Book 3: Chapter 9: Cultivator Chou
Once they were out of the city proper, Lo Meifeng seemed to relax a little. At least, Sen thought she did. Her answers to the occasional questions that Sen or Lifen asked were less sharp and terse. It wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but Sen liked to take his victories where he found them. Despite relaxing slightly, Lo Meifeng kept them moving until nearly sunset. At that point, they had moved beyond the city and the dense crush of buildings that had gone up beyond the city walls. Instead, they were traveling through the smaller towns and farming villages that seemed to dot the landscape beyond every city. While Sen would have been perfectly content to simply find a spot off the road, both of the women emphatically declined that option.
“Some of us require a proper bath from time to time,” said Lo Meifeng with an unimpressed look.
“Agreed,” said Lifen, giving Sen a nearly identical unimpressed expression.
Seeing those two women put forth a united front made the back of Sen’s neck itch and brought on vague worries about some kind of impending, world-destroying catastrophe. So, Sen promptly shut his mouth. It wasn’t as though he’d personally deprived them of baths. He actually liked baths. There just hadn’t been one on the ship, so everyone had to make do with scrubbing themselves down with a cloth and a small basin of water. Or, in Sen’s case, jumping down into the ocean for a brief swim most days. It wasn’t exactly the same as a bath. He’d still found it necessary to wash himself down occasionally to remove some of the lingering salt on his skin if nothing else. It was with those thoughts in his head that Sen walked along in the wake of Lo Meifeng and Lifen as they searched for a place to stay that had a bath.
Once they’d found a small inn with both free rooms and a bath, the decisions were made without much input by Sen. Before he knew it, they were checked in for the night, and Sen was left to his own devices while the women claimed the bath. Sen felt it was a true testament to their feelings on the matter that neither woman had sniped at the other even once after the subject of baths came up. Since he had no belongings to stow in his room, Sen made his way to the front of the inn in search of food. He’d finished his food and was sipping on a mug of rice wine when the front door of the inn opened and a brute of a man with a thin beard and faded scar across one cheek sauntered in. Even with his hiding ability suppressing most of his senses, the man was close enough that Sen could tell he was a cultivator. Sen sighed and hoped that the man would just take a room and leave everyone be.
“I am Chou Bai, the wandering cultivator,” the man thundered to the room.
Sen lifted an eyebrow. The other people in the room looked nervous, but no one said anything. The wandering cultivator seemed to deflate a bit when no one seemed to know who he was. The man tried again.
“I am Chou Bai, the man who slew the dread lightning serpent of Eternity Pass.”
There was more silence until someone said, “Where’s Eternity Pass?”
The cultivator deflated even more, walked over to the owner and asked for a room. Sen felt a moment of relief, but then Lifen and Lo Meifeng came down the stairs, looking very refreshed from their baths. The wandering cultivator’s eyes fixed on them, his chest swelled, and he bellowed again.
“I am Chou Bai, the wandering cultivator.”
Lifen simply lifted an eyebrow at the man before she continued on toward Sen’s table. Lo Meifeng eyed the man up and down and sniffed.
“I,” she said, “am not interested.”
As she went to follow Lifen around the man, he reached out to grab her arm.
“There’s no need to rush,” said Cultivator Chou.
Sen saw what happened, but he doubted anyone else did. Lo Meifeng’s hand shot out, seized the wandering cultivator by the face so hard that Sen thought he heard bones crack, and then jerked her arm downward. The sheer speed and force of that motion pulled the wandering cultivator off his feet and sent him face-first onto the floor. A second later, she had a dagger pressed beneath his ear.
“The last man who tried to touch me without my permission lost that hand at the throat. Would you care to join him in Diyu?”
“No,” mumbled the chastised cultivator.
“Good. Now, apologize to these good people for being an insufferable boor.”
“I apologize,” he said.
When Lo Meifeng pressed the dagger a little harder beneath his ear, he hastily added, “For being an insufferable boor.”
“Good. Now begone from my sight before I lose my patience with you,” said Lo Meifeng, slipping the dagger into some hidden sheath in her robes.
Chou Bai got to his feet and stumbled up the stairs to his room. Lo Meifeng walked over to the table where Lifen and Sen were staring at her. She sat down and signaled for a server to come over. She and Lifen ordered food and more wine, while Sen continued to stare at his minder. Eventually, she grew tired of his relentless piercing gaze and turned to look at him.
“Yes?” she asked with all the sweetness in the world.
“I thought we were supposed to keep a low profile.”
