Chapter 66: An Experiment of His Own
Sen very nearly panicked at the thought of being incapacitated on the street with less than friendly strangers around. He was even more frightened of the idea of coming out of it just to find himself about to be killed. Once that first second or two of wholly irrational thinking crashed through his head, Sen made himself calm down. This wasn't a major stage breakthrough. He wasn't even breaking from middle-stage foundation formation to late-stage. This was a minor breakthrough inside the middle stage. He just needed to keep a grip long enough to get somewhere safe. If he could do that, he doubted the breakthrough would even last until the next morning. Of course, to get somewhere safe, Sen would have to keep all of the qi contained in his body while he moved. He was about halfway between the shop and Grandmother Lu's home. There were likely to be fewer people at her home, so that's the direction he went.
Sen could move very fast when he ran full out, but even he wasn't sure he could make it back to the house in time. He weighed his options. He did have one potential way to move faster. It might even help keep the breakthrough at bay for a little while. He'd had a lot of trouble with the technique up on the mountain, but Sen found that desperation and an overwhelming amount of qi in his system made for an ideal situation to learn his qinggong technique. He was still haphazard at first, but quickly found a rhythm and began hurtling past, around, and occasion over people and obstacles. Despite a brief surge of happiness at that minor success, all of the extra qi was putting a lot of pressure on Sen's dantian, channels, and body. It was beyond distracting and bordered on painful.
The experience gave Sen a very clear picture of why nobody ever put off a breakthrough. His only solace was that the qi he was pooling around his feet to drive the qinggong technique did help bleed off some of the pressure inside him. It downgraded the experience from very painful to simply miserable. Even so, a part of him loathed the waste. Giving up so much qi that he could have potentially converted into the more potent liquid qi that now kept his dantian about half full stung. Under the circumstances, though, he was willing to accept it as a necessary sacrifice for his own safety. He could always accumulate more qi the slow way. He couldn't count on restoring his freedom if he lost that. As for his life, well, everybody got another chance at that, but he wouldn't be Sen anymore. It'd be the same soul, carrying some of the same debts, but all the memories and knowledge that made him Sen would be washed away on the Naihe Bridge. No, he decided, it's a tiny sacrifice compared to what might happen.
Even with his greater speed, Sen was growing desperate by the time he reached Grandmother Lu's home. He burst through the front door bellowing for Zhang Muchen. In the process, he scared a maid so badly that he thought she might faint or possibly suffer some kind of fatal heart condition. He mumbled a quick apology as he staggered. Without the qinggong technique, the pressure had built back up inside him. He gritted his teeth against the pain until the older man hurried into sight with a deeply worried look on his face. The older man waved the maid away and, after hesitating for a moment, caught Sen's are to steady him.
"Young master, are you injured?"
"No," said Sen. "It's a breakthrough."
The confused look on the man's face told Sen everything he needed to know about the servant's working knowledge of cultivation. No wonder he acts so impressed around me, Sen thought. He doesn't know the difference between me and someone like Master Feng. We're all just stories to him. Sen realized that his mind was wandering from the pain. With an effort of will, he focused on the servant.
"I need a room. Private. No intrusions."
That, at least, the servant understood perfectly well. He hurried Sen through the house to what appeared to be a bedroom. After seeing that Sen was situated in the room, Zhang Muchen quietly left and closed the door behind him. With a gasp of pain and relief, Sen let himself collapse onto the reliably stable floor. Sen was disappointed to discover that the process had not grown any easier since his last breakthrough. He had harbored a minor hope that getting his dantian to half full with liquid qi would make converting more of the misty environmental qi easier. There wasn't even a good reason for why Sen had hoped that. It was just an idea that popped into his head one day. He supposed that he just liked the idea of it. Unlike so many other ideas, Sen knew that one didn't harbor any traps in it. It would either prove true, which would make him happy, or not true, which would leave him no worse off than he was. The world of cultivation was filled with many unknowns, but very few that lent themselves to such simple and comparatively safe answers. He knew he could have just asked about it, but it had been to run a little experiment of his own, instead of being the experiment.
Thinking of experiments at that moment triggered the eternally mysterious mechanism that birthed new ideas. Part of the reason why Sen was in such a desperate state when he arrived was because of the size of his dantian and his channels. He knew that the dantian could stretch, and it stood to reason that his channels could as well. Can I use some of this qi for that, instead of converting it all? It wasn't just a matter of stretching the dantian or the qi channels. For that work to matter, they'd need reinforcement. Otherwise, they could rupture the next time they came under pressure. The idea was risky, but it also came with rewards.
If Sen could stretch them, his channels especially, it could open up enough room for him to use even more kinds of qi at the same time. There were limits to that ability. Sen could only split his concentration in so many ways. Of course, wider channels would let him use more qi when he used different kinds simultaneously. He did have all of that qi, and he'd told Grandmother Lu that he could mix an elixir that would repair channels. Could he mix one that would reinforce them? Could he mix it while stretching his channels and dantian? As appealing as the idea was, and as much as he needed to do something with all that qi, Sen took a moment. If he went down the stretching path, he was committed to it. He couldn't undo that stretching.
In the end, he simply couldn't overlook the advantage of a larger dantian and wider qi channels. He had the rest of his life to advance his cultivation. More opportunities would come. A minor in-stage boost to his cultivation would make him a little bit stronger, but stretching those qi channels could potentially save his life in the very near future. He couldn't depend on all his opponents being substantially weaker than him like those idiots in the market had been. If he came up against someone stronger than he was, which seemed highly probable to Sen, he'd have to beat them with something other than main strength. He'd need surprise, and throwing up multiple kinds of qi was exactly that kind of surprise.
With the decision made, Sen went to work. Like most new and difficult things, stretching his dantian and qi channels was grueling in ways that only experience could show a person. It called for him to stuff each channel as full of qi as he could stand, hold it in place, and then force more in. It hurt. It hurt enough that it made him sweat. It made his hands shake. A few times, it hurt so much that Sen couldn't even breathe. Yet, he carried on because he had to. Splitting his attention to prepare an elixir made the work even more taxing. He had to think through every ingredient, consider the proportions, consider the oddities of his own body. His natural affinities for fire and shadow meant that his body used those kinds of qi with far greater efficiency than other kinds of qi. That meant he had to, contrary to what most people might expect, reduce the proportion of fire and shadow qi in the elixir.
Bit by bit, though, he stretched his channels. One by one, he assembled the medicinal herbs and alchemical ingredients. Finally, he began stretching his dantian. As the pain of that process tried to double him over, he began dumping the ingredients into a pot. He'd chosen his ingredients with care. He'd picked ones that would work directly with the reagents he had on hand without the need to heat the pot. Normally, he could have just heated the pot with qi, but even the idea of sending qi down his channels was enough to send a deep shudder through his body. When he had stretched his dantian as far as he dared, he looked down at the liquid in the pot. It looked and smelled far too much like one of Master Feng's pills for Sen's liking, but it didn't matter. He lifted the pot to his lips and dumped the contents down his throat. It was thick and a little cloying, but he forced it down. Then, for a few blessed seconds, nothing more was required of Sen.
He slumped down on the floor again and just let himself rest. He'd managed to use up some of the qi with his channel stretching, as the energy sometimes slipped from his control and leaked out into his body. He relished those few moments of doing nothing because he knew what came next would be terrible. And it was. The agony started in the walls of his dantian. It felt as though someone was ramming a thousand white-hot needles into those walls. Then, the sensation spread up and down his channels. Sen had enough forethought to shove a folded-up piece of cloth into his mouth before he lost the ability to do anything but clench his jaw and suppress his screaming. Sen lost any notion of time in the haze of torment. When it did finally wind down, though, he felt inside. Much as he had needed to suppress his screaming, he had to suppress the need to howl in triumph. It had worked. He sent qi cascading down those wider, newly reinforced channels. What had once felt like a potent stream of energy now felt like a river of power rushing through him. He'd wanted a way to surprise stronger cultivators. Now, he had it.
