As he’d been directed, Sen presented himself at the home of the prince. Although, words like palace and fortress sprang to mind a Sen stood at the gate of the walled compound. It seemed the guards had been expecting him because he was ushered inside quickly and shown to some kind of sitting room. He was given tea and a plate of some kind of elegantly decorated pastries that Sen couldn’t immediately identify, although the red bean paste filling was familiar. He wasn’t left waiting for long before a Tiu Li-Mei entered the sitting room. Sen went to stand, but she waved him back to his seat. She glanced at one of the other chairs, then at him, and seemed resigned to standing.

“Sit, if you wish,” said Sen. “I wouldn’t know or care if you were breaking etiquette.”

The woman inclined her head to him and sat. Sen poured her a cup of tea, waving away her frantic protests, and handed it to her. She reluctantly took the cup and waited for him to sip before she sipped her own. She hid it well, but Sen could sense that he made the woman nervous. He did his best not to focus on her too much. When she didn’t say anything for several minutes, Sen finally lifted an eyebrow at her.

“Were you sent simply to keep me company?” he asked.

“No,” she admitted. “I came to ask you a question.”

Sen thought he had a pretty good idea what question was coming, but he played along. “Of course. Please, proceed.”

“Were you involved in an altercation last evening?”

Sen took a moment to sip his tea. “I was.”

“May I ask what happened?”

Sen looked at her for long enough that the woman began to shift uncomfortably. “Several people tried to abduct my friend and wounded her severely in the process.”

“I see,” she said, her brow furrowed.

“What happened then?”

“I slaughtered them,” said Sen in a conversational voice. “This tea is excellent, by the way. Do you know where I can acquire some?”

Tiu Li-Mei was staring at him with wide eyes. “You killed them?”

“I take those kinds of attacks on my people very personally.”

The woman looked a little pale to Sen’s eyes, but it didn’t bleed into her voice. “I see. Do you know who they were?”

“I do. One of them survived long enough to answer my questions. They were from the Steel Gryphon sect.”

Tiu Li-Mei’s mouth tightened at the name. “You’re sure?”

“Very sure.”

Sen watched her for a moment before nodding. After he’d gotten Falling Leaf back to the inn, dressed her wounds, and forced several custom elixirs into her, he’d left her to sleep it off. Then, he’d gone to find Lo Meifeng. He’d found her pacing in her room. He’d leaned against the wall, arms folded over his chest, and just watched her pace for a while. Eventually, she turned an annoyed look on him.

“Could you not stand and stare that way? It’s creepy. It’s like having a statue glare at you.”

Sen snorted. “Sorry.”

“Walk me through what happened.”

Sen gave her an accounting of the earlier events. He skipped past some of the more colorful moments in the name of brevity. She had closed her eyes and let one of her hands clench into a fist when she heard the name Steel Gryphon sect.

“And then what?”

“Then I gave him to Falling Leaf.”

Lo Meifeng looked startled. “What did she do?”

“She expressed the depths of her displeasure.”

“She killed him?”

Sen frowned. “Yes, I guess that’s a way to describe it.”

“Why would they do something this stupid?”

“You know why,” said Sen.

It had taken him a little while to figure it out, but that had mostly been because he’d been so angry at first. Then, he’d been distracted with tending to Falling Leaf. Once the fury had burned off and the healing was tended to, he’d been able to turn his mind to the more immediate problem. He’d been confused, at first. What the Steel Gryphon sect had done ran contrary to everything he’d heard about how sects operated in the capital. Blithely grabbing people off the streets, or trying to, was not a good show of sect discipline. Sen acknowledged that it was possible that they had tried to grab her strictly because of him. On balance, though, there weren’t a lot of good reasons for them to do it.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

He supposed that the list of demonic cultivators probably hadn’t included people in the capital, given that he hadn’t heard any stories that involved it. That suggested that any demonic cultivators located in the capital had escaped the recent purge. Of course, that was an incentive for them to avoid Sen at all costs. Drawing his attention that way was just begging for nascent soul-fueled destruction to reign down from the sky. No, the more likely scenario was that they had tried to get to him in order to get to someone else. Someone local. And the only local people he knew that mattered were Chan Yu Ming and her brother. Since Chan Yu Ming had been out of the picture for years while she was training at the Clear Water sect, that only left one real candidate.

“The prince,” said Lo Meifeng.

