BOOK 12: CHAPTER 37: CAMP PRINCESS

While Lu Sen had expressed that his main intention was to travel south, the army had been traveling North for the last two weeks. Something that Song Lan, Matriarch of what fragments remained of the Order of the Celestial Flame, understood. That understanding did little to assuage her frustration with the choice. Not that she had any intention of voicing those frustrations to the man himself. No one could secure the entirety of the kingdom. Not even by burning the shockingly vast swathes of the wilds that Judgment’s Gale had seen fit to destroy. She did understand that he had a vested interest in leaving the second largest city in the kingdom secure. Even if only the capital and Emperor’s Bay remained secure, they would be more than enough to reestablish rule over the kingdom proper.

Her frustration wasn’t even really about heading north. She wanted to kill spirit beasts and not by the score. She wanted to wipe them out by the hundreds, if not the thousands. An opportunity she didn’t expect to get inside this kingdom if the stories she had about the battle at the capital were true. And she did believe they were true. The tales the other cultivators and mortal generals had told her were simply too consistent. Not that every detail was identical. She knew better than most how fickle memory could be, and the mortals didn’t have the advantages of a spiritual sense. They had to rely on their barely adequate senses.

Even so, the way everyone had spoken about that battle and Lu Sen’s role in it had been unnerving

. It had all sounded like events out of myth. A time when cultivators supposedly strode across the continent like living gods and reshaped land and sea to meet their whims. She’d always held those stories as just that, stories. Recent events had forced her to revise that opinion, which had reinforced her unwillingness to challenge the decision to march on Emperor’s Bay.

In the end, it came down to the child. From what the people who'd been inside the tent when Lu Sen arrived had said, they all thought he’d returned with the corpse of a child. Even the cultivators thought that he had resurrected the little girl. She knew better, as all of the cultivators should have known, but none of them had felt even the tiniest spark of life in her. But, somehow, he had known she still clung to life. Then, he had taken it upon himself to do what even Song Lan would have considered impossible. She had stood outside that tent for two days while it had blazed in her spiritual sense like a sun brought down to the earth.

A part of her knew that he would just say that he’d been doing alchemy. He probably even believed that. Yet, no alchemy she had ever seen, or heard of, or even heard wild, unsubstantiated rumors about could have dragged that little girl back from the very embrace of death. It wasn’t quite a miracle, but it was just about the closest thing she’d ever encountered in her very long life. It made what he’d done for her seem almost prosaic. A word she could scarcely have imagined using in the immediate aftermath of someone else advancing her cultivation.

The most telling sign that whatever he’d done went beyond alchemy was the little girl’s behavior. Lu Sen had, in what seemed a remarkably responsible decision given all she’d heard, left the child in the care of the mortals. The girl had promptly toddled across the camp and gone directly to the man’s tent. A feat that no one could explain, as she’d never been to that tent as far as anyone could determine. Then, she had demanded to see her Uncle Sen.

“Uncle Sen,” muttered Song Lan.

It was probably an appropriate term since he had saved her life. Her parents were presumably among the dead they had burned back in that ruined city. That meant that someone had to take responsibility for her, or she’d share the fate of so many other orphans. However, it was wildly inappropriate for a tiny child to see arguably the most powerful political and military figure this side of the Mountains of Sorrow in such a casual light. An opinion that Lu Sen did not seem to share. He had immediately abandoned whatever far more important matter he had been dealing with to entertain the child with shadow constructs. An activity that seemed to delight the girl almost as much as it frustrated everyone who had been promptly ignored.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Then, there were the women. That damnable fox-woman that Lu Sen seemed to be keeping as some kind of pet had cooed over the little girl. Taking her cue from Judgment’s Gale, she spun illusions for the child. More delight ensued. The green-eyed jade beauty took a different approach. She hadn’t played with the girl. That didn’t seem to be in the woman’s nature. What she had done was direct glares at anyone who muttered a word of protest over how Lord Lu chose to spend his time. Those glares had promised nine kinds of immediate, violent retribution if the complaining continued. The unfortunate souls on the receiving end of those looks had wisely chosen to remain silent.

That was how the hierarchy of the army camp was upended. Lu Sen and his women had, for whatever their reasons, closed ranks around that mortal child. Word had spread and, overnight, that little girl had gone from being no one at all to being the army’s princess. There was literally nowhere in the entire camp that she was not safe to wander. The mortal soldiers tended to treat her like a substitute child or younger sister. She’d seen more than one of them carrying the girl around on their shoulders and explaining whatever she pointed at as they went.

Even the cultivators treated her with care and far more patience than they would normally show to any mortal. Song Lan had even watched a few of the cultivators summon small candies from their storage rings and give them to the girl. An activity she wholly disapproved of but couldn’t figure out a way to forbid. At least, she had at first, assuming the cultivators were trying to use the child to make political inroads with Lu Sen. A few of them probably even were, but the ones who seemed most likely to do that were also the ones who seemed least likely to play those sorts of games.

Of course, that was what was happening when the child wasn’t following Lu Sen around. He had tried to return the girl to the care of the other mortals several times, but she wasn’t having any of it. She would escape whoever was in charge of minding her and go off to find him. The guards at his tent didn’t even try to stop her, which meant the child would routinely invade meetings with the mortal generals. She’d done the same thing during one of Song Lan’s meetings with the man. The girl had burst into the tent like a tiny storm. She’d looked around before climbing into Lu Sen’s lap, where she’d listened to them talk for a few minutes and promptly fell asleep. All of which the man just seemed to take as perfectly normal.

While it had been a very long time since Song Lan was a mortal, the child’s behavior struck her as strange. She would have expected the death of the girl’s parents and brush with death to have left deeper wounds. And she supposed that maybe those wounds were there and just hidden from sight. There were many distractions for the girl during the day. Maybe those wounds were more apparent at night. However, it seemed that she had formed a bond with Judgment’s Gale that was, for lack of a better term, inexplicable. One that the man didn’t seem very determined to discourage, given that he frequently let the girl ride on his qi platform during the daily marches.

It troubled her. All of it troubled her because she didn’t know what would happen when they finally reached Emperor’s Bay. The plan was to leave the survivors there, where they could hopefully find some semblance of a new life. Yet, where would they leave the child? She had no family to care for her. Some politically-minded family in Emperor’s Bay would probably volunteer to take the girl in and lavish her with a luxurious lifestyle. The problem was that she struggled to see the girl accepting that situation. In truth, she struggled to see anyone accepting that situation. But what was the alternative? Marching to war with a child? She could only hope that Lu Sen wasn’t insane enough to consider that an option. ℞åΝổ฿Êș