Chapter 67: Quick Fix
When Sen came to, he was still sprawled out on the floor. He tried to gauge what time it was, or even what day it was, but it was a hopeless task beyond a general assessment that it was dark out. He pushed himself up and was happy to discover that, once again, his breakthrough did not involve his body expelling vast amounts of impurities. Master Feng had assured him that those were over unless something drastic changed in Sen's body cultivation. Still, it was always a relief to come out of a breakthrough and not find himself and everything around him covered with stinking filth. Wanting to reassure himself that everything went as planned, Sen turned his perception inward and examined his dantian and channels. Everything looked fine. In fact, his channels looked stronger than they had before his spur-of-the-moment experiment. With a quick mental effort, he cycled qi through all his channels. There was a moment of disorientation as a whole new level of strength coursed through him. Sen recognized that he would need to spend a little time getting used to that feeling. Disorientation at the beginning of a fight could only end badly for him.
Sen also realized something he hadn't truly accounted for during his hasty, desperate decision-making process. He had just slowed his own progress down. Where his dantian had been around half-full with liquid qi before, it was somewhere between a quarter and a third full now. The misty qi that took up the rest of that space looked thin, very thin to Sen. A horrifying thought crashed down on Sen. Did I unintentionally step my cultivation back? He hastily ran through some techniques that were safe to do inside. They didn't seem any weaker to him. If anything, they seemed meaningfully stronger. He checked his dantian again. The misty qi had thinned out to the point that it looked more like a haze than a mist. Sen's racing heart slowed down.
"Okay, this is a problem, but it's not a catastrophe," he said aloud, mostly to reassure himself.
If he'd had the idea of expanding his dantian and widening his channels when he didn't have to make the choice immediately, and when he hadn't been distracted with pain, none of this would have surprised him. He suspected that he didn't have substantially less qi than he did the day before. It was just that the same amount of qi was occupying a larger space. Filling that dantian with enough qi to form more liquid qi, however, was going to take longer and more effort than it had before. Sen recognized that meaningful insights could trigger a big influx of qi and even a breakthrough, but he couldn't plan around having those on a predictable schedule. It could happen again the next week, or not for a year, or possibly even never again.
The problem in front of him was those expanded qi channels. They would be useful, so very useful, in crisis moments. It'd take some testing, but he guessed that he could probably work with two different kinds of qi at around sixty or seventy percent of his old limit using just one kind of qi. Of course, that also meant that every time he used qi, those channels were sucking away way more qi than he was used to. It would be all too easy to run himself dry. He could always fall back on using that liquid qi, but that was a desperate measure. That truly would step his cultivation backward. The more of that liquid qi he used up, the farther back he would step. Sen thought about the problem for a while before he came to two conclusions.
First things first, he needed to master how much qi he let into those channels at any given time. Before, the channels provided their own limits with their size. Now, it was on him to regulate that flow so he got enough qi to do what he needed but didn't waste qi overpowering techniques unnecessarily. The second thing he needed to address was at least a short-term problem. He needed to refill his dantian at least partially with some environmental qi. Testing new methods for flow control would prove a terrible idea if he didn't give himself some breathing room to make mistakes. Unfortunately, the qi concentration in the town was definitely not on par with the qi concentration at Uncle Kho's house on the mountain. Sen could set up something like the formation Uncle Kho used, but it wouldn't have nearly the same efficiency. He might get the concentration in one room up by five or ten percent, but that was it.
He needed some other way of gathering qi or some other source of attributed qi. As he pondered that problem, he idly twisted one of the storage rings on his finger. He still had a lot of attributed qi herbs, plants, and minerals. Could he mix himself a one-time elixir to boost his qi reserves? He thought he probably could, but it struck him as a bad solution. To make a real difference, he'd probably need to use up half of his stores. More importantly, he didn't know how difficult it would be to replace them once they were gone. No, he much preferred to keep those for other uses, like treating the injuries he felt certain were in his future. He started going through a mental inventory of what was in the rings, then sat up straight. He did have a fix for the problem. Withdrawing some formation flags from his storage ring, he placed them around the room. Instead of drawing in more ambient qi, that formation would contain any qi in the room. Once he had the formation up and activated, Sen started pulling spirit beast cores out of his ring by the handful. He scattered them across the floor but within the boundaries of the formation flags.
Auntie Caihong had given him a rather in-depth explanation about spirit beast cores, but the highlight was that they were, in effect, solidified qi. She also told him that you want to keep them in a storage ring until you're ready to use or sell them. If you just leave them out, they'll radiate qi and slowly, but surely, become less potent. Sen accepted that he'd be reducing the value of the cores, if only marginally, but it was the best quick fix he had available to him. Dropping down onto the floor in the center of the formation, Sen could sense how much thicker the qi was around him. He took active control of his cycling, rather than letting it happen passively in the background. That background method worked, but it was slower. Something about active participation in the process made it more efficient.
For the next several hours, Sen soaked up the qi that the cores slowly trickled into the room. Individually, no one core could make that much of a difference. With dozens of them around him, Sen was able to increase that misty environmental qi in his dantian by around 20 percent. It wasn't a perfect fix, of course. The qi wasn't balanced in quite the same ratios as it was in nature. In some cases, the qi types were rare enough that they weren't found in regular environmental qi. If Sen had been pushed into focusing on a particular type of qi, taking those kinds of unusual qi into his dantian might have proven a disaster. Since Sen wasn't committed to any one kind of qi, he could process those unusual qi types. It would take more work, but it wouldn't set him on a collision course with qi deviation.
When caught hints of morning light through the window, he sighed and gathered up the cores. His dantian wasn't as full as he would have liked it, but he wasn't worried any more that any random qi technique would leave him utterly spent. Then, he put away the formation flags with a silent word of thanks for Uncle Kho. Sen was sure that at least some of the qi had escaped the formation. He wasn't skilled enough or experienced enough to have prevented that entirely. Still, it had worked well enough to get Sen what he needed. Of course, after the night he'd had, what he really needed was a cup of tea. Stretching his back and neck, he heard a few pops that offered immediate relief to some aches he'd been feeling. Smiling, Sen opened the door and went looking for the kitchen.
Chapter 68: Making Good
Sen wasn't sure if it was some kind of bad luck or weird karma, but he managed to scare the same maid. He'd found the kitchen and made tea. Then, he'd sat down at the small table in the kitchen to enjoy his tea. Not too long after, the maid came into the kitchen and saw him sitting there. She let out a brief shriek before clamping a hand over her own mouth. Given that he'd just been sitting there with a cup of tea in his hand, Sen couldn't quite find it in himself to feel bad about startling her. If he'd jumped out at her or been waving a sword around, okay, but he felt it was difficult to be less threatening than sitting calmly with tea. Still, he wasn't heartless. He gave her a nod and gestured at the table.
"Tea?" He asked.
The girl stared at the teapot like it might launch itself across the room and attack her. She shook her head abruptly and then stared down at the floor. Sen waited for a moment to see what she'd do. She kept just standing there, her cheeks slowly getting redder and redder. When the silence started to annoy Sen, he gave up on waiting.
"Am I in the way here? I can leave if you have work to do," said Sen.
The girl peeked up at him for a second or two before looking down again. "The young master is not in the way."
Sen waited again. The girl continued to not move.
"Is there some way I can help?" Sen asked, hoping she'd just tell him what she needed to do.
The girl looked at him again, looked at the tea set, and then looked back down. "Forgiveness, young master. I am to make the mistress's tea in the morning."
Sen looked down at the tea set – the only tea set that he'd been able to find – and understanding dawned. Sen wasn't in the way, but his tea was in the way. He sighed. He hated to waste good tea, but there was just no getting around the problem. The girl had a job to do. Sen looked back over at the girl to tell her to take the tea set, when Grandmother Lu appeared right behind her.
"Did you oversleep this morning, Lin?" Grandmother Lu asked in a tired voice.
