For all that Sen had thought about it, imagined it, and tried to mentally prepare for it, the capital still stunned him. It was just so damned big. When he’d imagined it, he’d imagined something like Emperor’s Bay, just more of it. The reality of miles upon miles of buildings and roads ground that feeble image to dust. He literally couldn’t see the far side of the city even with his enhanced sight. Smells that had been unpleasantly present in the heart of Emperor’s Bay were strong on the air miles from their destination. As his eyes tracked over the sprawling mass, he could make out movement on the roads. The part of the city closest to him was near enough that he could see down into those streets and he felt a moment of mild panic.
There were people everywhere, moving back and forth, stopping, talking, arguing, and laughing. There were people leading carts and vendors selling food. There were more people in one stretch of road than the entire population of the Orchard’s Reach. Sen felt an almost irresistible urge to turn around and go looking for the mad nascent soul cultivator who might have a copy of the manual. Sure, she might be crazy, but that was far better than a place that was insanity incarnate. Sen couldn’t imagine wanting to be in that place, wanting to be around so many others, to be constantly confronted by other human beings. There would be no silence in a place like that. There could be no peace. The longer he stood there staring down at the city, the more Sen realized that he hated it.
“Sen?” asked Chan Yu Ming.
He turned to look at her, to say that he wasn’t going down into that madness, but he stopped short. The young woman had barely spoken for the last few days, and Sen had left her mostly to her own devices. Looking at her now, though, he wondered when she had last slept. Short of being injured badly, it took a lot for core formation cultivators to actually look bad. Their recovery rate from pretty much every kind of normal affliction was stupendous. Yet, Chan Yu Ming looked…sick. There were dark bags beneath her eyes, and there was so little color in her skin that she almost looked like a corpse. There was even a bit of gauntness to her face that added to that impression.
“Are you feeling well?” asked Sen in genuine concern.
Chan Yu Ming abruptly looked away. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”
“You don’t look fine,” said Sen.
“It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with.”
Sen stared at her and kept staring at her until she looked at him again.
“What is going on?”
Chan Yu Ming looked like she wanted to get angry, but then she just looked tired and resigned. “I thought that I’d be able to think of a way to convince you, but I can’t promise you that manual. I’m relatively confident I can get it, but you want a guarantee. I can’t give it. I even thought about lying, but you’d have figured that out soon enough. If I did that, I doubt you’d ever speak to me again.”
“That’s probably true, but how is that connected to this?”
“Once I enter the city again, I’ll have to present myself to my father. Then, the preparations will begin for the wedding. I know who I’m to marry. It,” she sighed, “it will not be a harmonious marriage.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just let it lie, Sen,” she said in a tired voice.
“The man you’re supposed to marry, he’s that bad?”
The look that crossed her face in that moment was more telling than any words. There was a contempt on her face that only undiluted hatred could fuel.
“He is evil. He enjoys inflicting pain. He enjoys the suffering of others. He especially enjoys the pain and suffering of those who cannot threaten or harm him. The poor. The young. Everyone knows it, but his house is powerful, and they’re all just like him. So, it’s ignored or covered up. Admittedly, he couldn’t harm me even if he wanted to, but there are expectations of every bride,” she said with visible shudder.
“I see,” said Sen, feeling like he needed to acknowledge her words in some way.
“I intend to murder him on our wedding night. There will be consequences for my family, for me, but I will not subject myself to his touch, or carry his seed, or raise a child tainted by his family line. If I could, I would scourge his house from the world. Every last one of them, man, woman, and child,” she said, before she offered Sen the bleakest smile he’d ever seen. “Have I disappointed you? I remember it so clearly. You towering over that battlefield with the sky on fire. It really did feel like the heavens had sent you there, and that all it would take was a single word from you to see us all swept away in a divine inferno. So, tell me, what is your sentence on me, Judgment’s Gale?”
Sen forced himself to remain silent. For a moment, he jumped to the thought that this was another attempt to manipulate him. And maybe it even was, but he didn’t think she was doing it on purpose. All he saw in her, all he sensed from her, was hopelessness. As for him, if anything, it felt like she meant to provoke him somehow. Although, he couldn’t imagine what that would accomplish. At least, he tried to tell himself that. If she could provoke him and start a real fight, there was one other way out of her predicament. He’d already proven he could defeat her. So, there was a story there already. Chan Yu Ming couldn’t accept her defeat at his hands and pursued him across the country. Then, very nearly at the gates of the capital itself, she fought him again, only to fall beneath his blade. It was very neat and tidy, for her. Someone might even turn it into a tragic play. She would get to flee into death, escaping a marriage she didn’t want and a murder that would harm her family’s interests.
