“Oh, the sleepy sleepy boy is awake. Sleeps too much, too much, too much!”

“I… I…,” said Sen, taken off-guard by her appearance and odd speech.

“And he stutters!” shouted the woman, pointing an accusatory finger at him. “Why does he stutter? Why? Why? Why?”

Even having been warned about her nature, Sen found himself flummoxed by the actual experience of meeting this odd woman. He shook his head a little and tried to regroup.

“Are you Fu Ruolan?” he asked.

“No! I’m a pretty, pretty, fairy princess!” shouted the nascent soul cultivator.

“A what?”

With that, the woman burst into light, transformed into a human-sized fairy with gossamer wings. She held something out to him in her hand.

“Have a cookie, kid.”

Not sure how to react, Sen just took the thing she called a cookie. He glanced down at the round flat object in his hand and lifted an eyebrow. “What do I do with it?”

***

A quick sweep of his spiritual sense told him that most of them were regular mortals armed with crossbows. There were a few upper-tier foundation formation cultivators and one core formation cultivator. Part of Sen told him that it would be better to talk this out. Surely, there was some peaceful solution to this problem. Yet, the rest of him knew that it wasn’t going to play out that way. These people had come out here to ambush them. Sen supposed it was his own fault. He’d been experimenting on the trip with tamping down the expression of his cultivation level. The goal was simply to make himself less obvious without going in for full-on hiding. Hiding was helpful, but it limited his senses in ways that he didn’t like in the wild. It was the only thing that Falling Leaf had shown an interest in during the whole last week, so he’d explained it as well as he could and she’d figured out her own version of the tamping-down technique.

Of course, it also came with the problem of making him and her look like easier targets than they were in truth. The population had been so sparse on their way to the mountain that it hadn’t resulted in any incidents, but he supposed his luck had been bound to run out. Sen debated with himself briefly before he looked at Falling Leaf. She wasn’t looking at any of the would-be ambushers. She’d pulled out a roasted chicken that Sen had forgotten he’d made a few weeks back. She was pulling hunks of meat off the bird and chewing them.

“What do you think?” Sen asked.

“Let Larry deal with it,” said Falling Leaf around a mouthful of chicken.

The core cultivator stepped forward. She was a tall woman with a piercing gaze. Her skin was pale and her features refined through the magic of advancement. Yet, her lips were pressed into a hard line as she glared at the pair of them. She had an expensive spear in her hands and handled it with the casual air of someone who knew its use.

“Who is Larry?” she demanded.

“He is,” said Sen, gesturing to the side with a thumb.

At those words, a spirit ox that stood twice as tall as Sen exploded from the forest.

“Run!” screamed the core cultivator.

While Larry the spirit ox rampaged through the would-be robbers with world-shaking moos, Sen reached out to pluck some of the meat off the chicken. Falling Leaf slapped his hand.

“Get your own.”

***

Falling Leaf was frowning up a storm at those comments. “Humans seem a lot more complicated than that to me.”

“They are but that’s when you’re dealing with people you know. Personal history, personality quirks, and even your mood can influence how those things play out. When you’re dealing with people one time and never likely to see them again, you can generally assume that food, shelter, family, and safety are their priorities. If you can throw in some entertainment or kindness, you’ll probably be on safe ground more often than not. Plus, you’re a cultivator. If you act a little strange, most people will just chalk it up to that.”

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“You make it sound easy.”

“Well, easy is probably overselling it,” said Sen. “It’s probably more accurate to say that it’s straightforward. You probably got a bit of a skewed view of things because most of the people you’ve dealt with regularly have been cultivators, nobles, or both. Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, and Uncle Kho are so old and have so much experience that you can’t use them as an example for anything except how really old nascent soul cultivators work. I end up dealing with cultivators and nobles all the time, so all of those people are bad examples too. You’ve gotten a really lopsided experience of people. I’ll tell you what. I spent some time in a village a while back. I just lived there with a family. I learned a lot from doing that. Once we get this business with my body cultivation settled, we’ll find a place like that.”

