Unintended Cultivator

Sen had to ruthlessly suppress his panicked, guilt-ridden instinct to literally bury the evidence. It would take nothing to sink their corpses down into the earth far enough that no one would find them. He knew that it was childish. Making their bodies disappear wouldn’t make them any less dead. He wouldn’t be any less responsible. Besides, doing that would create all kinds of suspicions. Those two had no doubt been seen by others the previous day. The guards would probably swear up and down that they hadn’t left the sect. People coming and going from the academy had to state their business, so he had to assume that similar measures were in place at the much older and better-established Twisted Blade Sect. No, if these two just disappeared it would create more problems than it solved. He needed to think, not react.

He’d known that something like that was a possibility. He paused. I didn’t expect to find people having sex, he thought. He considered that maybe that was part of why he was so panicky. Death had been a grim but distinct possibility. He’d been prepared for that. Killing people in the midst of that kind of intimacy had felt different. Wrong. Unacceptable. Then, he’d done it anyway because there was no alternative. Once that woman had seen him, there had only ever been one possible outcome. He’d debated it because he’d been shocked and that shock had unsettled him. Ultimately, though, it had been a hollow distraction for himself. He’d wanted to think there was a choice. He’d pretended there was a choice. There had never been a real choice.

Everyone in this sect was his enemy. Fantasizing that they weren’t was only going to get him killed. He’d been getting caught up on the issue of innocence or guilt, but that had never been a real issue. It was about sides. This sect was planning on wiping him and his sect out. That was the beginning and end of it. That put anyone and everyone in this compound on their side. He could never let himself forget that. He was determined to stop them before they could start. That was his side. And there was nothing in the middle. If he got caught, these people would kill him or try their very best to kill him. They wouldn’t ask questions about guilt or innocence. If their elders told them to, they would march north to wage a war. There could be no compromise when faced with annihilation.

Sen didn’t want to think in those terms. He didn’t want to condemn everyone in a sect simply because they were in that sect, but the alternatives were absurd fantasies born out of a desire to avoid blood on his hands. If he kept indulging in those fantasies, he was going to hesitate at a moment when he couldn’t afford it. He had to stop thinking of these Twisted Blade disciples as people first and enemies second. They might be people, but that didn’t matter. It stopped mattering the second their sect decided to go to war. They were enemies. Until the fight was over, that’s all they were. It’s all they could be. When faced with enemies who threatened everything you cared about, there could only be one response.

I can be merciful when it’s done, thought Sen. When they aren’t enemies anymore, when they’re just survivors, I can be merciful then. He knew that for the half-truth that it was. He could maybe be merciful with the outer disciples. That didn’t hold for anyone in even a nominal leadership position. When it came to them, the result had to be absolute. Every single inner sect disciple, core member, and elder had to die. If he could find a way to do it, the patriarch had to die. Of course, that assumed that the patriarch was even in the sect. He’d been told that patriarchs and matriarchs routinely left their sects to enter closed-door cultivation in places that closely aligned with their cultivation. Those places were often deep in the wilds. It was surprisingly common for those peak leaders to vanish for centuries at a time. Later, they would reappear and be forced to cull an overambitious elder who had assumed the mantle under the false belief the patriarch or matriarch was dead.

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Sen wasn’t sure what he was hoping for in those terms. If the patriarch was in the sect, it would mean that Sen could end it all in one move. As much as he might loathe the necessity, it would simplify things. If nothing else, assuming Sen could actually kill the man, it would go a long way toward preventing the possibility of retaliation later. Of course, the patriarch would also be the most powerful member of the sect. Having the person not be in the sect meant that Sen would have one less terrible threat to deal with in an already fraught situation. Neither option was ideal, and he dropped that line of thought to consider what to do with the corpses.

Having let himself get caught up in his thoughts had let him calm down a little and approach the problem a bit more rationally. If he couldn’t make them disappear without making his life infinitely harder, what could he do to make this an internal problem for the sect? The answer came to him, and he hated it immediately. He pushed his disgust at the idea aside and got to work. If an outsider didn’t kill them, then it would need to look like they killed each other. I’ll make it look like a lover’s quarrel gone wrong, thought Sen. He felt lousy for tarnishing their reputations like that. He could only hope that they were terrible people.

For all he knew, they had come out here into the trees because they were having some kind of affair under the noses of their other lovers. He spun a story in his head about what awful, deceitful people they were while he positioned their bodies to make it look like they’d come to violence after they finished their lovemaking. He was grateful that they were both sword wielders. He had no idea how plausible it was that they had killed each other. If one of them was some kind of sword genius, the story he was trying to tell by repositioning them would look very unlikely. There wasn’t much he could do about that, though. He didn’t have close to enough information about either of them to judge.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

He felt ghoulish as he drove their swords into the existing wounds. There was no way to know if this was going to convince anyone. He just had to hope the idea that they killed each other was more realistic than some unseen murderer haunting the sect. The more he thought about it, though, the more he thought the idea would convince the sect members. Cultivators were notoriously fickle and prone to violence. In this sect, he had to imagine that the focus on martial skills only served to enhance those tendencies. He wouldn’t be surprised to find out that sect members regularly killed each other for stupid reasons or no reason at all. That secret lovers might come to violence would probably appeal to the collective imagination of the sect.

Sen remembered how swiftly rumors would spread in Orchard’s Reach. The more salacious the rumor, the faster it spread. This would be more than salacious enough to spark rumors. He felt a little dirty inside for hoping that the pair did have other lovers. That way, if there were suspicions, those suspicions would almost certainly fall on the heads of those jilted others. After all, what was more likely? A mysterious killer that no one had seen, or angry lovers taking revenge on their straying partners? He was willing to bet that most people would assume the latter was more likely. And, if someone did eventually conclude that some other party had done the deed, Sen suspected he would be finished with his preparations by then.

He suppressed the reflex to search them for valuables. Ensuring that they still had everything that people expected them to have, other than their lives, would also help to cover up his existence. He wasn’t at all satisfied with his hasty work, but he didn’t dare stay where he was. Cultivator senses were sharp. If guards patrolled by here, someone would smell the blood and investigate. Sen needed to be well away from those corpses when that happened. Reminding himself again that those people were enemies, Sen disappeared into the shadows and continued his search for buildings where he could expand his trap.