Book 7: Chapter 9: Or I Will Do It for You

Book 7: Chapter 9: Or I Will Do It for You

It only took about an hour of wandering through the town for Sen to yearn for a place like Grandmother Lu’s shop. A place where you could find a bit of everything, as long as it was meant for mortals to use. Instead, he had to ask where to find a tailor shop, only to be directed to the home of a very terse, very stern woman who told him in no uncertain terms that if she was going to make clothes for a child, she had to actually see the child. At which point, he was summarily dismissed with an admonition to acquire cloth for the clothes. It was sort of refreshing, if abrupt. From there, he had to track down a carpenter to make the bed, only to discover that man didn’t deal with things like pads. On and on it went, with Sen crossing back and forth across the town a dozen times, only to get about a third of the things he had on his list.

With the afternoon sun dipping toward the horizon, Sen finally went back to the inn. When Sen once more didn’t find either Falling Leaf or Laughing River there, he walked toward the bar. The inn owner took one look at Sen and went very pale. Sen stepped up to the bar and placed his hand flat on top of it. He stared at the inn owner as he started putting pressure on the bar. The wood creaked ominously, which made the inn owner’s eyes go very wide.

“Where is my friend?” asked Sen in a tone that he would never describe as murderous.

“She... She left.”

“She left,” repeated Sen, putting a little more pressure on the wood beneath his hand. “When did she leave?”

“Yesterday, honored cultivator.”

“Did she leave me a message?”

The inn owner shook his head back and forth while his eyes never left Sen’s hand.

“Did she say where she was going?”

“No, honored cultivator,” said the man, sweat streaming freely down his face.

“Did she leave with someone?”

The inn owner nodded vigorously. “She did! She left with that older man you were sitting with the day that... The other day.”

“I see,” said Sen, lifting his hand from the bar.

The inn owner sagged in relief. Sen didn’t say anything else. He simply turned and walked out of the inn. As soon as he stepped out of the inn, his spiritual sense crashed down on the town like a force of nature. Nothing was hidden from him, which was how he knew that Falling Leaf was nowhere to be found. While he normally made a point not to do anything that made it too obvious he was a cultivator, all he could think about right then was that Falling Leaf had gone somewhere with the elder fox. A being with countless centuries of crafting illusions behind him. While Sen couldn’t imagine why the fox had taken Falling Leaf and left, he had done it. With a burst of qi so powerful that all of the mortals in the town felt it, Sen vanished heading south at qinggong speeds.

“It seems that Laughing River decided to wander off and take Falling Leaf with him.”

Fu Ruolan lifted an eyebrow. “That’s a remarkably stupid thing for him to do. Which is strange, because he isn’t usually stupid. Well, setting aside the whole ignoring his entire species thing. Doesn’t he know you’re Feng Ming’s disciple? Does he want someone hunting him until the end of time?”

“I have no idea,” said Sen. “All I can think of is that he’s going to use her to blackmail me for the spatial treasure.”

“Weren’t you going to give it to him anyway?”

“Yes!” said an exasperated Sen. “Which is what makes all of this so bizarre.”

The nascent soul cultivator gave him a dubious look.

“You didn’t do anything drastic with that treasure, did you?

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” said Fu Ruolan. “Hurl it into space? Drop it into a volcano?”

Sen felt a mild inclination to act offended that she’d even suggest such a thing, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had been contemplating exactly such a thing. Instead, he just shook his head.

“I didn’t. It was a close thing, but I didn’t.”

“Let’s call that a victory for sanity. Come along. We can discuss the rest of this tomorrow. You should at least be there when the little one wakes up. She was all but inconsolable when you didn’t come back. I think she thinks that you’re dead.”

Sen winced. It was hard to hear clear evidence that he hadn’t done nearly enough thinking all day. But he could take a tiny bit of comfort in the knowledge that he hadn’t done anything truly irrevocable.Youur favorite stories at novelhall.com