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There was even some mild protection built in for Sen, as it would be a matter under the Jianghu. However, he suspected that would prove flimsy protection from the wrath of a powerful noble family. Still, they were largely a mortal house, which meant they would need to arrange for other cultivators to hunt him. He’d have some time to put distance between himself and the capital. Except, he wasn’t going to let himself be provoked into a fight where he’d have to kill her. Sen wasn’t even sure he could make himself do it. Sen recognized that part of what allowed him to kill when anger wasn’t involved was a certain indifference to the people he fought. He wasn’t indifferent to Chan Yu Ming. He hated that she’d tried to trick him into doing what she wanted, but he didn’t hate her. That would have made life so much easier.
“I have no judgment on you,” he finally said. “You plan to kill one evil man. I don’t even know anymore how many people I’ve killed. I do know they didn’t all deserve it. How could I stand in judgment of you?”
Sen didn’t have a clear expectation for what her reaction to those words would be, but looking like he’d personally doomed her hadn’t been it. He saw her hand twitch toward her jian, but that was as far as it got. Maybe she’d simply recognized that he wasn’t going to give her what she wanted, even if she did start a fight with him. Instead, she lowered her head.
“I understand,” she whispered.
Sen went to turn away when a thought struck him. There was another way out that he hadn’t considered, mostly because he wouldn’t have expected it from Chan Yu Ming. But, if her family forced her to marry, and she carried out her plan to murder the groom, and she was hopeless enough, that might be enough to make that option look palatable, even preferable. Of course, he didn’t know that she’d do that, and he didn’t think that simply asking would get an answer he could trust. All he had to go on was his instincts about her and the situation. His instincts told him that if she walked down the path in front of her without some kind of outside intervention, it would end in her death. In the face of that, his arguments about staying out of mortal politics and uncertainties about what her family might expect felt, not untrue, but weak.
Yet, he wasn’t confident that he could or should intervene in what might well be her fate. Just as importantly, nothing had changed about his situation. He was still racing against his own death. Intervening would no doubt create problems and enemies that he might find it impossible to extricate himself from or avoid. He didn’t know what he should do. He only had his judgment to go on, and that was something he had more than a few doubts about. Sen turned away so he wasn’t looking at Chan Yu Ming, but he didn’t walk away. Instead, he looked to where he might get sounder judgment than his own. He looked to the heavens. I could use some guidance, he thought. If this is her karma, her fate, I’ll leave it alone. Then, he waited. He stood there in silence, listening, feeling, looking for anything that might point the right way. Just when he was certain that silence was the answer, he felt a tug on his soul. It was the lightest of things, and would likely have gone unnoticed if he wasn’t looking for guidance, but there it was.
Sen stood silently for a long moment before he spoke. “I need you to understand something. My priorities haven’t changed because my situation hasn’t changed. I’ll expect you to devote every resource, leverage every favor you’re owed, and enlist your family in getting me that manual.”
“What?”
“I’m saying I’ll help you, but there is a time limit. I can’t still be here in six months if I don’t have that manual. If I can’t get it, and you can’t get it for me, I will leave. I’ll have to.”
“I understand,” said Chan Yu Ming. “How long?”
To Sen, it sounded like she was having a hard time breathing. Since he suspected she didn’t really want him to see her that way, he didn’t turn around. Sen honestly didn’t know how long, but he understood that she needed some kind of time frame to work in.
“Three months.”
“That is, it’s not a lot of time for nobles,” she said, sounding very hesitant.
“I don’t have a lot of time left,” said Sen. “Now, let’s go. I want to see what kind of rooms Lo Meifeng got for us.”
Sen started down the road, no longer considering the size of the city. He didn’t look back to see if the others were following. He could hear their footfalls. Sen hoped that he hadn’t just made another terrible decision, but he’d committed himself to that path. He’d have to walk down it and hope that he was strong enough to bear the consequences. They passed through ever denser areas of buildings and ever denser throngs of people until Sen felt like they might as well be in the capital. He did, however, fall back to walk beside Falling Leaf. They’d known each other for so long that they almost didn’t need words. He had felt her growing apprehension as they closed in on the city proper. She shot him a grateful look and stepped closer. When the wall and southern gate to the city came into view, Sen grudgingly took his place at the back of the line, preparing for an extended wait.
Yet, they hadn’t been there for more than five minutes when they became the center of a lot of activity. Within moments of each other, a man who looked like he was some kind of messenger, a group of men in some manner of uniform led by a woman a few years older than Sen, and a group of city guards all strode up to them. The city guards immediately dropped to their knees and kowtowed. The woman leading the other group of uniformed men looked at Sen, and then her eyes drifted over to Chan Yu Ming.
“Princess,” said the woman, dropping her eyes respectfully. “We didn’t know you were returning.”
Sen turned toward Chan Yu Ming very slowly and fixed her with a flat stare. “Princess?”
“Yeah,” said Chan Yu Ming weakly. “I swear I was going to tell you.”
“We are going to have to have a long talk about this,” said Sen through clenched teeth.