Sen stepped out of Fu Ruolan’s home with a mildly perplexed expression on his face. It turned out that what came next was not even remotely what he thought would come next. Sen had fully expected the woman to go into a full-blown explanation of the technique. Instead, she had instructed him to do something he thought was absurdly simple. It was something that he’d figured out how to do years before.
“I’ll need you to practice isolating the shadow qi in your core,” she said. “It’s an essential step—”
“Done,” said Sen, having carried out the order.
Fu Ruolan’s face scrunched up in confusion. “What’s done?”
“I isolated the shadow qi in my core.”
“Just like that?” asked the nascent soul cultivator.
Sen got the distinct impression that Fu Ruolan was aggravated with him, although he couldn’t quite imagine why.
“Um, yes.”
Fu Ruolan closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. Then, she opened them and gave Sen a very strained-looking smile.
“Has anyone ever told you how utterly ridiculous you are?”
It was Sen’s turn to close his eyes and take a couple of breaths.
“It might have come up once or twice,” he answered.
“Well, you should sleep soundly in the knowledge that it’s still true.”
“Terrific,” said Sen in an extra-dry tone. “So, what’s next?”
“Now, you go away from me for a couple of weeks and play with shadow qi. Figure out what it can really do. Something I must assume you haven’t bothered with given what I’ve seen and the stories about you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Fire and lightning, isn’t it? Those are your preferred tools. No one ever talks about the things you do with shadows.”
“Just because they don’t talk about it, that doesn’t mean it never happens.”
“Alright,” said Fu Ruolan. “When did you last use shadow qi in a battle?”
“It’s been,” Sen paused and thought hard, “a while.”
“And did you use it to do anything but blanket the area in darkness?”
“I have used it to do other things,” hedged Sen.
“Recently?”
“No,” he admitted.
“It’s hard to estimate these things with certainty, but shadow is possibly your strongest affinity. Yet, as near as I can tell, you don’t even bother with it. I blame Feng Ming and Kho Jaw-Long for that. You got most of your combat training from them, didn’t you?”
“I did,” said Sen, feeling protectively defensive about his teachers. “But what does that have to do with it?”
“They both favor direct confrontation. Victory through pure, overwhelming strength. That’s fine if you can back it up, which they can,” she said before giving Sen an appraising look. “Granted, it seems you can as well, most of the time, but it’s foolish to leave such a useful tool untrained. Shadow qi gives you more options. I’ve never had a moment where I believed that having more options for ending my enemies was a bad thing.”
Sen was hard-pressed to disagree with her without sounding like a complete fool. In his experience, victory was the goal. Any path he could stomach that would get him there was a good path. Plus, she had a point. He’d always known he had a strong shadow affinity. He’d even used it pretty regularly in the early days away from the mountain. Hells, Auntie Caihong had even made him that pill that seemed to enhance that affinity in some way. That he had neglected it in recent years was an oversight on his part. Any affinity could be a very useful tool in the right circumstances, but only if you knew what it could do.
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On the other hand, he had been rather busy these last few years with trying to escape demonic cultivators and not die. He hadn’t been overwhelmed with time to explore affinities that didn’t seem to contribute to his immediate survival. Fire, lightning, and earth had become his go-to options because they did just that. Now, though, he did have the time. More importantly, he was being outright told to take that time. To fight against that because she had made a slightly disparaging but ultimately accurate observation about his other teachers would be… Well, it would just be stupid on his part. A stupidity born of ego and misplaced loyalty. He had learned a great deal from Master Feng and Uncle Kho. Yet, their way wasn’t the only way or even the best way in every situation.
He expected that they would probably agree that he shouldn’t ignore a practical tool. The fact that they had overlooked it probably had more to do with them trying to cram as much as they could teach him into his mind in the time they had. Looking back on it, he wished he had been less impatient. He wished he had been much less impatient. Given how much he had learned, how much more could he have learned if he had stayed for another five years or ten years? Part of him thought that he could go back, but it wouldn’t be the same. He wasn’t the same as he had been. They would welcome him with open arms, no doubt, and teach him if he asked them to. However, Sen intuitively understood that some window of opportunity had closed when he left the mountain. It took Fu Ruolan making an impatient noise to bring Sen out of his ruminations.