"No, Mistress, I-," she started before Sen cut her off.
"It's my fault, grandmother. I got to the tea set before she did."
Grandmother Lu's eyes shot to Sen. Sen felt like she was trying to see his bones the way she was staring at him. Her gaze softened as she turned to the maid.
"It's fine, Lin. You carry on with your other duties. I'm sure that Sen will share his tea with his old grandmother."
"Yes, mistress. Of course, mistress."
The maid, Lin, shot Sen a grateful look before she vanished out of the kitchen. Grandmother Lu sat down across from Sen. He prepared her a cup of tea. She sipped at it and then gave the cup an appreciative look.
"Lin must be getting better at this," said Grandmother Lu, mostly to herself.
Sen hesitated. Correcting her might cost the maid a tiny bit of goodwill from her employer, but it would probably save her trouble when she couldn't make the tea the same way.
"I made the tea," Sen admitted.
"Oh, that explains it. Lin is a good girl, but she can't brew tea to save her life. Did Cultivator Feng teach you to brew tea?"
"No. It was Uncle Kho."
"Uncle who?"
"Oh, right, we didn't get to talk. How long was I out for?"
Grandmother Lu raised an eyebrow. "You don't know?"
"Time gets strange during breakthroughs. At least for me."
"I supposed it does, now that I think back. Just the one night."
Sen let out a relieved breath. "That's good. I lost most of a week once."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Remind me about it, and I'll tell you the story. As for Uncle Kho…"
Sen launched into a very lean explanation of where and with whom he'd spent most of the last six years. Grandmother Lu listened intently, her eyes occasionally going wide with wonder or narrowing with anger. After Sen finished, the older woman just sat there quietly for a few minutes with her eyes closed. She hummed to herself a few times. Sen remembered her doing the same thing years before when she was thinking deeply about something.
"So," said Grandmother Lu, opening her eyes, "you made friends with a spirit beast panther?"
Sen laughed. "Out of all of that, it's Falling Leaf you're curious about?"
Grandmother Lu shrugged. "I can make sense of the rest of it. I just can't imagine how you befriended a spirit beast."
"You know, there wasn't much befriending going on. It was mostly that she was curious, and I had food."
"That's it?"
"Yep. Pretty much. I think she also thought I was kind of funny. I fell down a lot in the early days."
"It's a strange life you've led, Sen. Strange enough for two people and then some. Still, you seem to have come out of it hale and whole enough. After that display yesterday in the market, I'm guessing you're in one of the late qi condensing stages? Peak, maybe? It's hard to get a clear sense of your cultivation."
Sen found himself oddly embarrassed that he needed to correct her about his cultivation level. It felt almost like he was insulting her. Still, she had asked. It would be rude not to answer.
"Middle foundation formation," he offered. "About the same in body cultivation, as well. At least, I think so."
"In six years? I don't even understand how that's possible unless you're some kind of cultivation genius," she said, then got a speculative look on her face. "Are you some kind of cultivation genius?"
Sen snorted. "I doubt it. I don't think I'll be able to explain it to you either. Not exactly, anyway. My training wasn't exactly traditional. They didn't want to, well, it's a long story. One I'm happy to tell you at some point, but I'm sure you have things to do today."
Grandmother Lu sighed. "I do. The shop can run itself without me, but people expect me to be there. The kids I hired are dedicated enough, but they're easily distracted. You saw that for yourself, yesterday."
"I did wonder about why those girls were just hanging around outside that room and bringing me food."
Grandmother Lu frowned at Sen. It was a very serious look.
"Oh, that's not good," she finally said.
"What's not good?"
"I just realized that there are probably some of those practicalities that we need to discuss. Tonight, though, when I'm done at the shop."
Sen shrugged. "Fair enough. Speaking of the shop, there's something I need to discuss with you. I hope it won't take too long."
"Go on," said Grandmother Lu.
Sen briefly described his interaction with the big man in the market, as well as his promise to help.
"Sen, a thousand silver taels is a lot. I can probably get it for you, but it'll take some time to free it up from the business."
"Oh, no. I don't need you to give him your money. I'd never ask you to do that. I have a storage ring full of spirit beast cores. I planned on giving him some of those. Or maybe selling you a couple and giving him the balance in cores."
"You have beast cores?"
Sen nodded. "I do."
"How many?"
Sen had never done a proper count of them, but he had a rough idea. "Fifty, give or take a few."
Grandmother Lu's face went as pale as a sheet of paper. "Sen, you're walking around with a fortune on your hand. People would kill you for that ring."
"I know, which is why I haven't told anyone but you."
A little of the color came back to Grandmother Lu's face, and she looked touched by his display of trust. "Well, I think I can probably muster enough funds to buy two or three of them. But, I have to ask. Why would you help him?"
Sen shook his head. "It's just a feeling. I can't explain it any better than that. Something, maybe the heavens, maybe the winds, told me that I was supposed to take some kind of action. It had to do with that man. I can't even be sure that it's a good thing that I'm doing. I think it is. I hope it is. If it isn't, well, he'll become my responsibility down the road."
"You'll kill him if it turns out he wasn't worth helping?"
Sen thought hard about that. "No. If he turns out to just be useless, I'll let life sort that out for him. This life, or the next life. If he turns out to be evil, though, I'll kill him. I'll have to, or I'll have a share of guilt in every terrible thing he does. For now, I'm just making good on my word. Let's hope he appreciates that enough to become someone worth knowing."
Chapter 69: Yesterday's Sins
After a brief discussion and a quick meal, Sen accompanied Grandmother Lu back to her shop. She wasn't comfortable simply carrying around anything as valuable as beast cores. It turned out that she didn't have a storage ring of her own, which Sen found odd at first.
"I don't deal with many things that would call for them. Oh, they're terribly useful things, but a well-guarded caravan gets the job done just as well. Plus, if you look around the shop, I deal with mortal luxury items. High-grade silks are valuable, but if someone wants qi work done on their silks, they can find someone to do that work for them. We don't keep stores of medicinal herbs or that sort of thing, which really do need a storage treasure. Frankly, sticking to mortal luxuries keeps us from being too enticing to thieves. We do have a few small storage boxes, for those rare occasions when we really need one, but that's very rare indeed."
In the back of his mind, Sen thought that perhaps he could find a storage ring for Grandmother Lu out in the world somewhere. It might make for a fine new year's gift at some point. In the meantime, though, they maintained a brisk walk from the house toward the shop. Sen smiled to himself at Grandmother Lu's sure and pain-free steps.
"What's it like?" He asked.
"What's what like?" She asked, giving him a baffled look.
"Going from how you were to how you are now. What's it like?"
"Oh, that. It's like," she ruminated for a moment, "being set free."
Sen pursed his lips as he tried to make sense of that. "I guess I don't know what that's like."
"Well, I don't suppose there's any reason you should. When your body starts giving out on you, it's like you're stuck in a cage. The older you get, the more things go wrong, the smaller the cage gets. Getting back some of what I lost, it was like someone opened the door to that cage and invited me out."
"I'm happy for you, grandmother," said Sen. "I'm glad you get another chance to, well, live life the way you want to."
"Oh, don't get me wrong. I lived a good life by most measures. I had a decent husband who loved me. I had healthy children who went on to start their own families. It was only at the end that things really went wrong for me. Still," she looked down at one of her hands, "I am grateful to have a chance to do something more. Some people, when they get older, they're ready to journey into Diyu and embrace reincarnation. Some people, people like me, they want more, to have done more, to have been more than they were. I actually get that chance. I'm going to make the most of it, free from yesterday's sins."
They fell into a comfortable silence after that. Sen's entry into the shop caused a bit of rustle among the girls who were there. Sen noticed Grandmother Lu rolling her eyes and muttering something about "having a talk" with him. He was about to ask her what they needed to talk about when the round-faced girl from the day before rushed up to them. She saw Sen looking right at her and managed to trip over her own feet. Sen took a quick step forward and grabbed her by the arms. He steadied her on her feet and then stepped back.
