Sen was still distracted when the woman came into the room, so it took him a little while to realize two things. One, he knew her. Two, something was wrong with her. She looked sick. She was pale but not the intentional paleness that many women seemed to strive for. This was the kind of paleness that he’d only seen in people who had been bedridden for a time. There was a sheen of sweat on her face. It even looked as though she’d chewed her lip bloody not too long before. Even if he’d managed to miss all of that, he couldn’t miss the fact that her hands were trembling violently. He’d seen reactions like that before, but only in people who were deathly afraid of something. He sighed internally. It was usually him that they were afraid of but that didn’t make any sense here. As far as his memory served, he’d only met this woman a few times and those meetings had been polite enough. Did I do something scary in front of her? Nothing sprang to mind. He searched those memories and came up with a name.
“Tiu Li-Mei,” said Sen with a little nod.
He’d thought that showing her that he had at least some vague memory of her might help to calm the woman down. The exact opposite thing happened. Her eyes went wide and, if anything, her hands started to shake even more. Stranger still, every time he moved one of his hands, her eyes fixated on the hand. It was like she expected him to do something terrible to her with them. He almost said something but feared that would only make this—whatever this was—even worse. With no other obvious options, he just lifted an eyebrow at her and waited. And waited. He put his eyebrow back down since it was clear that she wasn’t seeing that silent prompt. He gave it most of a minute before he rolled his eyes and, in a louder voice than would normally be necessary, asked a question.
“Can I help you?”
“What?!” Tiu Li-Mei almost screamed.
“I asked if there’s something I can do for you. Or do you plan to simply stand there all day? Honestly, I don’t care if you do. I’d just like to know so I can plan appropriately.”
The look of fear partially gave way to confusion, and then to something that vaguely resembled embarrassment, although it also sort of resembled being nauseated. Sen wasn’t confident enough to venture a firm guess about which it was. Tiu Li-Mei gathered herself and stared at a point somewhere on the wall behind his head.
“The king sent me to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead,” said Sen.
He was relieved to finally be getting to the point of this… He hesitated to call it a meeting. It was a bit too odd for that. Encounter, maybe? Yes, thought Sen, I’m glad to be getting to the point of this encounter.
“Are you almost finished?” asked Tiu Li-Mei.
Sen needed to give that question a proper amount of consideration. Practically speaking, after what he’d learned from the Wu patriarch, the answer was no. He, or his people, weren’t done yet. Jing told me to think like a politician, thought Sen. This is as good an opportunity as any. For political purposes, all that mattered was what he did in a public or semi-public fashion. If, sometime in the future, he had to kill some more people, that could be done quietly. So, the question was really about whether he was done making examples yet. That answer was mostly straightforward.
“Almost,” said Sen. “I should be done within the week. And I won’t be visiting any more noble houses or depriving any more of their family members of life.”
“I will relay the message,” said Tiu Li-Mei.
She gave something that might have been a bow or might have been some manner of back spasm and lurched toward the door. He thought he could probably live with the mystery if he didn’t ask, but it would bother him. He had enough things bothering him already.
“Stop,” said Sen.
The woman crashed to a halt with her hand ready to yank open the door.
“Yes, Lord Lu,” she choked out.
“You’re afraid of me,” said Sen.
“Everyone is afraid of you,” she whispered.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
“No, they really aren’t. People are afraid of Judgment’s Gale, the fearsome cultivator who does whatever it is that people’s imaginations tell them he does. This is different. You’re afraid of me, Lu Sen, personally, and I don’t know why. I don’t believe I’ve ever harmed you or threatened you. So, if there’s something you want to say to me, this is probably your best chance. I’ll guarantee your safety. I’ll even take a vow to the heavens to hold no grudges and take no actions against you for anything you say to me in this room.”
She laughed then. There was something ugly and hopeless in that laughter.
“Safety,” she said, almost snarling the word like it was a curse. “A vow? Like that matters at all. Who could possibly be safe from someone like you?”
The sentiment wasn’t really new to Sen, but the pure vitriol in her words did catch him off guard. He honestly could not think of anything he might have done to provoke this response from this person. There were plenty of people in the world who would be perfectly justified in reacting this way to him, but she wasn’t one of them.
