Benton rushed in the direction of the scream, his mind conjuring up all kinds of dangers that could be assailing the young lady. Su’s memories, in turn, introduced knowledge of multiple spirit beasts that could mimic such a cry, but Benton dismissed the concern. His enhanced spiritual sense didn’t indicate any large sources of qi in the direction he was headed. In fact, it only picked up only the vaguest wisp of any.
Since the shriek had sounded desperate, Benton threw caution to the wind and began using his qi to speed his running. Su’s memories guided him in directing brief surges to isolated portions of muscles, multiplying the force he applied with each step and propelling him forward. It took a bit of trial and error for him put the skills that Su had mastered into practice, but soon, Benton was speeding along fast enough to leave Usain Bolt in the dust.
The best thing was that he achieved such a fast pace without using all that much qi. A typical cultivator that had only achieved the fourth minor realm of Qi Gathering would likely still be supercharging an entire muscle or even a whole limb and applying the qi for too long, meaning they’d burn through their meager qi pools fast. In contrast, Benton had the benefit of Su’s many years of experience, and his usage was incredibly efficient, applying just the tiniest bit of qi to the smallest possible area to achieve the result he wanted.
He dodged trees and hurtled bushes with a nimbleness like nothing he’d ever experienced. There wasn’t even a worry about making too much noise. The further and faster he ran, the more he grew to trust Su’s hunter instincts as they guided Benton to avoid leaves and branches.
It was the most exhilarating experience of his life. Rushing toward danger. The wind blasting his face. Adventure. Excitement.
Nothing he’d ever done on Earth compared in terms of a pure adrenaline rush.
In what he judged to be less than a minute, he crossed the distance of more than two football fields through a densely packed forest. Such a feat was, in a word, superhuman. And he’d only just began his journey as a cultivator.
Maybe living in a cultivation world wouldn’t be as bad as he’d feared.
He emerged from thickly packed foliage to find two groups of people opposite each other on a moderately wide dirt trail. Facing him were seven men who all held spears. One stood in front of the others with his weapon held inches away from a young lady whose back was to Benton. Behind the girl was a young man desperately trying to get up off the ground while holding his hand over his side.
The boy was bleeding. The hand was applying pressure to the wound.
“System,” Benton said in a low voice, “can you make my spiritual sense read out a status like some sort of Identify skill?”
Yes. When Host applies Host’s spiritual senses toward a person, information will be converted to a table.
“Thanks, System. You’re the best.”
He directed his spiritual senses at each of the men accosting the boy and the girl. None were cultivators, though the youngest of them—and the one whose clothes appeared more expensive than the others and whose faced seemed frozen into a perpetual scowl—did have something that contained qi in a pouch tied to his waist. All of them, including the young one, had spiritual roots of either F- or F rank, definitely not good enough to join even the weakest sect. Benton quickly dismissed each box as uninteresting.
But when he scanned the boy and the girl, his eyes just about popped out of his head. For the boy, he got:
Affiliation: None Age: 15 Cultivation: None Techniques: None Spiritual Roots: B+ Qi Aspect: Low viscosity lava flowing down Mount Burning Thunder
The girl was even more impressive.
Affiliation: None Age: 15 Cultivation: None Techniques: None Spiritual Roots: A- Qi Aspect: Perfectly smooth ice balanced on the razor edge of freezing and thawing
According to Su’s memories, approximately eighty percent of people on this planet would be ranked F-, F, or F+. Another seventeen percent would be ranked across the same spectrum of E. Somewhere in the D rank was where the smallest of sects started to take an interest, about two percent of the population. Of the remaining one percent of people, the C rank, which qualified for at least outer sect membership in all but the most exclusive of sects, took up over nine tenths. B was where it started to get interesting. Occurring in under point one percent of the population, few sects would turn down someone with that kind of potential. And an A rank, even more rare by several orders of magnitude, was usually accounted to be the feted find of a generation.
The chances against randomly encountering a B+ and an A- out in the middle of a forest somewhere, especially when neither had any cultivation and thus likely no prior sect affiliation, was astronomical.
That was when it hit Benton. His Auspicious Encounter. It had to be.
Sweet.
If the presence of the sneering teen who was going out of his way to fulfill every stereotype of an arrogant young master hadn’t already convinced Benton which side of the conflict to take, the high potential of the kids being bullied certainly would have.
