“You what?”
“I killed them. That entire branch of their family. Gone. Doing that once was enough for me. I’ve no interest in going down that road again. And from what you said, it could come to precisely that.”
Chan Yu Ming scowled at Sen so hard that he could see it quite clearly even in the minimal light. “You didn’t care that I was a noble before.”
“I didn’t know that you were a noble before. You didn’t tell me.”
“Like you really didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know. I suspected. But as long as you kept things on the level of cultivators, it didn’t matter. Jianghu rules applied. Will the same be true in the capital? Will the same thing apply to your entire family?”
“No. Most of them aren’t cultivators.”
“That means mortal politics. I don’t involve myself that way. Cultivators are just,” Sen struggled to find the exact right word for what he wanted to say. “We’re just visitors in the mortal world. It’s not for us to interfere in their politics.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re a wandering cultivator. It’s no challenge for you to stay above it all. If you think you’re getting too involved, you just pick up and move on. As near as I can tell, your only family are old monsters that only someone with a suicide wish would challenge. It’s different for me. My family lives in that mortal world you occasionally deign to visit. They face real threats. They have expectations of me, and I have obligations to them. If I don’t interfere, my brothers could die, or my sisters could get forced into bad marriages. I can’t stay above it all.”
There it was, again. That world of family that Sen only understood in the most abstract ways. She might be right that she couldn’t stay above it all, but she might not. Sen honestly didn’t know because he didn’t have any context for what having a family like hers meant in practice. Even Grandmother Lu wasn’t truly mortal anymore. Although he worried about her more than ever now that he’d seen how so many cultivators treated those in the qi-gathering and early foundation formation stages.
“That may be true. You’re right. It is easy for me to be above it all because I don’t have any family. I never did.”
“I don’t understand. What does that mean? That you never had any family.”
“I grew up living on the streets. I must have had parents at some point, but I don’t remember them. If I had brothers or sisters, I never met them. So, I have no idea what responsibilities or obligations you feel you have toward your family or even why you feel you have them. It’s also clear that you take those things very seriously. Maybe that makes you a, what’s the word, oh, a filial daughter or sister. I suppose there’s nothing you can do about the fact that your family business is all tied up in mortal politics. You don’t choose what family you’re born into, at least, I don’t think you do.”
“I can see how that might make it hard for you to understand where I’m coming from.”
“It does. I’m also sure that I must look terribly callous to you. But I also hope that you can understand where I’m coming from. No matter how strongly you feel about things with your family, it doesn’t change anything for me. I have no business meddling in mortal politics, especially mortal politics I know nothing about, most especially in the capital.”
“That’s not all of it, though, is it? You were at least considering helping me until you found out I was a noble. Then, all of a sudden, you didn’t want to know anything about anything. I know you said you had a bad experience with one family, but that’s one family.”
Sen took a breath. “Who said it was just one family I had a bad experience with? I didn’t have a bad experience with one noble or one family. I’ve had bad experiences with every noble I’ve ever met. When I was a child, all of the local noble brats took turns beating me for fun. Then, later, several of those same nobles tried to ambush and kill me. They tried to kill the closest thing I had to family, the woman I call my grandmother, even if we’re family by choice rather than blood. Then there’s Gong Jun De. He had noble written all over him, particularly when he called me a peasant. He said the word the word the way I might say rotting corpse. He is, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “He’s a noble, though not a particularly good example of one.”
“He tried to have me crippled. Even you tried to pull me into some political game that would most likely end with violence and possibly even my death. So, given all of that, can you honestly blame me for not being interested in your problem?”
“No, I guess I can't. Yet, you clearly expect this kind of behavior from nobles. So, why are you so angry with me, personally?”
“I’m not,” said Sen.
“Oh really? You seem pretty angry.”
“I said I’m not angry with you, personally. And I’m not. I’m angry with everyone, constantly. It just came out a bit more because you gave me a reason to be angry with you. That poor fire cultivator I have traveling with me catches way more of it than he deserves because he aggravates me.”
“Why are you so angry with everyone?”
“That’s way too much to get into right now. I’ll give you a few of the highlights from the last year. Being hunted by demonic cultivators. Imprisonment by an insane cult leader. Betrayal. And, of course, killing a whole bunch of people that I never wanted to kill.”
“Okay, that is a lot.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Yeah,” muttered Sen. “It’s a lot.”
“You were imprisoned by an insane cult leader?”
“For about six months. It’s,” Sen had to push down another surge of anger, “a story for another time.”
“Then, after all that, I come along and try to trick you. You know, I wasn’t going to do it that way. I was going to explain everything, all of it, back at the sect. Then, I was going to ask for your help.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“When? After the dinner you stormed out of? During the three days you were in a cultivation trance? During the three weeks you spent locked up with the sacred spring where I couldn’t get to you? After that, you were leaving in a rage. I had maybe five minutes to convince you of something, and that wasn’t enough time to give you all of the details. So, I tried to convince you to take me with you. At which point, I could have explained everything.”
Sen went to object, but he couldn’t find a way to fault her logic. He couldn’t think of a time when she would have had a good opportunity to talk with him privately. Certainly not a time when he was in one of his better states of mind. He’d kept himself very busy during that visit to the sect, if not entirely by design. And, everything she’d done since did have the feel of things she was making up as she went along. Sen had been through enough disasters of his own making to recognize the signs. He knew he should just hear her out. It was the reasonable thing to do, the rational thing to do, and probably even the polite thing to do. But his anger just kept getting in the way.
