Sen had been ignoring his symptoms for the better part of two months. He masked the symptoms with an ever-increasing number of healing elixirs, core qi spread through his body, and one of his dwindling supply of Auntie Caihong’s healing pills in moments of true desperation. The knowledge that he was fighting a losing battle was something he pushed to the back of his mind in the same place he pushed the mounting pain. All he thought about was covering more ground in his search for Fu Ruolan. I can keep going, thought Sen. Just one more day. He told himself so often that he even started to believe it. Right up until the moment when the pain cracked through the walls of barriers he’d put up in his mind. One moment he was forcing himself to run and sweep the forest around them with his spiritual sense. In the next moment, he was on the ground screaming and vomiting up blood. The only mercy was that pain drove him into unconsciousness in a matter of moments.
The next thing he remembered was being driven back out of that sweet, black nothingness by the same pain. He managed to stifle his screams and in an act of will that left him pale, sweaty, and trembling, he painstakingly rebuilt the walls in his mind that held back the pain. Yet, the moment he tried to stand up, the walls threatened to collapse on him. No, he thought. No, not yet. For a time, he just lay there and only slowly realized that he was back in the galehouse. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. They’d been a long way off from the place. He tried to dredge up some kind of memory from that missing, in-between time, but there was nothing to find, no knowledge to glean, just a hole in his mind where knowledge usually lived.
Eventually, when the barrier between him and the pain felt a little more stable, Sen managed to sit up. He looked down at himself and grimaced. Where there had once been abundant muscle, he could see bones pressing against the skin. Whatever damage the body cultivation was doing to him, it was speeding up. The simple thought of standing felt like a goal beyond reach. As much as he wanted to get up, as much as he needed to get up, his body wouldn’t have it. He’d pushed it as far as he could, and it would be pushed no more. Yet, stopping meant giving in to inescapable death. Sen sat there, gathering what meager fragments of willpower he could muster, and prepared to make the attempt at standing anyway. After all, he wondered, what else is there to do? Yet, before he could summon the courage to try, the door to the room opened. Falling Leaf came in, stared at him with a blank expression, and spoke a single word.
“No.”
“I need to-,” started Sen.
“No.”
Sen had never heard her speak that way before. Her tone was flat and absolute. She hadn’t spoken a word or made a mutable statement. It was a decree with the force of divine law.
“Then, what am supposed to do?” asked Sen.
“You will rest,” she said, making those words another irrevocable command from on high.
There was no give in her. He could see it in her eyes. If she had to hold him down in that bed to make him rest, she would do it. He realized with a start that, in his current condition, she could do it. Everything in him wanted to ignore her, to rise from that bed, to keep searching. Yet, just as far out of reach as standing had felt, getting past her was just an empty wish. He didn’t just lack the strength of body. He lacked the strength of will to defy her. She had done everything he’d asked of her. She had traveled thousands of miles. She had searched with him from dawn to dusk and never uttered a word of complaint for months. In all of that time, she had never asked him for anything. She had let him pretend that he could keep going forever, even though she must have known he was burning through what little remained of his life. Now, she had gone along as far as she was willing to go. She had made her first demand on him. He couldn’t fight that or deny her. He didn’t have the right. Sen watched her for a time, looking for any crack in her resolve and he found none.
“Alright,” he said and let himself mostly fall back into the bed.
Only then did her expression soften. She came over and sat on the bed next to him. Her expression was grave.
“It will happen soon,” she said.
“I know,” said Sen. “I’m sorry I dragged you out here. I never wanted you to see this.”
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She gave him a small smile that he couldn’t interpret. “Foolish human boy. Thinking you could tell me where I can go. I would never willingly let you die alone. Now, rest.”
Sen nodded and, for the first time in the better part of a year, he gave himself permission to just rest for a time. Sen’s dreams were chaotic things. He saw disjointed images and landscapes where everything looked as if it was half melted, as though the world was made of wax and had been subjected to excessive heat. He saw fragments of memory from his time on the streets. Fights with the noble brats, sharing bits of stolen food with Grandmother Lu, and even the occasional moments of serenity. Then, there were flashes of his fights with spirit beasts. There had been so many of them, most of which he hadn’t wanted to kill but there had been no other choice. He had to fight. It was the only way to survive. Yet, even as he drifted up from those dreams, the sounds of fighting persisted.
