“Crudely put,” said Liang Daiyu, drawing Sen’s attention again, “but she has the crux of the matter surrounded. You say that you’ve experienced moments of enlightenment before. Do you recall how many?”
Sen thought back about it. “I don’t know the exact number offhand. Maybe two dozen.”
Silence fell all around the table, which made Sen glance around at the dumbstruck faces of the water cultivators around him. Liang Daiyu seemed to recover first.
“Two dozen? In how many years?”
“At this point, six or seven I guess.”
Liang Daiyu’s mouth worked a few times without any noises coming out. Chan Yu Ming was staring at him like he’d casually announced that he was going to break through to the nascent soul stage in precisely three minutes and forty-seven seconds. The man who had originally answered his karma question broke the silence.
“You’re averaging three to four moments of true enlightenment per year?”
Sen found himself wishing that he’d asked other people a lot more questions about their experiences with enlightenment. It had just never occurred to him to ask about how often they’d had them. Still, he was already committed to answering. He nodded a little self-consciously.
“I am,” he said.
“How?” demanded Liang Daiyu.
“I’m on a plan.”
Confusion crossed the jade beauty’s face. “A…plan? What do you mean?”
Sen knew an opportunity when he saw it. “I just went to enlightenment.com. They offer all these plans. They were running a sale, so I got the deluxe package. If you go, say that I referred you. Ten percent off.”
As everyone started shouting questions at him, Sen rubbed his mental hands together in greed. Ten more referrals and he’d get an enlightenment for free.
***
After nearly ten minutes of walking, Sen finally emerged from the tunnel into a brightly lit expanse of meticulously tended grass and flower gardens. For a moment, he thought he might be in the middle of another illusion, but a quick examination with his earth, wood, and water qi revealed that where he was standing, it was all quite real. Sen found himself glad that he hadn’t simply tried to fly over the wall. He was willing to bet that there was some kind of deeply unpleasant surprise waiting for any water cultivator that thought they could skip over the work of finding their way through the door. After taking a moment to examine his surroundings, the alchemist in Sen started frothing at the mouth in naked greed. Nearly everything in the gardens was useful in alchemy in one way or another, assuming you needed water-attributed ingredients. Sen’s hands twitched toward a flower before he stilled them. He wasn’t there to steal from this sect. He was there to see the spring.
That good intention lasted for almost ten minutes before he came across an incredibly powerful water-attributed sparkling dew flower. Sen stared at it, then down at his storage ring. Then he looked around at all of the alchemical resources that abounded around him.
“On second thought,” said Sen, “I’m going to rob these people blind.”
***
Sen rolled his eyes and gave serious thought to going and yelling at Chan Yu Ming. Then, he thought about it a little harder. There was no upside to going back and yelling at her. It likely wouldn’t change anything. At best, she’d probably just follow them more discreetly. Plus, even if he knew she was following him, and she knew she was following him, he couldn’t actually tell her not to travel in the same direction as them. So, all a confrontation would accomplish would be that he got to yell at someone. That sounded like a terrible use of his time and energy. So, he shrugged.
“That’s her business. It’s not an us problem unless she makes it one.”
“You really don’t care that she’s following you?” asked Lo Meifeng with a troubled expression. “And, let’s be clear here, it’s you she’s following around, not us.”
“Of course, I care that she’s following us around,” said Sen. “But what do you suggest I do about it?”
Lo Meifeng immediately opened her mouth and then hesitated. Then, she frowned. “Oh.”
“Yeah, you see my problem. There’s basically nothing I can do to make her stop, other than killing her. Do you think I should kill her, Lo Meifeng?”
Lo Meifeng sat in thoughtful silence for a moment before she nodded. “Yes.”
“What? Why?” demanded Sen.
“I don’t know. I just have this feeling that she’s going to be more trouble than she’s worth. We already have Shi Ping for that.”
“I’m sitting right here,” said Shi Ping.
“I know,” said Lo Meifeng. “So irritating.”