"Your mom makes those great mooncakes, right?" He asked.
The girl just stared at him with her mouth a little open until Grandmother Lu reached out and snapped her fingers right in front of the girl's face.
"Did you need something, Bai?"
The girl blinked, blushed furiously, and nodded. "My mother asked me to send her thanks to the young master for his kind words. She also asked me to give these to you."
The girl held out a small cloth bundle. Curious, Sen took the bundle and untied it. Folding back the cloth, he found several small buns that gave off a smell that was equal parts sweet and tart.
"These look delicious. What are they?"
"Pineapple buns. Has the young master never had them before?"
Sen shook his head. "Well, I certainly can't eat all of these alone. You'll have to eat them with me later."
"I, I, I would be most honored to share them with the young master," said Bai, who had gone the color of a tomato.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Grandmother Lu look upwards as if she was beseeching the heavens. What's that look all about, Sen wondered. Glancing around the shop, he saw several of the other girls giving Bai baleful glares. What are those looks about, he wondered. Grandmother Lu took a very firm hold of Sen's arm and pulled him toward the back of the shop.
"Thank you, Bai," she all but growled over her shoulder before glaring at Sen. "I need to get you out of sight before there's a murder."
Sen let himself be pulled to a back room, where Grandmother Lu tried to glare a hole through him. Sen tried to understand what he'd done wrong. He'd tried his best to be polite to the girl. He thought he'd succeeded, but maybe he'd overlooked something. His obvious and complete lack of comprehension seemed to soften Grandmother Lu's temper. She shook her head and gave another of those imploring looks upward.
"We will need to have a very long talk about young women later. For now, let's have a look at those beast cores."
Sen dutifully began pulling beast cores out of his ring. Grandmother Lu almost automatically rejected several of them, while setting aside six. Sen put the rejects back in his ring and then took a hard look at the ones she had set aside. A glimmer of understanding took hold and he pointed at the stones in turn.
"Earth qi. Air qi. Fire qi. Metal qi. Earth qi. Water qi. Nothing unusual. Nothing unique."
Grandmother Lu nodded. "I can reasonably sell an earth qi beast core or an air qi beast core without raising a lot of eyebrows. They're common enough that I could have come by them in several very plausible ways. An ice-attributed beast core? A metal-wind core? Nobody just has cores like that lying around unless they're a sect or maybe a very successful alchemist. People mount full expeditions to find those kinds of things. I don't even know how much you should ask for something like that. Be very, very careful who you tell about those cores, Sen."
Up until that moment, Sen had been working from the assumption that all of those cores were more or less of equivalent value. Now, he knew that he'd been underestimating the wealth in that ring. It made him nervous to be wearing it out in the open, but he couldn't see a better option. He didn't dare just leaving sitting in a drawer somewhere. Not even at Grandmother Lu's home. He suspected that her servants were probably honest, but one moment of curiosity with a storage ring could test that honesty to the breaking point. Sen sighed. He'd need to offload those cores for his own safety, but he'd have to do it very carefully. He watched as Grandmother Lu put two of the cores into one storage box, and the other four in a second storage box. She vanished from the room for several minutes before she came back with a heavy pouch that gave off a faint jingle whenever she moved it too fast. She placed both the storage box with the four cores and the pouch of money into a heavy sack. The other storage box disappeared into a locked cabinet.
"I'll see that your," she rolled her eyes, "friend gets that sack. I just hope he's smart enough to take it straight to his father."
Sen shrugged. "Either he is, or he isn't. I promised I'd help. It's on him to actually put that help to good use."
Grandmother Lu and Sen stiffened at the same moment when a powerful surge of qi passed through the shop. Sen just knew what was coming and it made his heart sink. A part of him had expected it, but another part had hoped that his display from yesterday would have bought him a bit more time.
"Lu Sen! Come out and face your death!"
Grandmother Lu gave Sen a look that was equal parts furious and afraid. "What is this nonsense about?"
Sen sighed. "Yesterday's sins, I'd imagine."
Chapter 70: The Absence of Choice
Sen felt a sliver of cold dread as he made his way back through the shop under the frightened, watchful gazes of the workers. It wasn't a worry that he might get hurt. He'd been hurt before. He wasn't even truly concerned that he might die. It was a possibility, but he'd faced that possibility before as well. Besides, if it really was his time to die, somehow fated to be, then worry wouldn't help. Sen's dread came from words the man had shouted. Come out and face your death. The mayor's son and his lackeys had come to teach Sen a lesson, but none of them had actually issued a challenge to the death. That had given Sen the option to let it go with the severe chastisements he'd handed out. This guy had opened with a challenge to the death. Sen didn't think the man was going to let that idea go, not after being so brazen and public about it.
After Sen stepped out into the same market where he'd fought less than a day ago, he wondered if perhaps this town was simply cursed. Oh, not cursed for everyone, of course. Plenty of people seemed to get by quite well there. Still, Sen had to wonder if the town was specifically cursed for him. Uncle Kho had admitted that such things were possible if rarely done. Apparently, such curses were rather work-intensive to set up and expensive to maintain. Yet, very little good had come to Sen in the town, and what little good had come his way seemed to be constantly in jeopardy of some kind. Sen didn't believe for a moment that, should he fall, Grandmother Lu and her shop would go unscathed. No, if he fell, that shop would be burning within minutes of his death. Maybe, they'd let the people inside out first. Maybe they wouldn't.
If Sen had to guess, they probably wouldn't. After all, they'd sent someone after him the very next day after he'd soundly beaten seven qi condensing cultivators. Granted, that was no mighty accomplishment for him, but it at least spoke to a kind of tactical competence that should have given any would-be heroes a bit of pause. Then again, the man glaring at Sen didn't look like the sort who ever felt pause over anything. He looked like the kind of man who was always angry about something. There was a scowl etched into his features that made him look older. Sen almost thought that it made the man look older for his age. But there was no good way to know a cultivator's age. The man could actually be in his mid-twenties, or he could be in his mid-fifties. A brief touch of qi told Sen that the man was also in the foundation formation stage. Sen thought his own cultivation was a little lower than the man's, but the finer differences inside a cultivation stage often eluded him.
"Who are you?" Sen asked, just as a place to start.
"I am Chen Aiguo, the Cold Blade," said the man in a tone that suggested that every living thing between the dirt and sky should recognize his name.
Sen did not recognize the name. He shrugged at the man. "Okay. Who are you to me?"
"I am the teacher of Guo Jun."
Sen stared at the man, waiting for the explanation to continue. When it didn't, Sen let out a very audible sigh. "So, you're the one who trained the mayor's son. If you're angry about his defeat, perhaps you should have spent more time training him to use his brain instead of that dao. Either way, it's no business of mine. I have no quarrel with you."
"You have dishonored my clan!"
"How?"
Chen Aiguo apparently hadn't anticipated that question because he just stood there with his mouth open and no words coming out. Sen then learned that the man had no good answer for the question because he drew a dao and pointed it at Sen.
"I will not be distracted by these foolish questions. Draw your blade, boy, so that there will at least be some honor when I kill you."
Sen took a moment to glance around the market. He didn't spot any obvious signs of lackeys waiting to intervene. He supposed talking the angry, scowling Chen Aiguo out of a duel had always had a low probability of success. Chen Aiguo was no doubt under orders from the mayor to honorably murder Sen for the great offense of beating the mayor's son unconscious for being a moron. That meant that Chen Aiguo almost certainly wouldn't let this go, no matter what Sen did. That also made this one of those cases where, even if he tried to walk away, he'd probably just get attacked anyway.
Sen muttered to himself. "In the absence of choice, the only path is forward."
