Unintended Cultivator

Sen stood outside in the small courtyard of the house that was theoretically his. He mostly thought of it as Lo Meifeng’s house. It wasn’t a home he’d have chosen. It was just a place to sleep and work while he was stuck in the capital. He intended to give it to Lo Meifeng when he left. She seemed comfortable in the city and, Sen presumed, that her work would bring her back to the city in the future. It would be convenient for her to have a place that was legitimately hers. He supposed that he would need to leave some money so she could hire servants to maintain the place when she wasn’t around. She could probably afford it herself, but she’d only bought the place at his request. No reason to burden her with financial problems when it wasn’t necessary. Plus, he doubted he’d ever return to this city after he left. Nor, he imagined, would he be especially welcome after he did what was necessary.

Sighing a little to himself, Sen peered up at the sky but found it frustrating. Something about being in the city obscured the sky, reducing the number of stars he could see. Still, he persisted, quietly cultivating and considering his next steps. He’d been standing there like that for almost an hour when he sensed something. He didn’t hear her, so much as felt Falling Leaf approaching. She certainly hadn’t lost all of her stealthiness in the transformation from ghost panther to human form. He’d been surprised, at first, when she’d decided to go along with him and Lo Meifeng to deal with the Choi Zhi Peng problem. When he considered how little she’d had to do and how often he’d gone off without her recently, the choice had made more sense. She had come all this way to watch out for him. Plus, he had the distinct impression that Falling Leaf’s world was divided into two very distinct categories.

There were the people she liked or at least tolerated. That was an exceedingly short list that mostly consisted of Sen himself, followed distantly by Auntie Caihong, Uncle Kho, and Master Feng, and followed even more distantly by Lo Meifeng and Chan Yu Ming. Then, there was everyone else. In the case of someone like Shi Ping, she seemed to put up with him because Sen put up with him. Beyond that, though, Sen didn’t think that Falling Leaf cared at all about human beings. That seemed to give her a disturbingly casual attitude about whether any specific person lived or died. Not that she’d go out of her way to hurt anyone. She’d never been malicious. But once it became clear to her that Sen intended for Choi Zhi Peng to suffer and die, though, she’d accepted it the same way she might accept that it was raining that day or that they’d be eating chicken for dinner.

The recognition that, when it came to humans, Falling Leaf was disinterested at best had brought up some old guilt for Sen. He’d worried that this transformation had taken her away from everything she cared about and replaced it with things she didn’t. That might have been okay in the short term because she’d had a lot of distractions in the last six months or so. In the long term, though, he worried that she’d regret that choice to change herself more and more. He feared that she’d learn to resent him for it. Especially if he left her behind to go face the danger of Fu Ruolan by himself. Forcing a smile onto his face, he spoke before he could see her.

“Did you get everything we’ll need?” he asked.

Falling Leaf made an annoyed huffing sound. “I miss being able to sneak up on you. It was funny.”

“Sorry. Should I pretend to be startled next time?”

Falling Leaf stepped up next to him, gave the sky a quizzical look, and shook her head. “No. It’s not the same. What are you looking at?”

“I’m not really looking at anything. The sky is just slightly more interesting than the walls around us.”

Falling Leaf considered that for a moment, then nodded. “True. I got everything we’ll need for now. Lots of food. I’d have gotten more, but my storage ring is full.”

“Oh,” said Sen. “I can help with that.”

He reached into a pocket and pulled out a small handful of storage rings he’d emptied recently. He’d been accumulating them at an almost appalling rate during his conflict with the Shadow Eagle Talon Syndicate. It was only in the last day or so that he’d finally had the time to start looking at them. He hadn’t even gotten around to looking in the storage ring the Steel Gryphon sect had sent him after his confrontation with Tang Ehuang. Sen idly wondered if they really had imprisoned her or just told her to stay out of sight until after he left the city. He hoped that they had locked her up. He didn’t need yet another person sending killers after him. Looking over at Falling Leaf, he took her hand and emptied that pile of storage rings into it. He found it a little sad how commonplace the storage treasures had become to him. Once, they had seemed like a miracle. Now, he handed them out like they weren’t really valuable at all.

He supposed the wonder he’d once felt about them had simply been extinguished by knowledge and exposure. Even if he couldn’t make one himself, he had at least a working understanding of the kinds of qi manipulation it took to make one. That had bled away most of his wonder at them. Looting them from the corpses of dead enemies had soaked up the rest. There was nothing miraculous or wondrous about that. Falling Leaf gave the storage rings a happy smile and put them into a pocket.

“Now, I’ll be able to get enough food to last for years.”

“Did you get anything other than food?”

She squinted at him in confusion. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Did you get anything for yourself?”

She looked even more confused. “I got food.”

It took Sen a moment to reorganize his thinking. As much as she looked like a young woman, Falling Leaf was still a ghost panther in her thinking. She didn’t care about things that normal people cared about. Fine clothes meant nothing to her, save that the material might be a little more comfortable. Money meant nothing to her, save that it could get her the things she wanted. And, for a ghost panther, wants were basic in the extreme. She cared about food and water. She cared about shelter. Anything beyond that just wasn’t important to her. She already had a tent, so shelter wasn’t a concern. All that left was food.

“Well, if you see something you think is nice or pretty, you should get it.”

“Why?”

“So, you can have it later to look at or enjoy.”

Falling Leaf frowned at me, then shrugged. “I don’t need to buy things to look at.”

“As you say.”

“When we go, we’ll seek the mad one?”

Sen nodded, keeping an iron grip on his guilt. “Yes.”

“The mad are dangerous. Unpredictable.”

“They are.”

“How will you convince her to give you what you need?”

Sen had given that problem some thought and come up with exactly nothing. Saying something was insane was like saying that a plant was green. It told you something, but it didn’t really give you any context. After all, there were a lot of different kinds of green out in nature. By the same token, there were different kinds of madness. Sen had asked some questions about her on the off chance he was forced to seek out Fu Ruolan, but the best anyone had come up with was that she was erratic. That put Sen in the worst possible position. He couldn’t plan. He just had to wait and see what he got when, or rather if, he managed to find her.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t even know that I can convince her or that it will even be necessary. Do you remember what Uncle Kho said about her? He said that, if I catch her in the right frame of mind, she might just give it to me, pat me on the head, and send me on my way.”

“He didn’t say she’d pat you on the head,” said Falling Leaf.

“He implied it.”

“He also said she might just kill you for bothering her.”

Sen nodded. “He did. At this point, though, it doesn’t change anything. I need that manual, and she’s the last person who might have it.”

“We hope.”

“Yeah,” admitted Sen. “We hope.”

“What will you do about the king?” asked Falling Leaf in a tone that suggested she was only mildly curious.

If it had been anyone else in the entire world, he would have thought that this whole conversation had been about getting to that question. With Falling Leaf, he believed that she really was only mildly curious.

“About what you’d expect.”

A faint line appeared on Falling Leaf’s forehead as she thought about those words. “If you kill him, won’t Chan Yu Ming be angry with you?”

“Yes. I expect that she’ll be very angry with me.”

“Maybe you should get someone else to do it.”

“Like who?”

“One of the other royal people? He has sons, doesn’t he? Let one of them challenge to be pride leader.”

While Sen knew that things didn’t work quite that way, it did give him an idea.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“Being you.”

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