While Sen was ready to leave right that minute, he realized it wasn’t practical. It was still dark out for one. Even though Falling Leaf was probably better equipped to travel under those conditions than any of his other traveling companions, it was an unnecessary risk. One that could be easily avoided with a delay of nothing more than a handful of hours. Beyond that, Sen reasoned he might as well sleep for a few hours before they left. While he didn’t necessarily need the sleep, it wouldn’t hurt him to get that sleep. No reason to skip sleep when I don’t have to, thought Sen. Then, there was the problem of Chan Yu Ming. It seemed she wasn’t ready to just let things go. She pulled him aside.
“Do you really expect me to just wait for you, here, for a month?”
Sen gave her a startled look. “No. I expect Lo Meifeng to wait because it’s literally her job. I expect Shi Ping to wait because he’s lazy. Plus, if I don’t come back, he can go home and no one will bother him about it. I expected you to leave once the sun comes up. I only brought you here so you’d have somewhere relatively safe to sleep.”
“Oh,” said Chan Yu Ming, looking like she wasn’t quite sure how to feel. “That was thoughtful.”
Sen shrugged it off. “So, you’ll be returning to the Clear Spring sect?”
“I,” she hesitated, “I’ll decide in the morning.”
“As you wish,” said Sen, walking over to a room and looking in.
Seeing that it was empty, he stepped into the room. Feeling a prickling between his shoulder blades, he looked over his shoulder to see Chan Yu Ming staring after him. She immediately looked away, but not before he caught her. Sen couldn’t decide whether to be amused or annoyed and settled on neither. He closed the door behind him and, after throwing some blankets on the stone bed, stretched out to get what sleep he could. For once, he wasn’t plagued with bad dreams. As had become normal for him, though, he only managed to sleep for about three hours or, rather, he slept for two hours and then dozed for an hour while he obstinately refused to get out of bed. It was the need for tea that ultimately drove him to get up.
As usual, he took a little comfort in the familiar routine of brewing the tea. He also enjoyed that he could have a cup or two in relative peace. When he was drinking tea by himself, there was nothing to rouse his anger or steal his attention from the process. He could just breathe in the steam and smell of the tea, let the cup's warmth seep into his hands, and then, when the moment was perfect, tip the cup against his lips and let a sip of tea slip into his mouth. That ritual of morning tea had been all but sacrosanct on the mountain, a moment of calm before the demands of the day bore down on him, and Sen had found that returning to that ritual eased something inside of him. Maybe it was nothing more than the comfort of the familiar, or maybe it was that the process reminded him of a time when things had been less complicated. He could never decide and wasn’t even sure that it mattered. What mattered to him was that it helped him maintain control.
Of course, if his plan worked, he wouldn’t need to lean on every crutch he could find to keep from incinerating everyone around him with white-hot rage. Even so, he thought he’d still prefer days that began with quiet tea over those that didn’t. He was firmly of the opinion that one could not have too many moments of peace and thoughtful calm in a life. Yet, he knew that moment couldn’t last. No one else was in the common area, yet, but he did hear the noises of someone stirring in one of the rooms. It would soon be time to go and finally come to some kind of terms with his anger. He didn’t necessarily need his anger to be entirely gone, as anger could serve a purpose. If burning it out of himself was what it took to resolve this issue, though, he would do what needed to be done. He didn’t need to be angry to fight the way some men did. He hadn’t been trained that way. Stripping that well of anger out of himself wouldn’t make him less effective. If anything, he hoped it would make him more effective, more coolly calculating in the face of enemies with less control.
It was less than a minute later that Falling Leaf joined him at the stone table. He gestured at the tea, silently asking if she wanted any. She stared at the teapot with resignation and nodded. Sen poured her a cup and watched with a sort of detached curiosity as she consciously forced herself to drink the liquid. It was very clear she didn’t enjoy it, so wondered why she insisted on drinking it. He’d have to ask her about it later when there were fewer prying ears around. Sen realized, after glancing around at the otherwise empty common area, that the best time to leave was right then. There would be no awkward or insincere goodbyes, and no last-second attempts to talk him out of this course of action. Sen quickly cleaned up the tea set and stored it in his ring. Then, he gestured to the front door. Falling Leaf looked at closed doors to the other rooms, and nodded thoughtfully. They slipped outside as dawn was sliding inexorably toward morning.