Sen just stared at Lo Meifeng for a second before he said, “So, you want me to kill her because she might be irritating later.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
Sen thought it over for a moment. “Well, I’m not going to kill her for that, but you do you.”
Lo Meifeng immediately stood up. “I’ll be right back.”
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
***
“Anything interesting happen?” Lo Meifeng asked.
“There’s an owl about a quarter mile that way,” said Sen, pointing in the right direction. “Aside from that, I haven’t noticed anything.”
“Good. I like it when things are quiet on the road,” said Lo Meifeng.
Sen glared at her. “You just had to say it, didn’t you?”
“Oh, come on, that’s a complete myth,” said Lo Meifeng.
No sooner were the words out of her mouth than they both heard a loud boom in the near distance.
“Myth, huh? You stay here. I’ll go check it out.”
“Why you?”
“Because you know it’s Chan Yu Ming. So, I might as well be the one to go deal with it.”
“What do you think she’s fighting.”
“Since the universe is mocking us, it’s probably a giant snake,” said Sen.
“Why a giant snake?”
“Because Shi Ping was complaining about them earlier. Honestly, I’d be a little disappointed if it wasn’t a giant snake. It’d feel like the universe wasn’t really trying.”
“Fine, I’ll watch the kids.”
“Thanks,” said Sen.
He took off back the way they had come earlier, moving as fast as his qinggong technique would carry him. It didn’t take him long to find Chan Yu Ming. She wasn’t being subtle. Sen was so certain that he’d find a giant snake when he arrived that it caught him off guard when he found her in a big clearing fending off half a dozen spiders that were as big as horses. He just stared at the big, creepy things for a long moment before Chan Yu Ming noticed him.
“Are you going to help or just stand there?”
“But where’s the snake?”
Chan Yu Ming lopped off part of a spider leg that got too close before gesturing with her jian. “It’s over there.”
“Yes!” shouted Sen before he charged at the ridiculously huge snake.
***
Then, he thought of Master Feng. There were questions that Sen had always meant to ask the old man, about why he’d picked Sen, about why he’d never tried to ascend, but it had always seemed like there was more than enough time. Most of all, though, he asked himself what Master Feng would do in a situation like this. Sen smiled then. He felt bloody spittle drip from his bottom lip. He knew exactly what Master Feng would do. He’d make a statement. He would burn this moment into the dragon’s memory forever. So, that’s what Sen would do. He started cycling for everything. It hurt, splitting his attention that many ways, but what was pain in the face of death but a minor, very temporary, inconvenience? It wasn’t like he needed to worry about healing from it. He pushed his qi channels to their limits, feeding each cycling pattern as much qi from his core as they could handle.
Then, he started layering it all together. Weaving it all together like a rope. Forcing the strands to merge, to fuse, to become something else, something more, something terrible. He wrapped that hideous, monstrous energy around his fist. Then, he fed it his pain, his anguish, and his regrets. So many regrets. How could anyone my age have so many, he wondered. He fed it his killing intent, every last scrap of it, because why hold back in the last moments? Then, he fed it his rage. He pulled on that anger that had haunted him and hounded him. He drew on that inferno of fury until it was nothing but embers inside him, and then he drew on those. Hold nothing back, he thought. Nothing at all. While all of that had felt like it had taken forever to his battered mind, he dimly realized that he’d been in the middle of that odd, almost accelerated state of mind he fell into sometimes when fighting. He lifted his eyes and saw the dragon bearing down on him, moving almost impossibly fast even to Sen’s enhanced eyes and thoughts. Then he let his gaze drop down to the hand where he’d summed up everything he had to fight with, everything he’d had left to give, or borrow, or spend.
He couldn’t even see his hand anymore. He didn’t even think that there was a human word for the color of it. It didn’t look like a technique. It wasn’t a thing of beauty or balance. If hate could look like something, if it could take color, form, and shape, that was what was in his hand. Personified hate. Sitting in his palm was a kitten…if one that only the hells could spawn. It looked at him, fury and malicious intent in its eyes. Sen looked at that hate-kitten for the briefest of moments, and then he threw it at the dragon. The kitten yowled in rage as it hurtled toward the ancient spirit beast.
