Unintended Cultivator V13 Chapter 63 – Honor the Dead

Despite Sen’s fears, Falling Leaf’s annoyance was short-lived.

“You went to fight without again,” she said with narrowed eyes.

“There was a devil,” answered Sen.

Sen felt a tiny bit guilty because he hadn’t known there was a devil when he raced after Changpu in a fit of wrath. Even so, not having Falling Leaf there was ultimately for the good. An opinion she seed to share. The outrage, which Sen suspected was at least partially an act, vanished. It was replaced by legitimate concern.

“Did you kill it?” she asked.

Sen stared at her in confusion before he said, “Didn’t you feel all that divine qi from my advancent?”

Falling Leaf shrugged and said, “That happens all the ti.”

“I— Well, I suppose that’s true. Okay. This ti it happened because, yes, I killed the devil.”

“That’s for the best. Did you destroy it?” asked Falling Leaf with sudden anxiety clear in her voice and on her face. “It will corrupt the land if you leave the corpse.”

Sen did his best to hide the flare of disappointnt in his heart. Despite his best efforts, Falling Leaf was no closer to caring about mortals or cultivators now than she had been the day she took on her human form. That isn’t fair, he thought. She does care about Ai and seed to take a liking to Shui. He even had to concede that she’d liked Chan Yu Ming before things turned so very sour between him and the princess. He felt a more serious stab of guilt about that. He couldn’t see a way that things could have ended other than they had. But it didn’t change the fact that his actions had cost Falling Leaf a potential friendship.

On the whole, though, she could take or leave, and mostly leave, everyone else. What the ghost panther did care about was what she had always cared about. The lands of the wilds. He supposed that she thought of those as her real ho. So, it only made sense that her thoughts went there first and everywhere else second.

“The devil is nothing but ash now,” said Sen around a yawn.

He’d been trying to hide that he was tired, but it was no use. Breaking through was never easy. Even if it had just been a minor advancent, it was a minor advancent at the nascent soul stage. He suspected the sheer power involved was more than all of his advancents as a qi-condensing and foundation formation cultivator put together. It took a toll. The fact that it was taking actual concentration on his part to maintain the qi platform he and Falling Leaf stood on was proof enough of that. He just hoped that whatever trap the spirit beasts had in store for him would wait for a day or two.

Sen spent the rest of his day in a blank haze. Whatever ntal resources he had went to keeping the qi platform in the air and not swaying on his feet. When the army stopped for the day to make camp, all he wanted to do was sleep. Unfortunately, there was a grim task that needed to be attended to. He needed to honor the dead. Three funeral pyres were built. The cultivators with the army had handled constructing those. No ordinary flas could consu a core cultivator’s body. It took special preparations to erect pyres for them. An act that brought back bad mories, Sen personally carried out the proper prayers and rituals for the three cultivator scouts who had died for nothing. Then, he stood watch over the flas as they burned down to embers.

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It felt like far too little, but it was the limit to what he could do. Their bodies were beyond his ability to heal. All that remained were their souls. Tired or not, he could take the ti to ease their passage into the next life. He just had to hope that the gods, for which he had almost no use, would take his prayers in the spirit with which he made them. It would take an appalling level of pettiness to ignore a good-faith place for rciful intervention. Of course, if cultivators did actually ascend into godhood, that level of pettiness might be common. He just had to hope that he was right and that wasn’t the case.

Most of the lower-level cultivators didn’t attend, but all of the nascent soul cultivators did. Sen wasn’t sure if it was an act of support for him. It could just as easily have been an act of acknowledgnt for the sacrifices made. Or, they might have been reminding themselves that death was always possible. He imagined that it was easy for cultivators at their level of advancent to take life for granted. Most of them had outlived their peers, their original kingdoms, and so had outlived the very sects that initially trained them. After surviving for that long, death had to be sothing of an abstract concept to them. Yes, it would find them eventually if they reached a bottleneck or failed to ascend. But it wouldn’t happen soon for most of them.

It was a mindset that Sen struggled to grasp at a visceral level. The proximity of death had been a near-constant companion since he’d been a child. Becoming a cultivator hadn’t changed that for him. It had only changed the form that his death might take. As a child, nature itself had been the great enemy to his survival. Starvation had always lood large as a possibility. The chance of freezing to death had been an annual trial. That was to say nothing of venomous spiders and even the rare snake. As a cultivator, the threats beca spirit beasts, other cultivators, tribulations, and suicidal advancent techniques.

But most nascent soul cultivators had left those threats behind centuries ago. They advanced so slowly that it might be hundreds of years or more between tribulations. As he understood it, most of them remained cloistered in their sect compounds. Challenges between nascent soul cultivators were, while not unheard of, extrely rare when compared with how often lower-level cultivators battled. Encounters with spirit beasts were equally rare unless they went out looking for one. He imagined that, for most of them, a bland saness marked their passage through ti. One day bleeding into the next with no aningful differences between them. The centuries only broken up by the occasional whim to teach a junior.

It was just one more way in which, while he was one of them, he wasn’t one of them. His path was so divergent that most of them looked at him like he was an exotic spirit beast in his own right. Sen understood it, but it was still painful. He’d been so terribly lonely as a child, and yearned so much for a family of his own. There was a part of him that desperately wanted to find common ground with these other nascent soul cultivators. He wanted peers. People he could talk with, share ideas with, and even get guidance from. Friends. Not that Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Auntie Caihong were stingy with their guidance, but they weren’t friends. Family, without question, but that was a different animal. Falling Leaf was his friend, but she wasn’t a cultivator. There was a divide there that couldn’t be overco. And none of that was going to change.

Sen couldn’t be friends with the nascent soul cultivators because he was expected to lead. He was ostracized by position, power, and his freakish path through advancent. Most days, he could look past all of that because it was a necessary sacrifice to accomplish his goals. On days when exhaustion and bad mories plagued him, though, he felt like an orphan on the streets again. He felt alone and desperately wished that he wasn’t. Not that he could let any of that show on his face. All he could show was stern resolve until he returned to his tent. It was only then that he could collapse onto his blankets and let sleep carry him away from all that troubled him.