Sen briefly noted that crowd of politicians and nobles hovering outside the orphanage. It was obvious the were waiting for him, but he didn’t have the patience to deal with them. Instead, he took his enormous qi platform and all the people it carried over the walls of the orphanage. He was careful to land it gently. His body might be able to withstand brutally hard landings, but the mortals he was carrying certainly couldn’t. Although, the flight seemed to have briefly left the women and children wonderstruck. All except for the boy, Ling Yun, who had experienced it once before. His attention was entirely consumed by his sister.
After they landed, Sen asked the mistress of the orphanage to find rooms for everyone, at least for the next few days. The women would likely need to be moved elsewhere. And found some other kind of work, he thought. Otherwise, they’ll end up right back in the same situation. The children, unless they had living family, would need to stay. This was the entire reason the orphanage existed. To give children like these some kind of shelter. He turned to his guards.
“Send someone to find clothes for them. I’ll also need mortal grade medicinal herbs and alchemical reagents,” he said, tossing a bag of gold to the guard. “Buy their shops, if necessary, but get me everything you can find.”
“Yes, Lord Lu.”
The days when Sen needed to go through a long process of understanding the injuries and illnesses of mortals was long past. A brief examination with his qi and spiritual sense had told him everything he needed to know about the condition of the people he’d taken from that brothel. Years ago, he would have been incandescent with rage at what he found. Now, that rage still existed, but it was buried beneath that weariness that never really left him anymore. He couldn’t heal everything that he’d seen. Some things were irreversible. He could, however, heal almost all of it. It wouldn’t even be difficult. He was thinking about the best methods when Falling Leaf walked up to him. She’d declined to go, saying that hunting mortals didn’t interest her.
“More lost people?” she asked.
“As good a description as any.”
“Will you try to save all of them lost people.”
“No,” said Sen. “No one can do that, but I can save these mortals. That’s enough for today. It has to be.”
Falling Leaf frowned at him before she spoke.
“Is this what the Caihong means when she says that you’re—” she paused to think. “Sentimental?”
Sen huffed out a laugh and said, “Is that what she called me?”
Falling Leaf nodded.
He thought it over and said, “Probably. I guess I am sentimental, at least for a cultivator. Although, that’s not exactly why I helped these people. At least, it’s not the only reason. There was some selfishness in there as well. One of those children, Ling Yun has a lot of potential as a cultivator. I want to nurture that talent, but it wasn’t going to end well if he destroyed himself looking for ways to get revenge. His sister has a lot of potential as well. Maybe even more than her brother, but I’m not sure she’ll ever recover enough to pursue it. Still, as long as I make sure that she’s somewhere relatively safe, I think Ling Yun will thrive. Also, this gives me an excuse to enact a few new rules for the mortals. Well, I guess they’re laws if I say it.”
“I remember what it was like when you were young like them. I remember you screaming in pain.”
Sen nodded in acknowledgment. Cultivation was, among other things, a torturous process.
“I won’t force him to do it, but I expect he’ll jump at the chance. Most mortals would.”
The ghost panther shrugged at that comment. Seeing that she wasn’t going to say anything else, Sen braced himself mentally and went out to deal with the politicians. The nobles were dismissed immediately. Putting up with their obvious attempts to ingratiate themselves to him held no appeal. Nor was he interested in granting his implicit or explicit approval for whatever schemes they’d dreamed up. He spent longer with the magistrate because they had actual things to discuss.
Sen found out that Jing’s relentless work to train competent bureaucrats was showing real benefits. The vague idea to offer incentives for farmers to return to the fields and for people to claim some of the land that was no longer infested with spirit beasts were starting to show results. The real problem was finding enough willing people. The war had, almost accidentally, culled the most adventurous mortals. They were the people most likely to be out near the Wilds when the war started, so they had died first. The most interested people were the young, but that presented its own problems. Villages needed elders to help maintain order. Some of it was to curb the hot blood that so often led young people into bad decisions. The rest of it was to bestow hard won, practical wisdom.
The meeting lasted deep into the night and ended with Sen decreeing some very specific rules about just who was allowed to work in brothels. He also spelled out some exotic punishments for those caught breaking those rules. They were bad enough that the magistrate paled. He even looked like he wanted to protest, but ultimately kept his thoughts to himself. Sen would have heard the man out, but he understood why the magistrate didn’t voice those concerns. No matter how pleasant he might act, he was the supreme authority in the newly-fledged empire. On top of that, he was a cultivator, while the magistrate was mortal. From the magistrate’s perspective, any misstep could mean instant death. With a casual wave, Sen released the magistrate to go home and sleep.
Honestly, as necessary as the meeting might have been, it left Sen feeling fatigued. He wondered if that was just one more sign that he’d been pushed into a position he wasn’t suited to fill. Then again, it might have been the lingering guilt from making children cry that had worn him out. All things considered, though, he was mostly at peace with how the day had gone. The guilty were punished. The innocent were, if not entirely saved, at least given some revenge-by-proxy. It wasn’t as good as having prevented the problem in the first place, but it was a good deal better than doing nothing at all. He’d done his best to install protections that would reduce future occurrences.
If I win the war, he realized, this is what my future looks like. That thought was enough to make him yearn for the time in his life when he wasn’t responsible for anyone or anything but himself. No wonder Master Feng never started a sect, thought Sen. He wouldn’t last a week being asked to decide about mundane problems before he killed someone.