Sen was vaguely aware that this situation would have sent him into a panic not so long ago. Before Emperor’s Bay and before the beast tide he’d faced in that abandoned town, the idea of careening toward a wall at high speed would have seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. Now, having passed through one crucible after another, those situational factors were just information. He was moving faster than he wanted to be moving toward something that would injure him and Lo Meifeng badly if he didn’t find a way to slow them down. Yet, that problem wasn’t occupying most of his attention, since he was already taking steps to deal with it. His mind was largely occupied with trying to discern how and why that building had exploded the way it did. He’d felt the surge of qi a second or two in advance, which he’d used to get them off the roof. The question was, where had it come from?
The most obvious answer was that it had come from another cultivator. Except, he hadn’t sensed anyone else nearby. That didn’t mean that there hadn’t been one. He could hide from other cultivators. While he hadn’t seen or felt anyone else do it, it stood to reason that the ability couldn’t be wholly unique to him. If he could hide from everyone, someone else could do the same thing to him. Yet, his teachers had always told him to look for the simplest explanations first before looking for some exotic explanation. Someone else with a hiding ability identical to his own sounded like an exotic answer to the problem. Had Li Hua done something? It was the simplest answer. One final attempt at revenge on Lo Meifeng made sense. Of course, that did leave the how of it unclear.
If the woman had triggered a technique powerful enough to destroy an entire building, he should have sensed something from her. Beyond that, the woman was either an air qi specialist or a wind qi specialist. There was a lot of overlap there, but neither type of qi should have been able to create devastation on that scale. At least, Sen didn’t think they should at the late core formation level. Maybe in the nascent soul stage, where he was pretty sure that summoning wind storms that were powerful enough to topple stone walls would prove entirely feasible. Then again, Sen could generate a lot of destruction when he was trying or being careless. Maybe Li Hua had tried to get creative in her last desperate moments. That explanation would fit most of the facts he had to hand, but it didn’t fit those facts well.
Li Hua hadn’t simply been on the edge of death at the end. She had been in the process of actually dying. Having been there himself, Sen knew what it took to pull off one last big technique. He had gone into the situation looking for that outcome or something similar and prepared himself mentally for it. While preparation wasn’t an absolute requirement, it did a lot to keep the mind headed in the right direction. He had also been angry, probably as filled with rage as Li Hua had been, with one key difference. He’d been finding ways to work past that rage for months. Her rage had been both blind and of the moment. Thinking past that kind of thing was, while technically possible, not very plausible. He had to admit that she might have set up some kind of formation as a fail-safe, but he hadn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary. An effect that big would have taken a powerful formation, and he was well-equipped to spot a formation like that.
No, the best explanation for what had happened was that some powerful third party saw Li Hua fail and tried to take advantage of the moment. If that was the case, then he and Lo Meifeng had more problems coming their way than just crashing into a wall. Having come that close to either killing or badly injuring them, Sen doubted that whoever it was would simply shrug and think, Oh well. Odds were good that something or someone was already coming. So, Sen needed to deal with the immediate problem of falling out of the sky at speed, and prepare, as well as he could, for whatever was going to follow in the wake of that event. He was already using that dome of hardened air he’d formed to create some drag that had slowed them to a less destructive speed, but the real problem was where to land. It wasn’t enough to just settle onto some rooftop. He’d be putting everyone in the immediate vicinity in danger if someone arrived immediately after to pick a fight.
His eyes scanned the area below, looking for anywhere he could direct them that would at least limit the mortal casualties. In the end, though, there was no helping it. He saw a park area, but it was both too far away and at a severe angle from their current direction. He might be able to redirect them there, but not without blowing through a lot of qi he suspected he was going to need very soon. Instead, he aimed for the roof of what looked like some kind of warehouse. He started summoning qi platforms that they crashed through, but each platform slowed their descent even more. By the time they touched down on the roof, they were floating more than they were falling. Sen leaned over and planted Lo Meifeng on her feet. She glared at him.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Saved your life. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“I meant to that building.”
“Me? That wasn’t me. I was just waiting around for you to finish up your personal business. Someone else turned that building into a crater.”
Lo Meifeng paused, cast a dubious look back the way they had come, and then shook her head. “Then, we need to get moving, because someone is probably already coming.”
“That’s how I read the situation. Split up or stay together?”
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“Stay together, at least for the moment. We should drop down to street level. It may not slow them down much, but it might make tracking us harder. We need to put eyes on whoever this is.”
Sen nodded and they jogged over to the edge of the building. Sen felt another twinge in his intuition, grabbed Lo Meifeng’s robe, and dragged her over the side with him. As they dropped through the air, Sen looked up and saw a big chunk of the roof and wall above them explode into rubble. He formed a vertical qi platform. He planted his foot against the platform and launched them away from the falling rubble. A few pieces still clipped him, but they were mostly annoyances that hurt, rather injured. He used air qi to cushion them as they dropped into a nearby alley. Sen immediately hid. Then, he looked at Lo Meifeng, who didn’t enjoy that same protection. Master Feng had said that he thought Sen might be able to do something similar for someone else eventually. Sen decided that this was the moment to find out if he could.
