NOVPUB“Do you truly mean to march armies in winter?” asked Jing. “General Kang was right about that much. Armies don’t normally march in winter.”
“I know,” said Sen while staring down at the pool of blood left by General Li.
The room was empty save for him and Jing. He’d been in no mood to discuss the particulars of his plan, so he’d ordered everyone away with a general directive to begin preparing the armies. His unwillingness to get into the details stemmed mainly from the fact that he didn’t know the details yet. He had intended to seek some input from the generals about setting overall objectives. Of course, that had been before he’d seen how self-serving and useless that advice was bound to prove.
“They don’t march in winter for good reasons,” said a more insistent Jing.
“I know that too,” said Sen. “And it’s a near certainty that the spirit beasts are aware of that particular human custom.”
That brought Jing up short. Sen had explained to him that there were spirit beasts out there as smart as human beings, but it seemed that Jing hadn’t fully understood his meaning. Sen ignored that problem for a moment and summoned some fire qi to scour the floor and wall of blood. He tried to find some pleasure in the near-apoplectic rage on Kang’s face when he left. That had been the point of Sen’s order when he gave it.
“Kang,” said Sen, gesturing at the body of the general’s dead aide. “Make sure that you take your garbage with you when you leave.”
“Grab that,” Kang had ordered an underling.
“No,” interjected Sen. “It’s your garbage. You should dispose of it. Personally.”
General Kang’s face had gone a shade of dark purple in unbridled fury. Sen knew how bad that level of anger could be for older mortals. He privately hoped it would lead to a heart attack. That would solve at least one problem without forcing Sen to take an active hand in it. Not that the universe would ever be that nice to him. Convenient coincidences did happen sometimes in life, but they rarely benefited him. At least, it seemed that way to Sen. It was like meeting Master Feng had used up his entire allocation of good luck in this life. Either that, or maybe his karma had just gotten too bad to enjoy that kind of favor anymore. He didn’t want to consider that dreary thought too deeply.
The general had, after glaring hatefully for longer than was probably wise, hefted the corpse up into his arms. Sen took some petty satisfaction in the knowledge that the blood would probably ruin the general’s absurdly ornate robes. The rest of the officers, aides, and servants had promptly followed the furious general out of the room. Sen wanted to leave himself, but he felt like he owed Jing more than a vague speech about doom and conquest.
“Are the spirit beasts truly that smart?” asked Jing.
Sen could tell that the man very much wanted him to deny it. He even wished he could do it. Savage enemies were bad enough. Smart and savage enemies were a nightmare for anyone with a shred of wisdom.
Sen had also gotten the impression that Jing considered saving the capital as being tantamount to saving the kingdom. It was a rare, if understandable, blind spot in Jing’s usually superior discernment. For Jing and probably for most other kings, a capital was where the important families gathered and, therefore, where the important work was accomplished. It would also be where all the major politics and backstabbing would happen. On top of all of that, Jing had been born, raised in, and shaped by the capital.
It would be terribly easy for someone’s vision to narrow in those circumstances. It wasn’t that Jing lacked concern about the rest of the kingdom, but rather that his attention was focused on the capital all of the time out of necessity. Turning his attention away, to say nothing of actually leaving for any length of time, would have been to put himself at a huge political disadvantage. Enough of one that it could very well have proven a threat to his life. For all that Sen had grown up in a small village, he probably had a much better sense of the larger world than Jing.
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“Yes,” he finally answered. “They really are that smart. Some of them are, at least. Enough of them. I must assume that they’ve been watching us for a long time. They’ll know how and when we wage war, which means that we can’t do things as they’ve always been done.”
“I understand your reasoning. Even so, people die on winter marches. They freeze to death. It always happens.”
Sen gave Jing a hollow smile and said, “They won’t freeze. There will be too many things on fire near the roads for that.”
Jing frowned, and then his eyes went wide with understanding.
“You mean to continue burning the wilds as you go?”
