“I’m just saying that you could have sent a message,” said Lo Meifeng.
Sen held his tongue for three seconds to make sure he wasn’t about to make things worse before he answered. “And what should I have said in the message?”
“That you hadn’t been kidnapped. That you were fine. That you were,” Lo Meifeng trailed off.
“Yeah,” said Sen, “that was the part that tripped me up. I wasn’t going to tell you what I was really doing in a message that anyone could intercept. And realistically, after five days, would it have really changed anything? I get what you’re saying. I should have let you all know that I was okay. I knew you were going to worry. I am sorry about that part. But I also know you. You would never have just accepted some vague assurance that I wasn’t under duress. And, frankly, it wasn’t anyone else’s business.”
“I know you haven’t figured this part out yet,” said Lo Meifeng with an unusual chill in her voice, “but every damn thing you do is our business.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“It is because we’re the ones it’s most likely to blow back on. Every time you pick a fight with a sect, take sides in some political situation, or decide to bed the nascent soul matriarch of the biggest sect in the city, it puts us in the line of fire. By the way, I hope you haven’t deluded yourself into thinking there won’t be any fallout from the last one.”
“What? Why would there be?”
“You’re not that stupid. Naïve sometimes, but not stupid. Not unless you’ve decided to be. Her list of would-be suitors and lovers could stretch from here to the ocean. So, naturally, you wander into the situation, ignore the existence of all of those people who would now gladly murder you, and spend most of a week locked in a bedroom with her. And you think nothing is going to come of that?”
“It’s not like I married her,” said Sen, feeling a little defensive.
“A fact that I’m certain calls for offerings to at least one god or goddess that has more wisdom than you. Also, not really relevant. What is relevant is that, as usual, you’ve made enemies you won’t know until they decide to act.”
At that, Sen’s patience ran out. He stood up from the chair he’d been sitting in for his lecture.
“Enough! I understand that you’re angry with me. But I am not going to apologize for the time I took for myself. Two years. Not even two years. That’s what I have left at the rate we’re going. So, if I decided that I could take a handful of those days and forget about the fact that I’m dying, forget about all of the killing, forget about stupid mortal political situations, I will not let you try to make me feel ashamed about that. You don’t have the right. You can complain to me all you want about how badly I failed at communicating what was going on. I have that coming. You don’t get to judge how I choose to spend what little time I have left.”
Lo Meifeng’s face had gone ashen beneath Sen’s abrupt tirade. Sen turned and started to leave the room.
“Where are you going?” she asked in a weak voice.
Sen looked over his shoulder at her. “To do what everyone seemingly wants me to do. I’m getting back to business as usual. I still have a nascent soul cultivator to murder.”
“Sen,” said Lo Meifeng, “that isn’t what I meant.”
“Isn’t it?” asked Sen, before he left the room.
***
While Sen was at the house at times over the next few days, he wasn’t present in any meaningful way. When he was there, he kept himself locked away in a room that he was using as a makeshift bedroom and alchemy laboratory, only occasionally coming out to eat something. When he wasn’t sleeping or working on alchemical projects that he refused to discuss with anyone, he was gone. When the others offered to go with him, he refused them all with a flat expression and said that they couldn’t go where he was going. It was true, as far as it went. Only Sen could hide from the normally all-seeing spiritual sense of a nascent soul cultivator, but he could tell that his coldness and withdrawal from the group had them all worried. Yet, he didn’t see another way.
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If he really was going to have to go and find Fu Ruolan, that was a danger he refused to drag others into. It was one thing to risk himself on a quest to find a mad cultivator when he was already dying. It was something else entirely to ask people who weren’t dying to face a situation where their deaths weren’t just possible, but probable. Beyond that, he had taken Falling Leaf with him once before where his death had almost occurred. It had changed her. He refused to take her with him when his death was a near certainty. Sen refused to have that be her final memory of him. He also knew that there was an element of cowardice in it. He didn’t have it in him to watch her die. It would be too much. It would break him. So, when he left the city, he planned on leaving it by himself.
