Unintended Cultivator

Guo Wuhao, captain of the city guard, was not having a good day. He hadn’t had a good day yesterday or the day before either. In fact, he hadn’t had a good day in almost a week. These were the kind of weeks that had killed his predecessor. Powers far beyond him were moving in the city. There had been rumors of some kind of an attack at the new Lord Lu’s manor. It was hard to credit those rumors. What kind of insanity would drive someone to attack a cultivator that powerful? Still, he had sent men to investigate, as was his duty. Those men had come back to report that they had been turned away at the gate, first by hard-faced guards, and then by a cultivator who had left them all shaken to the core. No explanations were given, and it wasn’t like the city guard was going to storm the manor of a noble without a direct command from the throne. Let alone to investigate something that the resident lord clearly did not want investigated. He had considered the matter closed. Just some kind of noble fight or cultivator conflict that had gotten out of hand and would be settled out of sight. Or, so he had thought.

A sharp pain in his stomach brought the man out of his own thoughts and back to the moment, where his second-in-command was giving him a report. Guo Wuhao only half-listened to the report. It was more of the same. It seemed someone was unhappy with the recent turn of events. Reports had been coming in all week. Figures in shadowy corners doing shadowy things. People disappearing in the night. Entire buildings disappearing in the night with only rubble left to show that anything had once stood there. It stood to reason that this was the work of Lord Lu, but there was no way to tie events to the man and no way to do anything about it even if they could. Still, Guo Wuhao had lived in the capital for his entire life. He knew the way the city felt when things were generally well, and when things were not well. Right now, there was a feeling in the air. Someone wanted vengeance, and they meant to have it. The city guard could try to stand in their way but that was a path to disgrace or death. His attention had wandered again, so he couldn’t recall what his second-in-command had just said.

“What was that?”

“I asked what should we do?”

Guo Wuhao winced at another sharp pain in his stomach and said, “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” asked the startled young man before him.

“Nothing. Whatever this is, these events are beyond us. We can either stand aside or be crushed. I won’t throw lives away on something we can’t stop.”

***

Chen Yuyi shifted his position on the bed again. There hadn’t been much sleep in the last week. Not since that day. It had seemed like a simple enough job. Get a talisman from someone who worked for that new lord. He’d done a hundred jobs just like it. He’d assumed that the point was to let someone infiltrate the manor and do some basic spying. The risk of offending a noble was high, and a cultivator even more, but the pay had simply been too good to pass up. He’d followed some woman from the manor and caught her alone. If she’d just given up the talisman, he’d have let her go eventually. He wasn’t a sadist. He didn’t like killing people. He’d even offered to pay for it. Enough that a servant could simply disappear with the money. Not only had the woman refused, she’d even tried to fight him. There hadn’t been another choice. He killed her and took what he needed. The entire matter had slipped from his mind until the rumors started to spread. An attack at that new lord’s manor. People dead or dying or injured.

His unease at those rumors had exploded into full-blown panic when a different kind of rumor started in the places where people like Chen Yuyi spent their time. There were new predators at work in the city. A pack of person-shaped wolves that someone had turned loose to hunt on their behalf. He’d left the city proper that very day and found a farm in one of the villages that helped supply food to the capital. He’d rented a room from the farmer and been a very quiet, very respectful tenant. He’d picked a place where no one knew him, which had advantages and disadvantages. The advantage was that he’d been able to make up a name and no one questioned it. The disadvantage was that he’d been cut off from his usual sources of information. He was forced to visit the village each day and listen for news of other strangers or people asking questions. There hadn’t been anything like that, but he wasn’t convinced at all that he was safe.

It’s probably time to move on again, he thought. Maybe go somewhere else in the kingdom. He had more than enough money that he could start some kind of legitimate business. It wouldn’t be anything extravagant. He’d keep it simple. Maybe he’d open up a little noodle shop. He didn’t know anything about noodles, but he could learn. Nobody ever showed up to hurt noodle shop owner. People loved noodles. The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. It would mean burying his pride and finding a noodle shop somewhere that would take him on to learn the trade. Still, sacrificing a little pride was a small price to pay for his life. There had to be some noodle shop owner out there without a child to take over the business. Chen Yiyi just needed to find them. Having made the decision, he felt better about things. Calmer. He’d leave in the morning and head to Emperor’s Bay. It wasn’t the capital, but he supposed that was the point.

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He rolled over to get more comfortable, only to have a gloved hand clamp down on his mouth. He stared up at the figure who had, somehow, impossibly, entered the room without making so much as a single noise. Chen Yiyi was used to dealing with dangerous people. He was friends with some of them. He was frequently hired by dangerous people. The eyes that looked down on him made all of those friends and employers pale in comparison. They were cold, pitiless orbs. The eyes of someone who would wear the exact same expression regardless of whether they were eating a meal or removing fingers one by one. When an invisible force wrapped around his body, Chen Yiyi knew he was doomed. A cultivator had come for him. When the cultivator finally said something, it was a simple confirmation.

