For all of the fighting they had to do against spirit beasts to find Fu Ruolan, there was virtually none as Sen and Falling Leaf began their journey toward Mt. Solace. This went a long way toward making Sen feel better about his absolute annihilation of that beast tide. He wished it hadn’t been necessary, but it seemed that the spirit beasts in the surrounding area had decided that he was a harder target than they wanted to take on. Still, it surprised him a little. He had thought for sure that the spirit beasts would come at them in numbers again. As the days turned into weeks with only the very occasional attack by a lone spirit beast here and there, though, his paranoia settled down into something that Sen considered manageable. Still, he thought some insight might be beneficial. So, one night after he’d put up a galehouse for them to stay in, he asked Falling Leaf about it.
“Why do you think that the local spirit beasts aren’t attacking more often?”
“They’re afraid of you.”
“That didn’t stop them before.”
“No, you made them cautious before. Now, they’re afraid.”
Sen frowned. “I don’t remember much that makes sense after I set off that technique. Just fragmented images and impressions of destruction. I didn’t want to think about it afterward, but I guess I need to know now. Was it as bad as I think it was?”
Falling Leaf became very still as she looked at him. “Yes. It was terrifying. I’ve never seen anything like it. What you did… What you made… It was hungry.”
Sen tilted his head a little. “Hungry? What do you mean? Techniques don’t work that way. They just do what they’re designed to do.”
“Yes. Usually, but not that one. It was,” she seemed to search for a word, “more. It was just more, and it was hungry. It didn’t just destroy. It consumed everything.”
Sen leaned back and tried to process those words. “Well, that’s certainly ominous.”
Falling Leaf shrugged. “It was for that spirit beast tide.”
“I’m just glad it happened out in the wilds. I can’t even imagine how many people something like that would kill inside a city.”
“You wouldn’t have used it in a city.”
Sen gave Falling Leaf a serious look. “Yes, I would have. If you’d been in that kind of danger in a city, I wouldn’t have thought twice. Consequences be damned.”
She smiled at him. “No, you wouldn’t have. You’d have done something else.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something just as terrifying but smaller.”
Sen had mixed feelings about that reply. On the one hand, he was happy that Falling Leaf thought he had enough restraint not to unleash a technique like that in place with lots of non-cultivators around. On the other hand, it was a little sad that she just assumed he’d find something equally terrible to replace it with. He didn’t think she was necessarily wrong, but it was a sobering thing to hear. He’d never set out to be terrifying. He’d just done the things that seemed necessary to him in the moment. That those things often seemed to leave other people chilled to the core was both a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because it seemed to encourage most people to think twice before they came after him. It was a curse because enough people didn’t believe the stories that he kept needing to do awful but necessary things, which no doubt reinforced Falling Leaf’s perception. Still, there was precious little to be done about it while they traveled, so he let it go. He just wanted to get to the mountain, get the mushrooms, and get back. He could worry about how to adjust people’s perceptions of him after that.
Sen decided that a topic change was in order. “So, we haven’t talked about this in a while, but how are you handling the transition to being human?”
Falling Leaf was quiet for a time as she ate some rice without enthusiasm. When she finally answered, it wasn’t what Sen expected to hear.
“I’m not human. I look human, but I don’t think like humans. I don’t think I ever will. Too many years thinking like a ghost panther. I can pass among the humans without drawing too much attention to myself. That is enough.”
“So, you don’t think you’ll live among them?”
“I might if you did. But I wouldn’t pick that. I might live near them. There are conveniences it’s hard to find in the wild. Easy access to food, for one.”
“You don’t have much use for humans, do you?”
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“No. They are loud. Their cities smell. They’re petty and divided. No pride could survive living as they do. I believe it is only by the heavens’ grace that any of you survive to become adults.”
“Were things truly so different with your people?”
“Things were more direct. You always knew your place in the pride. Leadership had to be won through strength and cunning. Humans are always lost.”
“Lost? In what way?” asked a perplexed Sen.
“You don’t know where you stand. In theory, a king holds power over everyone, except you proved that isn’t true very directly. That means that cultivators are really in charge, except you pretend that you’re not. For humans who don’t cultivate, they don’t know who to fear or who to fear most. They don’t know their places in the world. Some of you run toward things. Some of you run from them. Yet, none of you seem to know why. It is madness.”
