Unintended Cultivator-Chapter 7Book 11: : Jin Bohai

Sen found that, as he aged, fewer and fewer things truly surprised him. He wondered occasionally if that was a sad thing. A sign that he was becoming ever more jaded and that the world simply held less wonder for him. However, Jin Bohai’s admission that he was Fu Ruolan’s master had surprised him. She had mentioned having a master, but she’d been beyond sparing with the details. Sen hadn’t pushed because it hadn’t seemed like something he genuinely needed to know about. After all, he had secrets, so he couldn’t rightly complain that other people kept a few.

Part of his surprise was simply that he’d met the man before he’d met Fu Ruolan, however brief that meeting had been. It felt contrary to some natural order of things. He should have met her first, and then met her master at some later, more auspicious time. The rest of his surprise stemmed from the fact that he hadn’t gotten the impression that the man focused on shadow qi, although he supposed that should have been less shocking. He’d been early core formation when he’d last met the nascent soul cultivator. He suspected that the man was more than practiced at hiding anything he wanted from people at a lower cultivation level.

It was something Sen felt he needed to learn how to do better, but couldn’t ever quite find the spare time for. Like so many other things, Sen complained in his head. There had been so many lucky encounters, brushes with the transcendent, and intuitive glimpses in his life that he’d never been able to fully explore. Maybe if he’d led a life more like other cultivators, those opportunities would have compounded to let him accomplish something truly remarkable. Instead, they stagnated and grew ever more distant in the past. He despaired of ever being able to glean anything from them. Maybe, he thought, if I could take a century and just focus on them. I might be able to do something with them. It was a century of quiet and solitude he didn’t expect to get any time soon.

It was Jin Bohai’s expectant look that dragged Sen out of his dour thoughts. He’d asked a question after all. Now, Sen had to decide how to answer it. Or if he even should answer it. On the one hand, this man was Fu Ruolan’s master. It would make sense for him to ask after her. There was even an argument that Sen owed him an answer based on that relationship. On the other hand, Fu Ruolan was Sen’s teacher, which meant he owed her a level of loyalty and discretion. He also had no proof that what the man claimed was true.

Sen thought it was probably true since he could verify the claim easily enough. There wasn’t much value in a lie that could so easily be disproven. Still, Sen didn’t know for certain. He decided to err on the side of caution.

“I haven’t spoken to her recently,” said Sen. “I would be inappropriate for me to comment on her state of mind.”

Jin Bohai’s lips tightened a little at those words. He’d clearly expected a prompt and direct answer. Sen suspected that the man wanted to pursue the topic, but that course of action was problematic for more than one reason. The most immediate reason was that their relative standing was murky at best. Jin Bohai was more powerful. Sen wasn’t sure exactly how much more powerful, but it was enough that Sen could feel it. Despite that variance in power, they were both nascent soul cultivators.

That made them members of a very small, very select sub-society even within the cultivator community. It was a community that he was woefully undereducated about, which wasn’t entirely on him. His teachers had, probably with the best of intentions and eyes toward efficiency, waved off most of his questions. They had no doubt imagined they would have more time. What was even more telling was that conversations with other cultivators had made it painfully clear that he was better educated than most. There weren’t many hard-and-fast rules, as he understood it. The firmest rule was a general admonition not to interfere with each other unnecessarily. A rule that, given normal cultivator selfishness, seemed oddly focused on the general good. Sen had a much better idea of how much destruction he could throw around on a whim, which meant that someone even he knew was more powerful could exceed even those terrifying levels.

Beyond that, Sen needed to make a minimal effort to be polite, but he had no obligation to be subservient. Advancement in the nascent soul stage was far, far too unpredictable for anyone to dare play those kinds of games. Just because another nascent soul cultivator was weaker right now, there was no guarantee that the same situation would hold indefinitely. So, everyone in the community made the minimal effort unless there was some kind of unforgivable blood debt in their history. On top of that, Sen was effectively a monarch standing inside his own palace. Jin Bohai wasn’t required to be polite to him, but there was a long tradition that even sect patriarchs and matriarchs were not openly disrespectful toward royalty.

It was also well-known who Sen’s backers were. Offending him came with the added risk of offending Fate’s Razor and The Living Spear. Two beings who had the personal power to ignore all tradition and do whatever the hells they felt like. That was a threat with real teeth, given what Master Feng had done to his own brother. If he was willing to do that to family because of Sen, what would he do to someone who wasn’t family? Sen could almost see those calculations happening behind Jin Bohai’s eyes as they stood there in the twilight. After a few moments that felt longer to Sen, an amused noise escaped from the other nascent soul cultivator’s lips. The expectant, almost imperious front that the man had put on slid away to reveal a more affable expression.

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“Well, they haven’t been lying about you,” said Jin Bohai. “I’ve met plenty of new nascent soul cultivators who would have told me anything I wanted to know. It seems that you do have nerves of steel.”

“Of course, I wasn’t lying to you,” said Lai Dongmei, her annoyance clear. “What purpose would that have served?”

“Politics,” said Jin Bohai with a shrug. “Lies are the language of politics.”

