Sen was happy to discover that the tension that had hovered between him and Fu Ruolan largely dissipated after their conversation. However, he suspected the gift of the extremely rare ice lotus helped as well. That translated into unexpected but welcome changes in how they worked on his pill refining. The mystery of his persistent failures remained unsolved, but she paid much closer attention to his state of mind. When she thought that he was getting too frustrated or disheartened, she would have him do other things for a day or two. Sometimes, she’d have him make elixirs. Sometimes, she’d just tell him to go and practice his martial forms. Not that he needed any encouragement for that last part. He’d often end his day with hours of practice out in the dark, viewing it as an opportunity to hone his skills in adverse conditions. During those months, Falling Leaf would often vanish for days or weeks at a time. Sen didn’t question it until he found more comfortable furniture in the galehouse one day.
“Where did this come from?” he asked, gesturing at a chair.
“I bought it,” said Falling Leaf.
“Where?”
She shrugged. “I went back to the one of the towns on the road.”
Sen stared as he tried to make sense of what she’d said. Falling Leaf had made a habit of venturing out into the wilds to hunt for spirit beasts that could help her advance. She’d done fairly well at it from what Sen could sense of her advancement. Sometime in the previous few months, she’d once again snuck past his own level. The disparities between them were harder to judge. He was fairly certain that the new upper limits on his power meant that she was stronger than he was, at least in terms of pure shadow qi. On the whole, though, he was less confident. They might be on equal footing again. He might be a little stronger. Still, it had never occurred to him that she might seek out human beings on purpose.
“You went by yourself?”
“You were doing alchemy with the madwoman,” said Falling Leaf.
Sen chose not to argue about Fu Ruolan’s degree of sanity. “I’m just surprised. You don’t really enjoy human beings.”
Falling Leaf nodded enthusiastically to that sentiment, which made Sen close his eyes as he tried to repress his disappointment. He’d hoped that maybe her trip had been a sign that she was coming around on people. Then again, people kept going out of their way to prove to Falling Leaf that they weren’t to be trusted or liked.
“I don’t like humans, but your stone chairs and beds aren’t comfortable. The humans at the town sold things to me.”
Sen wondered if they had taken advantage of her, then thought better of it. He could picture exactly how those negotiations had gone. Falling Leaf would have been glaring like she meant to kill someone. The shop owner would have been trembling and sweating. If anything, that poor person had probably taken a loss just to get her out of his store as fast as possible. The scene in his mind was enough to make him snicker a little. He knew he shouldn’t find someone else’s terror amusing, but he just couldn’t ignore the humor in it. He noticed Falling Leaf giving him a quizzical look and waved it off, not wanting to have to try to explain human humor again. While she had worked out some of the essentials of making a joke, she rarely saw or understood the humor in a situation.
“The madwoman isn’t having you try to make pills today?”
“We’re both out of things to try, so we’re taking a break until one of us has a good idea,” said Sen. “Or, if I’m being honest, any idea at all.”
“We should fight,” said Falling Leaf.
“What?”
“If you aren’t making pills, we should fight.”
“I don’t want to fight you.”
“Not real fighting. The pretend fighting you do.”
“Sparring,” said Sen. “It’s called sparring.”
He thought it over and then gestured toward the door. They stepped into the cold air. Their feet crunched on the thin layer of snow that covered everything in sight. Sen cleared an area down to bare ground with a gesture and some wind qi. He felt a reflexive little stab of guilt. Master Feng would have made him fight in the snow. He also knew that there was a good chance that he or Falling Leaf would end up on the ground at some point. Since Sen didn’t particularly care for practicing in wet clothing, he’d learn to live with the minor shame he’d incurred with his memory of Master Feng. Suffering might build character, but minor discomfort was just annoying. They’d barely stepped inside the bare area when Falling Leaf launched her first attack, an attempt at sweeping his leg out from under him.
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It might not be considered honorable, but that didn’t matter much to Sen or Falling Leaf. In a real fight, people didn’t wait for you to get ready. He lifted his foot to avoid the blow and sent a punch at her face. There had been a time when Sen might have tried to pull his punches with her, but he’d moved past that foolishness. Sparing her in a spar did nothing to prepare her for the rigors of a real battle. She ducked beneath the punch and sent one of her own into his ribs. The angle was poor, so he didn’t catch the full power of the strike. Still, it hurt plenty. It had also been faster than Sen expected. He slipped away from her and managed to put a bit of distance between them. They’d be standing right next to each other, which was less than ideal for both of them. The distances and angles were strange enough that they were more likely to hurt each other by accident.
