Unintended Cultivator
Book 11: Chapter 37: A Debt Like That

The throne sat there, blithely ignoring Sen’s baleful glare. He tried glaring a little harder, but it seemed that scaring lifeless objects was still beyond his power. He knew that, all things considered, that was a good thing. In this one situation, though, he wished he could intimidate that one particular piece of vexing furniture.

“Glare all you like,” said Jing, “but you’re still going to have to sit in it.”

“I do not. I don’t have to do anything of the sort.”

“You’re right. You can interpret the phrase stand in judgment literally and pose in front of the throne.”

“I thought that this would bother you a lot more than it seems to,” complained Sen.

“It would have if things had been more or less peaceful when you seized power. I’d have felt betrayed and angry. I might have even been right to feel that way. The problem is that my kingdom was being murdered wholesale by spirit beasts, and I was wholly powerless to stop it. That was a rather sharp reminder of how little power I actually possessed. How much of the supposed power of the royal family and the nobles was an illusion? A game we were playing against each other while the true powers of the world chose to ignore us.”

“If they killed you, you’d be just as dead. Those stakes were real,” observed Sen.

“They were, but they were built on a foundation of willful blindness. Some part of me always believed that the sects, that cultivators as a whole, didn’t seize control because they couldn’t. That the sheer number of mortals would be enough to overwhelm them. I actually thought rather poorly of those mortals across the Mountains of Sorrow for never reclaiming control.”

Sen winced at that proclamation. He didn’t imagine that this train of thought had taken Jing anywhere comfortable for the former mortal king to go.

“And now?” asked Sen, mostly because he thought it was expected.

“I saw cultivators fight. Yes, they can get tired. Yes, they can be overwhelmed by numbers. But the pure scale of destruction they can produce before they get tired is almost beyond my ability to reconcile. That’s not even including what I saw nascent soul cultivators doing, or what I saw you do. It became very clear to me that cultivators didn’t run everything here because they just don't see any value in it. They see it as something trivial they’d rather not be bothered with. I doubt that there’s a mortal army big enough to stop a handful of nascent soul cultivators who were intent on domination.”

Sen wanted to contradict those claims, but he knew that was the street rat in him wanting to defend mortals and their dignity. Unfortunately, he understood just what a fragile and easily stolen thing dignity was when you didn’t possess overwhelming strength. Cultivators had that strength. Mortals didn’t. Jing had the right of it. Sen didn’t even have that hard of a time discerning why sects hadn’t displaced mortal authority. It would have been a distraction from cultivation. Why spend your time telling mortals what to do when you could be spending your time searching for natural treasures or locked away in closed-door cultivation, inching ever closer to ascension? Just let them deal with each other, and make it clear that you don’t want to be bothered.

He'd even lay a bet that when that choice had been made, the cultivators had told the mortals outright that was their reasoning. It had happened long ago enough that not interfering with mortals had become doctrine for the sects. But how many generations of mortals had come and gone since then? How many kingdoms had risen and fallen since then? More than enough for any knowledge of such a rationale to have been lost. Not lost through any specific intent, but lost through the inevitable destruction of historical documents and the fallibility of memory. That which might once have been known could only now be inferred through the echoes of long-held tradition. Sen wondered how mortals might have behaved differently if they’d truly understood just how stark and vast the power imbalance was. He wasn’t sure it would have been a change for the better.

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“I expect that’s all true,” said Sen. “If it means anything to you, all of this was not my first choice of how to handle things. I didn’t mean to get involved at all.”

“No?” asked Jing with a look of genuine surprise.

“All I intended to do was stay in my little town and protect my daughter, but the world has a way of making you do things you’d rather not.”

“Like what’s about to happen here today?”

“Like killing tens of thousands of spirit beasts. It was necessary, but I know for a fact that some of the spirit beasts who died were intelligent. They might have been reasoned with if circumstances were different. This world does not belong to humanity by right, despite what most mortals and cultivators seem to think. The spirit beasts have been here all along. They think. They feel. They remember. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them. They might have even been here first. For all I know, they have the better claim on this world.

“If they hadn’t turned this into a war where the virtual extinction of one side or the other was the only possible outcome, I’d have much rather negotiated something else. Agreed on territories each side could call their own. Settled on rules of conflict to prevent this exact situation. I don’t enjoy killing, Jing. I like mass slaughter even less, regardless of how good I’ve gotten at both.

“This,” said Sen, throwing his arms out in an all-encompassing way, “is not why I became a cultivator. I never wanted to rule the world. I just wanted to witness it. I dreamed about seeing oceans and standing on mountains. I never dreamed about killing people or destroying armies like some mad, wrathful god. Now, look at what I’ve become. A tyrant and a butcher. After what I did to protect this city, I suspect that I have more blood on my hands than anyone else alive. Compared to that, what’s happening here today barely rises to the level of distastefully inconvenient.”

Jing’s face was a little pale by the time Sen had finished speaking. He also looked stunned by what he must have taken as revelations. I guess there were probably some things in there he didn’t know or hadn’t considered, thought Sen.

“I’m sorry,” said Jing. “I suppose we all just saw that battle as a victory. Myself included. I’d never considered that you might see killing all those spirit beasts as—”

The man trailed off as though uncertain of what word could come next. Sen provided it for him.

“An atrocity. I know there wasn’t another way. In my mind, I know it as a certainty, but it was an unspeakable waste of life and potential. All of it made more terrible by the fact that most of those spirit beasts weren’t able to think or choose for themselves. Left to their own devices, most of them probably never would have seen a human being in their lifetime. They were driven here and compelled to fight by those who should have been protecting them. To me, it’s little different than hurling children into battle. And I killed all of them. I took everything that they were or might have become, and I burned it away.

“I didn’t do it out of some sick bloodlust or joy in the deaths of others. I also know their souls will reincarnate. Make no mistake, though. There is a karmic price to pay for doing things like that. And I don’t get to share that burden with anyone. Do you know what the worst part is?” asked Sen.

“What?” asked Jing, his face nearly bloodless.

“I know that I’m going to have to do it again, and again, and again. Not because I want to. Not because there isn’t a better way. It’s because some power-crazed spirit beast won’t let me do it another way. If this war plays out at all the way I expect it to, when the day comes that I ascend, I’ll do it with the blood of millions on my hands. How can any man pay a debt like that?”

Jing remained silent for several minutes after that, while Sen went back to glaring at the throne. He already regretted telling Jing all of that. It hadn’t unburdened him at all, while it had clearly laid an unearned burden on Jing. Thinking about the karmic consequences of the role he had chosen to take made everything that was happening with Kang seem as trivial as it actually was. Sen was tempted to dispense with the coming farce, but the farce wasn’t there for him. It was there to protect General Mo. With the army ready to march within the week, this couldn’t be put off any longer. Shaking his head a little, Sen lowered the air qi barriers he’d put up around the room. Taking a deep breath, he made himself sit down on the throne and called out to the waiting servants.

“Allow them in.”