The speed of Sen’s travel slowed considerably for a time. While he started every day using his qinggong technique, he always found himself simply walking along the road by the time afternoon rolled over him. While his qinggong technique didn’t call for much attention when using it in small bursts, using it all day required sustained attention. He didn’t have it to give. His mind kept turning back to the plague village. Parts of it came back with utter clarity, such as his initial exchange with the old man. Sen feared that the sight of that man’s grief had imprinted itself on his mind in a way that would be hard to escape in dreams. Other parts, he knew from direct experience, would haunt his nightmares. He’d already spent more than one night endlessly building funeral pyres for a mountain of bodies that never grew smaller. His actual memories of building the real pyres blurred together, which simultaneously made him feel better and worse. He didn’t want to remember all of them, but he felt like someone should. It made it hard to know what was best.
Sen suspected that their time in that village had affected Kong Zi Han more than the frustrating messenger had realized. It was all too easy for cultivators to brush off the deaths of mortals, so long as they didn’t have to actually see what those deaths meant. Yet, every cultivator started their lives as mortals. Becoming cultivators didn’t excise those human emotions, though it often seemed to blunt them. Confronting the hopelessness in that village, the sheer magnitude of the loss, and impossible levels of grief had seemed to reconnect the man with those dormant emotions. Sen didn’t know if it would mean anything in the long term, but perhaps Kong Zi Han would find some spark of enlightenment from it all. If nothing else, it seemed to put the man’s ridiculous ideas about honor in perspective.
Sen hadn’t been immune to the mirror that village provided either. As harsh as he had been with Kong Zi Han, Sen didn’t think that he was much better. Their failings were different but no less severe. While foolish ideas about honor had blinded Kong Zi Han, Sen had let himself be blinded by self-interest. Sen could forgive that in himself if only a little. His self-interest in recent years had been driven by life-and-death stakes. If he hadn’t been entirely focused on his survival, he would be dead. Yet, it had made him into someone who met any attempt to impinge on his time with naked, unbridled hostility. There were also traces of that old hatred of nobles mixed in there. The more entitled and powerful the person trying to impinge on his time, the more hostile he felt. It had felt like everyone he met in the last few years was someone entitled and powerful who thought they had a right to command his time and attention.
However, Sen knew that wasn’t true. He’d certainly met more of those people than he would like. It hadn’t been everyone, though. Assuming that everyone approaching him represented someone like that had just made his life simpler. It let him reflexively say no, to not listen, to be as callous as every other cultivator out there. It was simpler, thought Sen, but it wasn’t better. In the face of the suffering he’d just witnessed, Sen saw how petty he’d been. His worries about being used by people he saw as entitled were just trivial. Not that Sen thought he should let himself be used if he saw it coming, but it wasn’t rational to react to everyone like they were trying to get something out of him that would only benefit them and hurt him. He’d been acting like a child, throwing fits when things didn’t go the way he wanted, and lashing out to keep people at bay.
The people in that village would have traded places with me without a second of hesitation, Sen realized with a flash of guilt. As much as he didn’t reflect on it, he had become one of those distant and powerful cultivators somewhere along the line. He only felt out of his depth because he was constantly surrounded by people who towered over him. Yet, in most rooms, he was the person to fear. He was the person who could act with impunity, neither caring nor considering what the local authorities might do or even what most other cultivators might do. The differences between him and a nascent soul cultivator were all but meaningless to any mortals he encountered. He might as well be a nascent soul cultivator to them. The level of freedom he enjoyed and the amount of pure choice at his disposal were things mortals could only dream about. And he had taken them for granted because there were a handful of people out there who could, if they noticed him, potentially impose their will. What a tiny concern that truly is compared with mortal frailty, thought Sen. Even compared with qi-condensing and formation foundation cultivators, what I have must look all but unattainable.
