“It’s not?” asked Wu Gang, his brow furrowing. “That’s odd. Because lots of people called it a sect. The Judgment’s Gale Sect. The Hand of Chaos Sect. The Heavens Scouring Blade Sect. The Blue Demon Sect—”
Sen’s head shot up off the table. “What?! People are calling it the Blue Demon Sect?”
Wu Gang nodded. Sen turned a chilly gaze on Shen Mingxia. She raised her hands defensively.
“What?” she asked. “You told me not to tell you the other things people call you.”
“The Blue Demon. You didn’t feel like you should maybe lead with that?”
She shrugged. “It didn’t seem that much worse to me.”
“Blue. Demon,” said Sen in a harsh, clipped tone.
“Well, sure,” she admitted, “when you say it all angry and growly like that it sounds terrible. But if you said miracles and sunshine in that tone of voice it would sound like a death threat.”
Before Sen could organize all of the screaming he wanted to do, Wu Gang cut in.
“Well, if it isn’t a sect, what is it?”
“You explain,” said Sen to Shen Mingxia as he let his forehead thump back against the table.
Sen listened as Shen Mingxia explained that it was an academy intended primarily to train mortals in spear and sword techniques. Wu Gang listened, only interrupting once or twice to get clarification. He was quiet for a little while after Shen Mingxia finished.
“Well,” he said, sounding a little apologetic, “that may be what you think it is, but everyone else thinks it’s a sect.”
“I hate everyone so much right now,” muttered Sen, pushing up from his seat and trudging away toward his room.
“I’m sorry,” he heard Wu Gang say. “I didn’t mean to upset him.”
“He’s not angry with you,” said Shen Mingxia. “Well, he’s not specifically angry with you. As much as I hate to say it, though, the best thing that could happen tonight is for some idiot to show up looking for a fight.”
“Why?” asked Long Jia Wei.
“Because then he’d have someone to take it out on.”
As Sen shut his door, he couldn’t help but think that Shen Mingxia was right. The thing he needed most at that moment was for some arrogant young master with more pride than sense to show up and start shooting his mouth off. As soon as that thought passed through his mind, he glanced upwards and grimaced.
“You’re not going to let that happen, are you?” he asked the universe at large.
The universe didn’t deign to answer him, but Sen knew all the same.
“Seriously,” he growled. “Non-stop stupidity for the last week and now, now, you’re going to make sure they don’t find us? Right when I could actually get some practical value from having to kill someone?”
The universe again chose to remain silent. Sen sighed, walked over the to bed, and flopped face-first onto it. While the pillow muffled his words, he felt confident that the universe heard him anyway.
“You’re such a jerk, sometimes, you know that?”
***
A night of poor sleep did nothing to improve Sen’s mood. When he did manage to sleep, he found himself waking up mumbling the words Blue Demon. It wasn’t a particularly original or inventive name, but it didn’t need to be when people were tossing around a word like demon as a description of you. He shot an angry look around the room that no one had even tried to burn down around him. A little piece of him knew that he should be happy about that. That it was a good thing for the inn’s owner, who was a pleasant enough man, and someone who almost certainly didn’t deserve to have some cultivator trying to burn down his livelihood. Even so, Sen was disappointed. He desperately wanted someone to give him an excuse to do something drastic, even if he also knew it wouldn’t make him feel any better in the long run.
He'd known from the start that there was a good chance people would think his academy was a sect. It was why he’d been willing to tolerate spies there, after all. He’d just never considered the possibility that it would be such an uphill battle right from the outset. Sen had hoped that he’d be able to get ahead of things and shape the story, at least a little bit. It seemed that he’d missed any opportunity to do that. Now, he feared that his occupation was about to become explaining, over and over and over again, how he wasn’t running a sect. He cringed to imagine the number of cultivators who were at least contemplating showing up with some absurd notion that he’d take them on as students. He glanced at the window with a deep yearning for someone to crash through it with weapon in hand, spoiling for a nice, ugly battle to the death.
Instead, he heard the cheerful songs of birds announcing to the world that it was time to get up. Ai was right, he thought. Birds are dumb. He’d been pushing how much he missed her to the back of his mind, but it refused to be pushed back again. The truth was that Sen was sorely tempted to go back, fetch Ai, Falling Leaf, Auntie Caihong, and Uncle Kho, and simply leave. Go somewhere else and start over, minus fool’s errands like the academy. Sen had more than enough money to set himself and all of them up in a very, very comfortable life. He could even take up some kind of trade. With everything his cultivation-enhanced body could do, to say nothing of the fine control he could exert over that body, and the basic inability to get hurt doing most mortal trades, he could spend all of the years between now and Ai’s adulthood simply becoming a master craftsman. She would want for nothing in body or soul. It was such an enticing fantasy that he didn’t think anyone could honestly blame him for indulging in it for a few minutes.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Of course, he knew that it was only a fantasy. He had responsibilities that he couldn’t put down, such as his promise to Fu Ruolan. He also owed something to the people at the academy. Oh, it could probably limp along without him for a while, but it would inevitably collapse if he just vanished one day without a word. He didn’t have any kind of plan in place that would let them go on in his absence, not yet at any rate. And he couldn’t make a plan like that until after he’d found some more people to teach there. That meant going to the capital, or somewhere else just as likely to lead him straight into conflict and violence. Unless I just wash my hands of the whole thing, he thought. He wanted to believe he could do that but only because it would make his life easier. He knew himself well enough to know that he wouldn’t, possibly even couldn’t, make himself abandon people to whom he’d made real commitments, no matter how much it would simplify his life.