He drew his jian and closed the distance with the other foundation formation stage cultivator. Master Feng had told Sen that most swordsmen and swordswomen will test their opponents to try to gauge their abilities. This initial clash between Sen and Chen Aiguo lived up to that prediction. Chen Aiguo started with a few basic slashing attacks that Sen simply dodged. The other man then transitioned to thrusting and chopping attacks that favored the heavier dao blade. Sen parried those before the two broke apart. Sen deduced a few things from that brief exchange. Chen Aiguo wasn't a particularly skilled swordsman. He was basically competent, but by no measure brilliant. He was also the kind of fighter who expected to overpower his opponents. Sen could see the frustration on the man's face that he hadn't managed to land a blow.
On the next exchange, Sen took the offensive. He was a blur of metal and speed that wove a net of pain around Chen Aiguo. Sen didn't make a special effort to kill the other cultivator, but several deep cuts left bloody trails across both of Chen Aiguo's arms and beneath his left eye. Sen leaned out of the way of a particularly sloppy chop and, spotting an opening, drove his left fist toward the other man's throat. Chen was quick enough to turn his body away and take the blow on his shoulder. So, Sen used the distraction to thrust his jian into the man's thigh. Chen's eyes went wide, and he let out a bellow of pain. Anticipating some kind of instinctive counterattack, Sen briefly activated his qinggong technique to dance back out of the way of a wild swing of the dao. Chen Aiguo staggered back a few steps, one hand clutching the wound on his thigh, the other waving his dao in Sen's general direction.
"You worthless little bastard. You think you can dishonor me like this? When I'm done with you, I'm going into that shop. I'm going to slit the throat of every last piece of street trash I find in there."
So much for honor, said a calm voice in a tiny corner of Sen's mind. Fury filled the rest of his consciousness, threatening to overwhelm all reason. Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Auntie Caihong had all warned him about moments like this. They had warned him not to take the bait.
"I don't know if it's the oldest trick in the book," said Master Feng, "but I'm pretty sure it's right there on page one. They'll try to make you angry. Try to make you attack without thought. You'll want to do it. Oh, believe me, you'll want to do it. You have to give yourself a moment to think. Take a breath, count to three in your head, wait for five heartbeats. Find something that works for you."
"Why should I wait?" Sen asked.
"Because getting you to attack is only half the trick. While you're not thinking about anything except stabbing them in the throat a hundred times, they're getting a qi technique ready. As soon as you get close, they'll hit you with it. Hit them with something else first."
Sen took a breath. Then counted to three in his head. Then, he did something he hadn't done in the fight the day before. He waited until he felt the qi stirring around Chen Aiguo, then Sen unleashed the full force of his killing intent. He'd never done that with another person who wasn't a peak nascent soul cultivator before, so he wasn't prepared for what would happen. For a space of two heartbeats, Chen Aiguo was completely still. Sen watched with a kind of detached fascination as the dao fell from the man's limp fingers. Then, the screaming started. It wasn't the hoarse screams of pain that Sen might have expected. It was the high, shrill screaming of someone caught in the fist of abject terror. Blood began pouring out of the man's nose, ears, and even his eyes. Sen could still hear Chen Aiguo's threats against Grandmother Lu and everyone who worked for her. With those threats and Master Feng's many stories in mind, Sen infused his jian with metal qi, walked over to the screaming man, and calmly cut off his head.
Chapter 71: Spoils
Sen stared down at the corpse that used to be Chen Aiguo. It took Sen a moment to realize that he was waiting for something to happen. Heavenly rebuke? Overwhelming emotions? Neither happened. If the heavens were troubled by what he had done, they were keeping it to themselves. As for emotions, Sen did feel some regret. It had been a pointless and avoidable death that served no one's ends. Chen Aiguo had not accomplished his goals and never would again. The mayor hadn't accomplished his goals, whatever those had been. Sen gained nothing from the man's death either, save perhaps a bit of unnecessary proof that he'd been taught the jian by someone truly gifted. The only thing that Chen Aiguo's death accomplished was leaving one less cultivator in the world. Sen looked around the market.
There were faces pressed up against windows or staring out of mostly closed doors. There was no awe or envy in their eyes this time, just fear. After a moment of consideration, Sen decided that was appropriate. In some ways, the fight with the mayor's son and his hangers-on had been more of a demonstration of Sen's skills than anything else. After all, however injured, everyone had walked away from that fight. Only one man was walking away from this encounter. That changed things. Sen supposed it might change things for a lot of people. Chen Aiguo might have had family somewhere. There could be friends out there who would miss him or, Sen sighed, try to avenge him. Lives had been changed by Sen's actions, in subtle or profound ways, yet he struggled to muster strong feelings about it. In the end, he simply hadn't known the man. His only interactions with the man had been filled with anger, violence, and threats. Perhaps there were people who would mourn Chen Aiguo, but Sen wasn't one of them.
Sen did take some comfort from the fact that the man hadn't announced that he was part of a sect. That was a level of trouble Sen had no desire to bring down on his head if he could avoid it. Although, a sect might prove more reasonable about the whole thing than the mayor. Sects understood the Jianghu. The story of Chen Aiguo challenging a wandering cultivator and losing would largely absolve Sen of lingering trouble. As Sen thought back, though, Chen had mentioned something about a clan. He desperately hoped that he hadn't managed to set off a blood feud after being off the mountain for less than a week. While Master Feng would probably find some kind of morbid humor in it, he expected that Auntie Caihong would be a little disappointed in him. Sen wasn't sure what Uncle Kho would think. If the man thought as poorly of cultivator clans as he did of sects, he'd probably tell Sen to go on a killing spree and carve his name into the nightmares of the next ten generations of that clan. When he thought about what that would mean, he put it firmly into the last resort category.
Shaking himself out of his musings, Sen discovered that Falling Leaf had trained him well. He had already taken the man's dao, sheathed it, and put it away in his storage ring. He claimed a purse of coins and similarly stored those. Sen found a jade seal in one of the man's pockets. He didn't recognize the seal, but he hadn't really expected to recognize it. It could have come from a lot of places. Still, it might have some value eventually. The last thing that Sen took off the body was a storage ring that Chen Aiguo had hidden in an inner pocket of his robes. Sen didn't inspect the ring, just slipped it into one of his own pockets for later examination. Even Sen knew that you didn't go through the trouble of hiding something in a place where you could feel it every time you moved if it didn't contain something of value. While it might be of personal value only to Chen Aiguo, Sen had his doubts.
He did note a few disapproving looks from the townspeople. He was not impressed by the way their morals shifted from moment to moment and day to day. Oh, yes, let a homeless child get beaten. That's fine. Let a man stand alone against seven attackers. That's acceptable. Loot a body? Oh, for shame, that's deplorable. Sen expected that their disapproval had more to do with disappointment that he'd beaten them to it than any actual moral qualms. At the end of the day, he had fought. He had killed. The spoils were his by right and natural law. Why should he leave it for someone else? When he'd completed searching the body, or at least as much as he planned to do, he stood up and walked toward Grandmother Lu's shop. Then, he heard someone shout.
"You aren't just leaving that dead body there, are you?"
He heard inaudible grumbles and murmurs of agreement and until he turned to face the rest of the market. Then, near-total silence reigned, save for a bird in the distance that remained blissfully unaware of the day's events. Sen let his gaze travel over the people, who all looked away or lowered their heads.
"I did not bring this man here. He was sent. Take it up with the man who sent him," Sen said in a carrying tone.
Then, Sen very deliberately looked in the direction of the mayor's manor. Many of the people who followed his gaze looked confused, craning their heads back and forth to try to see whatever had drawn the cultivator's attention. Sen saw understanding flicker across enough faces that he was satisfied. Word would spread that the mayor had sent a cultivator to try and assassinate someone. It was something Master Feng would have done. The story wouldn't be enough to destroy the mayor by itself. After all, a story is just a story. It would make the man's life infinitely harder, though, because people would believe the story. People would want to believe the story. After that, they'd trust the mayor less. They'd take their business elsewhere. Oh, none of it would be too obvious. Yet, over time, it would isolate the mayor and his family. It would strain their finances. Then, in a generation or two, the mayor's noble family would find themselves living as commoners.