“Come here,” he ordered Lo Meifeng.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I want to try something and you need to be close for it.”
“Even if I were interested, this is hardly the right moment.”
“Even I know that this isn’t the time for jokes.”
“Fine,” said Lo Meifeng, walking over until she was almost pressed up against him. “Close enough?”
“I hope so. Now, let me concentrate.”
Of all the things that Sen could do, his ability to hide was his oldest. Yet, for all the time he’d been able to do it, it was all the ability he understood the least. His teachers hadn’t understood how it worked. Lo Meifeng hadn’t understood how it worked. Without guidance, Sen had been left to his own devices to comprehend it. Despite having spent a lot of time thinking about it, he’d never gotten anywhere. Some of it was simple hesitation to experiment with something that even nascent soul cultivators didn’t understand. Mostly, though, he was simply blocked by his own ignorance. Sen was keenly aware that there was so much he didn’t know. His recent time with the dragon and learning about auric impositions was just the most recent case in point.
Now, though, he didn’t have the luxury of being afraid to experiment. Whoever was out there, Sen hadn’t caught so much as a hint of their presence. That meant they were doing what he could do, or they were launching attacks from beyond a distance that he could sense them. Either way, he needed an edge here, and needed Lo Meifeng alive to help him. Setting aside his reservations and his almost superstitious fears about his own ability, Sen got down to the hard business of trying to make it do something he’d never made it do before. Since he couldn’t rely on knowledge to guide him, he’d try to do it the same way he’d done so many other things. He’d try to feel his way through it.
Ignoring the information his mind kept trying to force into the center of the process, Sen focused on the literal, visceral feel of the technique. There were layers and layers to it, but he refused to get lost in all of those nuances. There would be a time to explore those later. For the moment, he just needed to pin down the general sense of the ability. Sen didn’t think that it was exactly the right word, but it felt as though he was folding something inside of himself and around himself. It created an overwhelming sense that there was precisely nothing in the space he occupied. The exact what he was folding was, for his immediate purposes, almost irrelevant. He just needed to replicate that feeling to include an area that extended past his own skin. His first few attempts failed miserably, but he kept after it. Kept pushing himself harder, willing that sense of nothing to push outward.
Every step of the way, it felt like the ability itself was fighting him. Like it didn’t want to do what he wanted it to do. He ignored that resistance, ignored his own mounting sense of urgency, ignored the trickle of blood he felt from his nose, and pushed harder. Inch by inch, he pushed it outward, forcing the area immediately around him to conform to his will. It felt like it took hours, but eventually Lo Meifeng was inside a small bubble that told everyone and everything around them that nothing was there. With an effort of will that felt laughably easy in comparison, Sen cycled shadow qi and cloaked them in darkness. Despite his belief that a ridiculously long amount of time had past, he suspected that had mostly been inside his own mind. Lo Meifeng was staring off toward the warehouse that they had been standing on.
For a minute or two, nothing happened. Sen gritted his teeth and kept that bubble in place around them. Then, a figure appeared on the rooftop. He was a bulky man with a thick beard, although one he kept trimmed short. Sen could sense nothing about him. With all of his own senses dulled by the hiding technique, the man was simply too far away. Sen watched as the man glared around the area, and then felt it as the man swept the area with his spiritual sense. Sen worried that his altered use of the hiding ability might not work as effectively, but the man’s spiritual sense brushed passed them without a pause. The strength of that spiritual sense gave Sen pause, though. Whoever the man was, he was either an overwhelmingly powerful peak core cultivator or a formidable early nascent soul stage cultivator. Sen found himself leaning in the direction of the latter. The sheer force and range of the man’s attacks suggested something that went beyond core cultivation to Sen.
The man jumped down from the roof and began searching the area. However, the search was a half-hearted thing that the man soon abandoned with a muttered curse. Sen hadn’t realized she was doing it, but he heard Lo Meifeng release a breath she’d apparently been holding. She went to say something, but Sen waved her off.
“Once we’re back at the inn,” he said, the strain evident in his voice.
The pair kept mostly to the shadows, but Lo Meifeng kept shooting worried glances at Sen. Keeping that ability up and running was taking a toll on him that he wasn’t going to be able to just shrug off with a night of sleep. Yet, he didn’t dare drop it until they were somewhere he could put up obscenely overpowered protective and offensive formations. Eventually, they scaled the wall of the inn and went back in through the same window they’d left from. Sen didn’t say anything. He just started assembling formations around the room, forcing Lo Meifeng to stay within arm’s reach of him at all times. He dropped a small fortune of spirit beast cores on the ground to fuel those formations at need. Only when he felt the formations lock into place did he release the hiding ability. Then, he slumped to the floor, every last bit of his mental energy and formidable willpower spent.