Book 2: Chapter 31: What Comes After

Book 2: Chapter 31: What Comes After

Sen had been right about what to expect. As soon as he stopped speaking, questions started pelting him like hail. Of course, he couldn’t really understand any of the questions because the Soaring Skies sect members were talking over each other, each one getting louder as they tried to be the one who got their question answered first. After a while, they weren’t even really directing questions at Sen, just yelling at each other to be quiet. Sen let the noise wash over him without really paying attention to any of it. If they wanted to yell at each other, that was their business. Sen lifted an arm and draped it across his face. At that, the sect members fell silent.

“Well?” demanded Wu Meng Yao.

“Well, what?” asked Sen, not even bothering to move his arm.

“What happened here?”

Sen found it surprisingly difficult to keep a straight face when he said, “Rule one, Wu Meng Yao.”

“What?!” she all but shrieked at him. “You’re not going to explain any of this?”

“I wasn’t planning on it. As you can see, I’m very tired. And injured. Clearly in no shape to answer questions.”

The silence that followed that pronouncement was so profound that Sen actually moved his arm back out of the way so he could take a look around. Changpu looked like he wanted to throttle answers out of Sen and would enjoy doing it. Wang Chao had wandered away and was looking back and forth between Sen and the broken tree. Then, the young man’s eyes traced upwards toward the sky. Sen sighed. That one was quick. Wu Meng Yao looked thunderstruck, as though she just couldn’t comprehend the words that Sen had just spoken. Of them all, only Song Ling seemed to get the joke. She bit her lip and looked away.

Sen continued. “Wait until you see what’s down the road. When I won’t explain that, this will seem trivial.”

“What’s down the road?” asked Changpu.

Sen just shrugged. “See for yourselves.”

Much to Sen’s disappointment, they did not go see for themselves right away. Instead, they went back to asking him questions that he ignored. Realizing that they weren’t going to let him sleep if he just stayed in the crater, he pushed himself up. A lot of things still hurt. He checked inside himself. He was still almost out of the misty, environmental qi he depended on for most activities. It seemed his healing had snatched most of it away. He also discovered that the healing pill he’d taken earlier had also been used up. He considered taking another, but he recognized that for the pure laziness it was. He had a finite supply of the pills crafted by Auntie Caihong. He was keeping those for emergencies since he trusted her skills more than his own.Ñøv€lRapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on Ñôv€lß¡n.

He wasn’t in an emergency anymore. Using up one of those pills when he could very well make an elixir for himself was foolish. Making an elixir was less expensive since he could actually replace the ingredients without going all the way to the mountain. Sen also had the feeling that showing off one of those pills in front of sect members might be a bad idea. He knew that resources like pills were limited in sects, and he didn’t want to tempt the sect members into foolish decisions while he was injured. So, as Sen ignored all of them, he built a small fire and got out his elixir pot. The sect members seemed excited when they saw the pot, and then confused as Sen started dropping in medicinal plants and alchemical agents. He did it by feel, judging what he needed by what he felt was still wrong with his body.

“What technique?” demanded Wang Chao.

“The effective kind,” said Sen before he whirled on Changpu.

The big cultivator was crouched over the spirit beast bodies, clearly preparing to harvest from them. Sen fixed his gaze on Wu Meng Yao as he unsheathed his jian.

“If you don’t stop him,” said Sen, “I will.”

“Changpu! Stop!” the de facto leader of the sect cultivators ordered.

The big man looked over at Wu Meng Yao. Then, he noticed Sen’s furious expression. The big cultivator got a truculent look on his face.

“What? No use wasting their cores.”

“Indeed. Feel free to harvest from all the ones that you killed,” said Sen.

The big man smirked at Sen. “I don’t think you’ve got enough left to stop a butterfly, let alone me.”

As Sen stepped toward Changpu, Wu Meng Yao called out after him. “Wait!”

“You had your chance,” said Sen.

Changpu’s confident expression faded when he realized that the supposedly injured wandering cultivator he’d just been mocking was done talking. Instead, the man was covering the distance between them at a frightening speed. Sen had spent almost all his time since leaving the mountain trying to strike a balance. He had been failing. Some of it was his own fault. He’d told himself that he’d been trying to avoid the necessity of killing, but that wasn’t really true. He’d done plenty of killing already. He’d been trying to avoid accepting full responsibility for that killing. That basic imbalance in his thinking had led him to wax and wane between extremes. He waited until someone pushed him far enough, then he justified it all. Yet, he could see, looking back, that he should have killed those bandits he encountered on the road with Bigan. Regardless of the threat they posed to him, they posed a threat to every mortal who passed that way. Leaving them alive had been dooming someone to the fate of being robbed or murdered or worse.

The fight with the spirit beasts had clarified that imbalance in his thinking for him. If he had taken his usual approach, he would have died. Instead, he had acted. There was no room in the world of cultivation for half-measures, which meant that he couldn’t continue on in that world as he had been. It would mean disaster. He didn’t have to descend into mindless butchery, but he couldn’t keep hiding from the facts of the Jianghu. Strength ruled. Sometimes that meant acting, violently, decisively, and sometimes that meant bending beneath the weight of things more powerful than oneself, lest one be broken beneath that weight. In the case of someone stealing from you, flagrantly, as a petty revenge, knowing full well that your strength outstripped their own, there could be only one response. Make them bend or break them utterly.