“Lord Lu would like to speak to you.”

***

The door opened and, after a gesture, Quon entered the room.

“He has arrived,” said the man.

Fong Huifen nodded and did her best to smooth her features into a mask of polite pleasantness. After witnessing his display at the royal palace, she had been looking for a way to ingratiate herself to Lu Sen. She hadn’t expected an opportunity to present itself so quickly. Events had simply outpaced her. It was a rare occurrence for the matriarch but not unheard of. No one could know everything, after all. The foolish attack on the man’s new manor had caught everyone unawares. She had not expected it. By all accounts, the king had not expected it. However, she was willing to bet that the most surprised person had been Lu Sen himself. Not that it had slowed him down very much. There were whispers that he had worked alchemical magics the likes of which the world had never seen to save lives that anyone else would have given up for dead. Not simply saved lives, but restored limbs and washed away the scarring that were the inevitable result of burns. She didn’t know how much stock to put in those stories, but she wasn’t sure she dared to disbelieve them either. Stories of such miracles swirled around the man like fog.

Once he’d finished the healing, though, he had turned his resources to finding the guilty. It had been swift and ruthless. She didn’t know where he’d found the people who were doing the work but found them he had. And that was where the opportunity she’d been looking for finally showed itself. The one thing that she could provide the man was information. While his people were efficient, they didn’t seem to have roots in the city. They were making up for that shortcoming with simple scale, but her family had been in the capital for centuries and centuries. Their spy network was deep. There were entire families who had been in the employ of the House of Fong for ten generations. Never one to let an opportunity slip through her fingers, she had put those spies to work. Even if the information they gathered overlapped with the information Lu Sen’s people gathered, that was actually a benefit. It would serve as a kind of verification. Given what she’d found out, she needed him to believe the information was genuine, and not simply a ploy on her part. Not that she’d expect him to act on it immediately, but if he put in the effort, he could confirm it.

When a servant showed Lu Sen into the room, Fong Huifen told herself that she was focusing on a spot between his eyebrows because she wanted to. She most certainly was not avoiding looking directly at his face. She was far too old to be flustered by the appearance of any man, especially not a man who couldn’t be more than half her age. He gave her a shallow bow and eyed Quon with a curious expression.

“Matriarch Fong,” said Lu Sen, “I don’t wish to be rude, but I have a number of important matters that I should be attending to. You said this was urgent, so I hope we can dispense with the usual pleasantries.”

If she hadn’t known that he was telling the absolute truth, she might have been a little annoyed with his brusque manner. Running her house required a positively obscene amount of her time. She cringed to imagine what it would be like trying to take over an entire house.

“Of course,” she said. “Please, have a seat.”

“Thank you,” he said, settling into a chair across from her.

“Quon, if you would.”

Quon walked over and offered a scroll to Lu Sen, who took it but did not open it immediately. That was more self-discipline than she would have expected from one so young.

“Patriarch Lu, I have become aware of your recent efforts. I decided to see if my own sources could unearth any information that might prove useful to you. The contents of that scroll contain what we have learned.”

Fong Huifen waited as the man studied her with a distant expression on his face.

“Why?” he asked.

“Isn’t it obvious? I do not wish for my house to share the same fate as the House of Xie.”

“Is there a reason it would?”

“No, but the world doesn’t always turn on reasons, does it?”

“I suppose it doesn’t,” he admitted.

The man opened the scroll and read through the contents at a speed that Fong Huifen was certain would only be possible for a cultivator. When he was done, he rolled the scroll up again and, after a moment of thought, held it out to Quon.

“I expect you want to destroy that,” explained Lu Sen.

“Indeed,” answered Quon.

Lu Sen turned his attention back to her.

“You’re certain of your findings, Matriarch Fong?”

“Yes. Or as certain as one can be in such situations. I don’t expect you to take my word for it. You have your own people. I imagine they can verify anything we found.”

Lu Sen rose from his seat, and she was struck again by how imposing the man was up close. Not that he did anything specific to be imposing, he was just so tall that he loomed simply by standing there. He offered her another shallow bow.

“I will remember this…” he seemed to consider what word to choose. “This kindness.”

Fong Huifen rose from her own seat and returned his bow. It irked her, but she made it deeper than his. He was a cultivator and only fools ignored something like that.

“I wish you good fortune in your current endeavors,” said Fong Huifen.

Then, the man was gone. The matriarch turned to Quon.

“A success, do you think?”

The man stood in thoughtful silence for a moment before he said, “I think so. What do you think he’ll do?”

“That, I honestly don’t know,” admitted Fong Huifen. “I expect we’ll all hear about it whenever it does happen.”

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