Book 2: Chapter 22: Elder Sen
Sen made only two brief stops on his way out of the village. The first stop was at the small market to stock up on some extra food. Sen had acquired a bit of a taste for the local fish and suspected they might be hard to come by once he left. He’d also concluded that it was largely impossible to have too much fresh produce available while traveling. While it was still too early in the season for many of the locally grown crops, Sen purchased liberally from what was available. Not for the first time, he wondered how people got by without storage rings that could preserve food in a fresh state. Then again, most people didn’t spend weeks at a time away from the relative convenience of a market. They didn’t need a way to store fresh food the way he did.
His second stop was less friendly. He walked up to the unkempt-looking man standing outside the poorly maintained house and held out the axe. The man recoiled from the axe, or Sen, or possibly both as though Sen had issued a challenge to the death. Sen said nothing, just stood there, a flat expression on his face, and waited for the man to take the axe. As the man reached out, Sen infused a little of the qi he’d been cycling and lightning crackled around the axe head. The man yanked his hand back, the color bleeding away from his face at the reminder of Sen’s status as a cultivator. As satisfied as he could be that he’d reinforced his threats, Sen pulled the qi out of the axe. He waited there, patiently, until the man took the axe with a trembling hand.
His final task in the village completed, Sen turned south and began walking. He wasn’t in any particular hurry. Nor was he making great efforts to hide himself. The once persistent paranoia that cultivators from the Stormy Sea sect were relentlessly hunting him had faded over time. While Sen was reasonably confident in his woodcraft and hiding abilities, he wasn’t optimistic that he could elude a truly dedicated effort to find him. If there had been people looking for him, really looking for him, they would have found him by now. He hadn’t traveled so far or so fast that he would have lost all pursuit. No, the far more likely answer was the sect had decided that pursuing him simply wasn’t worth the effort. Maybe Cai Yuze had been unpopular. Maybe his choice to spare those girls on the beach had tempered their wrath in some way. He didn’t know, but he was willing to accept the apparent good luck and move on.
As the miles between him and the village grew, that sense of pressure that had been inexorably bearing down on him began to fade. It didn’t happen immediately or fast enough that it stopped him in his tracks. Instead, he slowly became aware over the course of several days that he felt lighter, less burdened. He had dallied, hiding from the necessities of being out in the world. Now that he was no longer hiding, the source of that growing pressure had released him from its grasp. Yet, for all that he was no longer hiding, Sen was also more cautious. He might exchange greetings with other travelers he met on the road, but he rarely invited conversations with them. Instead, he cultivated and idly speculated about why dominant qi types in a given area shifted from air to earth or earth to metal, while the forest that dominated the area around the road looked the same as it did for miles in any direction.
As he traveled, Sen also began to marvel at the sheer size of the continent. Uncle Kho had warned him that even good maps were rarely accurate about distances. Now, Sen understood why the elder cultivator had issued that warning. On a map, the distance between Tide’s Rest and the next major city, Emperor’s Bay, looked negligible. On land, that distance was probably hundreds of miles, which meant weeks of travel by foot. It didn’t bother Sen, as he had both time and the reinforcements of body cultivation to support his journey. Yet, if his guesses were accurate, that meant that the southern coast was thousands of miles away. It was no longer mysterious to him why the continent was divided into kingdoms. No one land could possibly control such a vast territory. The time it would take for news to reach the ears of authority would make any relief sent in the wake of a disaster or uprising months too late.
Even for a cultivator who could, if he decided to, cover much more ground, much more quickly, there were limits. His qi stores would run low, at which point he would have to revert to the modes of travel that mortals favored. He could walk, get a cart, or learn to ride a horse. With this newfound appreciation of the pure size of the continent, he found himself struggling to believe that Master Feng had ever so much as visited the western coast of the continent, let alone owned a pastry shop there. Then, he began to wonder just how far Master Feng could travel in a day or a week. The gulf between the foundation formation stage and the nascent soul stage was so vast that Sen had no true sense of what that level of development allowed cultivators like Master Feng to do. He’d only ever seen tiny glimpses, hints of the power that cultivation level offered.
While Sen could, with careful management, keep up a qinggong technique for most of the day. He knew he couldn’t do it for three days, let alone a week. Yet, he suspected that Master Feng could literally fly. How long could the old cultivator maintain that? Was there even a functional limit? Sun reasoned that there must be a limit, but he was hard-pressed to imagine what that limit would even look like. As a rule, Sen hadn’t craved cultivation advancement purely for the sake of more power. Yet, as he considered the possibilities of traveling to anywhere on the continent that he wanted to go in a matter of days or weeks instead of months or even a year, he found a spark of ambition in himself that hadn’t been there before. The freedom that such power offered resonated with something in Sen’s soul. While he wouldn’t rush to advance, he did find that he wanted that advancement in a much more real way than he ever had before.
