Unintended Cultivator-Chapter 48Book 10: : Cunning on Demand
Sen had to work hard to quell his nervousness as he sat at the large table and waited for the last few stragglers to arrive. Some of them were mortals and near the outer edges of the city, so he couldn’t expect cultivator speed from them. He’d called together the main leadership in the city for the ostensible purpose of informing him about the progress of the various defense projects they were overseeing. He did need that information, but he wouldn’t have bothered to summon them if that had been his main purpose. Anyone with a functional memory could have brought him those updates. He also knew that some leaders demanded that people in lesser leadership roles appear in person as a means of exerting authority and dominance over them. It wasn’t a practice that Sen meant to regularly employ, but it was fine if people thought he was doing that ahead of this particular meeting.
No, he had a far different purpose in mind. He needed to introduce them to the idea of the nine-tail foxes helping them and to Misty Peak as their representative. He’d considered asking more of the foxes to come along, but neither he nor Misty Peak wanted to expose their identities in case things went poorly. It was harder to kill people you’d never seen. He also had to consider the foxes’ natures. He trusted that they all wanted to live and would play their parts in the battle because looming death had a way of focusing the mind. He had less faith in their self-control if presented with a room full of the city’s most powerful people. He suspected that it would prove to be too much temptation for the mercurial spirit beasts.
He wasn’t entirely sure he trusted Misty Peak to behave, either, but someone had to be the mouthpiece. He also knew that she at least had the ability to stay on task for more than five seconds at a time without a mortal threat hanging over her head. She’d chased Laughing River for a long time. He just had to hope that she maintained the motivation to remain disciplined. As the last person filed into the room, a mortal general who exuded a lot of vitality, Sen had to accept that there was only so much he could do to direct the results of this meeting. Once the general was seated next to Jing, all of the attention in the room focused on Sen.
“Thank you all for coming so quickly,” said Sen. “I know that you’re all doing crucial work, so I’ll come to the point of this meeting. I didn’t bring you here to talk about that work.”
There was a bit of hushed murmuring before Jing posed the question that was no doubt on everyone’s mind.
“If we aren’t here for that, then what are we here for?”
It required effort for Sen not to take a deep breath. He knew that he needed to look calm and in control for this to be anything but a disaster.
“As you are all surely aware, the people who will not be fighting are also the people at the greatest risk if spirit beasts should breach the city walls. I’m sure I don’t need to explain to the cultivators in the room what it would mean if spirit beasts rampaged unchecked through mortal women, children, and elderly.”
The cultivators had the most experience with the spirit beasts and the aftermath of spirit beasts attacking mortal towns and villages. The sects in the city had less experience than sects located away from the capital, but even they had seen the results of such attacks. Even the normally disinterested cultivators weren’t wholly immune from that kind of horror. He saw a few of them trade uneasy glances.
“That’s true,” said Lai Dongmei, “but I’m uncertain what we can do about that. If we’re to have any hope against the numbers you warned us about, our forces must remain concentrated at the walls.”
“I agree,” said Sen. “While we must provide the mortals who won’t be fighting with some protection, we cannot weaken the main fighting force.”
He saw a few relieved expressions around the table. They had no doubt thought he was about to order some kind of madness that would doom them all while simultaneously requiring victory. He decided to capitalize on that moment of relief and the modest goodwill it had earned him with the people in the room.
“There is,” he continued, “more than one way to protect them.”
That drew another round of quiet murmurs. It was Bey Peizhi who took the lead that time. The man was still a little hesitant around Sen, the memory of Heavens’ Rebuke probably still fresh in the man’s mind.
“Lord Lu, if we aren’t to draw fighters away from the wall, what other protection can we offer?”
This was the moment of truth.
“We hide them. Sun Linglu, if you please,” said Sen, almost forgetting to give the name Misty Peak normally used with people.
One moment, everyone was looking at Sen with confusion. The next moment, they were looking at Sen and the woman who had appeared right next to him with her hand on his shoulder. Sen thought that the hand-on-shoulder thing seemed a little possessive. A notion that Lai Dongmei apparently shared. Her expression didn’t change, but her eyes went arctic as she looked at Misty Peak. The reactions of everyone else in the room were far less predictable. The mortals mostly stared in confusion or shouted in surprise. He’d assumed that they wouldn’t recognize Misty Peak for what she was, and they hadn’t. The reactions from the rest of the cultivators were mixed. Some looked intrigued. The ones who realized what Misty Peak was started shouting.
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“Enough,” said Sen, letting enough qi slip into his voice that it resonated through stone, wood, and bodies alike.
“Lord Lu!” shouted a red-faced cultivator. “You cannot mean to ally us with a spirit beast. Let alone a nine-tail fox.”
That revelation almost set off the panicked response that Sen most wanted to avoid. Fortunately, he’d planned this moment out with Misty Peak ahead of time. It had been clear to both of them that he couldn’t say that nine tail foxes had just been there in the city the whole time. It had been Misty Peak who came up with the idea they decided to use. Sen was a little jealous of it, but he had to accept that she was better at being cunning on demand than he was.