“The prince,” agreed Sen. “I have to assume that they offended him in some way and that he’s putting some manner of pressure on them. I assume it’s economic pressure.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“Chan Yu Ming talked about it. She said it’s how her family punishes sects in the city when they act out in ways that the government doesn’t like. Higher taxes, delaying shipments, encouraging merchants to decline to work with the sect, that kind of thing.”

“It’s a smart move. Sects are expensive. Drive their costs up enough, and they can collapse under their own weight. Still, this wasn’t a good move on their part. It’s too blatant. They don’t even know what your relationship with the prince is. Beyond that, they clearly didn’t understand who they were dealing with when it came to you. If they’d looked into you at all, they would have known that a move like that could only end with a lot of dead people.”

“Loathe as I am to say it, I’m going to work from the assumption that the entire sect isn’t to blame for this. I think that this was just one overambitious elder being profoundly short-sighted. Probably whoever it was that pissed off the prince in the first place. I think Falling Leaf was just a target of opportunity. I’d bet that those idiots we killed were under orders to grab whoever they could get alone.”

“Well, you should be sure to thank your new friend for all the trouble he caused us. We have exactly zero chance of keeping anything even remotely like a low profile now.”

Those were the words in the back of Sen’s mind as he watched flickers of frustration and anger flit across Tiu Li-Mei’s face. She saw him studying her and closed her eyes for a moment. Then, she stood from the chair.

“You should come with me.”

Sen rose from his own chair and followed the woman deep into the heart of the building. He saw servants calmly but diligently going about their work. There was art placed in what Sen assumed were strategic positions. It was mostly paintings, but he also saw small sculptures and even vases set carefully on tables. They were obviously there to be looked at, rather than used. For all that, though, the decorations were understated, adding a sense of quiet dignity to the palace. Tiu Li-Mei asked Sen to wait, while she disappeared behind a heavy wooden door. He stood there in patient silence for several minutes, before a Tiu Li-Mei came back out. Sen didn’t comment on it, but he could see that her hands were trembling slightly.

“The prince will see you.”

As Sen went to walk past the woman, he could hear her heart beating much too fast. He paused and looked at her. Then, he gently laid a hand on her arm and a little of his qi passed into her. He adjusted the biological reactions that were driving what he recognized as a panic response.

“Peace,” he said, and then went in to see the prince.

The prince was standing by a window and, much like Tiu Li-Mei, Sen could see the signs of a strong emotional reaction. While the man looked calm enough, the hand the man held at the small of his own back was clenched so tightly that the knuckles were white. His posture was too rigid. Sen’s enhanced hearing caught the rasp of harsh breaths being taken in through clenched teeth. Sen decided that waiting until the prince was ready to talk was probably the best move at this point. Instead, he glanced around what he assumed was the man’s office. Sen let a small smile cross his lips when he saw that someone had placed the painting from the inn on a wall in the room. It would be easy to look at from the heavy and scroll-covered table.

“It doesn’t happen often,” said the prince without looking away from the window, “but it seems that I owe you an apology. It wasn’t my intention, but it seems I’ve dragged you into my conflict with the Steel Gryphon sect. I’ve brought trouble to you, and I sense that trouble was the last thing you wanted in coming to this city. For that, I am truly sorry. I understand that your companion was injured. Is she well?”

“I tended her wounds myself. I expect that she’s all but healed by now, given how healthy her appetite was this morning.”

A sliver of the tension that was keeping the prince fixed in place seemed to bleed away. He turned to look at Sen.

“You’re a healer?”

“An alchemist, of sorts. The line between healer and alchemist can grow very blurry. Healers can do things that I’d never attempt, but the reverse is also true.”

“You told me that you came here in search of a manual and that one of the sects in the city held a copy. Is it the Steel Gryphon sect?”

Sen considered drawing it out but that felt a bit too much like punishing the wrong person. “No. It’s the Golden Phoenix sect.”

A wave of tension left the prince at those words. “At least there was some tiny shred of good fortune in this disaster. Still, since I brought this ill luck onto you, I wish to make amends. Tell me what you seek, and I will do what I can to acquire the manual.”

Part of Sen wanted to jump on the opportunity, no questions asked. Yet, Sen didn’t want to take advantage of the man’s guilt. The prince may have caused the situation, but only inadvertently. He hadn’t come to the inn with malicious intent.

“The manual might prove excessively expensive. I don’t know what the relationship between the sect and the government is, but they may ask for things you can’t or won’t want to give.”

“There are limits to my wealth and influence, promises I cannot make, but I would still like to try.”

Sen let that rest for a moment before he spoke. “The manual I need is the Five-Fold Body Transformation.”