“You might as well kill me, Fang Wei,” the girl yelled. “I will never marry you. Never!”
The young master scoffed. “It’s too late for that. After my men kill your brother, I’ll take you right here. You’ll never be anything better than my concubine if I let you live at all. It all depends on how well you please me.”
Yeah, no. That was not going to happen.
The brother somehow finished staggering to his feet, his movements revealing that he’d been stabbed in his side. Su’s expertise said that the injury didn’t look too bad, though, even for a mortal.
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“Get away from her!” the brother shouted.
Fang Wei snarled. “Knock her down and kill him.”
No one from either of the parties seemed to have noticed Benton’s arrival. It was time to change that.
He cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I cannot allow that to happen.”
Nine sets of eyes turned to him. Most were confused. The girl’s held a glimmer of hope.
“Jin Fengg, kill Yang Ru,” the young master said, followed by the guy standing closest to the girl nodding. “The rest of you, kill the interloper!”
Before anyone else literally could move a muscle, Benton had his spear at the ready and was halfway to Jin Fengg. He made it a single step toward Yang Ru before Benton arrived.
Not at all used to violence, he did just what Su had done in so many memories. He manipulated qi in microbursts to his legs and feet and arms, thrusting the spear at his opponent’s chest. There was no possibility of the strike being blocked. It was too fast. Too powerful.
Before Benton even realized what was happening, the black tip connected with Fengg’s chest over the direct center of his heart. And kept going. Bone shattered.
The spear pierced the heart and didn’t stop until the tip protruded from Fengg’s back.
Benton pulled. The shaft slid out just as easily as it went in.
Fengg collapsed to the ground, blood pouring from his wounds. He gasped, unaware that he was already dead.
Horrified, Benton felt ill. He’d just killed someone.
Everyone else gawked at him.
Despite descriptions of corporate life as being dog eat dog, nothing had prepared him for something like what had just happened. He literally almost dropped his spear and ran.
Only Su’s memories saved him.
Killing a man was nothing. A man insulted you? Kill him. A woman disrespected the sect? Kill her and her entire family. A child laughed at you? Kill him, too.
To do anything else was to show weakness, and in the cultivation world, to show weakness was death.
Strong. He had to project strength. That was the way.
“Fang Wei, take your men and leave,” Benton said. “Swear never to pursue these two again, and I’ll let you live.”
Su’s memories brought up a half a dozen instances where someone in his sect had been merciful and lived to regret it. Or as was more likely the case, died regretting it.
In a cultivation world, showing compassion was the same as showing weakness. Benton understood that thinking, but he couldn’t just kill someone for no good reason. He wouldn’t.
Intellectually, it was all well and good to do whatever you wanted in a world where might made right, but he’d lived his entire life in a world where one got arrested for punching someone else in a bar. The police handled punishment. Anything else resulted in chaos. Emotionally, Benton simply wasn’t ready to embrace cultivation world ethics.
Fang Wei laughed. After seeing a man slice a hole clean through the middle of someone in a matter of seconds, he laughed.
Was the guy insane?
He held a piece of paper in his hand, the source of qi from the pouch. A talisman. A low leveled talisman.
Benton didn’t even need Su’s memories to guess the effectiveness of the charm. Its miniscule amount of qi was enough to draw the appropriate conclusion. He had to steel himself not to roll his eyes. An arrogant young master indeed. Probably never been told no in his life.
Slowly, Benton walked toward Fang Wei. When he drew close enough for his spear to reach, he feinted, quickly darting the tip toward Fang Wei a few inches before drawing it right back.
The kid tore the talisman. A qi filled haze filled the space between the two of them for a moment before dissipating into nothingness.
Talismans like the one Fang Wei used were meant to block a single blow, giving the cultivator a chance to escape—preferably by using a movement technique. What the heck was the kid’s plan? He just stood there like the charm was some kind of ultimate artifact that would destroy all enemies.
“Have any more heaven defying treasures you want to deploy against me?” Benton said.
The young master scowled. “Men, kill him. Kill him now!”
Benton couldn’t believe what was happening. Was the arrogant fool really going to force him to kill every one of them?
Conflicted by his Earthborn ethics warring against the reality of his new world, Benton froze.
Seeing him distracted, Fang Wei acted.
