Shen Mingxia had learned a few things over the last week or so. One of the things she’d learned was about herself. Specifically, she’d learned about her terrifying ignorance of what it meant to travel through the kingdom. Having spent years traveling with Wu Meng Yao, she thought she understood the dangers and how to deal with them. That had been utterly false. She had little more than a functional understanding of the dangers one found when traveling strictly on the roads. That was something that Judgment’s Gale seemingly found tedious and didn’t bother with most of the time. Hand-in-hand with that knowledge came a stark realization that she had drastically, hilariously underestimated the kind of power that Lu Sen wielded. Even more shocking was the raw strength that the spider wielded. The pair of them flew over the wilds on qi platforms that she couldn’t have made if her life depended on it, and they treated it like it was nothing. And it wasn’t just for short bursts. They carried on with that all day long. On top of that, Sen carried her with him.
Of course, she came to see that this seemingly wasteful use of qi really was nothing to them when threats inevitably arose. At one point, an entire flock of razor sparrows had risen from the trees to assault them. Sen had vaporized the entire flock using one lightning technique. The man hadn’t even bothered to slow the qi platform. One afternoon when Sen decided he wanted a hot meal, their makeshift camp was swarmed with furred, scorpion-like creatures that ranged from a foot long to three feet long. She had shot to her feet, drawn her sword, and cycled her qi in preparation for battle. Not that she thought she could handle more than two or three of the things. That was when she noticed that Sen hadn’t bothered to turn his attention from the meal he was cooking. The spider simply looked up from a scroll he was reading, and Shen Mingxia felt a massive burst of qi. Suddenly, every one of the nightmarish creatures was tangled in a qi web and desperately trying to escape. Something else happened then, something she didn’t understand, and the creatures were reduced to empty husks that would crumble to dust at the slightest disturbance.
When they did travel on the road or, she corrected herself, over it, there were three things that Judgment’s Gale would always stop for. If they saw ox-drawn carts, they would always stop so Sen could pet the oxen and chat with the cart owners. She didn’t quite know what to make of that, but the oxen always seemed very enthusiastic, and Sen usually bought fresh food that he would share. So, she didn’t make a fuss about it. The next thing he would always stop for were people who looked sick or injured. He handed out or made elixirs for them with barely a question and refused all rewards, save perhaps a cup of tea. She had pondered that long and hard, knowing full well that he could have sold those elixirs for a small fortune. Unable to find a suitable answer, she had finally asked.
“Why do you always stop for them? The ill and the injured, I mean.”
“You wouldn’t do the same?” he’d asked in a neutral tone.
“I wouldn’t know what to do,” she’d answered. “I wouldn’t know what was safe.”
He’d frowned at that but ultimately nodded.
“That’s always a risk. I do know what I’m doing, and I could still accidentally kill one of those people because I missed something. But you wanted to know why I do it,” he said. “Because no one else will. Because being injured or sick on the road is, well, it’s not a guaranteed death sentence, but it’s close to one. Just because they’re smart enough not to attack us, it doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of spirit beasts near the road that would attack an injured mortal. They are easy prey.”
Shen Mingxia frowned. “So, you do it because you can?”
Sen shot her a bright smile. “See. You do understand.”
“I thought you didn’t want people spreading stories about you.”
“I don’t mind these stories. They add mystery and maybe a tiny bit of wonder. They don’t add to the terror.”
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Of course, she also got to see that terror up close and personal as well. The final thing he would always stop for was bandits. And for all the compassion he might have shown injured mortals, he was equally merciless with bandits. He didn’t speak. He didn’t bargain. He simply killed them to the last man. It was a cold, efficient sort of killing. He didn’t draw it out or try to make them suffer. One moment they were all alive, and the next they were all dead. While Shen Mingxia would never mourn the death of bandits, she found it an oddly mundane task for someone with his power to do. They could have simply reported the men to the nearest sects. When she said as much to him, she hadn’t been able to identify the look he’d given her. She only knew it had made her feel very cold inside.
“And what do you imagine they would do about it?” he asked.
“They’d hunt them down,” she’d answered in confusion.
“No,” he answered, giving her a pitying look. “They’d send messages to the nearby towns and villages and offer to hunt them down for a price. You’ve seen these towns and villages. Do you really think these farmers can afford those kinds of services?”
“I suppose not,” she said, thinking of the poverty she’d seen so many times.
“It was within my power to act, and those bandits were within my reach. So, I dealt with it.”
“Is that why we travel off the roads so often? To look for bandits hiding in the wilds?”
He’d snorted out a laugh at that. “Not at all. We’re just avoiding all the cultivators who are out here looking for me.”
That revelation had brought her up short. She hadn’t sensed any other cultivators, but she supposed that Lu Sen’s ability to do that likely exceeded her own by orders of magnitude. Still, she’d never considered that anyone might be looking for them, let alone other cultivators. She also couldn’t think of very many reasons why cultivators would be looking for them. At least, she couldn’t think of many that didn’t end in violence.
“Why are they out here?” she asked.
Sen shrugged at her. “My whereabouts are known, at least in general terms. While it’s more trouble than it's worth to go that far just to pick a fight for most people, we’re getting relatively close to the capital. If some halfwit at the palace let it slip I was coming, which seems like a near certainty, it wouldn’t take much thinking to work out which road I’d take to get there. As for the specific reasons why, I expect some of them are carrying messages for me. I’m on amicable enough terms with a few sect leaders in the capital. They’d have reasons to want to get messages to me. Some of them are no doubt out here to try to delay me. If I show up late, it could drive a wedge between me and the king. The rest are out here to kill me.”
The utter calm with which he uttered that last sentence was positively chilling. He just took it for granted that there were cultivators out there looking to kill him. Worse, he was no more concerned about it than he would be about running some errands. Shen Mingxia knew that she wouldn’t have handled that news with nearly that much equanimity.
“So, rather than try to figure out which is which, you’ll just avoid them all?”
“That is the plan,” agreed Sen. “It has the elegance of simplicity, don’t you think?”
For all that he put on a jovial air, Shen Mingxia had noted that the closer they got to the capital, the more Sen seemed to take on a melancholy air. She had intended to leave it alone. He hadn’t volunteered any information about it, which she took to mean he didn’t want to talk about it. In the end, though, curiosity won out. One night when the spider had wandered off to do something, and it was just her and Sen sitting by a fire, she let the question slip.
“Why are you so sad?” she asked.
As soon as the question was in the air, she felt like she’d made a terrible, possibly even deadly, mistake. Yet, for all that the fear blossomed inside of her, Lu Sen had just given her a mildly startled look.
“I didn’t realize it was showing,” he’d said. “The last year was nice. It was relaxing.”
She stared at him in astonishment.
“Relaxing? I don’t think you slowed down for more than ten minutes at a time.”
“Oh, I was busy, sure, but it was a good busy. I was spending time with Ai, learning, building the academy, and there was practically nobody trying to kill me. I wasn’t exactly free of the Jianghu, but I didn’t have to be constantly aware and constantly on guard. It also wasn’t going to be the death of anyone if I got distracted,” he said in a wistful voice. “I knew something that good couldn’t last. It won’t be like that in the capital. By going back there openly, I’m basically inviting myself back into the Jianghu.”
“How do you know?”
Sen got a thoughtful look. “Well, the fact that we’re about to be attacked is a pretty good sign.”
It took a second for the words to register. Sen was already on his feet, spear in hand, by the time she managed to choke out a single word.
“What?”
“Honestly,” said Sen in a tone of utter disdain, “your stealth skills are garbage. You might as well come on out and say hello to Uncle Sen before I start handing out punishments to you children.”