It was getting in the way of everything, and he couldn’t keep going on the way he had been. At the rate Sen was going, Shi Ping was going to try to murder him in his sleep and be entirely justified in doing it. Sen also knew that while he could get away with that anger out in the middle of nowhere, he couldn’t go to the capital with that anger still burning hot inside of him. It would get him killed. He’d overreact to something someone said. It would spiral or escalate, and there would be a war in the streets. He’d no doubt take a lot of people with him, but he was certain that there would be nascent soul cultivators in the city. If things got bad enough, the royal family would ask one of those nascent soul cultivators and their entire sect to deal with him. Sen knew he was stronger than he should be, but he wasn’t deluded enough to think he could survive a confrontation like that. Those were the kinds of people who would know how to fight someone like him.
Then, the real horror would start. He knew perfectly well that if he died in the streets of the capital, his teachers would descend on that city like the avatars of cataclysm. Maybe the sects in the city could fight them off if they all banded together immediately, but Sen doubted the sects would do that. Cooperation wasn’t really the sect way. Some would abstain, thinking it wasn’t their problem. Some would refuse to get involved if one of their rival sects was taking a stand, seeing it as a convenient way to rid themselves of some hated competition. By the time they realized that Feng Ming, Kho Jaw-Long, and Ma Caihong intended to raze the city down to scorched and poisoned soil, it’d be too late. No, he needed to find a way to purge this anger, and he needed to do it now. He looked at the clearing where they’d fought those terrible spiders and a terrible idea came to him.
“Come with me,” said Sen.
“Where?” asked the suddenly nervous Chan Yu Ming.
“To shelter,” said Sen, keeping an iron fist wrapped around his anger.
Then, Sen set off toward the camp. Chan Yu Ming didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping up, so they made the trip back swiftly. Shi Ping stared at Sen and Chan Yu Ming like he expected someone to hit him. Lo Meifeng sighed and muttered something about another one. Falling Leaf just eyed the girl.
“Did you bed her?” the transformed ghost panther asked.
Chan Yu Ming looked shocked, but Sen just snorted. “No. We fought some spiders. Well, they were sort of spiders. Spiders with human faces. They were creepy.”
Falling Leaf nodded in recognition. “Yes, they are vile things. Did you kill them all?”
“All the ones I saw.”
“Good.”
“Spiders with human faces?” asked Shi Ping. “How big were they?”
Sen looked at Chan Yu Ming. “Horse-sized, do you think?”
“Ox-sized maybe,” she offered.
Sen looked at Shi Ping, “As big as horses or oxen.”
The man shuddered. “That’s almost as bad as snakes.”
Sen had several things to do and he wasn’t sure where the best place to start was. He looked around the campsite and finally decided.
“Pack up the tents. I’m going to make a galehouse.”
“What’s a galehouse?” asked Chan Yu Ming.
“Don’t distract him,” cried Shi Ping.
“You’ll see in a few minutes,” said Sen, walking over to his tent and taking it down.
There wasn't as much earth qi concentrated at this location as the last one, so it took Sen a little longer. It also didn’t help that he was making it a bit bigger and more complex. He wasn’t sure what his exact timetable was going to be, so he wanted to make sure that the place had some conveniences built in. When he finally pulled the completed galehouse up out of the ground, Chan Yu Ming couldn’t seem to decide if she should stare at the stone structure or him. Shi Ping wasted no time hurrying inside to claim a room for himself. Sen extinguished the campfire that they’d been using for light and followed the fire cultivator inside. Sen immediately sat down at the table he’d made in the common area, pulled out the kit that Auntie Caihong had given him, and wrote a letter to his teachers that explained what he’d done and why. He didn’t know how much cover it would give Lo Meifeng, but it was the best he could do. He walked over and handed her the sealed letter. She eyed it and then lifted her gaze to him.
“What’s this?”
“It’s to keep you out of trouble if things go wrong.”
“What could go wrong?” demanded Lo Meifeng.
“My anger it’s…it’s out of control or so close to out of control as to make almost no difference. I can’t go off and sit by a river for years or join one of those monasteries where people meditate to find peace. I don’t have enough time for those things to work. So, I have to deal with it a different way.”
“What way?” asked a very unhappy-looking Falling Leaf.
“I’m going to burn it out.”
“How?” asked Lo Miefeng, Shi Ping, and Chan Yu Ming at the same time.
“I’m going out into the wilds. Deeper than I’ve ever been. Maybe deeper than anyone has ever been. I’m going to fight. I’m going to find something that can actually kill me, and I’m going to fight it. And then, if necessary, I’ll do it again. You can find enlightenment on the edge of death. So, I’ll fight until there’s no anger left in me, no rage left to sate, or I find the enlightenment I need to understand how to live with it.”
Everyone started saying or yelling things.
“This is not a discussion,” roared Sen, bringing the room to immediate silence. “The problem is getting worse, not better. I don’t expect anyone to like this, but you do understand it. I need to fix this problem, and the slow way isn’t an option. So, unless one of you has a better idea that I can do right now, this is how it has to be. And no,” said Sen, pointing at Lo Meifeng, “you aren’t coming along. This is so ridiculously beyond any orders you might have gotten that it’s almost funny. I’m not getting you killed for this.”
“I’m coming,” said Falling Leaf, her gaze steady on Sen’s face.
“I know.”
Lo Meifeng seemed to bite back a lot of words and instead opted for one brief question. “How long should we wait?”
Sen thought about it for a few seconds, then transferred what he estimated was a month’s supply of food into a spare storage ring he’d gotten from somewhere. He tossed Lo Meifeng the ring.
“If we’re not back in a month, I doubt we’re coming back.”