Leaving the next day turned out to be substantially more difficult than Sen expected. Every ox in the herd had to take a moment to come and, well, he wasn’t quite sure what they were doing. Offering their blessings? Wishing him good fortune? He didn’t know, but he smiled and bowed to each in turn. When that was finally done, he had thought they could go, but then the calves charged up and encircled Falling Leaf like she was their favorite big sister. All but one. Sen sighed as a lone calf came over and regarded him with big, serious eyes. That one had latched onto him for some reason the previous evening. It let out a gentle, sad moo at him that tugged at his heart.

“Oh, that’s just playing dirty,” he complained.

The calf just kept staring at him until he rested a hand on -- Sen realized he didn’t even know if the calf was male or female -- its head. The hair felt soft and warm beneath his hand, although, he wasn’t sure that would be true for someone without his body cultivation. He gave the calf a mildly reproachful look.

“I’ll come back and visit one day if I can.”

Sen was racking up more of those promises than he felt entirely comfortable with. Granted, he wasn’t promising that he’d come back no matter what, only if he could, but that list was growing. The calf turned its head up and pressed a soft nose into his palm before it turned and made its way back to the older oxen. He wanted to be annoyed, but it took Falling Leaf almost an hour to finish all her goodbyes to the rest of the calves. He was pretty sure they each got at least three personal goodbyes from her before the herd mother let out a single snort. The calves immediately fell back into the herd. Sen wondered if he should say something, but he settled on offering the entire herd one last bow. Falling Leaf jogged over to him and then waved to the herd. With that, they set off again. They’d been moving west for most of an hour before Falling Leaf spoke up.

“Thank you.”

He looked over at her. “For what?”

“For waiting. For letting me have that extra time with the calves. I know you were ready to go last night.”

“We couldn’t have gotten that far anyways,” Sen justified. “It made more sense to start fresh in the morning.”

Sen caught her amused smile out of the corner of his eye.

“As you say,” she said and left it at that.

Contrary to Sen’s expectations, they met no resistance as they made their way west. He had assumed that it would be non-stop fighting. While he had benefited from all of the earlier fighting, it had been taxing. Even with confining the violence to those things that intentionally sought them out, Sen had what he suspected was another small fortune’s worth of rare beast cores in a storage ring. He’d offered half of them to Falling Leaf, but she’d declined. Instead, she’d picked out a small handful.

“Why those ones?” he asked when his curiosity got the better of him.

“I can eat these,” she’d said as if it had been obvious. “For my advancement.”

“Oh,” said Sen. “You’re still advancing that way?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

Sen realized that he’d simply assumed that when she transformed into a human form that her cultivation advancement would become more like his. Yet, he hadn’t had any evidence to support that assumption. Of course, eating the cores wasn’t quite as simple for her as it had been before. She had to grind them up and swallow the powder. Sen had watched the first time she did it and immediately realized that as much as half of the qi was lost by the time she could actually consume the powder. That would slow down her advancement for no good reason. The second time he saw that she was about to grind the core with a mortar and pestle, he just held out his hand. She eyed him dubiously but handed the core over. He poured a big cup of water for her and simply crushed the core with main strength. He dropped the powder and a few larger pieces into the cup and held it out to her. There was still some qi loss, but it was more like five or ten percent instead of half.

She'd stared at him in shock until he put the cup into her line of sight. Then, she’d snatched the cup from him and downed the mixture in a few big gulps. Sen didn’t really understand spirit beast advancement, so he wasn’t sure what to expect. She didn’t seem to experience any immediate boost in power the way that Sen would with a breakthrough. Yet, over the course of the trip, he’d felt the gap between them steadily shrink. Where he’d once needed to moderate his pace to keep things comfortable for her, she could now move at the pace he preferred. He’d grown more confident in his ability to judge the cultivation levels of human cultivators, but he was much less certain with spirit beasts. Still, if he had to make a guess, his best guess was that she was operating at around the level of an initial core formation cultivator. If she kept going at her current pace, she’d soon be stronger than him again. When he’d mentioned that thought to her, she’d given him a strange look.

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“Would that bother you?” she asked.

“Why would it bother me? Once you’re stronger than me, I can let you do all the fighting. That sounds like a win to me.”

“You’re not that lazy,” she said.

“Maybe I could learn,” said Sen.

