Book 5: Chapter 20: You Don’t
Falling Leaf came around the next morning once Sen started cooking food. He didn’t pester her with questions, just let her eat her fill. Only after plowing through bowl after bowl of rice porridge with pork in it and drinking a truly impressive amount of water did she even begin to look like she might want to talk about anything.
“How do you feel?” asked Sen.
He could have just taken a look with his spiritual sense and his qi, but Sen tried to only do that without permission when there was no other choice. Falling Leaf tilted her head back and forth before she answered.
“I’m fine. At least, I feel fine.”
“No lingering soreness? No problems moving around?”
Falling Leaf gave him an alarmed look. “Should there be?”
“Spider venom can do all kinds of terrible things to a body, but I got a healing pill into you pretty fast. I’m just being cautious.”
Falling Leaf relaxed. “Why didn’t you just check for yourself?”
“I thought I should ask first. It’s the polite thing to do.”
“I’d rather you make sure I’m okay than be polite. Be polite with other people.”
Sen laughed gently. “Fair enough.”
He took his time with the examination. As near as he could tell, the combination of the healing pill and Falling Leaf’s own recuperative abilities had washed the venom out of her system. Sen was a bit surprised by that. That spider had pumped a substantial amount of venom into her. He couldn’t be sure if he’d been underestimating the potency of the pills, Falling Leaf’s ability to heal, or both. He’d expected to need to stay for at least another day before they left. He also checked her tissues and organs, looking for any kind of necrosis. Again, he found nothing. Unless Falling Leaf reported some new symptom to him, he saw no need to hang around unless she said she wanted more rest.
“I can’t see anything wrong. If you feel up to it, we can leave today, now even.”
Falling Leaf nodded and stretched where she sat. “I’m happy to leave this mountain behind. When we pick a mountain, let’s pick one without so many spiders.”
Sen shuddered a little. “Agreed.”
While they didn’t leave that very minute, it only took them about fifteen minutes to clean up and pack up the bare necessities that Sen had gotten out for sleeping and cooking. He made a door so Falling Leaf could get outside and took one last fast look around. He checked to make sure that the fire was truly extinguished. He wasn’t worried about the galehouse itself, but there was always the possibility of sparks getting pulled out of the chimney. While he didn’t have any particular love for Mt. Solace, that was a far cry from wanting to see everything on it burn. He checked the rooms and found them as bare as he expected. Nodding to himself, he stepped outside. He noticed that Falling Leaf was staring. Sen looked around and came up short.
When he'd been confronting the spiders the night before, it had been dark. Far too dark to really see what kind of damage had been done. In the chill light of morning, though, it looked like some kind of war had happened. Trees as much as fifty feet away had been scorched to ash or blown apart. Where the ground didn’t have craters in it, all of the ground cover plants had simply disappeared, leaving nothing but seared soil in their place. And then there were the remains of the spiders. Everything from tiny bits of chitin to the charred corpses of the biggest spiders littered the area like a grim carpet. The scope of the destruction and death left Sen a little stunned. He’d known it was serious, but not that serious. Falling Leaf turned her eyes toward him.
“What happened?” she asked.
Sen shrugged. “The spiders decided they weren’t done with us. I discouraged them.”
“This was you discouraging them? How was this discouragement?”
“I let some of them live.”
“Will they be coming back?”
“I’d be surprised if they did. I was very firm with them about leaving us alone.”
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Falling Leaf shook her head. “I didn’t hear any of this.”
“You needed your rest.”
It took Sen a few more minutes to take down the formations. He was always a little disgusted that putting them together took forever while taking them apart was almost simplicity itself. He supposed the old adage that it was easier to break something than make something was true. The pair set off at the fastest qinggong pace that Sen thought they could maintain. They’d been taking their time on the way up to make sure they didn’t miss an opportunity to find the mushrooms. Sen didn’t plan to stop for anything on the way down short of a full-on fight with a spirit beast. Despite his words to Falling Leaf, Sen kept a very close eye on the trees and shadows with his spiritual sense. While it might have been stymied in that little hollowed-out area, he knew that it would work out in the open. He didn’t think that any of the spiders were going to come after them, but he didn’t see any reason to be careless. Besides, there were other threats on the mountain.
