Sen stared down into the cauldron in disgust. The misshapen, burned lump of ingredients that sat at the bottom of the alchemist’s tool seemed to mock him. If this had been the first such failure, or the twentieth, or even the fiftieth, it wouldn’t have bothered him so much. Sen had lost count of how many times his attempts at making even the simplest healing pill had collapsed into abject defeat. He didn’t know what the problem was, precisely, but the entire thing felt unnatural to him. He had been following the instructions and advice in the primer to the letter. It should be working. It clearly did work for other people. He just couldn’t seem to make it work. Dousing the fire in the stove with a burst of qi, he stormed out of the galehouse and into…Sen came up short. It was nighttime. He rubbed at his face, certain it had been morning just an hour or two ago.
He stood in the cool night air, taking deep breaths, and trying to get his frustrations back under lock and key. They weren’t any use, except maybe as an occasional prod, but he had plenty of incentive to learn already. He didn’t know what Fu Ruolan’s plan was, but he was certain that she had a plan of some kind. First, the trip to fetch the mushrooms, and then this crash course in pill refining, all to the end of making some pill. It was too structured to be anything other than a plan. The problem was that he couldn’t tell if she meant to shore up something she saw as a weakness in his education or if this was leading to some other destination. He wasn’t sure if knowing the point of the exercises would prove helpful, but his experience with nascent soul cultivators suggested that they didn’t do things on a whim.
Despite his best efforts, Sen’s frustrations welled up and burned like lava inside his chest. In desperate need of some kind of release, he kicked a rock that was sitting nearby. He felt a momentary burst of relief. That was immediately followed by chagrin as he heard the rock impacting trees. He winced preemptively as the tops of trees with shattered trunks crashed down to the forest floor. His enhanced hearing could hear the mad scramble of startled animals fleeing from the area. He closed his eyes when the inevitable happened. He heard Falling Leaf burst from the galehouse and dash toward him. Before she could get a word out, the presence of a nascent soul cultivator appeared in the clearing in a blur of speed. There was a long moment of silence as Sen imagined the two women scanning the area for the threats and, finding none, turning narrowed eyes on him.
“It was me,” he said in a defeated tone before either of them could demand answers. “I kicked a rock.”
He expected some kind of lecture about control from Fu Ruolan. He thought Falling Leaf might just hit him for startling her for no good reason. Instead, there was another protracted silence before Fu Ruolan snickered. His eyes snapped open and he turned to look at her, assuming his hearing had lied to him in some way. Her lips were pressed together so hard that her mouth was just a white line in her face. Her shoulders were bouncing as she tried to resist bursting into laughter. Sen whipped his head around to gaze at Falling Leaf who was looking at him like he’d lost his mind.
“Why would you kick a rock?” asked Falling Leaf in a tone of perplexed innocence.
That was more than Fu Ruolan could take, apparently, because she started laughing hysterically. First, she pointed at Sen. She followed that up by waving a hand at the forest. She kept trying to say things, but Sen barely caught a word here or there.
“Your face,” Fu Ruolan eventually managed to wheeze out. “Your face! You looked like a little boy expecting to have his sweets taken away.”
Sen felt a flush of embarrassment heat his face and didn’t quite know what to do with his feelings. The woman wasn’t being unkind. It barely amounted to teasing. It was just so very unexpected. Sen didn’t think he’d heard a genuine laugh from the woman since they’d met. Now, she was wiping tears from her eyes as mirth threatened to spill out of her again at any moment. Unable to settle on any specific emotion, Sen felt his face contort into some kind of expression. One look at that expression set Fu Ruolan off into more merry gales of laughter. She shook her head back and forth in some kind of negation, pointed at Sen one last time, and then disappeared back in the direction of her own home.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Sen shook his head a little and turned his attention back to Falling Leaf. Falling Leaf had her face turned in the direction the nascent soul cultivator had gone with a cautiously amused expression. When she noticed Sen’s lifted eyebrow, she gave him a shrug.
“I thought you didn’t like her,” said Sen.
