When Laughing River woke him up, Sen didn’t speak. He just forced himself to stand with gritted teeth holding back the pain. He stumbled to the fireplace, dropped down in front of it, and went to work. He wouldn’t call what he did anything remotely like alchemy. That would have implied a lot more conscious thought than he had available to give to the process. He relied almost entirely on his instincts and his understanding of what was wrong with him to guide what he made. Even as he worked, he could hear the other muttering to each other in concern over what he was doing or the things he was adding to his reliable little pot. He let those words wash over him without touching him. He didn’t care that they didn’t understand or didn’t approve. That was a them problem.
He pulled things from his storage ring that might have made even Auntie Caihong lift an eyebrow, and he added them in ratios that would have made any other alchemist go pale in the face. He didn’t care about that either. He could feel that devilish qi inside of him, searching for a way in, searching for a way to end him. Caution and half-measures weren’t going to get the job done. And if he had to hurt himself as badly as he had hurt with that first cleansing pill, then so be it. Pain was nothing new. There were even certain truths to be found in pain. Pain could show you who you really were and what really mattered to you if you let it. In the deepest pits of agony, the things you clung to were the things that mattered. They were the things that defined you. Granted, only madmen intentionally sought enlightenment through pain. But if it had found you anyway, it only made sense to learn from it.
Sen found himself in what almost felt like a conversation with the elixir he was crafting. Him telling it what he needed it to do, and it telling him what it needed from him to do it. It wasn’t anything so explicit as words, the elixir wasn’t alive. At least, Sen didn’t think it was. Not quite. But he could tell where things wouldn’t work the way he wanted them to work without adjustment. He was experienced enough to know what adjustments could work to remedy the problem. And, throughout it all, he was slowly infusing the elixir with divine qi. That was the spear that would drive the devilish qi from his body. The rest would support that effort and mend his body. It would just happen the hard way.
When the elixir was finally ready, he poured the end result through a cheesecloth and into a glass vial. It blazed so brightly that it looked like he’d captured a star in a bottle. Pushing himself back to his feet, he started back toward the room he’d been in. It was Li Yi Nuo who broke the tense silence that fallen over the others as he’d gotten closer and closer to finished.
“Are you insane?” she almost shouted at him. “You can’t drink that. No one should drink that! It will kill you.”
Sen stopped and turned enough that he could look at her. He thought maybe he should ignore what she was saying, but he couldn’t think of why. He hurt too much to worry about anyone’s feelings, and letting this woman live had used up whatever kindness he was willing to expend on her. His lung was still damaged from the spear and the devilish qi, so his words came out as a grim rasp.
“Then, I expect you’ll be happy. Mission accomplished, right?”
The sect woman faltered at those words. The foxes both had grim looks on their faces but elected to say nothing. The spider, either indifferent or uncaring about the mood of the room, walked over to Sen. It looked down at the vial for several seconds before it looked at him.
“The new one is right. That could kill you.”
“So can being alive and unlucky,” muttered Sen in that same rasp.
The spider thought that over for a second before he nodded. “True.”
Seemingly satisfied that he’d said all he needed to, Glimmer of Night went back over to the others. Sen counted to five in his head to see if anyone else wanted to say things at him. When no one volunteered, he went into the room, closed the door behind him, and sealed it with the trickle of earth qi he could manage. That was followed by him dropping to his knees as nausea gripped him and white-hot shocks of torturous agony lanced out from his chest wound. He lost track of time for a while as he tried not to pass out from the experience of that fresh hell. When the full-body shakes finally subsided, Sen slowly undressed. He wasn’t sure exactly what the elixir was going to do to him, but he expected that it wasn’t going to be pretty. He’d ruined enough clothes on this little expedition as it was. No need to add to that pile of things to burn. Not that he cared about the clothes themselves, but it wasn’t like there was anywhere to replace them this deep into the wilds.
Stolen novel; please report.
In the back of his head, Sen reminded himself, again, to just invest in a few dozen sets of robes that he could keep in one of his storage rings. Maybe see if he could get some like the ones Auntie Caihong had gotten made for him. Those had held up incredibly well. Sen shook his head as he realized that his mind was wandering. He supposed that part of him was trying to procrastinate about drinking the elixir. It was always harder to do when you knew something was going to be bad. Sen both knew it was going to be bad, and he even knew why it was going to be bad. He felt like that knowing why part ought to make it easier, but it didn’t. Bracing himself for what was to come, Sen got as comfortable as he could on the stone floor. He held the shining vial up and looked at it.