Once more, he lay on that bed and tried to understand what had happened. Was he still asleep? Was he hallucinating? It took Sen most of a minute to understand what his senses were telling him. Falling Leaf was outside, fighting the spirit beasts who had never stopped coming. The realization snapped him fully into waking reality. The once impossible feat of standing simply became a mountain of effort that he needed to scale. It felt like it took forever, but inch by inch, he forced his body to move. He flooded his body with qi, and even that was barely enough, but it was enough. I can’t let her fight them alone, he thought. She’ll die. Sen had promised himself that he wouldn’t let her die in the service of this mad quest. He had made that vow, and Sen was a man who kept his promises. Staggering and stumbling, he made his way to the door. He stopped, just for a moment, letting his head rest against the door, gathering what little remained of his strength. I promised, he thought. If it’s my final act in life, I will see her safe. Sen opened the door and stepped out.
When he saw what Falling Leaf standing alone not against an attack, but a tide of enemies. He didn’t know how long she’d been fighting, but there were corpses everywhere. He could see that she was fighting a battle she couldn’t win. She was already injured. He could tell by the way that she was moving. He saw that it would happen before it did, and the thought paralyzed him. Some massive insect thing took advantage of a moment of distraction and clamped down on her leg with massive mandibles. He heard her cry out and then a bear-cat lashed out at her. There was a spray of blood in the air and everything else in the world fell away, washed from Sen’s consciousness by a tide of wrath.
Sen was nominally aware that he activated his qinggong technique, but all he cared about was the fact that the distance between him and Falling Leaf vanished. The insect that had clamped onto her leg was converted to ash as he drove a pillar of fire through it. Simultaneously, the bear-cat was reduced to little more than a meat hash by a tornado of wind and metal qi. Stone spikes shot up out of the ground in a semicircle around him and Falling Leaf killing dozens of the attacking creatures. With a wave of his hand, he scooped her up and sent her back toward the house. A little part of him could hear her calling out to him, telling him not to do anything, but the situation had gone beyond that now. All that remained in Sen was the need to murder everything that stood before him.
He summoned every last drop of killing intent he possessed and slammed it down on that horde of spirit beasts. Some died instantly, and some were less fortunate as that killing intent shredded whatever passed for their minds, burst blood vessels and arteries inside of them, and left them mindlessly lashing out at anything near them. Sen was aware of the blood pouring from his nose and building in his mouth. He knew it was bad, lethal probably, but he just didn’t care. He couldn’t fight this horde with fists or jian. He didn’t have that kind of strength anymore. What he did have was a core and dantian bursting with qi and the foundation of a technique that was very good at destroying things. Sen cycled for everything and used himself as the medium. He twisted and fused all of that qi together. It was ripping him apart, but that wasn’t a concern anymore. One final act, he thought. Why not?
He recalled his killing intent. The withdrawal stunned the horde of beasts almost as badly as having the killing intent crash down on them. Sen forced his killing intent into that unspeakable mass of qi inside of him. Then, he drove the unbridled hatred he felt for anything that would harm his friend into the heart of that technique. He looked out over that mass of spirit beasts and smiled at them with bloody teeth. With a thought, he unleashed what he had wrought. A wave of destruction rolled out of Sen, and it spared nothing. The spirit beasts, the trees, the grass, and the very soil itself were simply annihilated from existence as though they had never existed. The destruction didn’t stop at the end of the spirit beasts. That wave traveled for miles and where there had once been life, the fruit of Sen’s wrath wiped it away. The most profound silence that Sen would ever experience happened in that moment, as though even the heavens were rendered mute by what he had done. Sen stood there for a moment, gazing on what he had done but lacking the energy to even have a thought about it. He was spent and, with the threat gone, the pain came for him again. As he collapsed and darkness closed in on him for what he expected would be the last time, he heard Falling Leaf screaming his name.