Whenever Sen was forced to leave home, an event that happened far too often for his taste, he almost always raced back as fast as he could. There was a beautiful orchid there waiting to shout Papa at him and tell him about everything that had happened when he was gone. Sometimes, that meant an extended description of her bug hunts with the birds. Sometimes, it was a hilariously garbled retelling of Auntie Caihong chastising Master Feng for one transgression or another. Sen could usually piece together what had actually happened, which only made Ai’s retellings even funnier if for no other reason than the things that her mind interpreted as the salient details. For example, the words were often ignored in favor of a careful description and reenactment of Master Feng’s expressions or Auntie Caihong chasing him with a broom, all while Uncle Kho howled with laughter.
This time, though, Sen found himself hesitating. He looked down at his arm and frowned. Like most cultivators, he’d been pale. All of the blemishes, scars, and signs of aging had been burned away during cleanings, advancements, and probably during tribulations as well. Now, though, he was a white as pale as bone. The divine qi embedded in his skin no longer rose to the surface to make him all but glow, even if he could still feel it there. His eyebrows drew together as a thought occurred to him. He concentrated for a moment and those spots did rise to the surface. Except, now, there were more of them. They seemed to form a lattice all over his body. In fact, it almost looked like a formation etched into his skin. He couldn’t be sure since he didn’t have the best angle to look at it.
He wondered if that was something that was meant to happen as part of the Five-Fold Body Transformation or if it was peculiar to him. A side effect of all that divine qi already being inside of him, perhaps? The moment he got mentally sidetracked, though, the pinpoint bits of divine qi receded down into his skin again. While it was a strange change, it was actually a welcome one. Not needing to maintain that bit of concentration to suppress their appearance all the time was one less thing on his plate. Getting to cross a problem off his list was so rare that it felt like he ought to throw some kind of celebration. Still, the almost deathly pale of his skin was concerning.
Despite the change, he didn’t feel ill. If anything, he felt healthier and stronger than he’d ever been. He’d experienced an almost unbelievable increase in strength. At another time, he’d have seen it as nothing but an improvement. In the world of the now, he couldn’t shake that feeling of concern. What would Ai think of him? Would the change frighten her? He thought that she’d get used to it. He hoped she might even make fun of it. If she ran away from him… If that happened, it would break his heart into so many pieces that he might never be able to gather them all up. So, he stood on the shattered peak of that new mountain and hesitated. He was high enough up that there was a constant breeze. The sound of his robes moving in that light wind sounded thunderously loud to him. I guess improved strength wasn’t the only change, he thought.
He'd been through enough body cultivation advancements to understand that adapting to the changes in his body wouldn’t be an overnight process. A few experiments had told him that his perception was actually lagging slightly behind his body’s new abilities. He’d need to hold back unless something was right in front of him and he couldn’t miss with a blow. If he was lucky, things would equalize after a while, but he worried that he’d be stuck using less than his full potential until his spirit cultivation caught up. That might not be an entirely bad thing, thought Sen. His relationship with restraint was a mixed bag at best. Being forced to employ it all the time might help him to shore up one or two lingering personal failings.
As much as he wanted to tell himself that Ai was the only reason he was hesitating, he knew that wasn’t true. Returning to the academy after that debacle in the capital hadn’t been a smooth transition. He’d found himself forced into roles and dealing with responsibilities for which he felt entirely unsuited. The passage of a year had only smoothed down a few of the roughest edges. He was not particularly well-equipped for the role of leader or, as every damn person at the academy insisted on calling him, patriarch. Patriarchs were old men with centuries of experience and, in theory anyway, tremendous wisdom. Sen met exactly none of those requirements. His only legitimate claim to that title came from personal power, and it hadn’t taken him long to see that personal power and good leadership had almost no relationship with each other.