Falling Leaf weighed those words before she shook her head. “I haven’t decided about that. I said I thought she might be insane.”
Sen dug through his memories, certain that she had said something about not liking the woman. His memories backed up Falling Leaf’s version though. She had been extremely cautious of the nascent soul cultivator and concerned about the woman’s sanity, but she’d never actually said she didn’t like the woman. Sen decided that he must have been projecting his own rather mixed feelings about the woman onto Falling Leaf.
“I guess you didn’t, at that,” he admitted.
“Why did you kick a rock?” asked Falling Leaf, resurrecting a topic he’d hoped she would abandon.
“Because I was frustrated.”
“By the rock?”
“No, not by the rock.”
“Then why did you kick it?”
A flash of irritation coursed through Sen, and he nearly snapped at Falling Leaf. He slapped that reaction away. He wasn’t irritated with her. He was irritated with alchemy and his ceaseless failures at it. He was also still feeling the vague sting of embarrassment. He’d acted like a child when he kicked that rock. He’d probably only knocked down a couple of trees, but that rock could have struck anything out there. He had a picture in his head of some nocturnal animal wandering by, minding its own business, getting killed by a rock that came out of nowhere. Feeling his shoulder sag, Sen just fessed up.
“It’s not going well with the alchemy.”
Saying it out loud gave the situation a gravity it hadn’t had before. It wasn’t that he was making slow progress. He was making no progress. That had to change and soon, or that extra time he’d been granted would slip between his fingers. Falling Leaf seemed wholly unsurprised by that revelation because she just nodded.
“No thoughts?” asked Sen.
“I don’t know anything about alchemy. I can’t help you with that.”
Sen nodded. “I know.”
“What did you used to do? When Ma Caihong was teaching you?”
“I’d ask her about it.”
“So, ask the other one,” said Falling Leaf.
She gestured in the direction that Fu Ruolan had gone. Sen didn’t speak or even look away at those words. They were words he truly hadn’t wanted to hear because he knew she was right. He should have done it already. His exact reasons for not doing it were a little hazy to him. He’d half convinced himself that she wouldn’t welcome such questions, but even he’d recognized that as an excuse. She might not answer his questions, but he didn’t honestly think she’d be angry with him for asking. She’d probably just give him a look or tell him to work it out on his own. If he’d gone and asked her, he would know where she stood. That would have provided him with some kind of direction. He wasn’t sure he could find the kind of help he needed if he had to seek it elsewhere, but at least he would know.
He recognized that it wasn’t like him to avoid asking questions. After that disaster early on with Master Feng, he’d made a point of asking questions. It was the best way to learn when you didn’t know the answer and couldn’t work it out on your own. He searched inside himself. Why hadn’t he just gone and asked her? The answer left Sen less than impressed with himself. It was just pride. The same kind of basic, stupid pride that he’d mocked in others. He’d been so successful with elixirs that he’d just assumed he would be successful with pill refining. He could accept that it hadn’t been an entirely unjustified assumption on his part. Hard work and some natural talent had let him go a long way with just about everything. At least, everything he’d devoted serious time and effort to master. He’d expected that there would be some transfer of aptitude between making elixirs and making pills. He could forgive himself that error of arrogance. What he couldn’t forgive in himself was not seeking help when it became clear that wasn’t the case.
Hadn’t he chastised the alchemists of the Clear Spring Sect for being too caught up in their own way of thinking? Looking at his actions, he struggled to see himself as any better. Practice and failure were part of the process, but he’d continued to let himself fail long, long past the point where either practice or failure could teach. It had been pride, and he didn’t have the time to waste on it. Recognizing his folly for what it was, Sen gave Falling Leaf a wan smile.
“You’re right,” he said.
Sen almost let himself leave it for the morning, but better sense saved him from more folly. If he let himself get some sleep, if he felt better in the morning, there was every possibility that he’d convince himself that just one more day of trying would let him glean the secrets that had eluded him so far. Repressing his sigh, he turned and trudged toward Fu Ruolan’s home.