only use one type of qi,” he said. “It’s not true that every cultivator is limited to using one type of qi. There are reasons why cultivators tend to focus on just one, though. Care to take a guess about what any of them might be?”

Chou Dai Lu frowned in thought for a moment before she said, “Time.”

“Go on,” encouraged Sen.

“It takes time to master techniques. For every type of qi you can use, you have to add that much time onto training and practice. At least,” she added while giving him a look, “I assume that’s how it would work for most cultivators.”

Sen huffed out a little laugh and nodded.

“Yes, for most cultivators, that is how it would work. Very few of them are eager to double or triple the amount of time they need to spend at every stage of advancement.”

“But you didn’t learn that way?”

“When I was learning, it was the only thing I did. I trained every single day, all day, without stopping, for years. I’ve also had an unusually eventful life since I left training. A lot of the things I’ve learned to do, I learned because not learning them on the spot meant dying. Looming death can be a potent spur to insight, but it’s not the ideal way to train a student.”

“I see,” murmured Chou Dai Lu.

“But we’ve drifted off the topic. Can you think of any other reasons why cultivators might only focus on one element?”

Unfortunately, the routine was periodically broken up by unsettling sights. They would come across villages and towns, some of which Sen vaguely remembered passing through, that had been devastated. In other cases, the towns appeared to have been abandoned. At least, that was what everyone hoped had happened. The other possibilities were far more unnerving to consider, not that the spirit beasts had seemed interested in taking prisoners. But Sen had worried more than once that they might decide that the humans would make an easy food source.

It wasn’t until they reached the coast that the rest of the army seemed to grasp the true magnitude of the war. They had reached a small port city. Or, rather, they’d reached what was left of it. It struck home particularly hard for Sen. He’d been through that city a few times. He even recalled two cultivators, a brother and sister, who had been inexplicably excited to meet him.

“Did they die when the city fell?” he asked no one at all.

“Who?” asked Misty Peak.

“I met a few people in that city,” said Sen. “It’s hard not to wonder if they managed to survive. Then, I wonder if it might not be better for them if they didn’t.”

His eyes drifted out to the harbor where he could see the remains of broken ships stabbing up out of the water. It was clear they had tried to flee the violence, thinking that the open water was safer. He thought it might well have proven safer if they could have reached it. Bracing himself mentally for whatever he might find, Sen extended his spiritual sense over the entire city. He jerked a little.

“What is it?” asked the fox-woman.

“Summon the cultivators and generals,” he said. “There are survivors in the city. Not many, but I don’t intend to leave anyone here to die without at least speaking to them first.”