BOOK 12: CHAPTER 33: IS HE THE GRUMPY ONE?

“You’re pale,” said Falling Leaf.

Sen smiled a little. Once he’d recovered enough that standing no longer felt like a monumental effort, he collected the ghost panther and went outside. The matriarch and her few remaining disciples needed time to speak privately, quite probably about a great many things.

“I’m fine,” he answered.

The steady look she gave him made Sen amend his statement.

“I will be fine,” he told her. “It was taxing, but I knew it would be when I started.”

The ghost panther didn’t seem satisfied with that answer, but apparently decided it wasn’t worth the effort of arguing about. Instead, she turned her attention to the devastation in the vale.

“We’ll leave this place soon, yes?”

“We will,” agreed Sen. “I just want to give them time to find their bearings before we go.”

“Will she come with us?”

That was the question. Sadly, Sen honestly had no idea what the Matriarch would or wouldn’t do. Master Feng might have been able to predict the answer. The two of them clearly had a long history, but Sen had only ever spoken with the woman briefly. Just as important to the future, he genuinely couldn’t force her hand. Not that he wanted to, given everything that had happened.

“I don’t know what she’ll do. I’m sure she wants revenge. How could she not after all of this?” he asked with a sweeping gesture around them. “But she doesn’t need me to get that revenge.”

“True,” said Falling Leaf. “She can just pick a direction and kill every spirit beast she finds.”

“Exactly. I’d just find it very convenient if she chose to come with us.”

“The same way you did with the water cultivators?”

“No,” said Sen immediately. “Not like that. The Order of the Celestial Flame never wronged me. When I’m eventually forced to split up the army, though, having a nascent soul cultivator to put in charge would solve a lot of problems. Especially one with so much leadership experience.”

Falling Leaf made a noncommittal noise.

“You think it’s a bad idea?”

The ghost panther shrugged and said, “If she wants revenge, she might get your army killed trying to get it.”

“There is that,” said Sen with a sigh. “Assuming she isn’t so bent on revenge that she’d sacrifice everyone in a doomed attack, she’d be able to keep the cultivators in line. While I’d like to believe the cultivators are growing more tolerant of mortals, I don’t. They certainly wouldn’t take orders from a mortal, not even if I said that a mortal general was in charge.”

“Is there a mortal general you’d trust that much?”

“General Mo, not that I’d dare pull him away from the capital. Much as I’d like to have him with us, Jing needs him there to maintain order.”

“Is he the grumpy one?” asked Falling Leaf.

Sen frowned for a moment before he remembered that Falling Leaf hadn’t been there for the siege on the capital. He wasn’t even sure if she’d ever actually spoken to the man. Given her general lack of interest in human beings, it wasn’t that shocking that she wasn’t sure which general he meant. That didn’t make answering her question easy, though. Sen thought that most of those generals seemed grumpy. Was General Mo especially grumpy?

“Probably,” said Sen. “Anyway, no one will ignore a nascent soul cultivator. That doesn’t mean she’d be good at actually leading the battles, but she wouldn’t have to be. If she can take advice, which I assume she can, she just needs to pass on the generals’ orders and let others handle the smaller decisions. More importantly, she’s got enough personal power to help tilt most battles in our favor. She can help lock up the most powerful spirit beasts on the field. That will prevent them from simply killing everyone and make it harder for them to control the other spirit beasts.”

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“If she agrees to come with us.”

“If she agrees to come with us. If she’s stable enough to make rational decisions. If she can take advice. I won’t pretend it’s a perfect solution, but it’s not a perfect situation. I have to work with the people I can find, convince, or coerce into joining us. Not all of them will care about saving humanity. Some of them will be in it just so they can kill spirit beasts. Some of them will see it as an opportunity to advance their cultivation. Others will try to use it as a chance to manipulate me. Human beings choose to fight in wars for lots of reasons. At least, that’s what Master Feng always said. And I can’t afford to be too picky about those reasons. I just have to try to keep the people who would pointlessly sacrifice others to serve their own goals out of positions where they can do that.”

“That sounds complicated,” said Falling Leaf.

“It is complicated, and I’m going into this knowing that I can’t possibly stop everyone from making self-serving decisions. I wish that I didn’t have to rely on others to fight. I’d much prefer it if it could just be you, me, Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Auntie Caihong.”

“So do I,” said Falling Leaf. “All of these mortals and cultivators… The mortals fear you. The cultivators fear you, but many of them also hate you. It would be better without them.”

“I know. I expect that there will be more than one assassination attempt. None of which changes the fact that this would also be impossible without them. There are too many spirit beasts. The continent is too big. We could never do everything that needed to be done by ourselves. Much as I might want to.”

The two fell into silence as they waited for the Matriarch and Order members to finish their conversations. Sen found himself dwelling on the possibility of assassination attempts. Even knowing that they were likely, there was staggeringly little he could do to prevent them. There were too many possible ways to approach it. He could post guards around his tent, but even cultivator guards were no guarantee against trained cultivator assassins. Maybe Long Jia Wei could do something against people with those skills if he were with the army, but Sen wanted that man exactly where he was.

While Sen had to be wary of the possibility of assassination attempts, he was far more concerned with someone targeting Ai. Circumventing Auntie Caihong’s spiritual sense would be difficult, but he knew from personal experience that it was possible. Trying to evade both her and Long Jia Wei’s attention within the sect or even the town made an already challenging task profoundly harder. A situation that Sen found appealing on several levels. He also knew that both of them would ruthlessly kill anyone they even thought posed a threat to Ai. That opened up the possibility that they might kill someone innocent. Sen had struggled with that idea, but not for very long. Would he act differently if he were there? Maybe. But he much preferred that they act too ruthlessly than not ruthlessly enough when it came to his daughter’s safety. If that meant an innocent died, he’d learn to live with it.

All of that did make it easier for him to sleep, but none of it did a thing to make him safer from something like poisoned food. He’d read that some kings had prisoners who served as food tasters, but the idea of making anyone, ever a prisoner, test his food for poison left him feeling ill. Anything that could kill him would likely mean a grotesque death for anyone else. Still, he thought, I should at least ask Long Jia Wei for some practical advice about this problem. While Sen would likely have to deal with any assassins himself, there was no reason not to take basic precautions to make it more difficult for them. After all, it was the practical thing to do. If he didn’t bother with the practicalities, Grandmother Lu would never let him live it down. It was around that time that the Matriarch and her three remaining disciples left the galehouse.

“Lord Lu,” she said.

“Matriarch,” replied Sen.

“I have decided that we will join your army and take our revenge on the spirit beasts.”

“Your assistance will be valuable.”

They both knew it was true, so he didn’t see any point in pretending otherwise. The Matriarch just nodded in agreement.

“Still,” she said, “we cannot leave things here as they are.”

“I didn’t expect you to.”

“It may take some time.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“We will gather the dead and burn them. It seems appropriate.”

Sen remained silent for a moment as he contemplated his next words.

“In that case, Matriarch, I will assist you.”

“Why?”

The question carried a lot of barbs beneath that lone syllable. Sen glanced from the Matriarch to the remaining disciples from the Order. They all wore mostly happy expressions, but that haunted look still lurked in their eyes. Having one thing go right for them wasn’t nearly enough to wash away the memories of or fresh wounds from recent events. He could tell that the mere prospect of doing something about the dead would drag them right back into the state he’d found them in.

“Because I can,” said Sen, turning his eyes from the three cultivators. “And because it’s the merciful thing to do.”