The young master thrust his spear straight at Benton’s heart, and once again, whether from the spear technique or from the memory of Su’s hours of practicing and combat, Benton didn’t think. He moved.
Faster than a snake, the tip of his spear knocked Fang Wei’s aside and, before Benton thought to pull back, struck the young master right through the eye, killing him instantly.
How much time had passed since discovering the confrontation? A minute? Two? And Benton had killed two men in that time, men who, though obviously on the wrong side of the current conflict, would never see their parents again. Even if he couldn’t greave much for the lives of the young people who died in the act of afflicting violence on others, he couldn’t help but regret the mourning he’d caused their mothers and fathers and siblings and other loved ones.
The other five men stopped, tension draining from their shoulders as if puppets with their strings cut as they looked at one another for direction.
“Leave this girl and her brother alone,” Benton said firmly. “Go back to whatever flyspeck village you came from and don’t ever let me catch you near her again.”
Su’s memories once again brought up all those memories of his sect members unfortunate ends after suffering just such a crisis of conscience, but killing wantonly just wasn’t something Benton was prepared to do. He just wanted the situation over and done with, preferably with the remaining five young men walking away alive.
None of the men reacted, either to attack or to retreat.
“You five,” Benton said. “I’ll put it to you another way. Do you want to die here today or are you going to peacefully retreat?”
They each looked at each other before standing silently for another moment. Eventually, one of them stepped forward, laid down his spear, and cupped his hands. “Esteemed Master Cultivator, these lowly ones are but employees of Fang Wei’s family.”
Benton almost sighed in relief. That start surely would lead to them asking for his forgiveness, followed by them retreating never to be heard from again.
“If these lowly ones return alive and tell the master that his son is dead, not only will these lowly ones be executed in the most painful manner possible, but he will have our entire families killed.” The man shivered. “My mom, my wife, my children. I cannot put them through that.”
“Can’t you just disappear or something?” Benton said. “Just never return.”
“If these lowly ones deserted, that would go even worse for our families. The master will find out. He always does. There is only one solution.”
Ridiculous. So, unless Benton wanted to go out of his way to track down Fang Wei’s family and kill them, too, along with whatever retainers got in his way, he would be forced to execute these five men for the high crime of choosing the wrong boss.
In the last several minutes, he’d been forced into actions he didn’t want to make. No more. He refused to become a brutal killer.
None of the mess the men found themselves in was of his making. They had chosen to accept the pay from the family of that vicious, evil young master. They had chosen to follow orders to accost the siblings. If Benton hadn’t shown up, he was positive they would have chosen to do exactly what the wretched bastard had ordered them to do.
He was no judge to find them guilty of the crime and carry out an execution, but neither was he under any obligation to absolve them.
“You should have thought about that before choosing to follow that asshole. Your families’ fate is on your heads, not mine. Drop your weapons and backpacks and go. Now. Or you will be making whatever decisions you have to make without hands.”
The men complied. Immediately. They dropped everything they owned save the clothes on their backs and took off running.
Like a zombie, Benton picked up everything the men had left, including what was with the bodies. Backpacks with supplies and bed rolls, tents, pots and pans, weapons, silver coins, everything disappeared into his spatial ring.
Which was just really a weird thing to do. Back on Earth, he’d never even would have considered robbing the dead or telling his defeated foes to leave their valuables behind. Those were the actions of a thug, not a law-abiding citizen.
In cultivation world, even the resources of mortals could be sold of traded for resources that could aid cultivation. Advancing cultivation was the ultimate goal. The only goal.
The act came as natural as breathing.
Everything he’d just done felt really weird. On one hand, the Earthborn part of him wanted to throw up. In contrast, the part that had been a Foundation Establishment Cultivator had absolutely no reaction at all. Killing those men was no different than pruning weeds from a garden.
He looked at the two kids who he hoped would become his disciples, the ones who’d watched him perform those acts. Both stared at him with wide eyes and indiscernible expressions.
At that moment, Benton simply did not care what they thought about him as they just weren’t something he was ready deal with yet. He needed time to come to terms with executing those two men and robbing, perhaps condemning five others. It wasn’t like the kids would be able to outrun him. He’d catch up with them later.
His best recourse was to nope the heck out of there in order to regroup, and that was just what he did.