Sen hadn't set out to learn how to do something like that. He'd just heard Master Feng and Uncle Kho discussing how this noble house or that royal family had come to ruin. It was only after Sen asked for more details that Master Feng explained how he had engineered those disasters. He told Sen that the details varied, but the essential story was always the same.
"Here's the thing, Sen. You only need one seed of doubt planted firmly in the people's minds. After that, they'll water and nurture that seed for you. Then, you just come back every once in a while to sprinkle a little fertilizer onto things. Once a noble house or a royal family truly loses the people's trust, it's just a waiting game. People are strange. They don't ever really trust their rulers. So, it doesn't take much to sever those bonds."
Sen wasn't sure when he'd decided that the mayor and his family had to go, but he'd committed himself to it with that not-so-subtle look toward the mayor's manor. Of course, that assumed that the mayor was smart enough to cut his losses. If he kept pushing, well, Sen was just about out of patience with the mayor, his son, and the town of Orchard's Reach. With one final glance at the remains of Chen Aiguo, Sen turned his back on the corpse, and the townspeople, and walked back to Grandmother Lu's shop.
Chapter 72: Spoils (2)
Grandmother Lu and all of her workers were waiting inside the shop. When he stepped back inside, all of them bowed to Sen. He knew they meant it to convey their respect, but it mostly just made him uncomfortable. No wonder Master Feng tried to keep a low profile when he went away all those times, thought Sen. Sen supposed that some people might crave that kind of attention all the time, but he could do without it. Still, there was no getting around the people in the shop. He gave them a shallower bow in return, setting them all free to return to doing whatever they had been doing before the excitement outside. Some of them looked like they would linger, but Grandmother Lu shooed them away. Sen nodded to the back room they had been in before. When Grandmother Lu nodded in return, he made a hasty retreat to the relative privacy of the space.
While Grandmother Lu tended to her employees, Sen pulled out the storage ring he'd taken off the other cultivator. While he'd imagined some kind of minor wealth in the ring when he'd grabbed it, he'd also done it as a minor act of spite against the townspeople and their judgment. Faced with the reality of actually taking whatever was in the ring didn't sit entirely right with him. It's not like you can give it back, he reminded himself. When curiosity finally got the better of him, Sen accessed the ring and emptied its contents onto a table. It was mercifully free of truly personal items. The most personal items were just some spare clothes in the ring. It was a habit that Master Feng and Auntie Caihong had strongly encouraged Sen to adopt. He found a small cache of pills that he couldn't readily identify. He supposed that he might be able to sell those. It was even possible he could use them, although he had no intention of ever using any pill he hadn't at least seen getting made.
There were other odds and ends in the ring. Basic camping supplies that he already had and a strange, enchanted object that seemed to channel environmental fire qi. He supposed it would be useful for starting campfires without using one's own qi. He found several more daos, at least one of which he thought was a spirit-level weapon. He lingered over that sword for a while. He didn't know exactly how rare spirit-level weapons were, but he knew they were far rarer than mortal-grade weapons. Sen vaguely wished that he'd trained with the dao, but it was a passing thought. He knew he could learn to wield one, but he also knew what it would require from him. He already had a firm foundation with the jian and the spear. That was enough. He would build on those skills. He would wait until he reached a larger town or city and then sell the dao or all of them if he could. It might even be possible to make a trade for another spirit-level jian. After a moment of deliberation, he pushed the weapons and the enchanted fire starter into his larger storage ring.
Then, he turned to the last thing that had been in other cultivator's ring. It was a plain canvas satchel with nothing to make it stand out. Sen opened it up expecting to find food or possibly some kind of document. What he hadn't expected to find was gold. The satchel was half full of golden taels. The sight of so much money, just sitting there, had a certain unreal quality for Sen. He didn't know how to process that kind of wealth. Then, he started to wonder where a foundation formation stage cultivator could have gotten that kind of money. Sen supposed that the money could be the man's life savings. Yet, it rang hollow to him. Sen couldn't imagine a scenario where he'd want to carry around that kind of wealth for any length of time. He'd have found somewhere to hide it, as insurance against a future disaster. Auntie Caihong had even told him about things called banks where people could put their money for safekeeping. No, there were no good reasons to carry around that much money. Sen suspected that the man had either stolen the money or been told to hold it for someone else.
If he'd stolen it, there wasn't much Sen could do about that. He wouldn't even know where to begin to look for the victims. He'd seen enough about people to know that if he just announced that he'd found stolen money, everyone would come running. He didn't have the resources to find out quietly. That would take delicate questions asked of discrete people. Sen didn't know those people, nor did he have the experience to figure out how to phrase those delicate questions. Of course, if the cultivator had been holding the money for someone, that was a different problem. They'd want that money back. When Sen considered who might have that much money or access to it, it was a depressingly short list. In fact, the most likely suspect was someone that Sen was very ready to never think about again. He found himself wishing that he had let someone else loot that corpse. It might have spared him some trouble. Then again, it might not have spared him anything.
Uncertain about how best to proceed, he closed the satchel and waited for Grandmother Lu. Sen could recognize when he was in over his head with a problem. With that much wealth on the line, he was absolutely out of his depth. He worried that it may well be out of Grandmother Lu's depth, too, but she at least had more experience with the world and politicians. Even if she couldn't tell him exactly how to handle it, she likely could at least point him in a direction. That was more than he had now. Perhaps half an hour passed with Sen staring daggers at that bag full of unwanted trouble before Grandmother Lu came back to check on him.
"What's all this?" She asked, gesturing at the table.
"That other cultivator had a storage ring. Those are things I can't use," he said, gesturing at the pile of clothes and camping equipment. "I thought you might know someone who could use them."
Grandmother Lu cocked her head to one side for a moment, thinking, before she nodded.
"Yes, I think I know some people who could use them. They can't afford much," she warned Sen.
"Just give it to them. I don't need money from people who don't have it. Besides, that's not the problem. That," he said, pointing at the satchel, "is the problem."
He reached over and flipped the satchel open. Grandmother Lu's eyes went as wide as they could. She reached out a shaking hand and grabbed a handful of the golden taels, letting them run through her fingers. Sen watched as the inevitable happened. For most of a minute, he could see the dreams of wealth running through the older woman's mind. He could almost guess at the content of those dreams. She was imagining her trading empire expanding by leaps and bounds, stretching clear to the capital, and then raking in profits by the bushel. Slowly, though, he saw her start to frown. She looked down at the satchel and started to really consider it. The longer she studied all of that gold, the more unhappy she looked. She glanced at him, almost as if to check and see if he had understood the dangers. Reassured by whatever she saw, she went back to frowning at the gold. Then, much as Sen had done, she closed the satchel.
"Put that away somewhere before anyone else sees it," she ordered, her eyes distant as she thought through something.
Sen did as she instructed and put the satchel into his storage ring. He idly tossed the other cultivator's storage ring to Grandmother Lu. She caught it and offered Sen a briefly puzzled look until she realized what she held. She immediately tried to give it back. Sen waved her off.
"You can use it. I already have one."
"These are expensive, Sen. You could sell it."
Sen shrugged. "Consider it a few years' worth of back new year gifts."
She rolled her eyes, but eventually slipped the ring into a pocket.
"They'll come looking for that gold," she said.
"You think it's the mayor's?"
She nodded. "Who knows where he got it, but yes. I think he imagined that cultivator you fought was the safest place he could keep the money. The mayor probably never imagined that someone would wander through town that could kill the man. Probably never even considered the possibility when he sent the fool here."
"Probably not. When do you think they'll come?"
"I'm surprised they aren't here already. I suppose it's too much for them to simply raid my shop in the middle of the day without a very good excuse."
"Tonight then?"
Grandmother Lu sighed, then scowled, and then nodded. "Tonight."
"Well, since we have time, I have gifts for you, Grandmother. Courtesy of Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Ma Caihong."
She looked both excited and apprehensive at the prospect of gifts from the elder cultivators. "Well, who doesn't love presents?"
