Sen sat at a table and sipped tea while Brother Khu muttered under his breath and searched through chest after chest that he pulled out of a closet that could never have held them. He considered offering to help the old monk, but Sen suspected that there were probably things in the chests or the closet that Brother Khu would prefer went unseen by an outsider. So, Sen did his best to wait patiently. That resolve was tested when the monk all but fell inside of a chest. It was a telling moment. It seemed the chests were storage treasures as well. Sen had been told that storage treasures couldn’t hold other storage treasures. Uncle Kho had tried to explain why, but Sen had given up even trying to understand when phrases like dimensional integrity started getting thrown around. He’d contented himself with the explanation that trying to store one storage treasure inside another would end badly. However, the closet and chests seemed to defy that rule. Sen wondered if perhaps they were linked in some way to get around that problem.
For all Sen’s concerns about Brother Khu’s safety, the monk emerged unscathed and held up a jade box that could rest easily on Sen’s palm. The monk casually flipped the chest closed with a foot and then proceeded to kick each of the half-dozen chests toward the closet. Sen watched with open curiosity as the chests slid into the closet without any apparent trouble. The monk closed the closet, wandered back over to the table, and sat down. He placed the box in front of Sen, then gave his cup of cold tea a mournful look. Sen cycled a bit of fire qi and waved a hand in the general direction of the teacup. Steam began to gently waft up off the liquid in the cup. The monk took a sip and nodded in approval.
“You cultivators do have your uses,” said the monk.
“I’m not an expert on, well, monks, but I have heard you have powers of your own. Is something like warming up a cup of tea not possible for you?”
Brother Khu lifted a hand and waggled it back and forth. “Can I do something like that? Probably. Should I do something like that? Probably not.”
“I don’t understand. It’s a trivial thing and would make life so much easier. Why not do it?”
“Whoever told you that deploying power is a trivial thing?” asked the monk.
Sen stared blankly at the monk before he said, “No one told me. Something like making your tea hot just is trivial. It costs virtually nothing.”
“Perhaps, but perhaps not. Acquiring the kind of power you have takes most people decades if not centuries of sustained effort. You must work for it. You must sacrifice for it. As I understand it, building up qi is time-consuming and even difficult. Warming up the tea appears trivial because it is small, but not when you put it in context with everything it cost to be able to warm up the tea. For most cultivators, every scrap of qi is a treasure beyond compare.”
All of that gave Sen more than a little pause. He was pretty casual with his use of power, and it was in large part because restoring his qi reserves was so stupidly easy. If he had to work for it the way other cultivators did, would he treat warming up as something trivial or as a waste of qi that bordered on a travesty? He honestly didn’t know. Part of him suspected that he might still treat it as trivial. He’d always been more interested in what he could do with qi than in hoarding it toward future advancement. Then again, he’d developed advantages that let him indulge that interest. There was just no good way to know how he’d feel about it if his circumstances had been different. His circumstances hadn’t been different. So, he was left with imagining how he might have seen the world differently. It was, however, a poor substitute for the lived experience, colored by his biases and attitudes.
Sen gave the monk a helpless smile. “Perhaps that is true for others, but not for me. And I seem to recall the question being about why you don’t do it. It wasn’t about why hypothetical cultivators would choose to avoid it. You don’t cultivate like I do, so you can’t be fretting about preserving qi in the distant hope of ascension. What prevents you from using your power in this way?”
“Humility. Reverence. Fear of selfishness. There are many reasons. In the end, my path is one of service. I exist to aid others. Using what meager power I have on something as trivial,” the monk winked at Sen, “as warming my tea is to treat that power lightly and selfishly. Particularly so when I can simply make more tea over the fire. It’s slower, I’ll grant you, but it preserves my strength for my true purpose.”
“Meager power?” asked Sen with a raised eyebrow. “I think it’s less meager than you pretend, but I do have a question.”
“Please, ask,” said the Brother Khu.
“You say your path is one of service, to provide aid to others, but foxes are notoriously troublesome. Not evil, necessarily, but few would classify them as good. Why would you choose to aid one of them?”
“Hmmmm,” said the monk as he sipped his tea. “I suppose you believe that empathy and compassion should be reserved for the worthy.”
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Sen didn’t respond immediately. He felt like the statement was a trap of some kind, even if he couldn’t quite see where the sharp edges were located. He frowned as he thought the sentiment over.
“I do,” Sen finally agreed.
“If we reserve our empathy and compassion only for those who seem outwardly deserving of it, what manner of karma do we sow? How will souls become better in their next lives if they never experience empathy and compassion? How will we become better if we withhold empathy and compassion? I choose to aid the old fox out of compassion, in the hope that it will help him become better, if not in this life, then in his next life. I cannot wash away his sins, nor free him from his karmic debts, but I can give him that small gift. The experience of one person’s compassion.”
