Unintended Cultivator-Chapter 37Book 10: : A Light that Carries Hope

Misty Peak watched as that unbearable glow in the center of the city finally faded away. She shook her head and smirked. That boy just doesn’t know how to make a quiet entrance, does he? Then again, if he did know how to make a quiet entrance, he might not be as interesting. Her smile quickly faded. If he was in the capital, that could only mean that the battle was soon to come. She doubted that there was much of anything short of a history-shaping fight that possessed the necessary power to drag him away from the little girl he’d adopted and that aggravating, terrifying ghost panther.

Although, she had heard stories about the proclamations being thrown around by Fate’s Razor and Living Spear about who ran this nation now. She supposed that Sen must have at least agreed to it, although she struggled to imagine him coming up with the mad scheme. No, that was nascent soul cultivator thinking right there. Not that she thought they were wrong. Humanity hadn’t had a leader to unify them, and they were crumbling fast without one. The nine-tail fox couldn’t say that she was especially entranced with humanity as a whole, but where they went, her people would inevitably follow. If the other spirit beasts brought on the genocide they so desperately wanted, the nine tails would have nowhere left to hide.

They might scrape out an existence on the very edges of the world for a time, but it would only be for a time. The Beast King wasn’t one to forget grudges. When he wiped the blood of the last human from his claws, he would turn his attention to the spirit beasts who had defied or rejected him. It was that knowledge that had drawn her to the capital city in the first place. She had come looking for a way to contribute to humanity’s survival that didn’t involve exposing her true nature. While Sen and some of the other cultivators would understand that she had no love for or loyalty to that army preparing to crash down on them, most would just see her as a spy and try to kill her.

That initial mission had been swiftly supplanted by the increasingly dire situation faced by her people in the capital. Foxes were tricksters. That worked well enough when the situation was normal, but the situation was anything but normal. Everyone was afraid. Food and other essentials were already running low. Most of the means that foxes used to support themselves were becoming increasingly untenable as time wore on. Some of the adults had fled to look for safety elsewhere, although she knew that to be the fool’s errand it was. There was perhaps one place in the entire kingdom where safety might be found, but most of the nine-tails would struggle to find acceptance in the domain of Lu Sen. She had heard enough to understand that he expected people to work, and work was not something most foxes were well-acquainted with doing.

Those of her people who hadn’t fled were those with children. Traveling with a child in these perilous times was tantamount to inviting death for the child or the entire family. So, they had stayed in the city where the dangers were held at bay for a time. She had considered leaving. Traveling alone, she had a better chance than most to evade danger and reach Sen’s stronghold in the north. She thought that he would even let her stay if she asked. But she had certain resources that other foxes in the capital mostly lacked. Years chasing her grandfather across the length and breadth of the kingdom and beyond its borders had forced her to learn a kind of self-discipline that most foxes would find wholly alien. Along with that self-discipline, she had learned a certain frugality in her ways. Another thing that most foxes wouldn’t understand.

So, she had stayed. She had bought a home and taken in those foxes she could. Those she took in gave her what money they had as the price. Misty Peak was not afflicted by shame or guilt over extorting that money. The others would have wasted it. She leveraged it. She had cut deals, bartered hard, and laid in a small stock of food and weapons, but it wouldn’t be enough. After all, she could only buy what was available, and that wasn’t much. And while she had some money, it was poor proof against a constant rise in the price of everything. The thought had occurred to her more than once that the spirit beast army didn’t need to attack. All they needed to do was wait. Time and starvation would provide them victory.

Except, that wasn’t what would happen. They didn’t just want corpses. They wanted to taste hot blood and rend flesh with tooth and claw, which was just a stupid way to fight this battle. Why work hard to win when you could be lazy and win? She was still enough of a traditional nine-tail to happily take the easy win if she could get it. For a while, she’d thought that the situation truly was hopeless. At the very least, she’d lost her opportunity to flee. It was one thing to sneak past some other spirit beasts. It was another matter entirely to sneak past thousands of them. She suspected her grandfather could do it. Hells, she thought, he could probably just walk past them right on the road and never get noticed. She just wasn’t on that level yet. There were a lot of mixed feelings in her heart about that old monster, but she’d have welcomed him with open arms if he appeared on her doorstep. At least, then they would have had hope.