“It’s the only way to march an army safely through the kingdom.”
“Won’t the snow and the cold make that difficult?”
“Not for me,” said Sen. “And not for any serious fire cultivators. It won’t prove as easy as it might during a dry summer, but it’s quite achievable. I assure you.”
Jing nodded a little absently, and Sen could see that the man’s thoughts were on something else. He waited while the man decided what to say and possibly even if he wanted to put voice to those thoughts. The king’s demeanor had been somewhat opaque to Sen recently. Not the kind of opaque that made him question the other man’s intentions. It was rather that Sen didn’t recognize what he was seeing in the other man. Jing settled his internal debate and looked to Sen.
“When Fate’s Razor first announced that you would be taking control of humanity, I had thought it a kind of hyperbole. I assumed he meant this kingdom. But you truly mean to seize the continent?”
“I do.”
“You understand that there are many powerful cultivators beyond the Mountains of Sorrow.”
“I do. But I suspect that there will be far fewer of them by the time we arrive. The spirit beasts didn’t just attack here. I would be supremely surprised to discover that they aren’t fighting there as well.”
“So, you will be as the legends and forge an empire,” said Jing. “Many have dreamed that dream and failed.”
Sen nodded. Jing wasn’t wrong about that. Many would-be emperors had risen only to be crushed. Sen thought that he and Jing had likely read many of the same historical scrolls. However, Sen had also enjoyed the benefit of being able to ask questions of people who had been there for some of those events, however peripheral their involvement might have been.
“Kingdoms and empires aren’t built on strength alone,” said Sen, “although the heavens know that strength helps. They’re also built on the right circumstances.”
Jing’s face soured at that, and he said, “Circumstances like widespread terror, weakened armies, and a dangerously powerful enemy.”
“I never said I liked the circumstances. But those are the circumstances in which we find ourselves.”
“Even if you succeed, do you really believe it will last?”
Sen snorted and said, “What makes you think that I want it to last?”
“But you’d be the supreme authority. No person is so pure that they’d give up that kind of power.”
“Pure? Definitely not. But I am more than selfish enough.”
“Selfish enough to give up absolute power?”
“I won’t have absolute power. I’ve… I’ve brushed up against powers that are so far beyond us that I can’t even describe them to you because the words don’t exist to do it. So, you might say that I have a different perspective. As for selfishness? Yes. I’m plenty selfish enough to walk away. I’ve seen enough of what your life has been like to know that I don’t want that for myself. I don’t want that for my daughter. Leaving her with an empire to manage? I might be willing to inflict that on myself for long enough to resolve this war with the spirit beasts. If I dropped that unspeakable responsibility on her shoulders, I really would be a monster. No one deserves that.” 𝘯𝘰𝑣𝘱𝑢𝘣.𝑐𝑜𝑚
“Plenty will crave it. Have you considered the chaos it would create if you simply abandoned an empire that you built? Do you even realize the kind of wars that would be waged?” demanded Jing.
There was genuine anger in the other man. So much anger that it worried Sen.
“I—” started Sen.
“No!” shouted Jing, slashing his hand through the air. “You need to listen to me this time. You may know more about cultivators than I do, but this is politics. This is what I know!”
Sen was so startled by the outburst that he couldn’t think of anything to do but nod his acquiescence. That, at least, seemed to mollify Jing a little.
“If you do this… If you somehow manage to march across this continent and subjugate it to your will, you cannot walk away from it.”
Sen opened his mouth only to be cut off by Jing’s raised hand.
“Listen to me, Sen,” said Jing through clenched teeth. “You can’t walk away from it, or you will undo every last bit of good that you accomplished. You’ll win a war just to plunge the continent into a different, maybe even worse war. Every aspiring despot would be clawing to seize your throne. And it wouldn’t just be mortals. It would be all of those cultivators from the other side of the Mountains of Sorrow who think they have a holy right to dominate mortals. So, if you do this, think long and hard about what happens after, because you cannot walk away.”