“Don’t. Shi Ping is lazy enough for all of us.”

Sen laughed at that. “Yes, he certainly is. Although, he makes up for some of that by playing the erhu well.”

“Does he?”

“Most humans would think so.”

Falling Leaf thought about it and shrugged. “It all sounds like noise to me.”

“Hmmm. I’ll have to find someone who plays one badly, so you can see the difference.”

“If you must.”

Right around the time that Sen was ready to call a halt for the day, they abruptly stepped clear of the forest into a landscape that could only be described as barren and rocky. While Sen was a tiny bit pleased and relieved to have arrived, he was also a little put off by the abrupt change in the landscape. If for no other reason, he didn’t understand why the landscape was so different. Changes like that didn’t happen naturally. Natural changes happened gradually, over dozens or even hundreds of miles. The absence of life before him, Sen realized that something or someone had done this on purpose. Someone had wanted it to be that way. Falling Leaf was looking around with her usual curiosity, but Sen could see that she was tense and ready for something bad to happen. Sen frowned around them. Evening was nearly on them, and night would soon follow. One look was all Sen needed for him to know that he did not want to be in that place when darkness fell. He made a very easy decision.

“We should go back for the night. We can head in there in the morning.”

“Leave? Now? After you’ve come all this way to see me? No, that won’t do at all.”

The voice seemingly came from everywhere. Sen searched the area around them frantically, looking for any sign. He tried to extend his qi and spiritual sense, only to have them batted aside by some qi and a force of will that dwarfed his own. Sen hadn’t faced down power like that since back on the mountain with Master Feng. He managed to keep his feet, but Falling Leaf was driven down to the ground. She looked up at him with terrified eyes. She started to say something, but Sen’s throat was seized in a hand that came out of nowhere. A figure emerged from some kind of concealment technique. Sen was stunned. He hadn’t even felt a whisper of that technique. The man was taller than Sen, although lighter in build, and his pure black eyes burned with some inner fire that made Sen’s blood run cold.

“No,” said the man, “You’ll be staying.”

“Sen,” gasped Falling Leaf.

“Silence, kit. This fight is not for you. It is for him. I’ve watched this one. The foundling. The tool. The pet of chaos and the favorite of the heavens,” growled the man, jerking Sen closer. “You will stay. You will learn. Then, you will die.”

At that, the figure turned and hurled Sen over that dead landscape. Even as Sen desperately tried to draw in air and gain control over his flight, he heard Falling Leaf scream something at him.

“He’s a dragon!”

That revelation shook Sen so much that he lost control of the qinggong technique he’d been using to get control of his impromptu airborne careening. So, instead of touching down softly on the rocky soil, he slammed into, bounced, and rolled. He felt sharp stones driven into his flesh by the force of his landing and felt lucky that was as bad as it got. If he hadn’t slowed his flight, he expected that landing would have broken half of even his reinforced bones. Yet, the landing, the injuries, all of it paled in the face of that one word. Dragon. Sen had spent most of his life coming up against people or things that were stronger than he was. But he’d also had options. He could flee or rely on allies to help him balance the field. Against a dragon, though, one of the true myths, a being both primordial and eternal, there was no hope of victory. No true chance of escape. As a spirit beast, Falling Leaf would almost instinctually defer to the dragon’s wishes. The herd mother had warned him that traveling farther west would place him in conflict with things that would overmatch him, but he had never dreamed it would mean something like this.

He had been looking for something that could push him to the brink of death, something that might open a door that would allow a moment of enlightenment to slip through. He might well have found it, he just wished that there was some sliver of hope for survival. Against something like this, there wasn’t. Yet, for all that, this was an opportunity. This was an opponent on which Sen could truly unburden himself of his anger. He could unleash the fullness of that fury without hesitation because it didn’t matter if he lost control. Death might be all that awaited him, but he could still use these moments before death to cleanse his soul before he passed once more into the cycle of reincarnation.

So, Sen unshackled his rage. He felt it course through him like fire. He felt the madness of it, embraced it, let it flow. He let it flow like water to every fiber of his being. He pushed himself up, felt the blood running down his body from the many open wounds, and roared his defiance. Sen drew his jian, knowing how pointless it was and not caring at all. He pointed the jian at the dragon who was a tiny figure in the distance.

“Come on, then! You say I’m here to learn! Then come and teach!”