Things were quiet when they set out the next… Sen pondered about the right word. It still looked like morning, but he suspected it was going to look like morning all of the time for the foreseeable future. Since there wasn’t much to be done about it, he set the concern aside. He’d just call whenever they got up and started moving again morning. The rest had done him good, despite dreaming about inscrutable patterns that seemed like they ought to mean something and might actually mean something to someone else. He felt like his mind was much clearer than it had been the day before. It seemed that attempted possessions were no joke and best avoided in the future. Misty Peak seemed consumed with thoughts that troubled her, while Sen was wondering how long the journey would take.
The spider seemed wholly unconcerned. Sen did spend some time considering how much he was taking the spider for granted. As docile as it seemed, it was still a positively lethal spirit beast. If it turned on them while they slept, Sen wasn’t entirely convinced that he would be able to withstand the spider’s poison long enough to both kill the thing and treat himself. He felt a little guilty thinking that. The spider hadn’t done anything to make him think it had ill intent. He supposed that distrust stemmed from not knowing why the thing had run after them into the ruins in the first place. I wonder if there’s something inside the ruins that it wants, thought Sen. That would at least make the spider’s behavior explicable. He also knew that if he truly wanted to know, he could simply endure the extended process of asking the spider endless yes or no questions, but Sen decided that he wasn’t worried enough to put up with that just yet.
At first, Sen tried to keep track of their progress by leaving a trail behind them as he had done before and flying up to see how far they’d come. After what he thought was the equivalent of a few days, he simply gave it up as pointless. The complexity of the path they were forced to walk made it all but impossible to measure progress in a meaningful sense. He simply gave in to the monotony of the walking. With the buildings all looking alike and the roads all made in the same way, the environment fell away from his notice. He drifted into something that was almost a trance. Every once in a while, he’d snap out of it and call for a halt. He’d pass out food, and they’d all rest for a while. Yet, even those breaks started to blur together. Conversation was sparse and usually faded to nothing after a few minutes. For Sen’s part, it was simply that he didn’t think of anything he wanted to say.
He didn’t notice when it was happening. The farther they walked, the less it looked like a city around them. The buildings melted away into a forest, and Sen found himself traversing a beaten dirt path that slowly carried him through foothills covered in tall grass that he didn’t recognize. The path carried him to the base of a mountain where it transitioned from packed dirt into narrow stone steps that led up the mountain. His eyes tracked up and up. There had to be thousands of steps that he could see and likely more beyond that. However, he didn’t hesitate. He simply placed a foot on the first step and started to climb. After all, what were thousands of steps to Sen. The ascent took hours, then days, then weeks, and still the mountain rose higher and higher. His steps fell on the stone with mechanical regularity, one after the next, each footfall making only a whisper of noise.
As he climbed, memories came back to him. They were memories that weighed him down with regret. The way he’d handled things in the capital with the king. The way he’d left Lifen behind with the cult. The way he’d treated Lo Meifeng. The bandits he’d let live so long ago on that empty stretch of road. The prices that other people had paid on his behalf. He thought of the people he might have helped if he’d been less distracted, less busy, less focused on himself. He thought of Grandmother Lu and how long it had been since he’d last seen her. He didn’t necessarily see these things in a new light. He slowly came to realize that his regret didn’t stem from what he had done. In most cases, he’d done as he thought was best or as circumstance had demanded. Sen’s regret was that he hadn’t had the wisdom or the will to find other ways. Yet, after a time, he saw that even that regret was self-indulgence.
Wisdom could be acquired. Will was something he had in abundance. If the regret was real, he would have worked harder to find more wisdom and apply that will to creating better options. His real regret, his true regret, was that it hadn’t been easy. He had chosen familiar paths and familiar solutions because that was easier than finding new ways. Worse, the world encouraged people to choose those paths. Cultivators honed themselves in violence and consciously chose to impose their will on reality. After all, what were techniques if not a cultivator’s will over reality made manifest? What was ascension if not the ultimate expression of a cultivator’s will over reality by transcending it?
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As Sen climbed those endless steps, he considered those revelations. The path of cultivators was fraught with pitfalls, but it was also a proven path. Just because he found the violence distasteful, hadn’t he agreed to it by pursuing cultivation? Then again, his pursuit of cultivation had been driven largely by outside threats. He’d grown stronger as much out of pure necessity as anything else. If he hadn’t gotten stronger, he doubted he would be alive. He struggled to identify just where to put the line between agreement and coercion. If the choice was between growing stronger or dying, Sen didn’t think it was much of a choice at all. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder if his ambivalence was a weakness that should be discarded or a sign that he should be forging in some new direction. The one thing he did know was that action took conviction, and ambivalence was a poison to conviction.
He wrestled with that problem for what felt like years as his steps carried him higher and higher toward a peak that he thought must be some infinite distance away. In the odd moment when he took a break from considering the problem of conviction and ambivalence, he tried to guess how many steps he had climbed. Had it been thousands? Tens of thousands? If he looked around, he didn’t see land anymore. There was no blue sky overhead. There was just the great expanse of darkness that one might see at night and the stars that lit glittering paths across the cosmos. And, somehow, the mountain still rose above him, the stone steps as hard and indifferent as the first one had been. As the climb continued, Sen eventually discarded his contemplation of ambivalence and conviction as a false problem.
He was ambivalent, it was true, but it was almost always in the aftermath. He had only allowed that ambivalence to hold true sway occasionally. In the moment, Sen held conviction. Sometimes, he might not like where that conviction took him, but he had it. He realized that the ambivalence was there to serve a purpose. It was a reminder that problems had more than one solution, not just a reason to question his value. I can be more than one thing, he reminded himself. It was that truth that he kept coming back to, over and over again. He could be the ruthless cultivator, but he could also be the healer. He could be an enemy, but he could also be a friend. These things didn’t make him weak. They didn’t make him less. That duality wasn’t just something in him. It was something in everyone. The drive to be only one thing was the true aberration.
How many hours had he spent trying to figure out what and who he should be? How much energy had he spent trying to decide which face was his real face? They were all his faces, his truths, and trying to suppress one in favor of another was to weaken himself. Sen imagined that many people would disagree with that conclusion. They would probably think he was being weak for not picking one thing to be but that was a them problem. He was the one who had to live in his skin, look at his own face in the mirror, and find them comfortable. He couldn’t accomplish that by discarding his sympathy in favor of disregard any more than he could accomplish it by forgoing ruthlessness in favor of compassion. He needed all of it to be himself.
Sen’s foot came down on another step and the reality around him shattered like glass. The endless starscape fell away in pieces to reveal the place he had been trying to go the entire time. His foot was on the first step that led up to the temple in the center of the city. Sen froze in place as he tried to make sense of the experience. How long had he been walking through that city with no conscious awareness of where he was or what he was doing? Time had lost all meaning. Part of him was convinced that he had climbed up that mountain for hundreds or even thousands of years as he contended with his inner self. Another part of him was certain it had just been a second. Those two perceptions battled for dominance in his head, but neither felt more real than the other. Maybe both are true, thought Sen. He turned to ask Misty Peak what her experience was like, but she was nowhere to be seen. He scanned the immediate area. Neither she nor the spider were anywhere to be seen.
“Fantastic,” said Sen. “That’s just great.”