“We are,” she sighed. “But some things you can’t let pass. It’s people like him that make a bad name for wandering cultivators. Plus, my cultivation is higher than his. If I hadn’t slapped him down, he would have known something strange was going on.”
Sen didn’t think that she was lying, specifically, but he also didn’t think he was getting the whole story there either. She’d jumped to physical violence a little too fast for someone who wanted to keep a low profile. Sen wondered if that poor fool had just caught the sharp edge of frustrations that Lo Meifeng couldn’t take out on him. Then again, the man had been obnoxious and had tried to grab Lo Meifeng. If she overreacted, it wasn’t necessarily by much. Probably not enough that it would make this a story that made people think of them. Lo Meifeng wasn’t the only woman core cultivator out there, nor did he think she was the only one who had little patience for handsy men. No, this would probably just go down as some funny story where a wandering cultivator got taught a lesson for being above his station. At least, Sen hoped that was how it would go.
Sen stayed and chatted with the woman for a while before he excused himself to go make use of the bath. As had become his habit, he added some medicinal herbs to the bath. While he couldn’t sense any lingering problems from the tribulation, there could still be damage hidden deep inside of him that he lacked the skill or understanding to recognize. As he soaked in the bath, he let his hiding slip away. He let out a breath of pure relaxation. He understood the need to keep himself hard to find but maintaining that skill most of the day had been an exercise in exhaustion. He let out another breath of relief as he cultivated. The much more balanced environmental qi slipped in his dantian without any need for him to micromanage the amounts. The cultivation exercise also helped draw in the healing properties of the plants and reagents he’d sprinkled into the hot water.
As he soaked, he let his senses bring him information from all over the inn. He could see the life force signatures of the people downstairs. Most of them were dull, but two stood out brighter than the others. Lifen and Lo Meifeng, he thought. There were a few life signatures upstairs in the rooms. Again, most were dull, but there was one bright life signature and, Sen sighed, it was heading straight for him. Sen made himself step out of the bath, and wrap a towel around his waist, before he summoned a jian from his storage ring. He didn’t especially want to kill the brash wandering cultivator. As far as Sen could tell, the man was just stupid, not malicious. Still, if he came through that door with a weapon in hand, Sen wasn’t going to hesitate. Just because he seemed stupid and not evil, it didn’t make the man an innocent. Sen settled into a stance, let his mind find its center, and then he waited, cycling lightning, poised on the edge of violence. The door swung open, and the wandering cultivator stepped into the room. Sen saw the glint of light on something in the man’s hand. That was enough.
Sen was across the distance in a move so fast that even the wandering cultivator was caught off guard. The man saw Sen closing on him, saw the jian, registered the lightning, and then, he screamed.
“Wait!” shouted the man, holding up a bottle of something.
By the time Sen registered that it was just a bottle of wine, it was nearly too late to abort his attack. As it was, his jian had sliced cleanly through the bottle. The ambient lightning around the blade vaporized the liquid instantly, which made the bath stink like alcohol. Sen arrested the blade’s motion a hair from the other cultivator’s throat. It was close enough that Sen could see and smell the skin scorching from the lightning he’d never stopped channeling. The wandering cultivator gritted his teeth against the pain but didn’t try to do anything.
“Why are you here?” Sen demanded.
“I thought you were her.”
“Her who?”
“From downstairs,” he said. “I brought the wine to apologize.”
“Given that I don’t believe that for a second, do you really think she would have?”
“It’s true.”
“So, you were just going to invite yourself in to watch her bathe?”
The implications of that hadn’t seemed to occur to the man before then because he turned bright red in embarrassment or shame.
“No. Of course not, I, I just didn’t think it all the way through.”
Sen frowned at the man. “Do you have some kind of death wish? I’m asking you, honestly. Because it’s the only explanation for intruding on the bath of a woman who slapped you around like a misbehaving puppy and threatened to cut your head off. So, if you do, just say so and I’ll end your pain right here.”
“No,” growled the man. “I do not have a death wish.”
Sen was minimally satisfied that man wasn’t there to try to assassinate him, so he took his jian blade away from Cultivator Chou’s throat. The wandering cultivator took a deep breath and gingerly touched the burned spot on his neck. Sen took another step back and gave the man a firm look.
“In that case, here are two pieces of free, probably life-saving advice for you. First, don’t walk in on a stranger’s bath, ever. Two, you need to stay away from that woman downstairs. There is a near absolute certainty that if you bother her again, in any way, that she will literally cut your head off. Now, if you don’t mind,” said Sen, pointing to the door with his jian, “I’d like to finish my bath.”
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