Unintended Cultivator-Chapter 52Book 10: : Young Monster

Sen ultimately told Shi Ping to head anywhere at the base of the wall, look for someone in charge, and tell them he was a cultivator there to help.

“If they give you a hard time, tell them that I sent you there personally,” Sen had told the other cultivator. “I don’t think they’ll give you any trouble, though. I suspect that anyone who can and will fight is welcome right now.”

Shi Ping had nodded at that and, after hesitating for a moment, asked the question that Sen had been expecting from the start.

“Just how destructive will this thing you’re going to do actually be?”

“Assuming it works,” mused Sen, “very destructive. The good news is that the destruction will happen at a meaningful distance from the city walls.”

“That’s something, at least,” muttered Shi Ping. “I suppose I should wish you good luck.”

“I think we’ll all need some of that before this is over. What I’m doing won’t stop their attack. It’ll just prevent them from using that formation of theirs.”

“Somehow, I doubt that’s all it’s going to do.”

“Probably so, but there are so many of them out there that I expect we’ll all be fighting with them up close before it’s all done.”

“Then, I’ll see you when it’s over. Or, I’ll see you in my next life.”

Without waiting for a response, Shi Ping stepped off the wall into open air, formed a qi platform, and flew toward the city wall. Sen waited for what felt like a very long time, but that he objectively knew was no more than an hour before Lai Dongmei rejoined him on the wall.

“They’re ready on the walls,” she told him.

Sen looked at the walls with his enhanced vision. The tops of the walls were still alive with activity that seemed to indicate that the mortals and cultivators there were not, in fact, ready. He hated needing to rely on the reports of others to decide when he should do something. When he fought, he was used to being the only person he needed to depend on to make a choice. He also knew that part of his frustration and uncertainty came from not being able to verify the information he was receiving. Of course, even if he’d been standing on the city walls, he lacked the experience to know if they were ready. He just had to trust that the people he was getting information from had gotten good information from others. Extending that trust to people he knew didn’t like him or that he’d never even met was a struggle.

“Are they really ready?” he asked.

“I think that they think that they are,” she answered. “Whether that’s the case is something we won’t know until after the fight is over one way or the other.”

Sen blinked at her a few times, sighed, and said, “If you were looking for the right moment to tell me a comforting lie, that was the moment. And you missed it.”

“I would never dare lie to you, Lord Tyrant,” said Lai Dongmei with an expression of utmost seriousness that was wholly undermined by the corners of her mouth trying to rise into a smile.

“Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t,” said Sen with a small shake of his head. “You’ll want to go, well, just about anywhere but the top of this wall for what comes next. It’s going to get very dangerous up here in a minute or two.”

“I’ll wait for you below,” she said and floated down to the open courtyard inside the palace grounds.

Sen forced himself to take slow breaths for the next minute. He could pretend with everyone else that what he was about to do wasn’t going to be potentially lethal to him. He couldn’t tell that to himself. He knew better. Waiting won’t make it safer, he told himself. He walked over to the last spike, bent down, and carved the formation into the stone with his fingers using a combination of earth qi and fire qi. He formed a qi platform and lifted himself into the air until he hovered above the palace. He could feel the formation he’d made and his exact distance from it. He adjusted his position until he was the exact same distance from every spike. He looked down to the courtyard far below and saw Lai Dongmei looking up at him. He wasn’t sure if she could see his face the way he could see hers, but he smiled at her all the same.

Then, there were no more preparations to make. No more necessary steps. The city was as ready as it was going to get within the very limited amount of time they’d had to prepare. It wasn’t enough. He also knew that if they’d had months to prepare, it wouldn’t have been enough. If they’d had years, it still wouldn’t have been enough. When it came to a battle, there was never enough time to prepare. There was only ever the time you had. Then, the outcome was left to the hands of individual soldiers, the demands of karma, and the uncertain favor of fate. With that comfortless truth in his mind, Sen activated the formation.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Read latest chapters at freёweɓnovel.com Only.

***

Boulder’s Shadow stood at the edge of the forest and observed the human city. He had been against the decision to attack this place so soon. Humanity wasn’t nearly desperate enough, yet. Not that he felt any particular way about this war. He’d simply been put in a position to either join or die. He had joined. Having joined, though, he felt it was prudent to at least occasionally offer salient input about the decisions being made around him. After all, those decisions might well put him in danger one day.