Sen stared at the old monk with a mixture of curiosity and horror. He could see Brother Khu’s point, but he didn’t agree with it. There were people and things in the world that didn’t deserve compassion or empathy or even pity. They only deserved death. It seemed the old man could read his expression without Sen uttering a word. The monk gave Sen a sad smile.
“You think that my path is a foolish waste.”
Sen considered his words with great care. “I think that your path would treat many with more respect and kindness than they deserve. I believe your empathy and compassion might be better spent elsewhere.”
“Spoken as someone who has, perhaps through no fault of their own, been taught that it is their right to decide who lives and who dies. Is your judgment so keen that you believe you can judge not only who deserves life but who deserves compassion?”
Sen’s expression soured at the word judgment. “Some seem to think that of me.”
For the first time, the monk seemed nonplussed by one of Sen’s answers. “Whatever would make you think that?”
“I’ve… I guess you could say that I’ve acquired a reputation. It came with a name. More of a title, really. That title comes with a lot of expectations attached to it.”
“What title?” asked the monk, his face lit with curiosity.
Sen let out a long breath, wishing he’d never brought the subject up. But he had brought it up, and it was only fair to answer.
“Judgment’s Gale.”
The monk fell into reflective silence as he studied Sen from across the table. Then, the old man chuckled with a surprising amount of sympathy.
“Oh. I see. No wonder you looked as though you’d bitten into something rancid when I used the word judgment,” said the monk. “A heavy burden for one so young. Saddled with the responsibility to pass judgment on others.”
“Yeah, well, I do my best to avoid it when I can. I’m no saint who can see into the souls of others.”
“Yet, you kill?”
Sen once again considered his answer with exceeding care. “I cannot see into the souls of others, but I can see what they do. If they act like ravening beasts, if they sacrifice the innocent, if they seek to do harm because they can, I will kill. If I am attacked, I will kill. I did not make the world this way, but I must survive in it.”
“I survive in it,” said the monk.
Sen lifted an eyebrow. “Do you?”
The monk gave Sen a big smile. “Perhaps not in the same way as you. I do enjoy a certain isolation here.”
“Just a bit. Speaking of isolation, why do you tolerate that horde of devilish beasts and spirits outside?”
“Better that they roam the world freely to do harm?”
“I meant why do you tolerate them to live? I can understand why you might help the old fox, but you cannot tell me you think that those things deserve compassion. They are evil.”
Brother Khu nodded. “They are evil, although an argument might be made that they need compassion most of all. That has been a matter of open debate since before your master walked this world.”
“My master?”
“I didn’t always live behind this barrier. I know of Fate’s Razor. I even met him once. I can see his influence in you. As for the horde, yes, I could destroy them.”
“Then, why don’t you?”
“Because it wouldn’t help. New evils would rise in their place to restore the balance. Suffering is a part of life. For suffering to exist, evil must exist. Except, those new evils would rise all over the world to cause havoc, chaos, and death. Here, they are contained.”
Sen hated that answer. He didn’t hate it because it was a bad answer. Assuming the monk was right, keeping the horde in place was likely the most responsible thing to do. He hated the answer because it meant that he would get no more help leaving the ruins than he had gotten coming into them. He didn’t relish the fight he expected was waiting for him. He was just glad that he’d taken the trouble to set up that second formation. He didn’t imagine it would work quite as well since the horde had seen something like it once already, but the horde didn’t seem to be made up of mental powerhouses. Even if the formation just drew some of them away, it would make life easier. Sen felt another question forming deep down in his mind, but it never got a chance to fully spring to life. The monk perked up in his seat and smiled at Sen.
“It seems that one of your companions is arriving.”
Sen followed the monk back out to the steps where they waited. After a few minutes, reality seemed to unwind like the threads of a garment coming undone. A figure stepped through the hole in reality. Part of Sen watched as reality rewove itself like the hole had never been there. The rest of his attention was on the pitch-black humanoid figure glaring at him. Sen was immediately put in mind of the spider queens, but this creature was decidedly male. Sen wondered if this was the spider that had been following him around. The figure pointed at Sen.
“This is your fault.”
Before Sen could say anything, another hole in reality appeared, ringed in a phosphorescent glow. Sen took a step back as Misty Peak flew through the hole while hurling profanities at some unseen attacker. That was a bit startling, but the part that snagged Sen's attention was that the fox woman was on fire. Sen summoned a heavy blanket and activated his qinggong technique. He arrived just a second after Misty Peak came to a stop face down on the ground. He threw the blanket over her and started patting at her to try to extinguish the flames.
“Lower!” she shouted.
Sen did as he was told and then stopped when he realized where his hands were. He turned his head to give the fox a look. She directed a huge and wholly unapologetic smile his way.
“Okay,” she said, “now squeeze.”
Sen closed his eyes. So, he thought, it’s going to be one of those days.