Book 12: Chapter 8: Following Through
Sen stared at the group of cultivators that he had dim memories of trying to teach his new qinggong technique. He’d largely allowed himself to forget about them because they all seemed so hopeless at it. Not that he blamed them for that failure. Their respective sects had been adamant that they were all gifted cultivators, which he’d accepted as likely being the truth. That meant that the problem was his ability to teach them the new technique, not their basic capabilities. Of course, he’d allowed their names to slip from his memory, assuming he’d ever known them, and those hadn’t surfaced from the murky depths of whenever he’d seen them last. There were only five of them. He’d thought there had been more. Too many new faces this last year for even me to keep track of, he thought.
“Gather around,” said Sen, gesturing to either side of him.
The sect cultivators looked nervous to be that close to him, which he found irritating and amusing in equal measure. A difference of a few feet wouldn’t mean anything if he decided to do something to them. Once they were all close enough, he formed a qi platform beneath himself and the group. A thought sent the platform and everyone on it hurtling into the air. They were all well-trained enough not to gasp or gape, although he did see a couple of jaws tighten and some eyes widen. He didn’t think that this was a sufficient feat to impress core cultivators, but maybe he was just forgetting what it had been like. Life had been busy the last decade or two. A disciple of the Calamitous Fist Sect with a thin mustache who seemed more familiar to Sen asked the question.
“If I might, Lord Lu, where are we going?”
“Outside the city. I’m told that you have all made progress. If that’s the case, there isn’t room inside the city walls to safely test that progress,” Sen answered while casting a sidelong look at the army encampment.
His eyes took in all of the salient details at a glance. The regular army was conducting the same kind of training that Sen had witnessed them doing countless times before. There was sparring, group drills, and even some formation drills. He knew from his own time training mortal townspeople that repetition was key to building the necessary skills, endurance, and memory to prepare for and survive combat. He also noted that the mortal prisoners he’d shamelessly made General Mo’s problem had been…Isolated wasn’t quite the right term for it.
They had been segregated, but the reason was obvious. They were getting a brutally accelerated version of the usual training that army spearmen received. Training that most of them seemed ill-equipped to handle. He pushed aside the guilt that tried to bubble up inside of him. He’d spared their children and the elderly from sharing this fate with them. Sen didn’t know if that would balance the karmic scale, but it was as far as he’d been willing to go. Grandmother Lu had been quiet about it on the trip back. She’d been far more vocal about her disagreement with that decision once they’d been in private.
“What were they supposed to do?” she demanded.
“Not attack my home,” answered Sen, his voice cold.
“And what do you imagine those cultivators would have done to them if they’d refused to go along? They’d have killed them or abandoned them in the wilds. That was a choice that wasn’t a choice.”“Life is full of choices that aren’t choices,” Sen had snapped back at her. “You know that better than anyone.”
“I do know that better than anyone. I know it even better than you. I also know they had their children with them. They had their elders with them.”
“I don’t care,” answered Sen.
“What?” asked Grandmother Lu.
The woman looked genuinely stunned by those words.
“Sen,” she continued, “I know you need to act that way in public, but—”
“I’m not acting. They endangered my child. My little girl. They endangered all of the elders in my city. People who came there and found a way to live peacefully. People who found a way to contribute. People who live beneath my protection. They should be offering prayers of thanks to every god and goddess of mercy that I didn’t kill them all on the spot.”
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Grandmother Lu closed her eyes for a moment. It was clear to Sen, even through his anger, that seeing him take this hard line was painful for her. When she opened her eyes, her expression was grim.
“I understand your anger, and you have every right to it. They did wrong you. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be punished, but this… Sen, it’s a death sentence.”
“I know. I intended it to be.”
“It’s a death sentence that you’re putting on them for trying to save their children. The way you feel about Ai is the way they feel about their children. How far would you go to protect her? With death on all sides, what would you compromise to make her safe?”
Sen had avoided that exact line of thinking because he knew that he would do just about anything to keep Ai safe. He also knew that it would make him want to go easy on the mortals. Not that he’d escaped it entirely. It had been the source of his guilt from the beginning. Part of him was sympathetic to their plight, but that sympathy didn’t have anywhere to go.
“And I should do what because of that? Forget it, and let them go? Life put them in a hard place. Sure. But they effectively declared war on me. They might not have known what that meant at the time, but they did it all the same. Even under the kindest interpretation, what they did was banditry. In truth, it was insurrection. Do you know what the punishment for both of those crimes is?” asked Sen, then continued without waiting for an answer. “I asked Jing about it after we got back just to be sure. The punishment is death. So, even if I just turned them over for trial, they’d still end up dead. The only difference is that their deaths would be utterly pointless instead of maybe serving a purpose.”
“You can declare that the laws say whatever you want them to say,” objected Grandmother Lu. “You could decide to change their punishments.”
“I could,” admitted Sen.
“But you won’t?”
They both knew it wasn’t a real question, because she already knew the answer. He answered anyway.
“I will not,” said Sen, and then answered her next question before she asked it. “Because I can’t just let it go. Maybe if I were still just Lu Sen, I could have, but I’m not just him anymore. I’m in charge of this kingdom now. If I ignore it when people attack Gale’s Bastion, it would tell everyone that it’s permissible to attack me and what’s mine. It would tell them I don’t have the strength of will to punish those who cross me. If I don’t have the strength of will to do that, how can anyone expect me to have the strength of will to punish those who haven’t crossed me?”
“That isn’t the real reason, is it?”
“It is a real reason. It’s an important reason. It’s just not the only one. The other reason is that I don’t want to forgive them. I might understand why they did what they did. However, I believe that they would have stood by and watched in silence while those cultivators murdered the people under my protection. They don’t deserve the kind of mercy you’re asking me to show.”
The argument had gone in circles after that because it couldn’t go anywhere else. Grandmother Lu was determined to convince him that he was being too harsh, and he was committed to following through with the punishment. He feared it would prove an unresolvable point of contention between them from that moment forward. Frowning, he turned his attention back to the task at hand. He’d been so distracted by his thoughts that they’d already reached the walls of the city. He landed the platform outside the wall. He extended his spiritual sense and found a place about three miles away where there weren’t any people. Using a combination of earth qi and fire qi, he erected a burning pillar that was clearly visible where he stood. He pointed at it.
“That pillar is your destination. It’s not a race. Just show me what you’ve learned.”
The five cultivators exchanged looks that said everything. Sen had to repress the urge to shake his head. Despite his words, they clearly planned to treat it as a race. Qi surged in the sect cultivators, and they shot away toward the pillar. Sighing a little, he took off after them. It took a lot of control to remain close enough to evaluate what they were all doing with their qi without simply overtaking them. Lo Meifeng had been right. He was surprised by how much they’d learned. They were moving at speeds that would make it difficult for anyone not using a similar technique to catch them.
That being said, none of them had really mastered the technique. They were all still burning through far too much qi to make it sustainable for a truly long-distance trip. He noticed that the woman from the Golden Phoenix Sect wasn’t getting the kind of explosive force she truly needed for maximum speed. In other cases, he saw that their internal qi control was sloppy. Still, now that they’d figured out the basics, those were all problems that he could help them resolve. It took less than a minute for everyone to reach the pillar. He tried not to let his lingering frustrations from the argument bleed into his voice when he spoke to them.
“Well done. There is still lots of room for improvement, but you figured out the essential elements. That’s the part that matters. Finesse can come with time.”
The cultivators all grinned at each other.
“Now, I suggest you prepare for a long trip. You’ll be coming with me and the army when we leave.”