Nothing impeded them, though. In fact, it seemed that the remaining spirit beasts went out of their way to avoid Sen and Falling Leaf. While he was grateful to avoid the delays, he was less thrilled to know the cause. He’d killed a lot of spirit beasts out in the wilds. If he kept doing that, he feared that it was ultimately going to make his life a lot harder. He didn’t want to have to worry about hordes of angry spirit beasts hounding his steps every time he left a city. That would just push him into a position of running for his life or killing more spirit beasts by the score, assuming that some truly powerful spirit beast didn’t decide to just shuffle him off to his next life. Granted, the number of spirit beasts with that kind of power was, thankfully, small and getting smaller with every advancement. It didn’t mean that one of them wouldn’t decide to make him their personal project.
Sen wanted to avoid that kind of attention at all costs. He’d gotten one nascent soul cultivator through blatant trickery and deviousness. He doubted he’d get that lucky with a nascent soul spirit beast. There wouldn’t be some handy building that Sen could take over long enough to set up a deadly poison storm to soften them up. No, a spirit beast would just track him down and crush him with overwhelming force. Avoiding more mass killings of spirit beasts was going to be his goal for the foreseeable future, assuming that he wasn’t already too late to avoid the problem. As midday rolled into midafternoon, Sen brought them to a stop. He’d learned a while ago that taking a break was a good way to help keep the senses sharp. He considered their progress and guessed that they would be close to the bottom of the mountain by sundown. As he served up some food, he looked over at Falling Leaf.
“Is there anything you want to stop for in the town?” he asked.
“No. I got more than enough of people back in the capital.”
Sen gave her a sharp look at that comment. They had been away from the capital for more than a year and a half. When they had stopped at inns, Sen had done all of the talking. Beyond that, they’d kept to themselves. By Sen’s reckoning, she’d had more than enough time to shake off any bad feelings she’d had since they left the huge city behind. The fact that she was still wholly disinterested in interacting with other people concerned him. She needed some kind of connection to people that extended beyond him. Even if those connective threads were tenuous, she needed them.
“Don’t you want to make friends?” asked Sen.
“You don’t,” she said, frowning at him.
“I,” Sen started, then reconsidered. “I guess that’s true, but it’s not the whole story. I avoid people because they’re constantly trying to drag me into things I want no part of. I have a sneaking suspicion that Karma is making me work hard to pay off some old debts. I doubt that you’d have the same kind of problems.”
Falling Leaf gave Sen a dubious look. “If you say so.”
“I just don’t want you to have no one if something happens to me. If Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, and Uncle Kho ascend, who’s left?”
“Do you think they’d just leave me behind?” she asked, a line forming between her eyebrows.
“I don’t think they would, but I can’t promise you that either.”
Falling Leaf thought that over for a little while before shaking her head. “If that happens, it happens. I can’t live in fear of something that may happen someday.”
Sen wanted to push the issue, but he wasn’t sure where he could take the point. He’d stated his concerns. She’d listened to them and demonstrated her fundamental lack of worry about it. He wasn’t sure if the possibility was just too nebulous or if the uncertainty of the timeframe made it seem moot to her. Then again, maybe she was right to dismiss the concern. Falling Leaf was very much a person who lived in the now, rather than making deep plans for tomorrow. While Sen didn’t invest a lot of time in thoughts of the future, it was plainly evident that he spent more of his time considering it than Falling Leaf. Maybe that would change at some point. Maybe it wouldn’t. He couldn’t make her care about the future any more than he could make her care about other human beings. It was something she would have to come to on her own or not.
All he could do was ask her about it from time to time and see where she stood. He could encourage her to make connections, but even that had to be done gently. He couldn’t force her to like anyone. If he pushed too hard about it, he risked damaging his relationship with her. While he did want her to have more in her life than just him, he wasn’t going to sabotage what they had to make it happen. That could backfire in all kinds of ways that he couldn’t predict. It was a bit of a mess in his opinion, but not a mess in need of immediate action. Sen finished the food on his plate.
“Do you want any more?” he asked.
Falling Leaf shook her head. “We should get going again. I’d like to be off of this mountain today if possible.”
Sen peered up at the sky and judged the time. “If you think you’re up for moving a little faster, I think we can make that happen.”
An eager nod confirmed her willingness.
“Alright, then. Let’s get moving.”
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