Falling Leaf dove through the narrow space between two intertwined trees. Her palm pressed down on the cold snow. She felt the strength in her arm as she used it to drive herself back up into the air. She twisted, spun, and landed on her feet just in time to knock aside the blast of fire that chased her through the tree. She exulted in the feeling of danger, the perilous game of hunter and prey, and dancing in the hazy space where the difference between hunter and hunted could turn on a moment, a thought, a mistake. She knew her human boy didn’t like it when she danced along that edge of oblivion, but he hadn’t been raised as she had. She snorted in amusement. That one hadn’t been raised at all. His pride had cast him aside, the mad fools. If they had known what he could become, they never would have done so. Then again, if they hadn’t cast him aside, he might never have become what he did. With a burst of qi, Falling Leaf shot back through that narrow gap, her hand extended, wreathed in shadows made harder than steel. The foolish bear-cat tried to stop its forward momentum, but it was too late. A bare movement of her hand and the creature’s vile head was removed from its equally vile body.
Falling Leaf felt no sympathy for it, not even an echo of the empathy she might feel for other spirit beasts caught beneath her killing claws. The reason was simple. They had been warned. Sen had told them that it was war between him and them, and his wars were her wars. Most of their kind fled before them like birds before the great wind storms. Every once in a while, though, one of them was brave, foolhardy, or suicidal, and it came for her human boy. She took it upon herself to deal with the minor annoyances like the corpse that lay before her. Yet, Falling Leaf also understood her limitations. As strong as she had become, as theoretically equal to Sen as she was, she knew better. In some ways, she had always known better. She knew the ways of the spirit beasts were not the ways of the humans. The ways they learned were different. But all must train. That was when she knew he was different. She had trained with her kind as a kit, learning to stalk, to move among the shadows. She had been diligent and talented.
Her human boy, though, for him training had been a kind of madness. He had pushed himself like no creature she had ever seen. Ceaselessly, season after season, never giving himself the luxury of rest unless driven to it by the ravages of advancement or commanded to do so by the Kho, or the Feng, or the Caihong. She had thought it would wear him away to nothing, as the water wears away the stone. Yet, she had misunderstood. He had not been the rock. He had not been the water. He had been the sun. She saw it best when she saw him fight. And there had been so much fighting in the last year. Their journey to the north in search of the mad one with the manual Sen so desperately needed, a journey deep into the truly untamed wilds had been almost relentless battles. Sometimes against other cultivators who had not understood that they faced something beyond their understanding. More often, though, they had fought against the spirit beasts who hated all humans. Those fights had been hard on Sen, but they had also benefited him in ways that she was sure he didn’t see. They had perfected him. She only needed to look to the sky to see that.
Her human boy stood there on his platform of qi, face calm, body relaxed, and jian held almost negligently at his side. Opposite him flew a wyvern, pale blue scales looking nearly translucent in the afternoon sunlight. It screeched its fury at Sen, casting lances of hardened air at him by the dozens. His expression never changed. His posture never stiffened. She watched as he lifted his jian and, so casually it looked like he didn’t even know he was in a fight, he swept the blade in front of him. She heard it and felt it as those lances of air shattered against the terrible strength Sen wielded against them. She saw his expression change into a look that was sad and almost pitying. She felt the swell of qi that he summoned. So fast. It was also so fast. Yet, this was different. This was the sort of power that could rend mountains.
The wyvern clearly felt it too, because the beast tried to flee. Yet, once committed to the fight, Sen would not let the enemy escape. She felt the qi condense around the jian into something impossibly dense and infinitely sharp. He swept the blade in an upward arc and a blade of something that Falling Leaf couldn’t even name swept across the sky. The wyvern tried to defend itself, but that blade was as implacable as gravity. It shattered the wyvern’s meager defenses. At least, they looked meager in the face of that technique. Falling Leaf was quite certain that she would have found those defenses all but impossible to breach. With a final screech of pure terror, the wyvern was split in half. Falling Leaf watched with a kind of grim fascination as the two pieces of the beast fell away from each other and showered the trees below with blood.