No. He’d have to accept that the world was just going to make things hard on him for a while. He’d have to do things he didn’t want to do to secure the future he wanted for Ai and everyone else around him. If that meant cutting his way through half the young masters and mistresses in the kingdom, that’s what he’d do. If that meant visiting noble houses that crossed him, burning them to the ground, and spitting in the ashes, he’d do that too. He wouldn’t make a lot of friends that way, but it wasn’t like he was making a lot of friends now. People he’d had no conflict with had sent killers after him for… He didn’t even know the reasons why. The people he’d interrogated along the way certainly hadn’t known why, and he’d pressed them hard. He wasn’t really surprised they didn’t know. They hadn’t been the kind of people who asked questions. Someone, probably an elder, ordered them to come and stop him, and they’d jumped at the chance to curry favor.
Sen shook off those thoughts. They weren’t going to lead him anywhere. He’d been over that barren ground more than once already. Without some kind of new information, he’d just be wasting his time. Standing up from the bed, he took a few minutes to wash up and shave. Uncle Kho managed to make a beard look good, but any time he started to try to go grow one, it just ended up making him look unkempt. Going out into the common area, he saw no sign of Shen Mingxia, Glimmer of Night, or Long Jia Wei. He did see Wu Gang sitting by the fire and sipping a cup of tea. Sen walked over.
“Do you mind if I join you?” asked Sen.
“Please,” said Wu Gang, gesturing at a nearby chair.
Sen sat down and regarded the other man. It struck him then in a way that it hadn’t the last time they’d crossed paths that he didn’t really know anything about Wu Gang. He’d had other things, genuinely urgent matters, on his mind at the time. He hadn’t bothered to learn anything about him back in Orchard’s Reach, either. He’d only helped him because of that tugging he’d felt. Something that had been absent for a long time. It made Sen wonder if that was because something or someone felt that he was on the right path, or because he’d wandered so far off the right path that they’d just given up entirely. In truth, helping the man had been tantamount to acting on a whim. It had positive results, in a big-picture way, but Sen had no clue what the effect had been on Wu Gang himself.
“How do you feel about where your life has taken you?” asked Sen.
“Well, that’s certainly a question,” said Wu Gang. “I’m not sure it has a simple answer.”
“Then, give me a complicated answer, and I’ll try to keep up.”
Wu Gang huffed a little laugh and said, “Fair enough. I could say that this is the life that I wanted. It’s the life I told you I wanted. To be a wandering cultivator.”
“Except now you know what that life is actually like. It’s easy to want something you’ve never had.”
“That’s the heavens’ own truth. I’ve done a lot of good. I’ve helped a lot of people. I’ve seen amazing things. It’d be childish to say that I haven’t gotten a lot out of that,” said Wu Gang, falling into a pensive silence.
“But,” prompted Sen.
“I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times that I resented you. I’ve seen wonders, true, but I’ve seen terrible things as well. They tell stories about me and call me a hero. That’s an awful word to put on someone. They don’t tell the stories about the times you didn’t get there in time. No one ever hears about the burned-out farms or wrecked villages that you failed to save. But I remember them. I’ve stood over more funeral pyres than I care to recall.”
Sen winced at that, recalling a plague village where he’d repeatedly stood that watch like some kind of hellish punishment. Wu Gang lifted an eyebrow at Sen.
“I’ve done that a few times myself,” said Sen, not wishing to relive the memories in any more detail.
“You know, sometimes, I try to weigh it all up in my head. I try to figure out if the good I’ve done outweighs the evil I failed to stop. I try to understand if the lives I’ve saved balance the lives I’ve taken.”
“Did you get anywhere with it?” asked Sen.
“No. Did you?”
“What makes you think I’ve ever done such a thing?”
“Because cultivators don’t do things like open schools for mortals. It’s beneath them unless they have a reason for it. A compelling reason. The kind of reason that haunts their dreams. Are your dreams haunted, Judgment’s Gale?”
“Sometimes,” admitted Sen. “Sometimes, it’s my conscience. I had a conversation about Karma a while back with people who understand it a lot better than me. Any guesses about what they had to say?”
“Not really,” said Wu Gang.
“They basically said that it’s ineffable and that it’s a good thing that it’s ineffable.”
“Why is that a good thing?”
“The consensus seemed to be that it acts as a kind of counterbalance to our worst impulses. If you can’t ever know the full measure of your karma, it may cause you to make different choices, better choices.”
“Do you believe that?” asked Wu Gang.
“The ineffable part, yeah. The rest of it, not so much.”
Wu Gang seemed to consider that answer before he nodded.
“Yeah, I think that’s about where I stand on it as well. So, why the deep questions this time?”
“Curiosity.”
“That’s it?”
“No. I’ve been trying to decide how to handle something. I thought that your answers might give me a clue about how you’d react afterward.”
“Did they?” asked Wu Gang, a speculative look on his face.
“No, not particularly. If it makes a difference, they also didn’t change my mind about anything either,” said Sen staring into the small fire. “I free you, Righteous Wu Gang, of all oaths and promises to me. Your life is your own again.”