“Yeah. This is going to hurt,” he said to no one or maybe the universe at large.
Before he could lose his nerve, he removed the cap and poured the elixir into his mouth. He knew it would take a few seconds before it reached his stomach and those seconds were both a short eternity and not nearly long enough. When it did reach his stomach, though, he knew immediately. A volcano of molten suffering ignited in his stomach and almost instantly moved over to his dantian and into his channels. It took a while for Sen to even realize that his body had arched into a bow and that he was making sounds that would have compelled him to put a demon out of its misery in an act of pure compassion. The longer it went, the worse it got. Impurities weren’t being purged from his body through his pores. They were being burned out of him anywhere they were found.
The worst was that wound in his chest as the elixir attacked the devilish qi. The feeling of heat in and around that wound grew and grew and grew until he was certain that his heart would be seared into coals and his ribs would melt. There was no escape from that pain, no respite, and part of him knew that the only thing keeping him tethered to life was his own will. All he had to do was let the mere thought that he wanted to die cross his mind and death would come with the sweet kiss of nothingness. The torment would finally, mercifully end. However, he did not let that traitorous thought slip through. He clung to life with a tenacity that bordered on lunacy. In one clenched fist, he held the thought of Grandmother Lu, the family that had chosen him, and how it would hurt her to know he had died so far from friends and family. In the other, he clung to the thought of Falling Leaf. The person he would never abandon for any reason, let alone for something so trivial and mundane as pain.
They were the rocks he clung to, and he would live to repay their kindnesses. He would live no matter what. Agony would pass. His body would heal. He simply needed to endure. If there was one thing that Sen had learned how to do in his life, he had learned how to do that. He drew on those long winters on the streets when it would have been so much easier to simply give up and die. He drew on those years he spent training on the mountain. Making himself get up and put in the hours of practice in spite of exhaustion, in spite of injury, and in spite of himself. He was the disciple of Fate’s Razor. He was the student of Ma Caihong and Kho Jaw-Long. He would not disappoint them. He would not fail this test. He was Judgment’s Gale, and he would outlast this pain if he had the break the world to do it.
While part of him had feared that the pain might never end, it did. His mind told him that it had lasted, well, forever, but it did end. He slumped down onto the floor. His groggy mind tried to understand that. Was I floating? He didn’t know and lacked the ambition to care. Sen had never felt so utterly hollowed out by anything in his entire life. He wanted to sleep for a year, eat ten thousand meals, and drink himself into a blind stupor all at the same. Instead, he made himself access his storage ring. An elixir dropped into his hand. It wasn’t anything special. He’d only made it as a change of pace. It was just a basic restorative. Something to help recharge the body and infuse a little qi into the dantian. He’d never imagined he’d ever need such a thing, but here he was. It took a superhuman effort of will to lift that stone vial to his lips and drink the elixir. Once that was done, though, he could finally let himself sleep. It was the sound of voices that roused him out of that blessed rest.
“I still can’t believe he survived drinking that bottle of death,” said Misty Peak.
“Few could have,” murmured Laughing River. “Do you see now why I treated him cautiously and respectfully?”
“Respectfully?” asked Misty Peak with a touch of amusement in her voice.
“Well, respectfully for us, at any rate.”
“Fair,” said Misty Peak. “I saw why outside those ruins. That man is terrifying. He didn’t even hesitate to fight that devil. Who does that?”
“He does, apparently,” said Laughing River. “And he’s still in the core formation stage. Imagine what he’ll be like when he reaches the nascent soul stage.”
“I shudder to imagine. Still, I can see how somehow who had Feng Ming and Kho Jaw-Long as teachers might end up acting that way in battle. Taking that elixir, though? He made it. He had to know what it was going to be like.”
“I’m sure he did. I think there’s a lesson you should take away from all of this. Any time you let yourself imagine he’s weak, remember this moment. Remember, that man is carved from stone.”
Growing tired of the conversation about him, Sen chimed in with, “That man is awake.”