“Oh crap,” said the dragon, his eyes going wide at the sight of a technique he hadn’t seen since before the age of mankind.
The name of the technique filled Sen’s Mind. Ruination Kitten.
***
“I don’t want you to mistake this for mercy. You’re going to take a message back to your masters for me. Pack up and leave. The Slovenly Chicken Foot Gang is done in this city, one way or the other. If they make me do it, I’m adopting a scorched earth policy. As for you, if you think what you just went through was bad, I have things lying around that would make that seem like a restful nap. If I ever see you again, I’ll make you eat one of those things. Then, I’ll hang your blackened, rotting corpse from a wall as a warning to everyone you know and love. Do you understand me?”
The woman was shaking, and Sen didn’t think that it had anything to do with the residual poison. He gave her a smile that would offer no comfort.
“You can just nod,” he said.
The woman’s head started bobbing up and down so fast that it looked almost comical. Sen stood up and walked over to the edge of the roof. As he was getting ready to make the leap back to ground level, the woman worked up the nerve to speak.
“Who are you? Who are you really?”
Sen paused. He’d been resisting it for a while, but the world had a way of making you do things you didn’t want to do, become things you didn’t want to become. Sen decided this was just one more of those things. However much he tried to resist it, he kept finding himself drawn into situations that called for him to be something, if not precisely better, than more than Lu Sen could be on his own. He kept needing to be the kind of larger-than-life person that only existed in a story. He supposed that it was convenient that he had just such a story right at hand. It wasn’t really relevant that he was learning to hate that persona as much as he hated killing. It was the need of the moment.
“I am Bat-,” Sen cut himself off and looked around with a deeply suspicious expression before continuing. “I am a generic and wholly uncopyrighted cowled vigilante.”
Sen immediately started looking around again.
“What are you looking for?” asked the completely baffled woman.
“The most dangerous enemy of all. Intellectual property lawyers.”
***
“I didn’t bring you here to talk to me. I brought you here to listen,” said Sen. “Your honorable king is going to explain to you why I’m here. Why he was going to trade Chan Yu Ming to the Choi family. He’s going to tell you everything. Isn’t that right, your majesty?”
When the king didn’t say anything, Sen unleashed a little more of his killing intent. The king flinched and then cried out.
“Yes! I’ll tell them.”
“Excellent. Face them. Look them in the eyes while you tell them what you traded away your honor for. What you were willing to sell your daughter to keep secret.”
The king slowly pushed himself up off the floor. He stared up at Sen with a naked plea for mercy in his eyes. Sen looked back at the man with nothing but cold resolve on his face. Not finding what he wanted in Sen, the king turned to face his family. He opened his mouth and froze, feeling the point of a blade on the back of his neck.
“If you lie,” said Sen, “I will make you suffer in ways you cannot imagine.”
Sen heard the king swallow. Then, the king started speaking in a halting burst.
“I…I served red wine with fish.”
Looks of abject horror crossed the faces of the royal family. The queen’s face remained stoic, but she paled at this revelation.
“Go on,” said Sen.
“I play games on my phone instead of paying attention during meetings.”
“Father!” cried Chan Yu Ming.
“Tell them the worst thing,” ordered Sen. “Be specific.”
A look of pure and well-deserved shame crossed the king’s face. “I cut in line at the amusement park.”
Sen just shook his head. “Despicable.”
Unable to restrain his fury at the king’s deplorable behaviors, Prince Jing summoned forth the greatest punishment of all. Storming over to his father, the prince dropped the links of the chain around his father’s neck.
“Guards!” shouted the prince.
Guards marched into the room. Jing pointed at that former king.
“Take that thing away and cast it out of the palace.”
Sen didn’t quite know what to make of the happenings, so he turned to the prince. “I don’t get it. What’s a big red letter U mean?”
“Unworthy.”