“And do what?” asked a perplexed Falling Leaf.

“Conquer it, obviously.”

***

As time passed, though, Sen had to stop fuming and concentrate on the task at hand. Making the superior healing potions required a lot of attention from him in terms of managing the reactions inside the pot, to say nothing of keeping the heat at a stable temperature. He blotted everything else out of his sphere of attention and gave the elixir his full attention. He could feel the elixir coming together properly, the discrete ingredients fusing together to make something more, something better. For Sen, this was alchemy at its purest. There was a part of him that wanted to experiment. He’d had some ideas about improving this elixir into something even more potent. He thought that there was even the possibility of making a version that might help restore qi, but that wasn’t the point of this exercise. This was just a demonstration.

Sen ignored those distracting thoughts and monitored the contents of the pot until they’d reached the perfect moment of fusion. Then, with a wave of his hand, he cooled the potion. He summoned a glass vial and a piece of cheesecloth from his storage ring. A moment or two of effort and he’d filled the much rarer glass vial with the elixir. In most cases, he used stone vials because they were sturdier. For this, he wanted her to be able to see the elixir and its faint blue glow, not just feel it. Keeping his expression neutral, he turned and handed the vial to Fu Ruolan. She just stared at the vial for several long moments before giving herself a slight shake. She reached out and took the vial. Sen felt her examining it, no doubt assessing its strength and nature. Her expression was complicated and difficult for Sen to read when she finally found something to say.

Fu Ruolan turned her gaze upwards as though she was staring at the gods themselves and yelled, “This is some bullshit!”

***

She gestured at the cauldron that had been placed on a heavy table nearby. Sen checked the stove to ensure that there was a bed of hot coals sufficient to heat the cauldron. He could do it himself if he needed to but preferred not to complicate the process with more interference than necessary. He wanted to replicate his process as precisely as possible in the hopes that the more experienced cultivator would see what he had missed. He entertained the idea of pulling out the manual to reference the instructions. That notion was dismissed almost immediately. He’d committed those words to memory at this point. Instead, he got to work. It seemed that Fu Ruolan was taking the same approach that he was and made no suggestions as he placed the cauldron over the heat, prepared ingredients, and added them to the cauldron. The only thing she did was keep an eye on what was happening in the cauldron with her spiritual sense as Sen worked. A part of him hoped with a kind of raw desperation that this time he would succeed.

He followed every instruction to the letter. He didn’t interfere with the process at all, at any level, despite his instincts to do so. He was so intent on the task that he was startled when Fu Ruolan stormed over the cauldron and yanked the cover off. She glared down at the contents of the cauldron which were, as Sen saw when he peered down into it, decidedly not anything like a pill. Fu Ruolan’s face went from anger to disbelief. It took Sen a second to realize that he hadn’t made any mistakes. What she saw in that cauldron was not what she had expected to see.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “You did everything right. This should have worked.”

Sen reached down into the pot and pulled out the strange thing he had made. It was white and squishy.

“What is this thing?”

Fu Ruolan gave the thing a defeated look. “It’s called a marshmallow.”

***

The captain seemed to accept that answer without feeling the need to ask more. The man had a pleased look on his face.

“You seem happy,” observed Sen.

“There are fair winds today and no signs of a storm. That’s always welcome news on a ship.”

Sen gave the sky a considering look before he accepted the words without feeling a need to ask more. If the captain said it was good weather for sailing, Sen believed him. Soon after, the real work of getting the ship out to sea began. Sen retreated to a spot on the deck that he remembered would keep him out of the way while the sailors worked. He felt the tug of recent sorrow on his heart, but he kept his eyes turned to the ocean. His emotions were sharp and fresh, but the ocean was vast enough to soothe even that pain. As the ship took on a gentle rise and fall over the water, a faint smile tugged at Sen’s lips. Perhaps there would be storms in the future but, for that moment, there was no storm to plague him. No sooner had that thought passed through his mind than he felt a massive swell of qi from the mouth of the harbor.

“Kraken!” screamed one of the sailors.

“Son of a bitch!” yelled Sen in frustration.