Unintended Cultivator

Sen stared at the shelves around him and had to resist the urge to steal everything. Even recognizing that this library was intended to serve the sect’s outer disciples, meaning all of the manuals and scrolls were aimed at qi-condensing and foundation formation cultivators, it would still prove invaluable to his sect. Minimally, it would save decades, maybe even several centuries’ worth of acquiring manuals at substantial cost, risk, or both. It wouldn’t be that easy, though. He could feel that the shelves were protected by formations that were much more competently made than the ones in the walls. He could still get through them, but it would take time he didn’t want to spend. It would also be painfully obvious the instant someone walked into the library, and he wasn’t ready yet.

He'd trapped all of the residential buildings in the outer sect already. This building had, mostly through pure happenstance, been the last one he visited in the outer zone of control. Between the inner sect and the elders’ residences, he figured that he had at least another two days before he’d be ready to enact his plan. Despite knowing that he shouldn’t linger in the library, Sen couldn’t help but stare at all that knowledge just waiting for someone to pick it up and understand it. He knew he couldn’t use all of those manuals and scrolls. He could almost certainly glean useful information from some of them.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

He was well past the point where he needed a manual to guide his every step or shape his understanding. As far as he knew, there weren’t any manuals for the nascent soul stage. At least there weren’t on the spirit cultivation side of things. Fu Ruolan had assured him that there absolutely were manuals for the equivalent body cultivation stage. What he needed now were new ideas about what he could do with the various affinities he had. All of these manuals were a perfect source for that kind of information. In an act that was almost physically painful for him, Sen jerked his eyes away from the shelves. There was a reason he wasn’t installing traps in this building. When the fighting was over, he would come back to the library and claim all of it. He repeated that to himself over and over again as he shadow walked out of the building and into a nearby shadow outside.

While the buildings in the section for the outer disciples were fairly closely packed, save for the martial training areas, the section for the inner sect disciples and core members was another matter. The buildings were spaced much farther apart, no doubt to give the more valuable sect members some privacy and solitude. While Sen would never structure his own sect in this manner, there was an underlying logic to it. Or, rather, there were two kinds of logic at work, only one of which Sen appreciated. The first kind of logic was that inner sect and core members took on more responsibilities. They taught or handled important work outside the sect. Those additional responsibilities should come with some benefits. Even Sen could appreciate and agree with that.

The other logic that Sen found more distasteful was that inner sect, core members, and elders were progressively farther and farther away from the walls. While it wasn’t necessarily obvious at first glance, the message was clear. The outer disciples were meant to serve as shields and sacrifices to defend the more valuable sect members in the event of an attack. By virtue of being outer disciples and of a lower cultivation level, the sect leadership saw them as disposable. While Sen wouldn’t pretend to have a close relationship with every member of his sect, especially the youngest members, he didn’t see them as disposable. They weren’t just there to be used for his defense or convenience. If he saw them that way, he very much doubted he would be standing where he was standing at that moment.

Unfortunately, the way the inner sect zone of authority was set up meant that he couldn’t simply shadow walk between buildings with ease. Well, I suppose I could try, thought Sen. Yet, the very idea made him feel a little cold inside. There was too great a chance of getting confused about where he was or where he was going. If he got lost, he’d just have to exit that in-between realm at some random location. The potential for disaster if he did that was simply too great. No, he wasn’t going to take those kinds of chances if he could avoid them. That meant assuming the lesser, but still very real, risks of physically moving between the buildings. He’d need to be much more wary of being spotted by patrolling guards and random sect members.

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His goal was to avoid killing while he was inside the sect walls if at all possible. Every death would make his mission less tenable. Even if he made the bodies disappear, it would only take a few people vanishing for the sect leadership to figure out that something strange was happening. While the sect guards were watchful, they didn’t have any reason to be paranoid right now. Strange occurrences might well spark that paranoia. Plus, if the sect leaders started to suspect that there was an enemy inside their walls, they could flood this compound with bodies and torches. They might institute room-by-room searches. It wouldn’t be impossible to stay out of sight, even under those conditions, but it would prove very, very difficult to finish setting up the grand trap he’d started to build.

No, he’d need to keep relying on stealth to make this work. He just worried that the core members and elders were going to have much more robust defenses in place. That would slow him down, which would increase the chances of getting seen. You knew this wasn’t going to be easy, he told himself. Even Sen understood that he was underselling it. The fact that he’d managed to get inside the Twisted Blade Sect and go undetected for even two days was the kind of impossible accomplishment that people would tell stories and write songs about. He wasn’t convinced that he was the only person with the right combination of skills and abilities to do such a thing, but he suspected that the list of people who could do it was very short.

Chiding himself for stalling, Sen inched toward the corner of the building. He closed his eyes and listened carefully, straining his enhanced hearing to warn him of nearby danger. There was nothing. He stared across the wide path that served as the demarcation line between the outer sect and the inner sect. There was much more greenery in that part of the sect. It wasn’t a forest by any stretch of the imagination, but there were copses of trees that would help provide some cover. He searched the area for an appropriate place to leave the in-between realm. He wanted somewhere deep enough back that one more shadow wouldn’t catch the eye. He desperately wanted to extend his spiritual sense and get a feel for what was waiting there, but he worried that it would alert someone. Doing his best to check his frustration, he slipped into the shadow and made his way to the patch of brightness he was fairly sure was the spot he’d picked out to exit.

Sen stepped out of the other realm and froze. he was still hiding. He’d wreathed himself in shadow as he re-entered the world proper. It didn’t matter, though. As fast as he’d been, it hadn’t been instantaneous. He knew that because there was a girl there staring at the exact place he was standing. Or rather there was a pair of cultivators in a particularly compromised position. Except, the young man on top of the girl wasn’t looking at him. He wasn’t looking at anything. His eyes were closed as he writhed and thrust. The startled look on the girl’s face gave way to panic. He could see her getting ready to scream or shout or do something that was going to draw a lot of attention.

Sen had worried about what he would do if faced with something like this. He had thought he would hesitate, and he was right. He did hesitate. Not that he imagined it looked that way to the girl. Sen’s mind had been improved to such a degree that what felt like a prolonged moment of hesitation to him took less than the blink of an eye to her. She would never know how he had struggled to figure out what the right thing to do was. It would never occur to her that he had an entire debate with himself about whether she and her lover needed to die.

By the time she started to take a breath to send out the alert, Sen was moving. His jian was in his hand and plunging through the young man’s back. It punched out of the cultivator’s chest into the girl’s heart. There was a look of incomprehension on her face that slowly twisted into one of bitter regret. Sen twisted the jian to ensure that both of their hearts were destroyed. He just took it as she stared up at him. He watched as all of her unfulfilled dreams died in those eyes. Finally, the life drained away from her eyes, and he was looking down at a corpse.