“She came to this city on my orders,” said Sen, using the same resonating voice trick.
He didn’t want to do that too often, or people might get used to it, but he thought he could get away with it twice. That pronouncement drew the moment of silence that Sen hoped it would.
“I serve at Lord Lu’s command,” said Misty Peak.
He had to give her credit. She sounded sincere about it, but he supposed this kind of acting was second nature to the foxes.
“The nine-tail foxes have no love for the Beast King,” said Sen. “Please tell them why.”
Cultivators and mortals alike listened with rapt attention as Misty Peak painted a stark picture of the betrayal and losses the foxes suffered. She imparted the tale with the flair of a natural storyteller, but she avoided any dramatic embellishments as far as Sen could tell.
“We would not serve the Beast King or his goals, and we suffered for it. Some of us entered into Lord Lu’s service as a way to strike back at our mutual, hated enemies,” finished Misty Peak.
The expressions worn on the faces around the table ranged from thoughtful to distrustful. Sen hadn’t believed that the tale alone would be enough. He just wanted to give them a reason to pause and think. The assertion that they had entered into any kind of service to him was laughable, but it would provide the foxes with some semblance of protection. After all, the last time someone had attacked people that Sen considered his, a great noble house had fallen. The same cultivator who had shouted earlier was clearly readying herself for more of the same. Sen searched his memory for the woman’s name and sect.
“Qin Fulu of the Swift Stream Sect,” said Sen. “You appear to have reservations.”
“Of course, I have reservations. All foxes are liars and thieves who cannot be trusted,” said the woman as she glared daggers at Misty Peak.
While Misty Peak said nothing, he could feel the anger radiating off the fox woman. He also had his suspicions that Qin Fulu’s objections were rooted less in concern for the city and more in some personal encounter with a fox that had gone badly for her. There was even some truth to her words. Foxes were deceptive and manipulative. Many of them probably were thieves and liars. That didn’t speak all that well of them, but it didn’t mean they were plotting to murder every human. Based on his experiences with them, he had a hard time imagining anything convincing them to do something that would involve that much work. Laziness would prevent their participation if nothing else.
“Do you think I merely accepted her every word about that story without even a hint of corroboration?” Sen asked in a deceptively mild voice.
Qin Fulu seemed to register that she had stepped onto dangerous ground because her eyes snapped from Misty Peak to Sen.
“I… No, of course not,” fumbled Qin Fulu. “But why do you believe her? If it’s not too bold to ask.”
Sen made sure to keep a neutral expression as he looked down the expanse of the table at the cultivator. Sen was secretly grateful to the woman. She’d given voice to the kinds of doubts that everyone else surely held but were too polite or self-interested to mention. By dragging those concerns into the open, it gave him the opportunity to put some of the doubts to rest. Still, he couldn’t look too eager or even too inclined to answer he question. As much as he wanted this meeting to go well, he also needed to keep these people off-balance and uncertain about him. As long as they were never entirely sure what he might do or how he might react, there would be hesitation in them. Even a moment of hesitation could be enough to save his life one day. So, he simply looked at Qin Fulu with that neutral expression and let her stew in her own thoughts. When she finally started to fidget, he answered.
“The reason I believe her is because precisely the same thing happened to the ghost panthers.”
The mortals looked perplexed, but many of the cultivators in the room straightened in their chairs. Sen imagined that they were all old enough to remember when ghost panthers still walked the earth.
“How do you know?” asked Bey Peizhi. “I thought the ghost panthers were no more.”
He had been one of the cultivators to react to Sen’s words.
“The Beast King’s campaign to exterminate the ghost panthers was, unfortunately, much more successful than the one against the foxes,” said Sen. “But it wasn’t complete. A few ghost panthers survived. I’ve met two of them. They both told me about how their people were hunted to the brink of extinction by spirit beasts loyal to the Beast King. Do you believe that they were lying to me as well?”
Sen looked straight at Qin Fulu when he asked that last question. She shrank back into her chair, but she answered.
“No, Lord Lu.”
“Good. Now, while the foxes might be flighty, unreliable, and prone to exaggeration,” said Sen, drawing a sharp look from Misty Peak, “they aren’t suicidal. They want to survive this battle as much as the rest of us. To that end, they will hide the people who aren’t fighting behind their illusions. Combined with a small force of soldiers and cultivators, that should make them much safer if spirit beasts penetrate the city. With that said, I have a few other thoughts on how they might assist us.”
Sen didn’t believe he’d convinced everyone that the foxes had nothing but good intentions. He didn’t believe they had solely good intentions. He did think that he and Misty Peak had successfully overcome the first and most difficult of what he expected would prove to be several hurdles. They’d diverted the city’s leadership from thinking that every fox inside the walls needed to die and shifted their attention to how best to use the foxes’ illusion abilities. And those abilities were valuable in a battle. Their pure utility would probably keep the foxes safe during the battle. That would mean nothing after the battle, though. It would be painfully easy to ambush some or even all of them and say that the spirit beasts had killed them. Sen needed to figure out some way to avoid that, but he’d settle for the minor victory in front of him for the time being.