As such, he had been vocal in his opposition to the idea, which was always a dangerous choice when dealing with the Beast King. For that sin, he had been sent to this place as an observer with orders to report back when the city was destroyed. The certainty of success that had underpinned that order had been given struck him as hubris. Every battle was uncertain, and what humans might do on any given day was almost frighteningly unpredictable. When chaos and fear struck, they would sometimes fall on each other like maddened beasts. He’d seen that often enough in his very long life. Of course, they were just as likely to contract into a unified line of hardened resistance if the right person stepped forward.

He had only learned about the arrival of that boy after it was too late to do anything about it. If he had learned sooner, he would have told the rest of them to kill him. He might have even done it himself. That boy was dangerous and more than a little mad. The kind of person who would hurl himself against monumental odds and certain death if given a sufficient reason. That had been true when last they’d met, and Boulder’s Shadow had been leery of the Lu Sen’s power even then. It only stood to reason that he would be even more powerful now, given the impossible speed of his growth.

“Those damn fools should have killed him,” said the ghost panther to the trees around him.

A battle with the boy might have damaged the formation. That would have delayed their assault on the city, which was a risk everyone else had decided not to take. It would have been worth it. It wasn’t like the city was going anywhere. Letting that boy enter the city had done exactly what he had feared it would do. It had spurred the previously passive humans into action. He had watched the cultivators suddenly go to work making changes to the walls. He’d even witnessed Lu Sen dragging a mountain’s worth of stone up from the depths of the earth.

Just in the last few hours, he had seen activity on the walls that suggested something important was happening. He had initially thought that the humans were going to venture out of the city and make a doomed assault on the gathered spirit beasts. As more and more time passed, he started to doubt that assessment. Still, it was clear that they expected something to happen. He wondered if they expected the spirit beasts to launch an attack soon. He’d seen the progress on the vast formation, and they were close to activating it. Once they did, all the preparation the humans were doing would prove pointless. It would carve those walls into tiny pieces regardless of any improvements the human had hastily done.

“What are they getting ready for?” he asked no one.

Then, as if in answer to his question, he felt a pulse of qi. An arrow of blinding light descended from the heavens into the very heart of the human capital. No, he thought, not light. Lightning! Except, lightning never struck that way. It was too controlled to be anything but the work of a cultivator. That slender column of lightning abruptly ended and was replaced by what he realized had to be a massive ball of lightning floating over the city. An abrupt sense of foreboding took him then. That foreboding transformed into dread that came from within and without. As he watched, the lightning was transformed into first one, then two, and then a dozen orbs that were blacker than the clouds that had hung over this place for days. With that transformation came a palpable pressure that carried with it the undeniable presence of annihilation.

With dawning horror, Boulder’s Shadow realized what he was looking at. He had seen Lu Sen use this terrible thing once before. But it had been a fraction of the size of what he saw floating in the air now. He recalled the devastation in that little human town. If the boy intended to rain those things down on them here, the destruction would be unspeakable. Tens of thousands of spirit beasts would die. Maybe more. If even one of those struck the formation, he thought, and his mind crashed to a stop. Of course, the formation would be the target. I have to warn the others, he thought even as he recognized that it was futile.

The boy had already sent those orbs of inky destruction hurtling out toward them. To make matters worse, they were getting bigger as they went, as if their original size was simply insufficient to contain their malignant fury. It only took a moment for Boulder’s Shadow to calculate that he was likely safe. He even had to give Lu Sen credit for the accuracy of his aim. It would only take one of those orbs to irreparably damage the formation, but it looked like nearly all of them would find their targets.

He heard the panic take hold. The spirit beasts with evolved minds were screaming orders and trying to erect defenses that Boulder’s Shadow knew would be pointless. The death that was descending on them was as inexorable as it was wrong. Such a technique should not exist, but it seemed that such things did not matter to Judgment’s Gale. The lower spirit beasts sensed that something powerful and dangerous was approaching. Some let out defiant cries, but far more tried to flee before that undeniable might. As some of the more powerful spirit beasts hurled techniques at those approaching orbs, Boulder’s Shadow simply closed his eyes.

The howling awfulness when they landed struck the ghost panther in his soul as much as his senses. He felt how things that had once existed abruptly stopped existing. The air itself screamed as it raced by to fill the sudden empty places. He lowered his head at the sheer scale of death carried out by a single man. Years earlier, after his first meeting with Lu Sen, he had wondered if Feng Ming had set out to make a monster. Now, he had his answer. The old monster had succeeded in making a young monster.

***

As carnage the likes of which the continent hadn’t seen in living memory unfolded, every eye in the city was turned outward. So, no one noticed as a figure that had, ever so briefly, blazed like a god in the fullness of their power plummeted toward the earth below. Nor did they see a woman in pristine white robes race up to snatch that falling man from the earth’s unforgiving embrace.