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He thought of all those villagers as they died. The looks of fear, anguish, and also the looks of relief. For them, the next life was a hope that they might escape the powerlessness of this life. A hope that they might achieve some tiny sliver of what he considered not enough. To him, every advancement was just a brief stop on the way to the moment of his ascension. Sen didn’t even know when he had decided that he would ascend. He knew there had been a time when he didn’t think he would. He had fears about what he might find there. Who he might find waiting there to exploit him. He didn’t know when he’d come to the conclusion that ascension wasn’t just possible but inevitable. He tried to find a specific moment when he’d decided that, but it didn’t exist. There had never really been a moment, just a slowly growing acceptance that he would, one day, leave this world behind him.
Sen shook his head. Other cultivators spent centuries hoping and praying that they would be able to take just one more step. Here I am, having already decided that I’m going to surpass them all like I’m just deciding whether to order more rice. Sen couldn’t help but wonder if those villagers had been more right to hate him than he’d thought. Thinking back, his younger self probably would have hated him on sight, seeing an arrogance that dwarfed any noble’s. Sen was so distracted by these thoughts that he didn’t even notice it when three people approached him moving in the other direction. When he did finally notice them, he just moved to the far side of the road to let them pass. When the three moved to block his path, he felt a great swell of apathy inside of him. He didn’t have the energy to deal with bandits or cultivators or anyone else. Still, it seemed that the world had other plans for him. One of the three stepped forward and started boasting about their sect. The words broke against Sen’s apathy like waves on a rock, making no impression. He simply stared blankly at the three. The one who was apparently in charge got angry.
“I said, what is your name?”
The weight inside of Sen made dragging any words out of himself feel like a task that was difficult beyond measure.
“You’re blocking the road,” said Sen in a voice that sounded listless to his own ears.
The one in charge started talking again about his sect and honor and a bunch of other things that Sen did not care about. It sounded like an infuriated bird chattering to him. The bird noises eventually stopped and the one in charge was looking at him with an expectant and self-important expression. Sen stared at the ridiculous little man without speaking for several seconds.
“You’re still blocking the road,” observed Sen in that same lifeless tone, barely able to dredge up the will to care about what these people were doing.
Sen felt them ready their qi. He could sense how affronted the three were that he hadn’t acknowledged their… He didn’t even know what they had wanted him to acknowledge. He stood there as they prepared to attack, doing nothing. He knew he could kill them. It wouldn’t be hard. It was just so pointless. A waste. There was a spark of memory from when he’d been advancing, an idea for a sword technique that he’d planned to try out. He’d never done it because it had always felt incomplete. Now, though, now he knew what had been missing. He even knew what others would call it. Heavens’ Shadow. The qi inside him stirred, almost as if it had been roused by the mere thought. He felt the shadow qi gather, but also a thread of divine qi, and all of that terrible sorrow he felt. The qi surged into his jian as his hand landed on the hilt. He drew the blade in a fluid motion and swept it in front of him in a wide arc.
A fog of shadow rolled forward, lit from within by a kaleidoscope of iridescent colors. It surged toward the other three cultivators, obscuring them even as they tried to defend against the technique. Sen’s qi ignored their defenses and crashed into them. The qi suffused their bodies, briefly turning their skin the same color as the shadow fog, with iridescent color playing over their faces, hands, and any other exposed skin. Then, it dove deeper inside of them, carrying the pain and sorrow Sen had been carrying and searing it into their hearts, their souls, and possibly their very flesh. He didn’t know. All he knew was that it wouldn’t kill them. It wasn’t meant to kill them. It had been Kong Zi Han who had let him understand. The way the man had slowly reconnected with those blunted human emotions. This technique did the same thing, but it did it all at once.
The only difference was that Sen had infused the technique with what he was feeling, what he had felt back in that village. Sen sensed it as the qi the other three had roused flickered and went still. Then, he watched as horror, shame, guilt, and pain as deep as the sky were etched onto their faces. One of them began wailing, falling to his knees and covering his head. Another simply passed out. The leader sank to his knees and began shaking as tears streamed down his face. Sen stared at the three for a time before he simply walked past them, his weary eyes fixed on the horizon, searching for the coast and the ships he could find there.