Unintended Cultivator

“You not going to pass out again, are you?” asked Lo Meifeng in an extra-dry tone.

Sen gave her a death glare from where he lay sprawled out on the floor. “Just give me a minute. That wasn’t as easy as I made it look.”

“You didn’t make it look that easy.”

“Exactly! And I’m telling you, it still wasn’t as easy as I made it look.”

Lo Meifeng frowned and a sliver of genuine concern crossed her face. “Are you alright?”

“No. Not really. There might be a right way to do what I did, but I didn’t find it. I just brute-forced it the whole way. As you can see,” he said, wiping some of the blood off his face and holding up his hand, “there were some consequences.”

Sen let his head drop back against the floor and just reveled in the wonderful feeling of not having to do anything. To Lo Meifeng’s credit, she let him, choosing to sit down on her bed. While she wasn’t putting any overt pressure on him to talk or act, Sen could almost hear her thinking hard. He ignored that, and everything else in the known universe, for five glorious minutes. He wasn’t even close to recovered. He was pretty sure he was going to have to go digging around inside his own body and make an elixir or five to make that happen. But he was pretty sure he could manage a conversation. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and scooted until he could rest his back against the wall. Lo Meifeng gave him another concerned look that didn’t fade entirely.

“How much damage did you do to yourself back there?” she asked in a no-nonsense, don’t-you-lie-to-me voice.

“I honestly don’t know. I’d have to use qi to examine myself, and I’m not doing anything with qi for at least another half an hour. Otherwise, I actually might pass out,” said Sen, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. “So, that bearded guy we saw. Thoughts?”

“Yeah. I sort of got those things from the building exploding underneath of us. I was hoping that you might have more specific insights.”

“Nothing more than suspicions. I mean, by the time he was close enough that I might have sensed anything, you’d already done whatever it was you did. After that, I was basically blind spiritually. It was horrible, by the way. How do you put up with it?”

“Well, I don’t love it, but most of the time I don’t need to sense anything farther away than fifty feet.”

“Fifty feet? You can still sense things that far away when you’re doing that technique?”

Sen opened an eye and looked at Lo Meifeng. “Yeah. Why?”

“I couldn’t sense anything, at all, at any range.”

“Huh. I didn’t expect that. That’s what I get for messing with something I don’t understand.”

Sen closed his eyes again. He heard Lo Meifeng shuffling around for a few moments. Then, something damped was wiped across his face. His eyes snapped open and his hand shot out, wrapping around Lo Meifeng’s wrist. It took him a second to realize that she was just holding a damp cloth. He could see a smear of red on it from where she’d wiped it against his face. She looked startled and almost afraid. That expression faded when he let go of her wrist and closed his eyes again. For the next minute or two, she silently cleaned the blood off his face.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“You had three chances to let me die back there. You didn’t. I’m in your debt.”

Sen didn’t have the energy to think about that, so he just said the first thing that came to mind. “Don’t say stupid things. I wasn’t going to leave you there to die. Like I told you before, I need live allies, not dead friends.”

“Would we be friends if I were dead?”

“Grievances are for the living because the living can make amends. Death washes all sins clean.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“It’s what Master Feng taught me. I think I believe it. Once someone is gone, there’s no point in holding grudges. Even if you somehow managed to find them again in their next life, it’s not like they’ll remember. At that point, the only person you’re punishing by hanging on to your grievances is yourself.”

Sen shifted around, looking for a position that felt better to his back. After ten seconds of useless adjustments, he gave up. He opened his eyes and looked at Lo Meifeng, who was pointedly looking away. He smirked and continued.

“I will say that if leaving you behind would have caused you horrible embarrassment, I’d have abandoned you immediately.”

Lo Meifeng burst into laughter and the somber mood in the room was broken.

“I believe that,” she said. “Whoever that cultivator was, I think we’ve just seen the face of the enemy.”

“Do you think he’s nascent soul level?”

Lo Meifeng seemed to give that question a lot of thought before she answered. “It’s hard to know for sure. Some peak core cultivators are absurdly powerful. They might as well be initial nascent soul cultivators for the sheer force they can unleash. If you survive that long, I expect you’ll be one of those people.”

Sen shrugged. “Maybe. It doesn’t make much difference now.”

“I guess it doesn’t. Still, core cultivators do have some limitations that nascent soul cultivators don’t, specifically on range. If he was a core cultivator, he should have been close enough that I would have felt him preparing those attacks. I didn’t. That doesn’t automatically make him a nascent soul cultivator. Just because I haven’t seen something before, it doesn’t make that impossible. It is suggestive, though. How did you sense those attacks?”

“I wouldn’t say I sensed them. I mean, I did, but not until they were right on top of us. It was just an intuition.”

“One time, maybe. Two times that close together, it wasn’t just intuition. It might not have been as obvious as seeing something in your spiritual sense, but you picked up on something. You should try to figure out what it was. If you can figure that out, you might be able to hone it a little finer. Make it something more dependable. That reminds me. I’ve been meaning to ask. What’s the range of your spiritual sense.”