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She looked back to her human boy. His face looked briefly regretful before it returned to its normal calm. A very small part of her feared him. It wasn’t fear that he might hurt her. She knew with absolute certainty that he would never harm her, nor willingly let harm befall her. No, what she feared was something else, something more specific than Sen. She feared the power he held. Power like that, it was truly the power over life and death, as so many spirit beasts had learned in their final moments. It would be foolish not to fear that. Her human boy sheathed his jian and flew off in the direction of the fallen wyvern. She turned her attention to the piles of bear-cat corpses that surrounded her. She began removing their cores. This deep into the wilds, nearly everything had a core, and Sen could use some of them. She assumed that was why he had gone off to investigate the wyvern’s body. It had been powerful in its own right, which meant its core should be potent. Perhaps, she fervently hoped, potent enough to do something to help Sen. It took her a few minutes of work to remove all of those cores. By the time she looked up again, Sen was standing there giving her a curious look.
“You know, I could have done that for you. Spared you from getting your clothes all bloody,” he said.
“It washes out,” she answered, not really seeing the problem.
She watched in amusement as he looked for something to say, almost said something twice, and then just gave a resigned shake of his head. It made her happy that he was as baffled by her as she was so often baffled by him.
“Let’s go home,” he said.
She nodded her agreement and the pair dashed off through the woods at speeds that would have made them all but invisible to mortal eyes. She felt it the moment they passed into Sen’s domain. He would have said it was their domain, but he was silly about many things. He had done as the Kho had done and set up powerful formations. It was his qi and his presence that permeated the area. Eventually, they reached the stone den that he had made for them. He had crafted it for them when they arrived in the area where the mad one supposedly resided. She thought it was much larger than they truly needed, but she would never tell him that. He seemed to take a childlike delight in the place that he had made, and there was so little left in him that was childlike or took delight in anything. She understood why that was, but she mourned every day as his very real worries stole those things from him piece by piece. They went inside the stone den and Sen waved his hand around the room. She watched with a wistful sigh as logs burst into flames in the fireplace, and orbs of fire appeared in the many nooks in the walls that he had apparently put there for that purpose.
“I’m going to take a bath,” said Sen.
She glanced over at him, judging his face. Sometimes, when he was in one of his sillier moods, she would join him in the bath to watch him splutter and be embarrassed. She still didn’t understand that reaction, but it was terribly funny to see it. Today, though, she could tell that he wasn’t in that kind of silly mood. Much like his delight, his silliness had become rarer and rarer. Something else she mourned, although she took great pains to make sure he never saw it. Instead of looking for ways to make her human boy make hilarious expressions, she wandered into the room where he did his alchemy. She had watched him often enough to know what she could safely touch and what she should never touch for any reason. That day, though, she simply deposited the cores she had collected on a table before she went to wash the blood off her hands and arms. She might have claimed the bath first, but the truth was that she didn’t particularly enjoy them. They were useful enough for staying clean, but something inside of her found the immersion in the water unnatural. By the time she had cleaned herself up and changed into clothes that weren’t charred, ripped, and bloody, Sen had come back and started making food.
They ate a quiet meal together before Sen announced that he was going to go sleep. Falling Leaf just nodded as though it didn’t mean anything, but a sliver of ice in her soul grew a little larger. There had been a time when he could go for weeks on end with barely any sleep. Now, he could barely go a day or two without it. His incomplete body cultivation was catching up with him, as she had known it must. She spared a moment to curse that damnable turtle as she did every day, hoping that some deity of vengeance would visit a thousand plagues on the old creature that had set her human boy on this path. For all that Sen’s power had grown, for all that he held the power over life and death for others, he was dying. It wouldn’t get better. It would only get worse. She had known that when she came with him. She also knew that he did his best to hide any symptoms from her. But he couldn’t hide his need for ever-increasing amounts of sleep. It burned inside of her that she couldn’t help him. All she could do was hope. Hope that they found the mad cultivator. Hope that this Fu Ruolan was feeling less insane on the day they found her. Hope that the woman would give Sen the manual. Hope that it all happened in time to save him.