Sen was so caught up in his visions of unrestricted travel that it took a few seconds before his mind truly registered what he was hearing. There was fighting ahead. Sen sighed. Some caravan had probably run afoul of bandits. Sen supposed it was inevitable that he’d run across more of the outlaws at some point. While he wasn’t really inclined to interfere, he also wasn’t inclined to let a bunch of mortals get killed for the great sin of using the road. Sen hid to ensure that he’d have the element of surprise with the bandits. He didn’t necessarily require the element of surprise, but he also saw no benefit in surrendering an advantage when he didn’t need to do so. When he rounded the bend in the road, though, what came into sight was not what he had expected. Instead of wagons being desperately defended by overmatched guards, he saw what looked like utter madness. There were perhaps eight people in the road, fighting each other in what looked like a very serious attempt to kill each other.
Based on the qi techniques he saw getting thrown around, they were all cultivators. Four of them were dressed in a motley assortment of colors and differently styled robes. The other four wore matched robes. A sect uniform, perhaps, Sen wondered. When Sen had first approached, he’d intended to intervene. Now, he wasn’t sure what, if anything, he should do. He’d felt an automatic dislike for the people he’d tentatively identified as sect members, but he knew where that came from. The reality was that he didn’t know what was happening in front of him. Maybe the sect cultivators really had initiated the fight because they were awful people, but the other cultivators could just as easily be criminals. Without something more tangible to go on than his own dislike for sects, he couldn’t intervene in this. Plus, without more information, he wasn’t sure it was entirely wise to do so. Sen let his spiritual sense spread out briefly to get a feel for the other cultivators. All of them were in the qi condensing or foundation formation stage. Sen frowned at the display. Was this some kind of cultivator tavern brawl, just played out at a safe distance from fragile mortal structures?
What he hadn’t expected was for all of the fighting to stop, immediately, when his spiritual sense briefly flickered through the crowd of battling cultivators. All of them were staring at him. He felt at least three different people’s spiritual senses wash over the area where he stood. Two were from foundation formation stage cultivators in sect robes, the other came from a hatchet-faced man in the second group. All three of them immediately straightened up and look worried when they discovered that, as far as their spiritual senses were concerned, Sen didn’t exist. He considered letting his hiding method drop, but it seemed to be the only thing keeping these people from killing each other. So, he let it persist. The cultivators had retreated from each other and stood in tightly huddled groups. They were all just staring at Sen, which made him deeply uncomfortable. He’d spent enough of his life hiding from the gazes of others that any kind of prolonged, focused attention made him feel like running away. Finally, a young-looking woman from the group of sect cultivators stepped forward.
She offered a tentative bow and said, “Forgiveness, elder? With your permission, we will clear away this rabble so you may pass unmolested.”
“Rabble!” roared the hatchet-faced man. “You attacked us for no reason, you sect bitch!”
The young woman whirled toward the hatchet-face man, white-hot fury on her face. “No reason? There are bounties for you in three kingdoms, you murderous piece of filth.”
The hatchet-faced man gave her a smug look. “Prove it.”
Looking just as smug, the young woman summoned a piece of paper from a storage treasure and showed it to the man. Then, realizing that she’d turned her back on someone who might well be her better, she spun back to Sen. She held up the paper for Sen to see. Cycling air qi, he gently lifted the paper from her hand and flew it over to himself. He looked down at the paper, where he saw a crude, but recognizable drawing of the hatchet-faced man. There was also a physical description of him and his companions, as well as a substantial list of their various crimes. A sum that even Sen could recognize as sizeable was listed for the man’s capture or death. With a casual gesture, he sent the paper back to the young woman. Part of him had really wanted her to be on the wrong side of this, but it seemed they were actually carrying out a public service. Sen weighed how best to handle it. Sighing to himself, Sen fixed his gaze on the hatchet-faced man.
“Put down your weapons,” ordered Sen.
“Those are lies! All lies!” screamed the man.
Sen drew his jian and strode up to within striking distance of the man. “Do it now.”
The hatchet-faced man didn’t hesitate, launching a furious attack with his own jian. Criminal or not, the man had been well-trained by someone. It was the first time that he had been truly pressed at all by someone since the last time he sparred with Master Feng. Sadly for the other man, he was no Master Feng. The exchange lasted for approximately ten seconds before Sen found the opening that he was looking for and neatly drove his blade into the man’s heart.
While most of Sen’s attention had been on the fight with the hatchet-faced man, he’d devoted a little attention to cycling earth qi. It wasn’t his favorite qi type. Using it was always so much harder than using fire or shadow or, these days, even lightning qi. Still, he could use it. So, while everyone watched the fight, Sen quietly sealed the feet of the hatchet-faced cultivator’s companions in hardened earth. He turned his gaze on those men. Two of them immediately dropped their weapons. The last tried to run and fell over. Sen heard muttering from the sect cultivators, including the phrase “sword genius.” What fools, he thought. Sen took a moment to wipe his jian clean before sheathing it. He turned to the sect cultivators and gestured at the corpse and the other men.
“There. Collect your bounty.”
The young woman who had spoken before gave him a much deeper bow and said, “I cannot, elder.”
With another sigh, Sen stopped hiding and said, “I’m not an elder.”
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