Chapter 73: Spoils (3)
Sen started by pulling out the small, enchanted box that Master Feng had given him. "With compliments of Master Feng and Auntie Caihong."
Grandmother Lu took the box and, with more nervousness than Sen thought was wholly appropriate, she opened it. The room was almost immediately overwhelmed with a potent medicinal smell and a burst of qi. Grandmother Lu quickly snatched a piece of paper out of the box and closed it. She read over the note. Then, she read it over again. Sen watched all of this growing curiosity. When Grandmother Lu looked like she might burst into tears, Sen's curiosity transformed into alarm.
"Grandmother? What's wrong?"
The older woman's head snapped around toward him, and she burst into laughter. "Wrong? Oh, you dear boy, nothing is wrong."
"Then, why do you look like you're going to cry?"
"I suppose it does pay to know old monsters. They didn't tell you what these pills were?"
Sen drew himself up straight. "I didn't ask. They were a gift for you."
"They're to help me break through."
"Oh, they'll help you get to late qi condensing? I thought you were stuck. No more breakthroughs."
"So did I. By all rights, I should be. But, no, they aren't meant to help me reach late or even peak qi condensing. Not just that, at any rate. If they work, they should help me break through to foundation formation."
"That would be-," Sen trailed off, unsure what word was appropriate.
"A miracle," Grandmother Lu finished for him. "It seems your teachers can make the impossible, possible, every once in a while."
Having seen Master Feng casually flying from wall to wall, and Uncle Kho summoning massive bolts of lightning from a clear sky, Sen was forced to agree. He decided that he shouldn't be shocked that Auntie Caihong could work miracles on that level in her own way. It seemed that she was just a little subtler about it. Sen smiled at Grandmother Lu.
"Then, I look forward to being a nuisance for you for many, many years to come."
"A nuisance," laughed Grandmother Lu. "Oh, yes, you've been nothing but a burden. Constant trouble. I don't know why I put up with you."
"It's your saintly nature, I'm sure," said Sen, working very hard to hold back his own laughter.
For several long moments, Grandmother Lu simply watched the box. She'd occasionally reach out to touch it, as though to reassure herself it wasn't a dream. Sen couldn't really blame her for her disbelief. She'd thought her life was going in one direction, and Master Feng and Auntie Caihong had sent it careening in a very different direction. They did this for me, Sen abruptly realized. It was even sort of obvious, although he'd managed to overlook it. As much as Sen respected Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Auntie Caihong, he understood the vast gulf between them. They had all talked about how cultivators and mortals lived in two different worlds, but Sen thought that there was actually a third world for people like the peak nascent soul cultivators. They might interact with the mortal world or the Jianghu from time to time, but they didn't really live in either of them. They were too old, had experienced too much, and simply held too much power. They truly were separated from everyone else. More importantly for Sen, they knew it. They knew that Sen needed at least one person who lived in the mortal world or the Jianghu that he could trust. They had picked Grandmother Lu to be that person for him. Well, Sen amended, I picked her, and they followed through. A surge of fresh gratitude for the elder cultivators warmed Sen's heart. Still, there was another gift. Sen pulled out the package that Uncle Kho had provided.
"This," said Sen, "comes with the compliments of Uncle Kho."
With visible reluctance, Grandmother Lu put the box with the pills into the storage ring Sen had gifted her. Then, she pulled the package over and opened it. Sen peered over her shoulder with intense interest. Uncle Kho's cryptic words about Grandmother Lu had stuck with him. What the package revealed left Sen feeling a little perplexed. There were two fans inside a wooden case, both open to reveal idyllic scenes painted on their surfaces. Sen felt a little let down. Grandmother Lu, on the other hand, looked stunned. She reached out with a trembling hand and touched one of the fans. As soon as her finger made contact with the fan, she jerked her hand back and covered her mouth. Then, with a speed that impressed Sen, the older woman snatched up the fans.
She took the fans through a series of movements that made Sen reevaluate the gift. With the fans in motion, he caught the telltale glint of metal along their sharpened edges. Sen could see moments of hesitation in Grandmother Lu when she was either trying to remember the next movement in the form or waiting for muscle memories to kick in that hadn't seen use in more than half a century. Still, she had clearly been trained in their deadly use at some point. She had said that she came from a family of cultivators. Sen hadn't pried, as the memories were painful for the woman, but he wondered just what those cultivators had done for work when they weren't busy being awful parents.
After a time, Grandmother Lu put the fans back in their case with nearly as much reluctance as she had stored away the pills. However he had divined the information, Uncle Kho had clearly struck true with this gift. Sen did make a mental note to ask the man about it the next time he saw him. Grandmother Lu beamed at him, as though he'd personally chosen the gift for her. Still, he smiled back at her, glad to see that the fans had made her so happy. She started shaking her head.
"I wonder how he could have known?"
"Grandmother?"
"Fans are uncommon weapons, even in the Jianghu. They were something of a symbol for my family. Do you think this Uncle Kho just guessed?"
Sen weighed that question. "He isn't the kind to just guess outright. If it was a guess, it was an educated guess. Although, I can't imagine where or how he would have come across information to connect you to the fans."
Grandmother Lu shook her head again. "You know what? I don't even care. Please thank him for me the next time you see him."
"I will."
Sen had been giving some thought to their situation with the gold while the older cultivator reacquainted herself with using the fans. He suspected those specific fans had meaning for her beyond their utility as pure weapons. After all, the woman owned a trading company. If she had wanted fans like those, she likely could have bought them for herself without too much trouble. Sen pushed that to the back of his head where he'd taken to storing mysteries about the nascent soul cultivators. He brought his attention back to the present, where a satchel full of money was threatening to send everything into another spiral of violence. Sen didn't crave violence to begin with, and two days straight of real violence had been more than enough to make him desire an extended rest from it. He'd considered something that they hadn't really discussed.
"Grandmother, do you think we should just give them the satchel?"
He'd initially dismissed the idea because he expected that it was the mayor's stolen money. The mayor had proven himself a hostile force, so it seemed unlikely he'd just let things go if they gave back the money. Then again, it was a lot of money. Getting it back without trouble might just pour a little oil on troubled waters. Besides, Sen sort of enjoyed the idea of bribing the mayor with his own stolen money. When he looked over at Grandmother Lu, though, she was shaking her head.
"I thought about it," she said. "It's tempting, but I doubt it will stop anything. If it is the mayor, he's all but declared a blood feud with you. So, I'm sorry, but you shouldn't expect that to go away. If it's someone else, they won't want any witnesses around to spread rumors about all of that gold. No, much as I wish it were otherwise, this will all end in blood."
Chapter 74: What Goes by Night (1)
After a discussion about where it would be best to have the fight, should it come to a fight, Grandmother Lu decided that she'd rather it happened at the shop. When Sen asked her why, she shrugged and said it would put fewer people in danger. Nobody lived in the shop, while she had servants at the house. The argument came when Sen insisted that he stay at the shop, while Grandmother Lu returned to her home.
"Why in the world would I agree to something like that?"
"Two reasons. The first reason is that, if they send people to the house, you have a far better chance of protecting those people than they have of protecting themselves. I'm sure that Zhang Muchen and your other servants would put up a fight if they had to. Are any of them actually trained to fight? I mean trained like us."
Grandmother Lu scowled. "No, they aren't. I didn't think it'd be necessary. More fool me."
"The second reason is that if I have a better chance of defending myself if I'm here alone. If it's just me, I don't have to worry about accidentally injuring someone on my side. That means I can strike as hard as I need to with no second guessing."
Grandmother Lu did not look happy about it, but Sen could tell that she was coming around on his way of thinking. While she'd gotten back much of her vitality, enough that she could wield those fans in a calm back room, it wasn't the same thing as going up against other cultivators in a full-on fight. Of course, Sen didn't know they'd send cultivators or how many there might be, but it seemed wise to assume that's what would happen. He just hoped that Chen Aiguo was at the top of the pile of local cultivators. Again, Sen couldn't know that was the case, but the man had been training the mayor's son. That suggested that he was the best the mayor could find. As long as they didn't send too many people at that level, Sen felt like he had a good chance of holding his own. Of course, there was the problem of keeping one or two of them alive. He needed to find out who sent them. Sen shrugged that thought away. That was definitely a problem for later.