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That blazing light in the heart of the city had provided the hope she’d all but abandoned. She’d seen Lu Sen work minor and even middling miracles before. Those wouldn’t cut it here, but if he could summon up just one big miracle for them, that might do it. It might be enough to give them all a fighting chance. That was all she wanted. A fighting chance. She didn’t expect him to save them all or single-handedly drive off a beast tide of that magnitude by himself. That would be asking too much of any one man. But if he could get everyone working together, marshal the cultivators and get them all moving in the same direction, it was possible he had some trick up his sleeve to level the battlefield. That was what she was hoping for in the secret places of her heart.

The question she couldn’t answer to her satisfaction was whether she should reveal her presence to him. On the face of it, she could help him. All of the foxes in the city could help him. Their illusion abilities could serve any number of functions both before and during a battle. That was, of course, assuming that he would trust her and them enough to let them help. A proposition that was in no way guaranteed. He’d made it very clear in their last conversation that he considered her little more than a stranger that he knew nothing about. That revelation had burned, in no small part because he hadn’t been wrong. Foxes never revealed their true selves to any but those they meant to spend the rest of their lives with, but it had been galling to be caught in the act.

She had shown him a face. Not her true face, but there had been a lot of the real her in that mask. The best disguises, much like the best lies, build on the truth. It had stung those real parts of her to be so utterly dismissed. Not that she cared very much about that when survival was on the line. The question of whether to go to him wasn’t just about whether he would trust them or let them help. There was a practical streak in the man. He might need to ponder it for a while, but he’d probably come to the right conclusion. The foxes would help him out of naked self-interest. He would understand that. Accept it. She suspected a little part of him would even respect it.

The problem she couldn’t solve was that revealing herself to him meant revealing herself to everyone around him, at least if she meant to get involved. There was just no way to predict what those people might do or the conclusions they might draw. And with the city effectively cut off from the rest of the kingdom, unless you’re a mad cultivator named Lu Sen, there was no escape for her or those under her care if those people turned hostile. She needed a way to test the water that was just a little less fraught. A moment or two of consideration led her to the obvious conclusion. There was somewhere she could go. A place that she had studiously avoided ever since she arrived in the capital. Decision made, she armed herself and threw on a cloak.

When she reached the door, one of the guards there gave her a questioning look and asked, “Is now a safe time to be venturing out into the city, Sun Linglu?”

There was one and only one person she let call her Misty Peak. All others called her by the name she’d chosen. She shrugged at the question.

“Likely not, but it won’t be safer tomorrow. Plus, things have changed. I need to find out if they’re changing in our favor.”

The other fox squinted at her and asked, “That light before? It meant something to you?”

“It meant something to all of us if I’m right. It means that a legend named Judgment’s Gale has arrived in the city.”

The guard traded startled looks at that comment. They didn’t seem as inspired by that as she had felt, but she supposed she had the advantage of personal experience to draw on. She’d watched him make the biggest formation she’d ever personally seen. It had been absurdly huge and he’d been absurdly nonchalant in his confidence that it would work. And he’d been right, damn him. Then, he’d picked a fight with a devil and held his own. Seeing things like that with her own eyes had probably colored her expectations of the man. Even so, she couldn’t help but wonder how much stronger he’d gotten since she last saw him. The speed of his advancement was stunning and worrying. With anyone else, she’d have assumed that his cultivation wasn’t stable. That was the usual fate of cultivators who pushed too hard to advance.

“What do you mean to do?” asked the guard.

Sighing a little, Misty Peak said, “I’m going to go meet with a very scary woman.”