Unintended Cultivator
Book 11: Chapter 34: To the Land of Judgment

A cauldron of mixed emotions boiled inside of Hsiao Jiayi as she stared down at the body. Her father, the king of Kanshun, was dead. There was joy at the sight. How could there not be? She had prayed for his death ten thousand times and more. Most of her brothers had been killed on battlefields of his making, and her sisters had been sold off to one noble house or another at his word. Not that marriage had provided any protection for most of those sisters. Half had died at their husbands’ hands. More had been killed off by jealous mistresses or other members of those houses. All because of him. Yes, there was joy at the sight of his lifeless eyes. There was joy in spitting on the corpse as she had dreamed of doing so often.

But, as she looked around at the ruins of the palace and the capital city, that joy was short-lived. The king of Kanshun was dead, but so was the kingdom in all but name. This was not what she had prayed for. Not what she had, in retrospect, nearly traded her life for in a failed attempt to recruit Judgment’s Gale to her cause. As she saw the bodies of countless mortals brought down by the spirit beasts, she tried to imagine what that terrifying man would think of all of this. She could still hear his words like he was speaking them to her again at that very moment.

“My daughter. The mortal girl I adopted. Under your rule, you would turn my beautiful, innocent little girl into a slave. So, I’m forced to wonder if the best thing I can do is kill you here and now. Then, go to your terrible little kingdom and butcher every last person I find who calls themselves a noble or a royal. Simply wipe your civilization from history.”

She couldn’t help but wonder if he’d celebrate the deaths of all those cultivator nobles and royalty or mourn the deaths of so many mortals. Then again, she found it all too plausible that he might do both. News had reached them from the other side of the Mountains of Sorrow before everything had turned into complete chaos. Strange and sometimes incoherent tidings that she hadn’t known whether to trust. The spirit beasts were killing there, as well. They were killing human beings everywhere. But she’d also heard tales of Judgment’s Gale slaughtering spirit beasts for some offense. No one seemed certain exactly what they had done, only that he had gone on a one-man rampage and had hunted them down. Hurled destruction at them from the sky and land. Killed them very nearly to the last beast.

There was equally strange news that those blood-soaked demigods out of legend, Fate’s Razor and the Living Spear, had emerged from their seclusion to announce that Lu Sen was to be the new ruler of, and this was the hardest part to believe, everything. She tried to reconcile that news with the man she had met. His hatred for nobles had been palpable, which had made her question his choice to become one in the first place. Beyond that, he seemed to loathe anyone and everyone who sought to impose their will on those who were weaker.

Yet, if the reports were to be believed, Lu Sen intended to conquer the whole of the continent. Or, the old monsters intended for him to do it. She didn’t know the exact nature of those relationships. Nor did anyone else, it seemed. There were rumors that they were his teachers, which she had no difficulty whatsoever in imagining. Not with the kind of overwhelming strength the man seemed to take for granted. However, she knew better than most that rumors were not facts. The only fact she had was that the old monsters were paving the way for him.

Still, where did his intentions begin and theirs end? It was possible that they were just using him as a figurehead, but she couldn’t imagine why they would bother. She also couldn’t fit such a goal into the puzzle that was Lu Sen. If someone had told her he meant to go around and depopulate the continent of nobles and royals, that would have been far, far easier to believe. He’d all but threatened to do exactly that in her kingdom. My former kingdom, she corrected herself with a shudder. The man hadn’t struck her as stupid, so he had to know that such an exercise in conquest would not, could not be completed without a great deal of bloodshed. It was almost the definition of imposing one’s will on those who were weaker.

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“If it’s true, though—” she whispered out loud.

That if was a terrible thing, but if it was true, it might represent a sliver of hope. It wasn’t a hope for her kingdom. That had been shattered beyond any and all hope of restoration. But there were survivors. She could feel them in the ruins. Cultivators and mortals alike who had, through skill or luck or the benevolent hand of the heavens sheltering them, survived the onslaught. She doubted that Lu Sen would feel particularly merciful toward the surviving cultivators. Not every cultivator in the kingdom had been a noble, but they had all been raised with that same bias against mortals that she herself carried. The one that angered Lu Sen so much that he had threatened a cataclysm very much like one stretching out around her in every direction.

However, she supposed he would have spared the mortals. Still, if she could get the surviving mortals to his lands, he might provide them sanctuary. That would free her and the remaining cultivators to fight the spirit beasts. It wouldn’t be anything like the wars they were used to. There weren’t enough of them left for something that structured. But they did have sufficient numbers to bleed the spirit beasts. If you bled something long enough, it would die. She hated having that thought. It had been something her father was fond of saying. Still, that didn’t make it untrue.

Of course, she’d have to convince the other cultivators to help her get those mortals across the mountains. Not an easy task at the best of times, let alone in the middle of winter. They wouldn’t see the point. She couldn’t entirely blame them for that. They hadn’t met Judgment’s Gale. They hadn’t seen the look on his face, the icy resolve in his eyes, when he had threatened to butcher them wholesale. If he crossed the mountain as a conqueror and discovered that the cultivators here let the surviving mortals die out of disregard or disdain… There would be no mercy. No amount of begging, pleading, or explaining would change that, either. He would see them as nothing more than murderers.

If they were all very lucky, he’d simply execute them on the spot. If they weren’t lucky, he’d use them as the front-line fighters in every engagement with the spirit beasts until no cultivator of Kanshun still drew breath. She doubted he’d even view it as a meaningful loss. If anything, he’d likely see it as an unalloyed good to eliminate all those people who still thought cultivators should rule and mortals should serve. She also knew that most of the cultivators on this side of the mountains would see Lu Sen as someone to fight because he would not allow their ways to survive his coming.

And, if he came, he would come with the strength to impose his will. He would come with monsters like Feng Ming and Kho Jaw-Long at his heels. If the heavens were feeling particularly merciless, he would come with Alchemy’s Handmaiden in his wake. The stories about her were much rarer, but the ones Hsiao Jiayi had heard left her shivering. Of all the old monsters, Ma Caihong was the one to fear the most because she was completely, utterly devoid of pity when she decided you were her enemy. If the stories could be believed, there were entire cities that simply ceased to exist after someone or something in them had offended her.

If she wanted to preserve anything at all of her old world, she would have to find a way to convince the other cultivators to help her save the mortals. She had to give Lu Sen a reason to spare their lives. Hsiao Jiayi had been so caught up in her thoughts that she almost missed it as people started gathering around her. There were cultivators and mortals who, for once, had something in common. They all looked lost. One of the cultivators, a man she vaguely recognized as a functionary from her father’s court, stepped forward.

“Lady Hsiao Jiayi,” he said in a halting voice. “The king—”

“Is in one of the hells, where he rightly deserves to be,” she snapped.

The man took a faltering step back in the face of her anger. No one else seemed prepared to speak up, so the functionary stepped forward again.

“With his death, and the circumstances of the rest of the royal family unknown, the crown falls to you. The kingdom is yours, Queen Hsiao.”

“What kingdom?” she asked. “There is no kingdom. All that’s left are refugees. But, fine, if you need a monarch, I’ll be your queen. Go out into the city. Gather all of the survivors. And when I say all, I mean all of them. Cultivator and mortal alike. Take whatever storage rings you can find. Collect all of the food, blankets, and warm clothes. We’ll need them for the long march.”

“Where will we go?” cried out one of the mortals.

“Across the Mountains of Sorrow,” she said, drawing shocked looks and gasps.

To the land of judgment, she added silently.