This is awful, thought Sen as another of the orphans burst into tears.
He’d warned the children right from the very beginning that only a few of them were likely to have what they needed to become cultivators. He’d done his best to explain it in very simple terms, but he hadn’t thought the situation all the way through. Watching that hope die in their eyes and knowing that he was the person who killed it, that was excruciating in ways that he hadn’t anticipated. Part of him knew that learning to face disappointment was something that every child had to go through. He wondered if it would have been easier if he didn’t feel responsible for all of these children. Probably not, he thought. You’d have to be heartless to remain unaffected at the sight of that kind of abject misery.
The worst part was that this was happening even though he was letting his sympathy get the best of him. If he was judging them with an honest view of their cultivation potential, he’d have picked out about one-third as many. The other two-thirds would maybe reach the late qi-gathering or early foundation formation stage if they were very diligent. Not that anything was absolute when it came to cultivation. Fortunate encounters happened. Even heavenly intervention happened. But there was no way to predict those. So, he had to pick based on what he could actually evaluate. That mostly boiled down to the health and size of their dantians and qi channels.
Unfortunately for most of the orphans, their problems in those areas ran deep. Most of them had at least a few qi channels that were irreparably sealed. Not simply blocked, which he could do something about, but permanently closed such that nothing would ever open them. Those sealed channels would prevent them from ever cycling qi the way a cultivator needed to. Some of the children had dantians that were so fragile that the mere attempt to cultivate would shred them. In other cases, their dantians had been damaged in some way. While that damage might be repairable, he didn’t know how to do it. After a brief conversation with Auntie Caihong that he hoped would yield a solution, he concluded that nobody knew how to do it. Or, if they did, they were keeping it secret. The same held true for the fragile dantians.
Giving the children with those problems any hope that they could cultivate would be cruelty, because failure was inevitable. None of which made it any easier for him to bear their tears. Even among those he had selected, most of them had narrow qi channels or small dantians that would be difficult to expand. They would watch other achieve with no effort what they needed to struggle for every time. Sen couldn’t help but wonder if picking them wasn’t an act of cowardice and delayed cruelty. Nothing more than a way to shield himself from present pain, rather than doing what was best for them. Try as he might, though, Sen couldn’t see the right path forward.
No matter what he did, he was deciding for them. And I must pick for them, because there isn’t anyone else to do it, he thought. It wasn’t a responsibility he could ignore because he had made some of these children into orphans. He’d had to think hard about whether to even consider allowing the children of the noble houses he’d butchered become cultivators. In the end, much like he had with the children who remained from the fallen House of Xie, he decided against it. He would not help make the children of his enemies into weapons that could be turned against his daughter. It was selfish and discarded any notion that people could become better. He suspected that there would be a karmic price for that choice, but he was willing to pay it.
“Lord Lu?” asked the mistress of the orphanage.
He blinked a few times before looking at her. There was understanding in her eyes. She was responsible for these children. She might not be a mother to them, but she did care about their welfare. She had no doubt imagined being asked to do what he was doing and found the prospect appalling.
“I just needed a moment,” said Sen, as he tried to steel his heart. “Bring the next child forward.”
She nodded and gestured at a tall boy who had to be very nearly old enough to leave the orphanage. Sen didn’t remember anyone that old being there. Then, he had to remind himself that it had been years since he last saw any of them. The boy stood in front of him, and Sen had to repress a sigh. There was hate in those eyes. Not hatred of him, but a burning hatred for someone this child intended to kill someday. Sen extended his spiritual sense and his qi. Of course, he thought. Of all the children, he would be he one with the most potential. Sen enclosed them in a wind barrier before he spoke.
“No one else can hear us. So, tell me, who is it that you wish to kill?”
The boy stared at him with wide startled eyes.
“L— Lord L— Lu,” he stammered. “I d— don’t want—”
Sen lifted his hand a little to bring he lie to an end.
“I can see it in your eyes. You want to kill someone. Tell me who. Tell me why.”
The boy looked down at the ground. Sen could see the muscles in his jaw working at the young man tried to decide what to say. Or what not to say. When the narrow face lifted, the hatred in those eyes burned so hot that even Sen was a little startled.
“Chen Hai,” the boy very nearly growled. “He killed my father. He took my mother and my sisters. He—”
Sen didn’t learn what exactly this Chen Hai had done, because pain, grief, and rage seemed to steal the boy’s words. That was explanation enough. Something bad had been done to them. Something bad enough to send this child down a path of revenge. Unfortunately, that turned the whole thing into a much more complicated problem than whether or not to help the boy cultivate. If the child became a cultivator, what had happened to his family would turn into a heart demon for him. There was far too much hate for anything else. Allowing the child to resolve that heart demon would eventually mean standing aside and letting him murder a man.
While there were some loose rules in the Jianghu about cultivators not interfering too much in mortal affairs, most few sects would bat an eye at something like this. They’d probably encourage it to smooth the boy’s path to advancement. Sen wasn’t opposed to it, not a personal level. He’d want revenge if someone had done terrible things to his family. He’d have taken that revenge, too, unless he died first. But this wasn’t just about his feelings. If he allowed it, even if he just turned a blind eye, that would send a message about how the imperial sect would be run. A message he wasn’t sure he wanted to send.
Letting cultivators who worked directly or indirectly for the empire go off and kill mortals for revenge would be complicated. After all, there was a difference between what this boy described and using newly-gained power to settle petty grudges with mortals. No mortal would ever feel safe. Since there would always be more mortals than cultivators, that was a bad way to run an empire. To say nothing of the fact that there was already too much killing between cultivators over petty grudges. No, if Sen was going to allow this boy to become a cultivator, this would need to be settled before they all left. The only question was how it would be settled. The when of it, however, would have to come after he finished the soul-crushing process of breaking children’s hearts.