“That’s the heavens’ own truth,” muttered Sen in a weary voice.

“Ha!” said Jin Bohai. “That’s the tone of a man with recent experience in said truth.”

“It is,” said Sen with a nod, “but I doubt that’s what you came here to talk about.”

“True. That would waste your time and mine. Although it could be argued that we have it to waste more than most,” said Jin Bohai, breaking into a great grin. “After all, what greater resource does a cultivator have than time? What are centuries when you have millennia?”

“Time is only a resource when you don’t have pressing matters,” said Sen, growing a little tired of the conversation. “I have many pressing matters.”

Jin Bohai’s expression became deadly serious in an instant. It was jarring. Sen couldn’t tell if the other cultivator was eccentric, putting him through a test, or maybe Fu Ruolan had found a teacher as unhinged as she was.

“You do have many pressing matters. Grave matters. It seems the survival of all mankind has been thrust on you by some terribly unkind teachers,” observed Jin Bohai.

“Why would you say that?” asked Sen, his voice going cold and hard. “You don’t know me or what I want.”

“I don’t know you? You are very young, Judgment’s Gale. Or perhaps you would prefer that I address you by your new name.”

“What new name?” demanded Sen.

He shot a glance at Lai Dongmei. She winced. This was clearly a topic she hadn’t intended to bring up with him. She knew he didn’t like all of the absurd names people kept dropping onto him without ever asking. Given the icy glare she directed at Jin Bohai, she hadn’t expected him to bring it up either.

“You haven’t heard it yet? I think you must have been trying not to,” said Jin Bohai. “They’re calling you The Warstorm.”

Sen groaned aloud and buried his face in his hands. It just kept getting worse. He gave himself a few seconds to wallow in his embarrassment and self-pity before he dropped his hands and gave Jin Bohai a flat look.

“Please tell me that you’re making that up,” said Sen.

“He’s not,” said Lai Dongmei while refusing to meet Sen’s eyes.

Sen leaned his head back and noticed that a few stars were starting to appear in the sky. He took three deep breaths.

“Wonderful,” he said. “That’s just what I need. Another ridiculous name.”

Jin Bohai gave him a look that bordered on sympathetic and said, “It gives them hope.”

“Perhaps. Your question implied that you know me better than I think.”

“I’ve been around a very long time. Maybe not as long as your master, or your lover here,” said the elder cultivator, eliciting a choked sound from Lai Dongmei, “but more than long enough to understand someone with a mere handful of decades behind them. I’ve been observing you and your rule over this place. You would never have chosen this path for yourself. You aren’t ruthless enough. That means that someone else pushed you onto it.”

“I assure you,” said Sen, “that I’m plenty ruthless.”

“Against your direct enemies, certainly. But ruling over a nation, or an empire, means that you must be ruthless with everyone. The innocent. The guilty. The brave and the cowardly. You don’t have that kind of ice in you.”

Sen didn’t like being read quite so easily. Nor did he wish to explore that topic with a complete stranger. So, he did the only thing that made sense to him. He changed the subject.

“Jin Bohai, we’ve already established that I am a very busy man. I have to assume that you also have many duties to attend to. If you merely came here to discuss politics and philosophy, I’m afraid that I’ll have to draw this conversation to a close.”

Jin Bohai sighed and said, “You speak as if politics, philosophy, and cultivation are somehow separate things.”

“They are. Cultivation, most of all. We are but visitors here,” said Sen. “Something every cultivator would do well to remember.”

“Yes, I’ve heard the same from your master’s own lips. Yet, here you stand. King Lu. Placed on a mortal throne by demigods of blade and lightning.”

“The hypocrisy is not lost on me. Nor is the gravity of our current circumstances.”

Jin Bohai lifted a placating hand and said, “An act of necessity. I do understand that. I’m just not sure that I agree with the idea that we should walk in separate worlds.”

“We do walk in separate worlds,” said Sen. “Look at me. I might, might, be able to convince someone that I’m twenty years old. But most people wouldn’t believe I’m even that old. I doubt many mortals my age can say they have that problem. I can probably shatter mountains with my strength. I can summon power that would raze cities. We aren’t like the mortals. Pretending we are is irresponsible. It’s stupid. It puts them in danger. I know. I’ve done it.”

“Well, no one can say that you weren’t listening when your teachers spoke,” said Jin Bohai. “And this is an argument to be had over glasses of wine, not standing around outside a palace.”

“So, we’re finally coming to the point?” asked Sen, feeling that he’d exhausted his well of politeness.

“I said before that we could probably learn things from each other. I still think that’s true, assuming you have as much affinity for shadow qi as I think you do.”

Sen didn’t answer. He simply lifted a hand over his head. He pictured one of Glimmer of Night’s more complicated webs and recreated it out of shadow. Threads as black as the night sky and thin as gossamer shot in every direction, covering hundreds of feet to the most distant parts of the walls. There was shouting as guards panicked. Sen withdrew the shadow web and looked at the stunned Jin Bohai.

“Is that enough affinity for you?”