More to the point, making her come at him straight on let him take advantage of his greater reach. He kept her at bay for a little while with a series of kicks, but she evaded them all. If he’d managed to land one, he might have slowed her down a little. In a battle of pure speed, he was pretty sure he was overmatched. It wasn’t a big gap but even small gaps in speed could spell disaster in a one-on-one fight. It was less important in the chaos of a battle with lots of participants because fighters could use other people or spirit beasts as distractions, negating the small but real advantage. Sen’s concentration slipped for a fraction of a second at an unexpected sound out in the forest. He didn’t even take the time to identify it. Still, that brief moment of hesitation was enough for Falling Leaf to land a blow on his thigh. He tried to pull the leg back, but it wasn’t reacting as fast as he expected.
Then, Falling Leaf was inside his reach and there was no room for thinking. It was all instinct and honed reactions as their fists and elbows moved in a blur. The sounds of their blocks echoed like distant thunder through the nearby trees and sent the winter birds in the area fleeing for the sky. Even with his disadvantage, Sen found himself smiling at the purity of their sparring. It was direct but spontaneous. The exact opposite of what he’d been trying to do with pill refining, which was often indirect and rigid. Sen was caught off balance when Falling Leaf disengaged instead of blocking one of his strikes. He took a stumbling half-step forward to regain his balance. Sen felt the blow coming more than saw it and threw out a hasty block, but it came too late. Falling Leaf’s foot connected with the side of his head. He staggered away and another quick strike drove him down into the snow.
Sen lay there for a moment to regain his wits. Falling Leaf certainly hadn’t held her blows either. His head hurt and there was a dull whine in his ears. He also felt the melting snow soaking through his clothes. Shaking his head, he pushed himself back up to his feet. Falling Leaf looked pleased with her victory, but she wasn’t gloating over it. Instead, she looked vibrantly alive and happy. He had been leaving her to her own devices a great deal in the last few months. While Fu Ruolan had all but required that Falling Leaf stay, the elder cultivator didn’t seem to have any actual plan for the panther girl. Sen had been so caught up in his own concerns that he hadn’t done anything to remedy that situation. Rolling his head to loosen up the muscles in his neck and shoulders, he gestured for her to attack. Eyes wild with anticipation, Falling Leaf lunged at him. They kept that up until both of them were making sloppy mistakes that meant a lot of bruises the next day.
“I think that’s enough for today,” said Sen, pressing his hand against a cut that Falling Leaf had opened along his ribs.
“I can keep going,” answered Falling Leaf while trying to catch her breath.
“Really?” asked Sen.
The panther girl looked at him and offered a weak, “No.”
The pair went back inside and Sen pulled out two healing elixirs. He handed one to Falling Leaf and downed the other. He let out a relieved breath as the collection of minor injuries he’d suffered started to close or fade. Slumping down into one of the new chairs, he gave it an appreciative pat.
“You were right,” said Sen. “These are way more comfortable.”
She smiled a little as she sat down in one of the other chairs. As Sen waited for the elixir to finish its work, he smiled. He wasn’t sure it would work, but he and Fu Ruolan had tried everything else. The only thing they hadn’t tried was for Sen to just try to do it the way he made elixirs. He’d discounted the possibility because he’d assumed that the process required that absolutely rigid approach. However, all of the evidence said that it wouldn’t and maybe even couldn’t work for him. It bothered him that he hadn’t figured out why it wouldn’t work for him, but he supposed that the why could wait. While she hadn’t gone into detail, Fu Ruolan had told him that he needed to use pill refining to make use of the Five-Fold Body Transformation. The manual only detailed the pills. She admitted that there were probably ways to make something similar in elixir form but that components were rarely the same, even if a pill and an elixir did the same things. Sen recognized the problem immediately. He’d need to see the pill version, maybe even see it used, before he’d be able to make reasonable guesses about how to create an elixir alternative.
To make matters worse, the pills were so precise that the person using them had to make them. Introducing anyone else’s qi to the pill creation led to inevitable failure. It was one of the reasons why the body cultivation method was so rarely used. The number of body-cultivating alchemists in the world was so small that they practically didn’t exist. Sen suspected those problems were also why it had killed so many people. Even if he managed to get it right, body cultivation was still a gamble. It could still kill him. But he was on borrowed time. What Fu Ruolan had done to stabilize him wasn’t a permanent solution. She hadn’t told him that, but he’d worked it out on his own. His inability to make any meaningful forward progress was the real clue. She’d figured out a way to restore most of what he’d been before and lock it in place. It had probably been an impressive bit of alchemy, but it was also unnatural. At some point, it would break down and he’d start to deteriorate again. He remembered with terrible clarity the kind of pain he’d been in at the end, and he wasn’t eager to experience that a second time. So, he’d take a chance and see if his intuition paid off.