Unintended Cultivator

It only took about an hour of wandering through the town for Sen to yearn for a place like Grandmother Lu’s shop. A place where you could find a bit of everything, as long as it was meant for mortals to use. Instead, he had to ask where to find a tailor shop, only to be directed to the home of a very terse, very stern woman who told him in no uncertain terms that if she was going to make clothes for a child, she had to actually see the child. At which point, he was summarily dismissed with an admonition to acquire cloth for the clothes. It was sort of refreshing, if abrupt. From there, he had to track down a carpenter to make the bed, only to discover that man didn’t deal with things like pads. On and on it went, with Sen crossing back and forth across the town a dozen times, only to get about a third of the things he had on his list.

With the afternoon sun dipping toward the horizon, Sen finally went back to the inn. When Sen once more didn’t find either Falling Leaf or Laughing River there, he walked toward the bar. The inn owner took one look at Sen and went very pale. Sen stepped up to the bar and placed his hand flat on top of it. He stared at the inn owner as he started putting pressure on the bar. The wood creaked ominously, which made the inn owner’s eyes go very wide.

“Where is my friend?” asked Sen in a tone that he would never describe as murderous.

“She… She left.”

“She left,” repeated Sen, putting a little more pressure on the wood beneath his hand. “When did she leave?”

“Yesterday, honored cultivator.”

“Did she leave me a message?”

The inn owner shook his head back and forth while his eyes never left Sen’s hand.

“Did she say where she was going?”

“Did she leave with someone?”

The inn owner nodded vigorously. “She did! She left with that older man you were sitting with the day that… The other day.”

“I see,” said Sen, lifting his hand from the bar.

The inn owner sagged in relief. Sen didn’t say anything else. He simply turned and walked out of the inn. As soon as he stepped out of the inn, his spiritual sense crashed down on the town like a force of nature. Nothing was hidden from him, which was how he knew that Falling Leaf was nowhere to be found. While he normally made a point not to do anything that made it too obvious he was a cultivator, all he could think about right then was that Falling Leaf had gone somewhere with the elder fox. A being with countless centuries of crafting illusions behind him. While Sen couldn’t imagine why the fox had taken Falling Leaf and left, he had done it. With a burst of qi so powerful that all of the mortals in the town felt it, Sen vanished heading south at qinggong speeds.

He let his spiritual sense expand around him to its full extent, spreading out miles in every direction. He could tell that it was infused with his anger by the way that every living thing within range froze as soon as it landed on them, only for those same things to flee blindly in terror before it. He’d assumed that they went south because there was very little to the north of them. Yet, as the miles fell away in a blur, he became less and less certain. He didn’t even notice that the sun had gone down until he finally stopped. Frustrated by the failure he turned around and headed back. His anger was an almost physical thing writhing around him and barely under control.

He wondered what the hell Laughing River was playing at. What could the fox possibly hope to accomplish with this act? If it was just to infuriate Sen, then the fox had gotten that much done. It was all that Sen could do not to take the spatial treasure out of his storage ring and destroy it as a preemptive act of punishment. Even that was only forestalled by Sen’s uncertainty about what destroying such a powerful treasure might do to the surrounding area. I could go to the sea and hurl it as far as my strength with allow, he thought. That would be a very long way indeed, and even Sen wouldn’t truly know where it was after that, likely putting it beyond the fox’s reach forever. The appeal of that idea almost made him turn east immediately.

With the temper he was in and the thousands of spirit beasts he’d slaughtered over the years, he expected that crossing through the wilds would likely prove as safe for him as simply traveling the roads. After all, what spirit beasts would dare to challenge him when he was in such an obviously wrathful state of mind? Spirit beasts could be brave, but they generally weren’t suicidal unless they were worked up into a frenzy during a beast tide. As much as he might welcome such a challenge at the moment, and as much as he wanted to do something that would damage Laughing River, a tenuous thread of reason held him back. He didn’t know what had happened yet. It was possible, maybe, that it was all innocent. It was also possible that the fox intended to leverage Falling Leaf’s location to force the treasure out of Sen’s hands. And he couldn’t trade the treasure if he sank it to the bottom of the ocean miles from shore or smashed it to pieces. Those fragile threads of sanity left him with no other course than to return to the galehouse and wait.