He spent the rest of the day doing his best to stay out of the way. Although, he did take a little time out to eat the pineapple buns with that Bai girl. The buns were amazing. He decided that he'd need to get the recipe for Auntie Caihong. It was the exact kind of thing that she liked. When he mentioned something to Bai about needing to meet her mother so he could get the recipe, the girl had seemingly lost the ability to speak and ran off. Then, Grandmother Lu had glared at him. Sen just shrugged at her. It wasn't like he knew what had sent the girl running.
When the day finally ran its course, Sen made a big show of being seen outside. All of the girls seemed to want to hang around and talk at him, but a combination of Grandmother Lu's stern looks and the hour saw the girls safely off to their homes. Finally, Grandmother Lu announced that she needed to go home. Sen waved goodbye to her, then looked around the largely abandoned market. He assumed that someone was watching, so he wanted them to be absolutely sure he was still at the shop. Then, he stepped back inside, closed the door, and locked it. Sen was surprised by the change in how the shop felt. When there had been customers and all the employees inside, the shop radiated a strange kind of aliveness.
With just him left in the shop, it felt dead to Sen. It was as if someone had worked some terrible qi technique and ripped away the vital essence of the place. He wondered if all shops felt that way after they closed for the night. Part of him hoped that it wasn't like that, mostly because it left him feeling a little depressed. It did, however, provide him a chance to set up a formation close to the exterior walls of the shop and activate it. It wouldn't give him a lot of warning if or when someone broke in, but he didn't really need a lot of warning. A few seconds for Sen was more than enough time to prepare himself.
With that precaution in place, Sen just wandered around the shop and looked at the things that Grandmother Lu sold every day. All of the goods were of excellent quality, confirming his initial assessment. Most of them were also of little use to him. In fact, they'd be of little use to anyone without a home. He did consider setting aside some of the fabrics to buy the next day. He wasn't any kind of tailor, but Auntie Caihong had sat him down one afternoon and drilled the essentials of sewing into his head.
"You're going to damage your clothes at some point," she'd said. "You won't always have the option of finding a shop to replace them. You need to know how to at least close a hole well enough that it can get you back to civilization."
Eventually, the light grew dim enough that even close examination of the goods on the tables and shelves became pointless. Sen debated lighting a candle or a lantern but decided against it. Now that true dark was setting in over the town, he expected that things would happen sooner than later. He slipped into the back room where he'd spent much of the day, sat down on the floor, rested his jian across his knees, and began slowly extending his awareness through the walls of the shop. It wasn't exactly like seeing or hearing. Master Feng had called it a spiritual sense, although the old cultivator wasn't entirely sure why anyone called it that. It didn't happen often, but sometimes the only answer Sen could get from his teachers was something along the lines of, that's just how it is. The spiritual sense was one of those things.
What the sense provided him with was more like a limited map of the life and qi use in the area. He could feel where there was life nearby, which Sen considered a shoddy advantage at best. There was always life nearby. That meant that Sen had to filter out anything that wasn't big enough to be a person to glean information from the sense. It took him a lot of mental effort to do that sifting, although Master Feng assured him that it was another of those skills that became easier over time. Sen might have written the whole thing off as useless if not for the qi awareness that came with it. While spirit beasts might actively use qi, most animals didn't. So, if he sensed a life signature and qi use in the same place, the odds were good that he had a cultivator nearby. After nearly a quarter of an hour with nothing to show for his efforts, Sen took a different tack.
He put most of his attention into cultivating, and only devoted a small portion of his mental energy to keeping an eye on the surrounding area. He wasn't anywhere near to back where he wanted to be in terms of his qi storage. The full day of passive cultivation had thickened up the misty presence of qi in his dantian at least. He found that he was glad that he'd switched over to active cultivation because it was another two hours before he finally sensed what he'd been looking for outside. There were five people moving in around the shop from the front and the back. Sen slowed his breathing and let himself fall into the calm, focused mindset that he had worked so hard to achieve with the jian. Once he achieved it, Sen stood and waited.
He had to give whoever was coming some credit. He never even heard them enter the front of the building. It was only when they tripped the alarm formation that he was certain. Still, he waited to act. He waited until he felt the formation trigger on the back of the building as well. Once he was certain that all five people were inside, he let a little air qi slip free and carry his voice to everyone in the building.
"You shouldn't have come here," he said, doing his best impersonation of Master Feng's cold indifference when facing the sect members on the mountain. "If you run now, some of you might even survive."
Every one of the living signatures in his awareness stopped moving. With all of them in relatively close proximity, he let his qi brush against theirs. Two early foundation formation stage cultivators and three qi condensing stage cultivators. It seemed that Chen Aiguo really had been at the top of the cultivator food chain in Orchard's Reach. Armed with the information he needed, Sen reached out to one of his stronger affinities and blanketed the interior of the shop with impenetrable shadows. He could almost feel the other cultivators panic as they went completely blind in the already dark shop.
"Just give us the money, you bastard," shouted one of the foundation formation cultivators. "That's all we want."
Sen found it a little ironic that he actually found moving through the shop in his qi-created shadows easier than doing it in the semi-darkness of natural light. With his shadows touching everything, he knew where everything was. That made it very easy for him to find one of the qi condensing cultivators. There was a little bubble around them where his shadows couldn't reach. It felt like some kind of fire technique to Sen, not that it mattered. By the time they realized that he was close, his jian had already passed through their back and into their heart. Sen twisted the blade to ensure maximum damage. The only thing that left the shadows was his jian's blade. With one person down, Sen engaged with them again.
"Tell me who sent you. Whoever tells me, I'll let leave."
"We're not telling you anything. Now, give us the gold!" The same foundation formation cultivator yelled.
Sen wrote that one off as hopeless. He also decided that he needed to pick up the pace. The shadow technique was very effective, but he could feel it sapping his qi reserves at an alarming rate. The second qi condensing cultivator died as easily as the first. The third actually gave him a little trouble. Sen didn't know if he made a noise or if the woman's spiritual sense was a bit more finely tuned, but she was ready for him. He very nearly lost an ear to a slender, sharpened bolt of ice that shot past his head. That would have been bad enough, but she also yelled.
"He's over here!"
Sighing, Sen stepped into the small area of control that the woman had managed to exert to escape the pure inky blackness of his shadows. The woman had a dagger in each hand. To her credit, she didn't hesitate. To her misfortune, neither did Sen. Two quick flicks of his jian sent the daggers flying from her hands. Then he struck her across the side of the head. She went down in a limp heap. Reaching down, Sen seized the back of her robes and lifted the woman up off the ground. He moved so that he was directly in the path of the uncooperative foundation formation cultivator. He held the woman up in front of him like a literal human shield and jumped forward into the foundation formation cultivator's sphere of influence. It was just a moment of hesitation, a brief instance of distraction from seeing the woman, but it was all the time Sen needed. He drove his jian up through the woman at an angle. It exploded through the woman's chest and, using the other cultivator's forward momentum against him, sank into the man's throat. The man staggered back, trying to hold his damaged throat closed while he stared at Sen with confused, disbelieving eyes.
Sen jerked the jian from the woman's body and let it drop to the floor. He didn't need to be subtle anymore. He closed on the injured cultivator, batted away a hastily thrown punch, feinted with the jian, then kicked the man's legs out from under him. The injured cultivator had barely hit the floor before Sen's jian pinned him to it. With that, Sen let the shadow technique drop. The last cultivator had been trying to get to them, but she stopped cold when she saw the bodies. Sen could see her doing the math. They'd been in the shop for less than three minutes, and now she was the only one left.
"So," said Sen, drawing his jian out of the corpse on the floor. "We should talk about who sent you."