“You said you wanted the responsible persons found and didn’t care about the methods or the cost,” said Lo Meifeng. “Now that you’ve had a little time to sleep on it, does that still hold true?”
Sen’s only answer was to drop a bag full of gold onto the table between them. Lo Meifeng nodded and stored the bag in her own storage ring. After that, a steady stream of people that a blind man could recognize as dangerous came and went through the manor. However, none stayed for longer than it took to have a brief, private meeting with Lo Meifeng. They all left looking highly motivated. Sen didn’t ask who they were or what orders she gave them. For once, the only thing Sen cared about was results. He did spend a lot of time in the courtyard, glaring at the spot where the explosion had happened. It had taken a lot of conversation with the survivors to piece together an incomplete idea of what had happened.
Someone had brought in a load of what was supposed to be food. They even had a talisman to let them get through the gate. That was enough to make Sen gnash his teeth. That was such an obvious flaw in the defenses. The talismans weren’t personal. A problem Sen realized he would need to overcome, although not until he could get his anger under wraps again. Still, the use of one of his own talismans undoubtedly meant that the body of someone who used to work for him was out there somewhere. Probably dumped or buried outside of the city walls, never to be found. One more body to add to the butcher’s bill, fumed Sen. There was a headcount going on to see who was missing. They had a fairly good idea of who had died in the courtyard, but a lot of these people were still strangers to each other or had been brought on recently. It was a frustrating possibility that he’d never know who had died with any certainty, which would make it impossible to see to the needs of their families.
The explosion itself had vexed Sen to no end. He couldn’t comprehend how such a thing could have been accomplished without any use of qi. It was Long Jia Wei who had finally solved that mystery for him after the man found Sen glaring at the scorched, damaged stones in the courtyard.
“It’s a kind of mortal alchemy,” said Long Jia Wei. “My sect… My former sect taught us about it. A tool to use in times when we didn’t want to make it obvious cultivators were involved. It’s a combination of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter. It’s a crude but effective way to cause an explosion.”
Sen frowned as he thought about it. Auntie Caihong had taught him a bit about those kinds of ingredients, but her focus was healing and poisons. Not surprisingly, those had become his own areas of real expertise, even if he was much more interested in healing than in poisons. Applying what he did know about those ingredients, he could see how that combination would produce such results. He nodded.
“I would like you to procure those ingredients for me,” said Sen.
“As you wish, Lord Lu,” said Long Jia Wei. “May I ask why?”
“I want the people who did this to personally experience the effects,” said Sen, his face going hard. “Not all at once. In small doses. One limb at a time, perhaps. I wish to repay their action in kind. However, I need to understand what I’m dealing with to make that happen.”
Long Jia Wei went very still for a moment, and Sen found the man’s expression all but inscrutable. Then, he offered Sen a deep bow.
“You are a frighteningly uncompromising man, Lord Lu. I sincerely hope that you never find a reason to turn your anger on me.”
“Continue to perform your duties diligently, and I’ll never have a reason to turn my anger on you,” answered Sen.
It was a compliment and a warning. Sen knew he wasn’t usually that subtle, but he thought that Long Jia Wei was smart enough to glean the proper meanings from it.
“As you say. If you’ll excuse me, Lord Lu. It seems that I have purchases to make.”
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Sen waved a hand at the man. There was no reason to make him stand around while Sen brooded over things he couldn’t change. For that matter, Sen couldn’t really afford to waste his time brooding. There was still work to do. It was work that he wanted to put off but it wouldn’t wait. Doing his best to steel his mind, he went back into the manor. The servants he crossed paths with, people who had once looked at him with fear, now stared at him with deep respect, some of it bordering on reverence. He hated that expression. It was so inappropriate, but it wasn’t like he could order them to stop looking at him that way. Well, I guess I could order them, but I doubt it would do any good, thought Sen. So, as Falling Leaf had advised him, he just strove to live with it.
He made his way to a set of rooms that had been set aside for a specific group of the wounded. Most of the people with minor injuries had been healed, physically anyway, and allowed to leave. The most injured, the ones who needed more time or more direct attention from him, had been put into these rooms. That included the ones he had experimented on to try to restore their missing limbs. Looking back, he wished he’d gotten their permission to do it. Not that any of them had been in any condition to agree to something that extreme. Most of them hadn’t even been conscious, which was probably a minor blessing. Still, he felt ill at ease about it. Like he’d been using them somehow.
It hadn’t been his intention to use them. He hadn’t gone looking for people to experiment on. He could have found those people in just about any town or village in the nation. Manual labor was both common and dangerous. People got injured. In some cases, amputations happened. Even after he’d thought it was possible to regrow someone’s limbs, he’d hesitated. What if he was wrong? How much worse would it be to offer that kind of hope and discover he’d overestimated himself? With the people who’d been injured by the explosion, he’d just reacted to the situation and done his best to help. A good intention, certainly, but Sen wasn’t sure how much intentions counted in situations like this. He didn’t think any of them would have rejected the possibility of being restored, but he didn’t know that. The lack of knowledge ate at him, and it wasn’t like he could take it back now. At least, he couldn’t take it back without doing some truly gruesome things.
The thing that let him sleep was that the experiments had, as near as he could tell, worked. Even so, he’d kept those people separated so he could keep track of their recovery. He hadn’t been certain that those new limbs, hands, feet, and eyes would work properly. The body was a horribly complicated thing. The more Sen learned about it, the more complicated it became. He’d relied far more on qi to fill in the gaps in his understanding than he felt comfortable with. He’d been haunted by the idea that he’d regrown limbs that people wouldn’t be able to use. That they’d just dangle, limp, like pieces of dead wood that they’d have to drag around for the rest of their lives. It would have been like some kind of sick parody of wholeness. If that had happened, Sen might never have been able to stop thinking of himself as some kind of monster.
That hadn’t happened, though, which wasn’t to say that it had been entirely successful. At least, he couldn’t say it was entirely successful yet. Those new limbs weren’t exactly the same as the old ones. The muscles were weak. Fingers lacked dexterity. The one exception was the young man who had his eyes restored. He had claimed the new ones worked better than the old ones ever had, even if he couldn’t bear bright lights yet. So, Sen went from room to room, asking questions, looking at the limbs, and examining everyone with his qi and spiritual sense. He fixed a smile in place and kept it there until his face hurt. He had to because that look of reverence he saw in the faces of the servants was full-blown worship on the faces of these people. They were zealots. Converts to a religion that hadn’t existed a few days before, and they had made him the central figure in that religion.
That, more than anything else, convinced him that he needed to leave the capital as soon as he’d wrapped up this explosion business. His continued presence would only be a distraction. When he’d finished speaking with the last person, he walked out into the hall and stopped dead. All of the people he’d seen were waiting, many of them leaning on the people next to them to stay upright. The person he’d just seen staggered out into the hall on a leg that wasn’t ready to support her. She walked over to the rest of them. They all lowered themselves to the floor and kowtowed to him. Sen was about to tell them all to stop it, but they beat him to the punch. As one, they did as Pan Shiji had done and swore their lives to him personally. Sen just stared at them as a brief divine glow surrounded them all for a moment before fading from view. He hadn’t planned for this, and his mind proved supremely unhelpful in navigating the situation. All Sen could think was, what in the thousand hells am I supposed to do now?