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Even as fast as he was moving, it still took time for him to get back. It was deep into the night when he was finally approaching Fu Ruolan’s domain. Yet, before he could even sense it, a presence rose up out of the darkness to hold him back. He jerked to a halt, hand dropping to his jian, and cycling for lightning. Yet, after a moment, he released his cycling pattern and loosened his grip on the weapon. He'd been so startled by the appearance of the other presence that it took him a moment to recognize it as Fu Ruolan’s. She rarely deployed it so aggressively. When she stepped out of a shadow, her face was as hard as Sen had ever seen it. Sen had witnessed the woman being erratic, frivolous, focused, contemplative, and studious. However, this was the first time that he truly saw her as the nascent soul cultivator that she was. The woman was imperious, commanding, and there was not so much as a hint of the eccentric in her. She fixed him in place with eyes that looked impossibly ancient and utterly without mercy.

“Calm your mind,” she ordered, the words slamming against his body and spirit like hammer blows. “Or I will do it for you.”

Sen was so stunned by the transformation in Fu Ruolan’s demeanor that his mind went blank for several seconds as he tried to catch up. He did his best to shake off his shock and confusion. He gave her a quizzical look.

“What do you care?” he asked.

“I will not have you disrupt everything I have built here with an infantile temper tantrum,” she said, her expression not softening in the slightest. “Then, there is the minor matter of the child. Would you prefer that I let you kill her with this outburst of yours?”

Sen went rigid as he felt like someone had just poured ice into his soul. He hadn’t even thought about Liu Ai. Someone that young would be utterly without defense against something like his anger-suffused presence. Fu Ruolan hadn’t been hyperbolic in her assertion that he could kill a mortal child that way. It wasn’t just possible but nearly certain that the combination of pressure and fear would simply stop the girl’s heart in her chest. For all her chill imperiousness, Fu Ruolan had just saved him from the kind of mistake that Sen recognized that he would not have recovered from. It might not have shown immediately. If he had accidentally killed Ai, though, carrying that burden would have broken him. Utterly. Some people might have been able to live with it, but there would have been no coming back from that for him.

Reigning in his anger was beyond difficult. It had been growing since he discovered that the damn nine-tail fox had taken his friend and gone on the gods knew where. Bit by bit, he clawed that nearly boundless fury back and compressed it until it was a white-hot coal in his chest. It wasn’t gone. No, it most certainly wasn’t gone. He had just tucked it away where it wouldn’t hurt the wrong people. It could stay there until the right moment presented itself. Taking a deep breath, he gave Fu Ruolan a deep bow.

“I am indebted to you, Fu Ruolan.”

He felt her presence recede into the background, and she sniffed in a way that was much more characteristic of her.

“Well, obviously. Now, explain yourself. You’re usually much more self-contained. What brought this on?”

“It seems that Laughing River decided to wander off and take Falling Leaf with him.”

Fu Ruolan lifted an eyebrow. “That’s a remarkably stupid thing for him to do. Which is strange, because he isn’t usually stupid. Well, setting aside the whole ignoring his entire species thing. Doesn’t he know you’re Feng Ming’s disciple? Does he want someone hunting him until the end of time?”

“I have no idea,” said Sen. “All I can think of is that he’s going to use her to blackmail me for the spatial treasure.”

“Weren’t you going to give it to him anyway?”

“Yes!” said an exasperated Sen. “Which is what makes all of this so bizarre.”

The nascent soul cultivator gave him a dubious look.

“You didn’t do anything drastic with that treasure, did you?

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” said Fu Ruolan. “Hurl it into space? Drop it into a volcano?”

Sen felt a mild inclination to act offended that she’d even suggest such a thing, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had been contemplating exactly such a thing. Instead, he just shook his head.

“I didn’t. It was a close thing, but I didn’t.”

“Let’s call that a victory for sanity. Come along. We can discuss the rest of this tomorrow. You should at least be there when the little one wakes up. She was all but inconsolable when you didn’t come back. I think she thinks that you’re dead.”

Sen winced. It was hard to hear clear evidence that he hadn’t done nearly enough thinking all day. But he could take a tiny bit of comfort in the knowledge that he hadn’t done anything truly irrevocable.

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