Unintended Cultivator

V13 Chapter 62 – There Are Consequences

The aftermath of an advancement was always a strange thing. On the one hand, Sen was undeniably stronger. He felt it. He knew it. On the other hand, it also came with the side effect of leaving him feeling simultaneously weaker. The stress it put on his body, to say nothing of his mind, wasn’t something to be scoffed at. He was mentally exhausted. He also knew that, ideally, he should rest for a few days to let everything inside of him acclimate to the changes. Not that he expected to actually get that rest. Even if the army stopped for a day or two, it wouldn’t be restful. Not unless he levied death threats against anyone who disturbed him for anything short of a monumental beast tide. Sen wasn’t above such threats, but he wanted to use them sparingly. Otherwise, they might lose some of their potency.

Avoiding a tribulation was a nice change, though. Sen had spent more than a little time pondering those over the years. He’d asked his teachers and the other nascent soul cultivators he was on good terms with about them. From all that accumulated wisdom, he could only draw one conclusion. No one had any idea what conditions triggered them. Sen had always assumed that the information was held back as a form of mental conditioning for younger cultivators. If you never knew when or why a tribulation might appear, it forced you to harden your mind and temper your will against the prospect of pain. And it did work that way. It just wasn’t a devious plan tacitly agreed on by cunning seniors.

He had to concede that it might be a cunning plan by the heavens. A subtle form of indirect assistance that didn’t look like assistance. He pondered that idea for a few minutes while he waited for some of that initial exhaustion to pass. On reflection, that struck him as a bit too subtle. The heavens were a hammer in his experience. Something that might help to explain just why so many cultivators were the way they were. Sen felt it when a familiar presence approached. If it had been almost anyone else, he would have pushed away from the tree. It was unwise to show weakness to predators, no matter what they looked like.

“Well, this looks like it was interesting,” said Master Feng.

“Interesting is certainly one word for it.”

“You’ll need to do something about that,” said the elder cultivator with a gesture toward the devil’s remains. “Even its corpse will corrupt most things.”

“I’ll burn it before I go back,” said Sen as he wearily pushed away from the tree.

Sen watched as Master Feng walked over to examine Changpu’s body.

“It’s been a very long time since I last saw something like this. Most people aren’t this foolish.”

“He was highly motivated,” said Sen in answer to the unasked question. “I’m the one who took his arm.”

Master Feng squinted down at the body and said, “I guess I do recall you telling us about something like that. I wouldn’t have thought he’d go this far. There are consequences to it.”

The way that his teacher had said the word consequences sent a shiver of fear through Sen.

“What kind of consequences?”

“Well, there’s the obvious disfigurement that you can see here. There’s no healing that. It’s been tried. So, even if he changed his mind later, he’d have been cut off from humanity for the rest of this life. Who could trust someone who looked so obviously corrupted?”

“True enough,” said Sen, having come to similar conclusions himself. “Is that it?”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Heavens, no. While not as bad as an actual devil, he’d have posed a threat to anyone or anything that spent any significant time around him. The evil he willingly took into himself would have spread like an illness. But those are just the minor effects.”

Those had not sounded particularly minor to Sen. That thought must have shown on his face because Master Feng gave him a sad look and continued.

“The real damage is to his karma. Admittedly, most things related to karma are poorly understood, but not this. He took on more negative karma than you can possibly imagine with this choice. He won’t have an easy time in his future lives for a very, very long time.”

“How much negative karma?” asked Sen out of morbid curiosity.

“Well, I’m not an expert on the matter. Then again, even the experts aren’t experts. If I had to guess—” Master Feng trailed off as he frowned in thought. “You could probably stack all the negative karma that me, you, Kho, Caihong, and even poor Fu Ruolan have accumulated, and it wouldn’t come close.”

Sen flinched at that last comment when he thought about the lives that the cultivators on that list led. The potential amount of negative karma was staggering. If Changpu was taken into the thousand hells, he might be able to burn off some of it. Even after that, though, Sen had to concede that Master Feng was likely correct. Changpu was going to lead very hard lives moving forward. Considering his own role in the other man’s path through the world, Sen had to wonder if he could look forward to getting a piece of that negative karma. He may not have intended for any of this to happen, but how often did people ever intend for disasters to happen? What mattered was that he had played a significant role in setting things into motion. However, Changpu had made his catastrophic decision far from Sen’s sight and influence.

Repressing the sigh that passed his lips proved impossible. Karma was so obscure that there was just no way for Sen to know or even guess what would happen. Master Feng gave him a knowing look.

“There’s no point in trying to determine how much or how little this will affect you,” said the elder cultivator. “You only know that it will.”

“I thought I was sparing him. After I took his arm, I mean. I thought it was mercy. Looking at him now, though. I can’t help but think that I made the wrong choice.”

Master Feng gave him a long look before he snorted.

“That’s a good way to drive yourself mad. Making the wrong choice is something that happens to everyone. The problem is that, as often as not, you can’t know it’s the wrong choice when you make it. Take this poor fool,” said the elder cultivator with a nod at Changpu’s body. “When you spared him, his life could have gone in a thousand directions. His future was undefined. He could have decided to accept what happened to him. He could have looked for other solutions. They do exist. It would have been exceedingly difficult, but he could have been restored. If he’d been especially vigilant, he might have even come out the other side of that restoration a wiser man. He could have settled down into a commoner’s life. Found a wife. Had children. Taken up a trade. Found meaning in something other than cultivation.”

“I suppose that’s all true.”

“Of course, it is. I’m very old. I know things. But that isn’t my point.”

“What is your point?” asked Sen, although he was confident that he knew the answer.

“My point is that it only became the wrong choice after he made a horrendously poor decision. Could you have predicted it? Possibly, but not with the kind of certainty that you would have needed at the time to justify killing him.”

“But you would have predicted it and killed him?”

“Yes. First of all, you’ll discover one day that it’s become much easier to predict what people will do. It’s a benefit of having thousands of years of experience.”

“Fair,” said Sen. “And second?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’d have killed him because I’m a vengeful old bastard who doesn’t like people stealing from me.”

Sen huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh and said, “I guess I should have predicted that answer.”

“You really should have. Now, why don’t you clean up this mess so you can go get some actual rest? Oh, and make sure you destroy both bodies.”

Sen shot his teacher a questioning look.

“Even though his corruption is minor compared to the devil’s, it’s still dangerous. Best that you don’t take chances.”

Taking those words to heart, Sen used some fire qi to turn both bodies to ash. By the time they were arriving back at the slowly-moving army, he was starting to feel better. That lasted right up until the second he saw Falling Leaf glaring at him. Damn it, thought Sen.