“I never really thought about it. Why?”

“Sometimes, I think you’re seeing farther than I am. I’m just trying to satisfy my curiosity.”

“Well, I never really tested it with another person. My best guess is a mile, maybe two.”

“A mile! Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I think so. Give or take,” said Sen. “Let me guess. That’s more than it should be?”

Lo Meifeng didn’t exactly sulk, but she didn’t look happy. “It’s not…wholly unprecedented, but it’s not usual for someone at your stage of development. For most people at your development level, it’s about half that. Assuming it’s not closer to two miles than one mile.”

“Does it matter?” Sen asked.

“Well, you’re sensing at about the same range as I am. So, if we both didn’t sense that guy, it makes it more likely that he’s a nascent soul cultivator.”

Sen nodded. “I was leaning in that direction myself, but I wanted to hear what you thought.”

“You realize that it’s a massive problem if he really is a nascent soul cultivator, right?”

Sen looked from Lo Meifeng to the formations around the room and then back. “It did not escape my attention.”

“Okay, you clearly realized that he was an immediate danger, but it goes beyond that. We can only hide in this room for so long. The minute either of us goes outside or even leaves this room, we’re vulnerable to attacks that we’ll barely see coming.”

“That’s less of a problem for me. He couldn’t see through that technique, or ability, or whatever the hells it is. Granted, that only helps me, but it’s also something I can keep up all day. At least, it is as long as I’m just hiding myself. And, if he can’t see me, there’s a good chance that nobody else can either. But my being able to come and go as I please doesn’t help the rest of you. On the flip side, though, it may be less of a problem than you think.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ve dealt with a few nascent soul cultivators and they are, if nothing else, territorial. I watched Uncle Kho kill a handful of cultivators for having the nerve to simply step onto his mountain. There are a handful of big sects here and at least a few nascent soul cultivators. Obviously, they can’t be going around killing every cultivator who intrudes on their territory. I suspect the tradeoff is that the nascent soul cultivators agreed not to do anything in someone else’s territory. I’d be willing to bet that guy just stepped all over someone else’s territory throwing around power like that and doing massive damage to buildings. Setting aside how much that’s going to infuriate the mortal government, those areas are almost certainly under the nominal control of a sect. I’m sure you noticed that he didn’t hang around to look for us.”

“He didn’t, did he?”

“I bet he was running home before someone showed up to complain with a nascent soul-powered groin kick.”

“So, you think we’re, what, safe to move around?”

“Safe? Not even slightly. Safe from being attacked by a nascent soul cultivator every time we stick our heads up? Yeah, probably.”

Lo Meifeng was nodding along. “It makes sense. People that powerful living in such close proximity would have to have very strict rules about how they behave. Otherwise, this city wouldn’t still be here. If some nascent soul cultivator keeps attacking us everywhere we go, he’s likely to make some equally powerful people very angry, very fast.”

“Plus, I have to imagine that part of the deal the sects made to set up shop in the capital is that the most powerful cultivators would keep each other in line. While it’s probably too much to hope that the sects will do our work for us and just kill him, it’s probably not too much to hope that they’ll keep that guy pinned down hard for the foreseeable future. That little display isn’t just bad for him, it’s bad for all the sects. They aren’t going to want a lot of repeat performances.”

“So, who do you think he is?” asked Lo Meifeng.

“Exactly the same person you think he is. I think he’s the person in charge of the Shadow Eagle Talon Syndicate.”

“We can’t take him in a straight fight,” said Lo Meifeng. “Not unless we can get up close to him, and work together, and I’m not sure we could kill him even then.”

Sen didn’t say anything for a while because he wasn’t entirely comfortable with his own line of thinking. In the end, though, he didn’t see a better way.

“I don’t intend for us to fight him directly. Like you said, it's really risky and there’s a lousy chance we’d win. What was it you said, something about lists, patience, and poison? Well,” said Sen holding up a hand with a storage ring on it, “I’ve got poison. Probably even something that can kill a nascent soul cultivator.”

“Just to be clear, you’re saying that you think we should assassinate him?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

“And you’re comfortable with that solution?” asked a clearly dubious Lo Meifeng.

“Gods, no. I’m not comfortable with it at all. But he’s not going to stop being a problem for us, even if he can’t come at us directly. I don’t feel like spending every minute I’m in this city looking over my shoulder for the next attack. Some problems, you can ignore. Some you can walk away from. Some problems, you just have to deal with or they’ll get worse and worse. I’m pretty sure that this is one of those. I wish there was a better solution, but assassination is the solution at hand.”

Lo Meifeng came over and sat next to Sen. “I’m pretty sure it’ll hold until tomorrow. Tonight, you need to get some sleep and make yourself one of those absurd elixirs of yours.”

“They’re not absurd.”

“I don’t know who told you that lie, because they are absurd. Just like you, they are absolutely, utterly ridiculous.”

Sen thought of about ten things to say but settled on, “I’m not going to win this one, am I?”

“You are not.”

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