He knew that the minute he got back, a mountain of work was waiting for him. There would be endless demands on his time. Time that he would much rather spend teaching things to Ai, or wandering the wilds with Falling Leaf. Time that he loathed devoting to stupidity like managing the personal disputes between the various teachers he’d brought and the small factions that were already developing inside his sect. Some of the divides were obvious. There were the mortals who were never going to be anything but soldiers for the small army he was building for Grandmother Lu. He’d already sent a fair number of those to her. She had promptly put them to work as manor guards, caravan guards, and sent some of them along to keep order at distant holdings of the House of Lu. Those mortals bore a certain resentment for the cultivators that Sen had acquired for the sect.
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He’d never truly tried to recruit anyone but cultivators kept showing up. They, being cultivators, had to have their arrogance beaten out of them. Unfortunately, that process was slow enough that more than a few lingering grudges had developed. Then there was the division among the cultivators. Some of them had, on the surface, adopted his stated mission of developing cultivators for the express purpose of defending the House of Lu. Others seemed to think that he was masking his true intentions, thereby exposing their own ignorance of his lack of subtlety. Those cultivators seemed to be more invested in some weird cult of personality that centered on him.
Then, there was the last group. He had done the impossible with Tiu Li-Mei. He had helped an adult mortal become a cultivator. She was a group of one. She fit none of the rules of cultivators. In some ways, she was even more anomalous than Sen himself. He, at least, had been found fairly young. No one seemed to know how to treat her. That had made her, by turns, an object of jealousy, scorn, and awe in his sect. The extensive attention he had to personally devote to her to make that transition from adult mortal to cultivator hadn’t helped matters for her. Many viewed her as his personal favorite when they weren’t making deeply unkind comments about the exact nature of their relationship. Many were terrified of offending her. Others treated her like some kind of prostitute.
All of that had largely isolated her, and there was exceedingly little he could do to help. Anything he tried to do was as likely to make her isolation worse as it was to make things better. He tried to assuage his own conscience by saying he gave her what she wanted. Even so, he feared that his attempt at recompense had come at a much higher price than either he or she had anticipated. He was tempted on a weekly basis to simply send her back to the capital, but that wasn’t a real solution either. She couldn’t step back into her old life anymore. On top of that, she was a one-of-a-kind experiment. He worried that someone sect would scoop her up and try to figure out how he’d done what he’d done. She was relatively safe from anything like that as long as she stayed beneath his shadow of protection. Plus, when he’d gentry broached the possibility of sending her back, she’d refused. Adamantly.
Huffing out an exasperated breath, Sen decided that it was time to stop being a coward and go home. Putting it off for another hour wasn’t going to alter how Ai reacted to the changes in him. It wasn’t going to solve any of the many problems waiting for him. It wasn’t even really helping him. He walked to the edge where the peak of the mountain started to drop off. A part of him wanted to explore this new mountain. It would be endlessly interesting to find out where the natural trails were, but he supposed that was a project best undertaken with Falling Leaf. She might never forgive him for making a mountain, however accidentally, and then finding all of its mysteries without her.
Sen stepped off the mountain peak and onto a qi platform. With a minor flex of will, he sent it flying back toward his daughter, and all those other things that were a lot less important to him. He told himself that things would be fine. Nothing had changed that much. Not really. So what if he was a little paler and a little stronger? He was still who he had always been. He supposed that his annoying legend would grow a little more when word got out that he’d advanced his body cultivation again, but there was always someone adding to that stupid thing. It was ridiculous. No one could possibly have done all the things and been all the places he was credited with during the approximate decade he’d been operating publicly. Hells, he’d spent a huge chunk of that time trying to find a damn manual. When did people imagine he had time to visit other kingdoms?
Shaking his head, Sen lowered the qi platform to the ground outside the galehouse. He did his best to calm his nerves. It’ll be fine, he told himself for the fiftieth time. Bracing himself for the worst, he opened the door and walked inside. Falling Leaf and Ai were sitting at the table. It looked like they were practicing writing. The green-eyed woman gave him a curious look but didn’t seem otherwise concerned. Ai turned to look at him. She looked perplexed for a moment before she hopped down from the chair, ran over, and jumped at him. He caught her and hoisted her up so she could hug his neck. She poked his cheek while wearing a skeptical expression before she giggled.
“You look funny, Papa.”
Sen abruptly discovered that he had regained the ability to breathe.