Everyone let Sen be for the rest of the day, which suited him just fine. He had plenty to think about. It wasn’t until later in the evening that Falling Leaf pulled him aside and led him away from the camp a short distance. It probably wasn’t far enough to keep people from listening if they really wanted to, but it was far enough that no one would casually overhear their conversation. She stared at him for a long moment with those odd, green eyes before she spoke.

“The things you said to that spirit beast, did you mean it? Would you really do all of those things?”

Sen supposed he should have expected something like this, but it still caught him a little flat-footed. He really thought about it for a little while.

“I wouldn’t burn down their forests. That would be punishing every living thing that lived or grew there. That wouldn’t be fair or right. As for the rest, yes, I meant it.”

Falling Leaf immediately relaxed. “Ah, that’s fine then.”

“Wait. What? You don’t care if I hunt those things to extinction?”

She tilted her head a little to one side as if considering his words. “No. Why would I? They are no kin of mine. They chose their enemy poorly. Cubs should not tempt the wrath of dragons. All know this.”

“I’m no dragon,” said Sen, snorting a little.

“Not yet, but your teachers might as well be. The Feng most of all. You follow in their footsteps.”

Sen chewed on that for a minute. “Yeah, I suppose I do. Listen, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

Falling Leaf stared at him for an uncomfortably long time before she jerked a little, seemed to remember something, and said, “Yes?”

“It’s your name. We really need to change it to something more,” Sen thought about how to phrase it, “human-like. It will help keep people from paying extra attention to you.”

Falling Leaf looked deeply unhappy about that idea. “Change it to what?”

“I was thinking something like Fa Ling Li.”

On hearing the name Sen came up with, most of the unhappiness drained out of Falling Leaf. “That’s not so different.”

“It’s not. I tried to keep it as close to your real name as I could.”

She paced a little bit, thinking about it, before she finally nodded. “If I must.”

“It’s mostly to protect you from people who might wish to…experiment on you.”

“Experiment?” asked Falling Leaf.

“Spirit beasts that transform the way you have are very rare. Very, very rare. There are sects that would want to study you. They’d lock you up at best. Some would want to dissect you, just to see how you work.”

“Dissect? What is that?”

Sen sighed. Of course, she wouldn’t know that word. “They’d cut you open, maybe even cut you up into little pieces. Hopefully, you’d be dead before they started. When you were with Auntie Caihong, well, there wasn’t much chance of anyone grabbing you. They just wouldn’t have dared. I can’t offer that kind of protection. So, whatever little things we can do to make you seem more like a human being, the less chance of someone trying to drag you off.”

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“Fa Ling Li,” said Falling Leaf, like she was trying to get used to it. “It will have to do.”

“Thank you. I much prefer you alive and healthy.”

“You know, I might still die. Anyone can die. Life is uncertain.”

“I know, but we don’t have to make it easy on people.”

Falling Leaf gave Sen a look that he couldn’t quite parse. “What would you do if someone killed me?”

Sen didn’t even need to think about it. “I’d take a page out of Lo Meifeng’s book. Everyone involved, everyone I even thought might have been involved, would die.”

“What if it was a sect?”

“It wouldn’t change anything, except that I’d probably burn the place to the ground and salt the earth when I was done.”

She made an unhappy noise. “You weren’t always so quick to hurt others.”

“You asked me what I would do if someone killed you. You’re my best friend. My chosen family. If someone took you from me, stole you from me like that,” Sen took a shuddering breath, “there are no words for the ways I would make them suffer for that. But, yes, I am quicker to hurt than I was. The world is full of people who will kill you for bad reasons, or no reason at all, if you let them. People who hurt others for sport. People who see kindness as weakness. I have no mercy for those people. No compassion. If people come looking to harm me and mine, and they have, then I act.”

“You should protect what is yours, but don’t grow too fond of the killing. There is a kind of madness, a blood madness, down that path. It can consume your heart and your soul. I’ve seen it before. I would not wish that for you.”

Sen nodded in understanding. He’d seen it before in some of the bandits he’d killed. They had reveled in the violence. They killed because they liked it, because they needed it on some level. They took a kind of sick joy in watching the life leave someone’s eyes. No one could truly see into his heart, so they had no way of knowing just how far away from that Sen truly was. He’d never stopped hating all of the violence and the killing. He just didn’t try to run away from it the way he used to do. It was everywhere, inescapable, and running from it in one place inevitably meant finding it somewhere else. One could only face it or become a victim of it. Sen chose to face it. If that meant doing things he hated, he could at least take some tiny shred of comfort in knowing he hated it. It also gave him a way to monitor himself. If the day came when he didn’t hate it anymore, that was the day he’d have to start to worry. That might even be the day he’d have to seek out a fight he couldn’t win.

“Don’t worry about that. I don’t like killing now any better than I liked it on the day we met. I’m just better at it.”

“It is easy to grow to like the things we are good at.”

That gave Sen a moment of pause. She wasn’t wrong.

“Then, I will rely on you to remind me from time to time not to enjoy it too much.”

Falling Leaf shrugged. “If you wish.”

“I wish it wasn’t necessary at all, but I don’t expect that the world will grant me that wish. You know, sometimes, I wish that we’d just gone off and found a mountain of our own.”

“Really? Why?”

“Then, none of this would have been necessary. You could have stayed as you were. I wouldn’t be constantly getting into bad situations. It’d be peaceful. Maybe, we still could.”

Falling Leaf grew quiet and her eyes were far away. “There are many mountains. As strong as you are now, you could likely claim one. Build a Sen den for yourself.”

Sen snorted. “A Sen den? I like it. What about you? Would you build a den for yourself, or stay in mine?”

Falling Leaf shrugged. “Either. Both. Shelter is shelter.”

“We could go now if you want.”

There was a look of yearning Falling Leaf’s eyes. She wanted to go back to the wilds, back to her mountain or, barring that, a mountain they picked. In the end, though, she shook her head.

“We can’t. Not yet. You need that,” she thought hard, “teaching book.”

“Manual?”

“Yes! You need that manual for your cultivation.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

Falling Leaf shook her head emphatically. “You need it. Your body change is incomplete. Unbalanced. It will serve for a time, but it will harm you if you leave it like this for too long.”

That was news to Sen and unwelcome news at that.

“How do you know?”

Falling Leaf shrugged. “How do you not know?”

Sen opened his mouth to answer, but he didn’t have an answer to give. It was his body. Shouldn’t he know? If he didn’t even know why he didn’t know, it probably wasn’t reasonable to expect Falling Leaf to know why she did know. The important part was that he was on a clock now.

“Do you know how long? Are we talking weeks or decades?”

Falling Leaf frowned. “A cycle of seasons? Maybe two? It’s hard to know for sure.”

“So, no mountain for us.”

“Not yet. One day, though, we can claim a mountain as the Kho has done and forbid it to all.”

“One day,” murmured Sen.