Still, leaving by himself didn’t mean that he had to leave them all in a terrible situation. He could resolve some of the problems and dangers he’d created for them in the city before he did. To that end, he’d been plotting Tong Guanting’s entry into his next incarnation. The cultivator criminal had been busy during Sen’s brief break. He’d consolidated what was left of his men into one location. Sen assumed it was meant as either a threat or a lure, but that wasn’t the building that interested him. The building that Sen was interested in was the one that Tong Guanting had tried to keep hidden. It had taken a while to find it. The nascent soul cultivator had hired someone to put up misdirection formations. They didn’t hide the building so much as make people want to focus their attention on other nearby places. Sen had also identified a number of nasty defensive formations.
Whoever Tong Guanting had found for the work had been good, but Sen had spent countless hours working with formations while his life and the lives of others hung in the balance. It had propelled his knowledge forward in ways that only life-or-death scenarios can. It took a little mental effort, but he figured out how to bypass those formations one by one without setting them off. That was important. He needed those formations to look like they were still active and working properly until he was ready for them to alert Tong Guanting that something was wrong. Sen couldn’t be entirely sure that the building contained the remains of the Shadow Eagle Talon Syndicate’s fortunes, but all the precautions suggested that’s what it meant. He’d also spent more than a little time tracking Tong Guanting’s movements. Sen wanted at least a general sense of where the man usually was at any given time, so he could make his move at the most opportune moment.
For all the complaining that the others had done about his little vacation, Sen had the sneaking suspicion that it was ultimately going to benefit this particular project. Sen understood just how hard it was to maintain constant vigilance. If he’d attempted what he was planning a week earlier, it might have failed. He suspected that everyone would have been too vigilant. With Sen’s reappearance in the city, he expected that everyone in Tong Guanting’s employ had been very vigilant for a couple of days, yet Sen hadn’t acted. He was able to very nearly watch the apathy start to set in. Guards paid less attention. Patrols happened less frequently. In the end, too much time had passed since the last attack. He imagined that they were all thinking that Sen had finally gotten tired of persecuting their entire organization.
He supposed they were even right about that in some ways. If they were just a gang of formation foundation cultivators and core cultivators, he probably would have just tracked down their leadership from the get-go and killed them. A power struggle would have taken place and the group might have simply fallen apart from the internal strife. Even if it didn’t, it would have been a long time before they were as organized and functional as they had been. Sen hadn’t spared anyone and the ranks of the Shadow Eagle Talon Syndicate had dropped precipitously. Just as importantly, unlike a regular gang, those people were more difficult to replace. The number of cultivators looking to become full-time criminals was exceedingly low. Cultivators were, as a rule, spoiled for options that didn’t involve crime if they spent even a little time looking.
In the end, though, Tong Guanting was simply too much of a danger for Sen to leave the man alive behind him. That was especially true if he planned to leave Falling Leaf, Lo Meifeng, and Shi Ping behind when he left. Tong Guanting was exactly the sort of man to take out his anger on the people he could reach. As long as Sen was in the city, being visible and interesting, the other nascent soul cultivators would keep a close watch on Tong Guanting. Once Sen left, he suspected that their interest would swiftly wane. That is when the man would strike out at the people Sen cared about. Since Sen couldn’t be sure that they’d leave the city to protect themselves, he’d just have to take a little some preventative measures.
Still, he didn’t rush things. He took his time. He watched. He waited. He developed countermeasures to things he suspected that Tong Guanting might try. Most importantly of all, he worked on the alchemical surprises he was cooking up just for the nascent soul cultivator. It turned out that making things that hurt people was infinitely easier than making things that helped them. Still, Sen didn’t just need things that could hurt a person. He needed something that could hurt a nascent soul cultivator. So, he worked and refined his elixirs until he was almost afraid to get near his own creations. It was only when he’d perfected the deadly little gifts that Sen decided it was time to make the final move in his war on Tong Guanting.