“Someone like me?”
She turned away from the door to look at him. There was a haunted, lifeless look in her eyes.
“Yes. Someone like you. The kind of person who can just decide what other people feel. If you don’t like what I have to say, there’s nothing to stop you from just changing my mind for me, is there? You wouldn’t even be harming me.”
Sen was so stunned by the accusation, and the pure impossibility of what she was saying, that he said nothing. Well, he supposed it wasn’t entirely impossible. He could adjust some physical processes that might make someone calmer or more prone to anger, but he couldn’t just change the way people felt. Not the way they felt about important things. He only realized later that he must have looked as stunned as he felt.
“Why so surprised? It’s not like you were subtle about it!”
“What are you even talking about? I can’t do what you’re saying I can—” Sen trailed off.
A memory drifted to the surface. Her coming out of Jing’s office looking downright panicked. He had done something to her then, hadn’t he? But it had just been something to calm her down. He was certain of it. He’d said something to her.
“Peace,” he muttered, mostly to himself.
Sen doubted that Tiu Li-Mei would have reacted more if he’d leapt out of his chair, roared like a beast, and charged at her. She lurched backward and threw out her hands in front of her like she meant to fend off a blow.
“No!” she screamed.
The pair remained frozen like that for a second or two before she lowered her hands enough to stare hatefully at Sen. Sen just looked at her as though she’d lost her mind. He thought that she might attack him with her bare hands. He was still mostly in the dark about why, though.
“How dare you!” she said through clenched teeth.
Before she could do anything reckless, Sen said, “I need you to explain this to me. I can see that you’re angry, but you haven’t told me why you’re angry.”
She kept glaring at him, but then she laughed again.
“Of course, you don’t understand. Why would you? A cultivator. A man. Why am I angry? Because you didn’t have the right! It wasn’t for you to decide how I should feel about anything! I bet that never even crossed your mind, did it?”
Sen didn’t remember the incident well enough to know for sure what was going through his mind at the time, but he doubted such a thing had crossed his mind. It had just been something he saw as a problem. So, he did something to fix it. He likely hadn’t even thought about whether or not he should do it. He could do it, and it would help, or he had imagined it would help, so he’d done it. He hadn’t thought about it once since then, but it was painfully obvious that the same did not hold true for Tiu Li-Mei. And she was right. He had overstepped. Wildly overstepped. A fact that would have been apparent if he’d been thinking more about her and less about what he could do. Since he’d given someone else a big speech about how selfish their thinking was recently, he didn’t feel like he had much in the way of a defense. Nor did he believe that saying something like, “I just didn’t think about it,” was going to hold much weight. Nor should it, he told himself.
“Don’t bother answering,” she said. “It’s obvious from that look on your face that you didn’t. The worst part of the whole thing is that someone like you will never know what it’s like to feel that helpless. To feel like you can’t trust what’s in your own heart, and that it doesn’t matter because some cultivator can just come along and change it.”
“They can’t,” he told her. “Cultivators can’t change how you feel the way you’re saying they can. I didn’t really change how you felt. I changed how some things were happening in your body. Things related to fear and panic. The details don’t matter. The point is that I can’t just make you feel however I want you to feel. I can’t make you hate, love, or find something funny. I can’t make you want to be loyal or desire to betray. So, if that’s your fear, you can safely set it aside. Your emotions are safe from me.”
“You can’t?” she asked, as suspicion and hope battled for dominance in her eyes.
“I can’t. I vow to the heavens that everything I just told you is true to the best of my knowledge.”
Sen felt the touch of divine qi on him. It was, thankfully, different than when it was poured into him against his will. He wasn’t sure exactly what he imagined it would feel like, but it ultimately didn’t feel like anything. Maybe it was because the vow didn’t put any demands on him. He wasn’t vowing to do anything in the future, but rather affirming that what he had already said wasn’t deceit. When the dim glow faded from around him, Sen stood.
“As for the rest,” he said, offering her a deep bow, “I have wronged you, Tiu Li-Mei. I acted without thought. For that, I offer you my deepest apologies.”