No wonder she doesn’t care for humans, thought Sen. Everything about our lives seems foolish or bizarre to her. Worse, Sen couldn’t think of a good rebuttal to her arguments. He thought that she was oversimplifying things. Then again, he expected that he wouldn’t understand the nuances if he ever ran across an intact pride of ghost panthers. He expected that much of what he saw would strike him as madness as well. He’d just have to hope that, with time, Falling Leaf would become more comfortable with the intricacies of human interactions. It wasn’t as though she could go back to living the way she used to. Then again, maybe she could in time. If she gathered enough strength, she could do whatever she wanted and no one would say a word about it. She may just claim a mountain for herself one day, the way Sen had suggested they do.
Of course, Sen wasn’t all that certain about his own grasp on human interactions. He was good at some parts of it, but others left him baffled. He might be better off just finding some place that was human-adjacent to live and work on his cultivation. It wasn’t as though his history with other people was a glowing list of successes. By his reckoning, he’d left a lot of wreckage in his wake and a fair bit of it was personal. He’d largely been a disaster for Wu Meng Yao and the other Soaring Skies sect members he’d met on the road. He’d been, at the very best, a mixed blessing for Lifen. On balance, he didn’t think he’d done Lo Meifeng any favors. That was to say nothing of the tatters he’d left the royal family in when he’d left. There had been a few bright spots in there, as well, but far too few.
“Well,” Sen finally said, “you’re not entirely wrong about any of that. Humanity is a muddled mess a lot of the time. But some people do know where they stand. Some people know what they’re running from or to. It sounds like it’s much rarer for us than it was for you, but those people do exist.”
Falling Leaf made a noise that Sen could have interpreted to mean just about anything. He chose to take it as her reserving judgment. They lapsed into a comfortable silence while they sat by a not-entirely-necessary fire. It took the chill off inside the structure, but neither of them really felt the cold the same way anymore. Sen had built it more because he enjoyed the light and crackling sounds of the wood burning. The fireplace was also more useful now than it had been in his early versions of the galehouses. Uncle Kho had given him some tips on how they were designed with smoke chambers and dampers. It had been a little tricky to make dampers completely out of stone, but he’d worked it out. He’d been amazed at how much control he had over the fire once he sorted all of that out. It turned out that he’d been overbuilding the walls of those early versions, but he’d largely hung on to that element. He’d intended for them to help provide protection. Foot-thick slabs of unbroken stone were a fairly sound basic defense against most mortal threats and lower-tier cultivator and spirit beast threats.
“We’re going to intersect with a road again, soon,” said Sen. “It’ll speed things up, obviously, but it’ll mean we’ll start running into humans and cultivators again.”
“That was inevitable. I’ll admit that I don’t mind inns. They’re very convenient.”
Sen smiled. “That’s certainly true. It’s nice to leave things like making food to other people.”
Falling Leaf made a sour expression like she didn’t enjoy what she was thinking about. She glanced his way before she asked him something he suspected had been on her mind for a while.
“Do you trust Fu Ruolan?”
“Trust? No, not particularly. But I don’t actively distrust her either. She could have killed us or let me die. She didn’t. That earned her a little credit in my book, but I’m taking a wait-and-see approach. Why? Do you not trust her?”
“I don’t know. I think she may pretend sanity more than she pretends madness.”
“What makes you think that?”
“It’s just an instinct.”
Sen idly drummed his fingers against the stone floor as he thought about that. “Well, I hope you won’t take it personally if I hope you’re wrong. I’m stuck with that woman for now. All I can really do is stay vigilant.”
“A wise course of action at all times,” said Falling Leaf before she changed the subject. “When this is done and you complete your body cultivation, what will you do?”
“I was thinking about that earlier. When I left the mountain, I wanted to see the world. Now, I mostly want the people in the world to not see me. Everywhere I go, I end up doing things that just make me more recognizable. I’m thinking more and more that I should go into some kind of seclusion. Give people time to forget about me. We talked before about claiming a mountain of our own. Maybe I’ll find myself a mountain by some little village and make it my own. Or, I could pull a Fu Ruolan and build a house out in the wilds. Except, maybe not so deep. Close enough to enjoy the conveniences of civilization, but not so close that people will bother me.”
“Do you think that will work?”
“If I’m being honest, no. All of the evidence suggests that something will happen to drag me away from that seclusion. But even if it only lasts for a few years, it might still be worth it. This time at Fu Ruolan’s has been nice. No sects. No politics. No demonic cultivators. No running for my life. I’ve really benefitted from that, mentally at least.”
“You have,” agreed Falling Leaf. “You’re calmer now.”
“What about you? You going to come along with me or go find a mountain of your own?”
“That depends on whether you pick a bad mountain. You make poor decisions sometimes.”
Sen squinted his eyes at Falling Leaf. “Did you just tell a joke?”
Falling Leaf squirmed a little before she said, “Maybe.”
Sen chuckled a little and said, “Good for you. That was funny.”