Chapter 24 | Callouses and Centuries of Growth

The distribution of supplies across ninety-four disciples turned out to be one of those problems that sounded complicated and was, in fact, almost insultingly simple.

Calid had spent the better part of five centuries managing an Academy whose annual supply requisitions ran to fourteen pages of itemised entries, four appendices, and a supplementary document that existed solely to explain why the Enchantment Department needed that much copper wire and no, they would not be providing further details, thank you, the last person who asked had been turned into a newt for forty minutes.

Distributing the swords, ingots, herbs, and miscellaneous forge output across ninety-four people was, by comparison, pathetically easy.

Each disciple received a bundle roughly the weight of a large sack of flour. The Foundation Establishment cultivators, whose Qi-reinforced musculature made them the pack mules, carried more. The youngest disciples carried slightly less. The net effect was a column of ninety-four people who looked like a particularly well-armed merchant caravan that had fallen on hard times.

Nobody dropped anything.

This was partly because Lin Mei had threatened consequences for anyone who damaged sect property, but also because the items in question included swords and other sharp weapons. Dropping said sharp weapons produced consequences of their own that required no administrative enforcement.

Calid looked toward Lin Mei.

She noticed and flinched.

He had given her a thorough tongue-lashing.

Not the kind that involved shouting, because Calid Asigoth did not shout. Shouting was the refuge of people who had run out of vocabulary and were attempting to compensate through volume, and Calid’s vocabulary had never run out of anything except patience. The tongue-lashing had been delivered in the same unhurried tone he used for everything, which made it considerably worse, because a shout could be weathered and a calm, precise, sentence-by-sentence dismantling of every decision in the chain could not.

The core of it had been simple.

It had not been her position to make a life-and-death judgement call for the group.

The rescue, the ambush, the trap, the battle, the five dead disciples whose names Lin Mei would carry for the rest of her life, all of it had flowed from a single decision that should never have been hers to make. She should have woken him. She should have come to the moss curtain, pressed her spiritual sense through it, shouted if necessary, thrown rocks if shouting failed, and if none of that worked, she should have sat down and waited, because the situation would have continued for hours regardless.

It had been a trap, an obvious one to any person that had seen such tactics.

Calid was one such person.

The five fleeing disciples, the eight pursuing cultivators, the crescent formation, the toying, the bleeding, all of it had been staged while using the disciples as the main portion unwittingly. Bait on a hook designed to draw out exactly the kind of rescue that Lin Mei had launched. The demonic cultivators had been waiting in the trees with their signatures suppressed, letting the eight-man patrol serve as the lure, and the real force had closed the moment the rescuers committed.

Hours of patience would have cost nothing.

The trap would have sprung on empty air and the demons would have moved on, and five disciples who were now being carried in the system inventory as wrapped bodies would still be breathing.

Lin Mei had not argued.

Instead, she had stood before him on the flat rock by the waterfall with her hands clasped and her mask kept up and hiding her expression. It did not hide the tears that were streaming down her face, the red eyes, shaking, trembling, and sniffing that ensued during the entirety of the tongue lashing.

She had said “Yes, Patriarch” four times.

And said “I understand, Patriarch” twice.

She had said nothing else, because there was nothing else to say nor could she utter any words in between the surge of guilt that shook her entire body. Lin Mei had hidden it since the incident well and no one noticed. But Calid had seen this exact thing before and knew what was covered under a thousand layers of stoicism and looking tough.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Lin Mei was eating her self alive from the inside out, blaming herself for every cut, bruise, and death they suffered that night.

Something no child, no matter how strong should suffer.

The burden of those decisions, Calid had told her, belonged to the teachers, the elders of this world. The archmages and patriarchs and old men and women who had been living long enough to grow the kind of scar tissue and emotional callouses that allowed you to make a choice that might kill people, live with the result, and still function the next morning because it was necessary and would save more lives.

Those scar tissue and callouses took centuries to develop.

It could not be grown in a nineteen-year-old girl through exposure to catastrophe any more than calluses could be grown through exposure to fire.

Let him carry it.