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Sen paused for a moment to consider which direction to go. After thinking back about the map, he opted to take them west. There was almost nothing but unbroken wilderness in that direction all the way to the Mountains of Sorrow. Sen reasoned that would dramatically improve his odds of finding something that could realistically kill him. Falling Leaf, who had rarely chosen to speak to him directly as a panther, seemed equally reticent as a human girl. At least, she was once she was away from other people who talked all the time. Sen quickly realized that, cultivation level differences aside, Falling Leaf was still very much his superior in the art of moving through the wilderness. They soon fell into old habits with her drifting out and around him, looking for threats. The only difference was that, now, he wanted to find those threats. Yet, threats were in annoyingly short supply. Not that Sen had truly believed he could solve the problem his first day out, but it would have been nice. It wasn’t until they stopped to eat something that either Sen or Falling Leaf spoke.
“Is it normal for there to be so few spirit beasts?” Sen asked.
Falling Leaf considered the question while she finished chewing and swallowing some rice. It was something else she didn’t seem to enjoy. She shook her head.
“No. We should have seen something by now.”
“Have you sensed anything? Smelled anything?”
Falling Leaf sighed. “I barely smell anything at all with this nose. But, no, I haven’t smelled or felt anything.”
“I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.”
“Why would it be good?”
“Well, if there’s something really dangerous out here scaring everything else away, that’s good for me. If everything is gone because something called them away, that’s bad.”
“You’re thinking about that other ghost panther you met. The things he said.”
Sen nodded. “If the spirit beasts aren’t here, they’re somewhere else and in greater than normal numbers. I’m worried there might be another mass slaughter in a town or village.”
“If there were going to be, would you abandon what you’re doing now to try to stop it?”
That brought Sen up short. Would he abandon this quest in an attempt to stop another slaughter like that? He probably would, under the right conditions. Of course, he wasn’t in the right conditions or anything close to them.
“Possibly. If I knew exactly where they were headed, or at least had a reasonably good idea of where they might be going, yes. But I don’t know those things. We could spend weeks just trying to track them. I don’t have that kind of time to waste on a guess. I barely have the time to spend on this. If it wasn’t as important as it is, we’d already be back on the road to the capital.”
“Good,” said Falling Leaf, seeming satisfied.
Sen thought about trying to get a bit more out of her about what that good had meant, but she’d probably just say she was glad he had his priorities in order. Instead, he asked about something else.
“You don’t like tea, do you?”
Falling Leaf shook her hard. “I do not. It’s bitter.”
“Then, why drink it?”
“The Caihong told me that everyone drinks it. That, to fit in, I would have to learn to drink it. So, I do.”
“She’s not wrong. Very nearly everyone does drink tea.”
Sen supposed that answered his question about rice, as well. Falling Leaf had no doubt been told that everyone eats rice and it might draw suspicion if she didn’t eat it as well. Then, she surprised him with a question of her own.
“Will the sect girl leave?”
Sen thought it over. “You know, I don’t think she will. She wants something from me. Or, she wants me to do something for her. Something she seems to think I’m uniquely suited to do. If she thinks she can’t find someone else to do it, she’ll be waiting when we get back. Why?”
Falling Leaf was quiet for a time before she finally spoke. “She was kind to me when you were locked away with the spring spirit. She kept others from bothering me. I’m…fond of her.”
Sen mulled those words over before he said, “You made a friend.”
Falling Leaf shook her head. “That word is…empty.”
“Empty?”
“It has no meaning. Humans use it to mean too many things. So, the word means nothing.”
“I guess that’s true enough.”
“I would not be angry if she came with us,” said Falling Leaf, almost hesitantly.
Sen was surprised, happy, and frustrated all at the same time. He was surprised because it was the first time that he’d heard Falling Leaf express a preference for anything not food-related since she’d become human. He was happy because she volunteered it with no prompting from him. He was frustrated because this would just have to be the thing that she had a preference about. Fortunately, the situation was murky enough that he didn’t have to commit to anything right then and there.
“We’ll have to see if she’s waiting when we get back. We can decide then what to do.”
Sen was relieved that Falling Leaf didn’t seem to pick up on his shameless hedging. He didn’t know what he’d think about Chan Yu Ming when this mad experiment was over. He might still want nothing to do with her problem, which would become a sticking point. At the same time, he didn’t want to torpedo whatever tenuous friendship Falling Leaf was developing with someone other than him. She’d been almost militantly disinterested in human beings other than him since they’d reconnected. He thought it was probably healthy for her to have at least one person beyond him that she actually liked on a personal level. I just wish it was someone other than Chan Yu Ming, he thought.
“We should get moving,” he said. “If there’s no spirit beasts anywhere nearby, we’ve got a long journey ahead of us.”