Sen offered Fu Ruolan a bow. “As you say.”
She had gestured toward the door, and Sen took his cue to leave. Once he was outside, though, he found himself a bit at loose ends. He understood, in general, what she expected him to do. It was the details that eluded him. He wondered if he had become a little narrow of vision in his relentless pursuit of survival. He didn’t think that his younger self would have found this task difficult to understand. Now that he thought about it, his younger self probably would have reveled in the freedom of the opportunity. He would have let his imagination run wild with possibilities. I need to recapture a bit of that mindset, he thought.
It was sobering to realize that he had sacrificed some piece of himself in the drive to live. He’d done it and not even realized it. He wasn’t even certain what it was, just that it was gone or so deeply buried that he was having a very hard time finding it again. He supposed some of that was down to having done a lot of difficult living in a relatively short period of time. He’d made a lot of hard choices in that time. So much of what had seemed so bright and wondrous about the world had lost its shine for him. Instead, Sen had started simplifying the world around him to make it easier to deal with. He’d started dividing everything into opposing camps. Things that help me, and things that don’t. People I trust, and people I don’t.
As with so many things, he’d taken it too far. The world was more complicated than that. Someone who wasn’t a trusted friend needn’t be an enemy. Just because something didn’t have immediate survival value didn’t make it worthless. He could understand how he’d gotten there. That mindset had even been necessary for him when everything was on the line and absolutely every second counted, but was everything on the line anymore? Sen still needed to complete the Five-Fold Body Transformation, but that was a perfectly achievable goal now. He wasn’t being actively hunted by anyone that he knew about. In fact, his only real obligation was to Fu Ruolan. It hit him all at once that he was, for all intents and purposes, safe. It was okay to relax, even if it was only a little bit.
Sure, there were probably people out there still trying to work out a way to use him or his reputation to their advantage. But he didn’t really care about those people. He had passed through worse trials than telling people no. Beyond that, at the pace he was advancing, he would soon grow beyond the reach of almost anyone to force him into doing what they wanted. The people he cared about were largely beyond reach or swiftly growing powerful enough that it would take true powerhouses to threaten them. It was true. It was actually true. He wasn’t in any real danger anymore. He had simply been in the crucible for so long that he hadn’t recognized it when he came out the other side. He hadn’t come out unscathed. Far from it. Yet, he had come through it. As Sen walked away from Fu Ruolan’s home, he started to laugh. If that laugh sounded a little manic or hysterical, he was alright with it.
Sen choked off that laughter as he approached the little grove of trees where he’d left Liu Ai sleeping. She’d apparently grown bored with her nap because he could hear her giggling. Sen came to an abrupt stop at what he saw. It seemed that Glimmer of Night had created a large, flat, tightly woven web of qi between several trees. Liu Ai was jumping up and down on the web. It seemed to flex slightly and rebound to send the girl higher into the air than it ought to. If the web hadn’t been so big that the girl could only fall off of it if she tried, Sen might have been concerned. Plus, the spider was nearby, attentively watching the girl with his reflective black eyes. Again, it might have concerned Sen if the spider hadn’t already proven several times that he wasn’t going to hurt the child.
The glee on Liu Ai’s face was uncomplicated. Even if Sen knew that there would be more nightmares to come, and a shadow that would hang over the girl for a time, there was none of that now. All that existed for her was the simple joy of jumping up and down on that absurd web. She didn’t need anything else in that moment. It was enough to be alive and having that experience, to simply be, and have it fill her world with happiness. Sen eventually walked over to Glimmer of Night, and they stood side by side, a pair of deadly sentinels to keep the uncaring world at bay for however long a little girl wanted to jump and laugh.